In the director’s commentary to The Godfather Francis Ford Coppola argues that the potential for art in film remains largely untapped, saying that filmmakers have only gotten about eight percent of what the medium can achieve. The number seems arbitrary, but I agree with the sentiment – a lot of the movies out there do not push what filmmaking can do in any meaningful ways. I remember watching Metropolis on a train in Spain last year, and feeling like filmmaking was a new invention, and then lamenting how little progress film has made as an art form. This is not the fault of the artist. The film industry works on a for profit basis, making films to entertain us, not enlighten. It is a business, and the final product has to gross more than the overhead. That means audiences have to be catered to – we are given actors we are used to seeing, music that tells us how to feel, camerawork that tells us where to look, and stories that reaffirm what we already know, all within a two to three hour period and fits the censorship rules imposed by the MPAA. This has been the history of filmmaking since sound was introduced, so what I want to do is recognise and recommend some films that managed to break that mold.
I don't know how Copolla was pushing anything with this one.
There is a period in the history of Hollywood known as “Pre Code” that refers to films made before July 1, 1934. That was the day laws of censorship began to be enforced – when studios and filmmakers basically had free reign on their products. The most controversial of these is the 1932 film Freaks. The film opens with some upper class society types being told to look in a box – we see their look of horror, but we do not get to see the box’s contents. Instead, a story begins about Hans, a dwarf who works with his sister as a sideshow performer. We see many other real life sideshow performers – people missing limbs, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, so called “freaks” – all working alongside Hans. Our hero falls in love with a woman named Cleopatra, who upon learning that Hans is heir to a vast fortune, agrees to marry him with designs to kill him and marry the circus’ strong man. Hans and Cleopatra get married, and at the reception dinner the freaks proclaim that they accept her despite the fact that she’s not like them (“we accept her, one of us, one of us, gooble gabble, gooble gabble”). She gets drunk and has an outburst at this, and soon thereafter begins to poison her new husband. The others catch on to what she’s doing, and a fight breaks out. After this the audience is shown the contents of the box: Cleopatra has had her legs chopped off and replaced with feathers, her hands severely burned, and her vocal chords mutilated. She is now a duck woman, a freak worse than any of those that did this to her. Freaks was extremely controversial when it was released, and although it broke box office records the press was so negative that the film ruined the career of Tod Browning (who had had major success the year before with Dracula), and it was not until the early sixties that the film was rediscovered and gained a cult following. The code began to be enforced two years after its release, ensuring that nothing like this could ever be created again.
Since the only common thread between the films I have chosen is that they change our ideas on filmmaking, don’t expect them to have much in common. The next project is not a film at all, but rather a series of documentaries. Since 1964, Michael Apted (working for the BBC) has interviewed the same fourteen people every seven years, to track the progress of their lives. Collectively, these films are called The Up Series, and began when each of the subjects was seven years old. The goal was originally to show a class divide in Britain, but it has become much deeper than that. In the first two episodes we meet Suzy, a spoilt rich girl who is obviously being forced to do these interviews by her parents. In the third instalment, she has moved to Paris, is chain smoking and impatient. We might sympathise with her a little bit, but we don’t especially like her, until the fourth episode – she is no longer the centre of the universe rich girl, she is now a mother, and she is truly happy. Another character, Neil, starts life full of humour and hope, but by the age of twenty-one he is living a life without any direction, a nomad squatting wherever is warm. He’s living this way for a couple years, until, with help one of the subjects, he finally finds meaning in politics. Today, he is an involved member of Britain’s Liberal Democrat party, having run for parliament in 2010. Some characters have dropped out along the way, but amazingly all of them were still alive earlier this year when 56 Up! was released. Seeing the arc of someone’s life played out over a few documentaries is an amazing and deep experience, something that could not be made to fit within the conventions of the film industry.
These two examples are highly ambitious, but in the end they are straightforward and easy to grasp. Not so with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. The film was released in 1973, with money from John Lennon and drawing inspiration from Salvador Dali. The making of the film alone would have made a great movie – Jodorowsky’s communal living with zen monks and the film crew without sleep, his demands that George Harrison bathe his anus on camera, and copious drug use are all legendary now. The film is itself no less lucid, with a main character who could be Jesus’ twin brother, slow motion fights between reptiles and amphibians, and characters that are based on the planets in our solar system. I am not going to go too deep into interpreting the film – to be honest, most of it went over my head – but it was completely Jodorowsky’s beast, nothing the film industry had ever seen before, and rarely has since.
I don’t want to single these films out as the only original things going on – obviously that’s not the case, there are many great films out there that are pushing the medium. About half of Richard Linklater’s films could be added to this list, and many other films have elements that are completely original. I just think these films best illustrate my point, that the films we have in our theatres are not living up to their full potential as art forms. Call me elitist, call me pretentious, call me postmodern, I stand by that statement. As for 2012, I think the only film that will really push us beyond Copolla’s “eight percent” is the Michael Haneke film Amour. It’s still only playing at festivals, but I am hoping it will be coming to the Princeton Garden Theatre soon.
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