Forman's Faces

I recently watched Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1967) for the first time, and although I've not viewed all his early output, I can safely say that the younger Czech director is the superior to the Hollywood prestige director. There's a case to be made for Forman as subversive, in his snarky early digs on Communist dogma and his later treatment of supposedly subversive material (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hair.) Leaving this aside, I'd prefer to remark on a trademark visual technique of three early works- Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball (1966), and Taking Off (1971)- as a perhaps more sublime portrayal of a radical/humanist ethic. That is, the predominance of the human face in both mise en scene and narrative, an emphasis not at all avant garde, but certainly distinctive from typical film form.


This representative shot from Loves of a Blonde shows a typical Forman composition: a tight arrangement around one or several inert bodies, usually from the waist up, in which the facial expressions of the actors subtly push along a narrative in lieu of a continuous expository dialogue. In this instance, three young factory girls find themselves at a mixer to welcome a troop of middle-aged reservist soldiers to their drab provincial town. Three fumbling soldiers eye them across the room, and this one still expresses almost entirely their half-bemused, half-curious response. This sequence forms a bulk of the film's middle part, and like a silent film can be understood with the subtitles turned off. As girls and men look warily at their own and their awkward opposites, the audience is presented with a rotation of 9 distinct faces in unison or alone, and a coterie of anonymous mugs in various states tending toward the banal. An emotional force of small narratives emerges through these precise montages- a technique used in a similar way in the elongated, farcical party that constitutes The Firemen's Ball.

And the faces themselves? Perhaps the best can be politely called provincially pretty, but Forman's true delight at this time is a density of faces that express the full variety of eye, ear, nose, hair, and mouth variations in the Czech hinterlands. This holds his work apart from both silent film's adoration of expressive beauty and Hollywood's star fawning. Rather, there's a certain egalitarian beauty of "the people" broadly distributed over each individual face, such that one feels something of an appreciation of the true community in which these slight films are set, even as the physical locations are limited. It should be noted that Forman is not here obsessed with the face as such (as opposed to Warhol's screen tests, for instance), but rather deftly utilizes it for narrative and, I think, political/ethical purposes. The tension between individual and social interest (The Firemen's Ball), or economy and the erotic (Loves of a Blonde) take shape as much through facial tics as plotting. Despite the slightness of both films, a plethora of small themes and micro-narratives play out in the cinematic space between glances and smiles. This is not to say that Forman dispenses with story or some conventions of form (these are social satires, not experimental adventures), but rather to point to this particular technique as what I feel distinguishes these films and places them among the best of the late 1960s.

But what is so different in Forman's faces, then, say the Hollywood close-up? Whereas the close-up usually conveys a heightened emotional state in contrast to physical action or to punctuate important moments of narrative, Forman's faces seem to need no such justification. Indeed, they typically express the more banal emotions- boredom, awkwardness, embarassment, mild disappointment, slight irritation or anxiety, and petty joys of conversation. And, as in life, they hide as much as they reveal, even when what they have to hide may be of no importance. This prevents easy generic typing and colors these films with unique characterizations. Although we can recognize a few types- the anxious, bumbling authorities in both films (fireman and foreman), for instance, how are we to characterize Loves of a Blonde's Andula and friends? It is a testament to Forman's remarkable direction of expression that we feel for the characters of these brief films without really getting to know them. Every understated face at the party has a story to tell, it seems, and Forman has merely picked a few at random to spin out in past and future.


Taking Off- Forman's first American film- begins with a variation of his face forward technique. Throughout the title sequence and in subsequent bits, auditioners face the camera against a black background and sing, sing, sing! The second such sequence features dozens of young female crooners slogging their way through "Lets Get a Little Sentimental." Its an intensification of the his Czech faces- more rapidly sequenced, framed squarely against a black background- couched within a neat construct that introduces us to the wayward youngster Jeannie and presents the film's general theme of the counterculture's intrusion into traditional American society. What is not abandoned is Forman's determined embrace of facial variety- in this example the mean which could perhaps be averaged out as outer borough pretty. Significantly, these faces are performing, striving- a transposition perhaps of the overriding Czech communist anxiety for social harmony to the more American liberal concerns of individualist achievement and the mass media complex.



Nifty formal and aesthetic moves, but political as well. The lack of glamour and expressive beauty in Forman's faces is an expression of egalitarian solidarity, even more powerful in that it subverts the officially egalitarian dogma of Czech communism, and the anti-egalitarian spirit of American individualism. While perhaps taking a cue from socialist realism or even Italian neo-realism, Forman's faces are not mere vehicles for blunt politics or the weather-worn skin of workerism. Its a generous humanism, one that embraces kind-of-pretty shy young girls as proletariat and would-be glamour pusses as proletariat in denial. As is often noted, while social satire, Forman's films are almost never mocking, and certainly never cruel. As each of his faces has its flaws, every person, regardless of their ideological placement, has their foibles. It is good, these films imply, to be amongst these people and their faults, their small beauties and small ugliness. It is debatable how much this ethic continued through Forman's later films, but most certainly his faces largely disappeared into the rush of the conventional film format.

Very Nice, This Belgium

What is Belgium? What is its character, its flavor, aside from European bureaucracy and dikes? Dikes, right, or is that Holland? What I know of the place from the screen is fairly dour- Jeanne Dielmann's frightful frigidness, The Man Who Cut His Hair Short's ugly psychic landscape. Toute une nuit may have spiced up the mix, but the backdrop remained uninspiring. And now we have the Dardennes to seal the deal for provincial Americans who live by the screen- Belgium is nothing but an industrial plant peopled by Europe's morally challenged marginals, strange folk some of who may speak French, but do very unsophisticated things to their kin and themselves.

It just so happens that my two most recent theatrical viewings were crafted by Belgians, but one by a filmmaker no longer associated with that flat nation. The truly Belgian film, the Dardennes' newest Lorna's Silence, strikes at the heart of the European soul, while Agnes Varda's Beaches of Agnes lolls on its beaches and avenues.

Lorna's Silence trolls familiar ground for the Dardenne brothers, but I believe dramatizes the conflict between humanist ethics and capitalism's profit motive more powerfully than their previous works (granted, as several reviewers have pointed out, the narrative is more contrived and plotted.) Lorna stands at the crux of the contemporary European soul, half way between the promise of egalitarian liberty and slavery to an underworld increasingly integrated with the official economy. Although this Albanian immigrant in Belgium sees glimpses of the utopian, unified continent- in her ability to emigrate, possibly open a small business, seek protection from a welfare state (as when she is granted a speedy divorce)- she is not a true citizen of anything called Europe. Rather, she is a reified commodity- a source of profit for human traffickers and a name on paper that will hopefully be lost in bureaucratic shuffle. Centuries after the Enlightenment revolutions, the soul of Europe remains locked in struggle between the championed ideal of the free individual and the body reduced to commodity. Lorna's Silence, then, works most powerfully as a critique of reification, of the betrayal of the revolutionary-liberal tradition by capitalism's insidious commodification of citizenship and citizen alike.

The Dardenne brothers' realist style is matched by their insistence on ethical decision as more than plot device, an approach alien to Hollywood. Lorna's decision comes mid-film. Claudy is her husband of convenience, a shiftless junkie, who is marked by Lorna's trafficker to be disposed of by way of a lethal overdose. Despite their emotionless business-like sharing of an apartment, Lorna tries to stall for time until a divorce can go through, thereby saving his life. Her attempt to save Claudy while preserving her self-interested immigration scheme animates this section of the narrative. One night, she comes home to find a dealer in their apartment, with Claudy, who has kicked the habit, fiending for a hit. Brazenly, Lorna locks the dealer out, throws the key out of the window, and, shockingly, strips silently and offers herself to Claudy. Her insertion of bodily affection into this chain of casual cruelty and exploitation is a supreme ethical gesture, daring but curious. Why is it sex, that most crassly demeaned human experience, that which disrupts the functioning of the capitalist imperative? It's preeminent place is a sly surprise in Lorna's Silence, one that injects an air of the mystic and mythic into the film's resolutely quotidian comings and goings.

The trauma of Claudy's eventual murder is internalized by the still silent Lorna in a phantom fetus she imagines to be the result of their tryst. Despite her attempts to move forward with her role in the trafficking scheme and small dreams of entrepreneurship, Lorna has irreversibly tripped up the chain of exploitation. Although her gesture of solidarity with Claudy, that of recognizing him as a human worthy by that dent of life and not a disposable junkie, has ultimately failed, the pains from her womb undermine the plan to marry a Russian thug. As all her plans unravel, she is abandoned by all and prepared for either her deportation or death. Lorna flees her captors, but it is an uncertain
escape; the film closes on her in an abadoned cabin, swearing to her unborn child to protect them both. Allusions to other mysterious, virtuous pregnancies are unavoidable. After all, in a similar situation, shunned and desperate, Mary gave birth to Jesus in rough shelter. Lorna, ironically, has become like a virgin after copulation with Claudy, purified of the tainted money relations of the underworld. Perhaps she falls somewhere between the virtuous virgin of The Marquise of O. and the decidedly unvirtuous Queen Mary, killed by a phantom pregnancy tumor.

In another interesting inversion, the film's ethical impulse comes from Lorna, an Eastern European character, amidst Western Europeans corrupted by the scrappy pursuit of money. This challenges the long-standing geographical narrative of the Eastern and slavic nations of the continent only slowly emerging from a natural proclivity to servility and corruption, be it to feudal lords, Turks, or Communist dictators, and lagging behind the progressive prosperity of the West. The "spirit of capitalism" is capable of awfully vile things, Protestant or not.

Agnes Varda, although associated with France in every way, was actually born Belgian, as her autobiographical essay film, The Beaches of Agnes, tells. True to its title, the lively octogenarian Varda narrates a collage of her life and loves, which all lead back to the sea, suggested as the font of her imagination. The film works both as a personalized account in documentary fashion of her life and work, and as a sly, engaging exploration of creative existence broadly considered, in the manner of her life long friend Chris Marker (who appears in the form of a cartoon cat, why not?) Varda's considerable charm and intuition for successful cinematic experiments (she is clearly having a blast with the camera and montage after all these years!) raise it above narcissistic nostalgia to a true work of art, if a humble one. It is a work that will not be considered an after thought to her career, destined to DVD extra menus, but an essential part of her ouevre.

*********************

I noted in slight alarm today, that aside from these Belgian gems, my viewing and re-viewing list from the past week reads like an Amazon list of sociopathic murderer films: The Bridesmaid (Chabrol, 2004), The Honeymoon Killers (Kastle, 1969), Badlands (Malick, 1973), & Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986). I'm not sure whether to chalk it up to the DVD collection at my new local library branch, of some darker element of my subconscious rearing up. Oh yes, I can't forget the outdoor screening of Chaplin's The Kid last week- a beautiful saving grace.

Down and Out in Late Capitalist America

In case you didn't get the memo, the American dream is dead. It never really was, but what I think most approximates what people have in mind when they bandy about the phrase is the relative prosperity of the post-WWII decades. For the left looking back, it is a paradoxical time of an apparently ascendant working class gaining on the back of continued racism, imperialism, and cultural conformity. Stable employment at decent wages and a pension, affordable and relatively private housing (the white picket fence; Levittown), access to public higher education, law and order, increased standards of living for your children, a rich community and cultural milieu, a car in the driveway and chicken in the pot- this is the stuff of the American dream. What enabled parts or all of the dream for large segments of America was capitalism's state-sanctioned compromise with labor, backed by emerging American superpower status. Part Keynesian New Deal remnants, part militant labor demand (CIO, etc.) remnants, this compromise allowed for increasing real wages in exchange for peace and productivity in the workplace. The post-war global hegemony of the US ensured that this transformation to an affluent consumer society could take place on the backs of exploited nations and peoples. The ideology of American exceptionism and meritocracy seemed to be coming into focus with material reality for the white middle class and organized working classes.

Its a crude schema, for sure, but I present it because I do think there is something to "the American dream" beyond its ideological utility. There's a whiff of egalitarian possibility to it that can be deployed by both left (the Communist Party's "working class Americanism", the contemporary labor movement's rhetorical emphasis on middle class lifestyles) and right (the fable of a return to innocence via conservative morality). Needless to say, the material conditions for the dream have long since been destroyed in the neo-liberal turn (off-shoring American industry, destruction of organized labor, defunding social services, privatization.) This is another story, the very narrative we find ourselves in now, where the fumes of the dream evaporate into the sober tragedy of foreclosed subdivisions, historic unemployment, and the financial voodoo of Wall Street. Modern capitalism of steel and stuff is long gone in the U S of A. Now we stumble through a late capitalism of spectacle and speculation, awaiting the next crisis.

No one told Hollywood. New American Cinema's brief 70s afterglow made some room for bold explorations of the dream gone bust- Barbara Loden's recently rechampioned Wanda is my immediate association- only to fade into the banality of the 80s and 90s. This is not to say that socioeconomic reality is ignored by Hollywood, which has to make its requisite prestige pics and occasionally grasp for a sympathetic, verite gloss of the poor and downtrodden. Overwhelmingly, however, American society is schizophrenically portrayed either as a smooth, prosperous backdrop for various romantic foibles and heroics, or as a spectacularly dysfunctional country on the razor's edge of dystopia. Neither approach critically explores society. American cinema by and large has no incentive do so when the audience growth markets appear to be torture pics and postmodern quirk.

And so imagine my shock to have earlier this year viewed two contemporary American films in a single week that both attempt a critical, challenging portrait of late capitalist America. Its protagonists change their clothing in gas station bathrooms, and it is not sexy; submit themselves to humiliating acts of violence, and it is not funny. Indeed, the extreme sobriety of The Wrestler and Wendy and Lucy indicate what a grim task dissecting the decomposing corpse of the American dream must be for a serious filmmaker.

I'll examine the 2 films through their protagonists, using the scheme Wendy->adult experience in late capitalist America->Randy "The Ram". Kelly Reichart astutely casts Michelle Williams as a vaguely hipster-chic, scrappy, and attractive young Wendy who, although bearing an at times cynical attitude, is nonetheless fresh-faced and naive. Wendy and Lucy follows her through several days flat broke and busted somewhere in Oregon, en route to a supposed canning job in Alaska. Stylistically sparse, this is damn well not some sort of contemporary On the Road or Easy Rider. Wendy is not searching for herself, or for America, but for a paycheck. Neorealist allusions, especially to The Bicycle Thief abound. Like that film's unemployed protagonist whose stolen bicycle sets off a downward spiral of degradation, Wendy's bad luck dooms her within days to absolute penury, including the loss of her precious pet and only companion, her dog Lucy. Poverty and homelessness are mere missteps away from anyone, we are shown, even for the hip young things Hollywood pampers and adores. Pluck is not enough, and social ills can not be pathologized in inner city minorities. Wendy is a benchmark, a true hipster bum- not a slacker lost in a pot-clouded malaise a la Kevin Jackson or Richard Linklater, or an over-educated mumblecorer, but a victim of the cold, banal mechanations of the economy. The vagaries of capitalist society in crisis, corporate flights from existing communities and livelihoods, stimy her no matter her significant reserves of resolve.

Generally then, Wendy's experience is an anecdote contra the American dream. In its specifics, it portrays a very contemporary type of alienation- that of outwardly hip, intelligent, light-skinned young people from not only from personal fulfillment, but from the very means of subsistence. If we can chart the rising affluence of Italy in the evolution of its cinema from the material deprivation concerning the Neorealists to the spiritual alienation of Antonioni's characters, then we can likewise see in Wendy and Lucy the fall from relative affluence even seen in, say, the Singles of 16 years previous.

And perhaps the Singles/Wendy and Lucy example has more to it. The geography of Wendy and Lucy, although certainly originating in director Reichart's connection to the northwest, is significant for our analysis. Wendy has fled Indiana, which calls home reveal to be an unhappy place personally as well as economically. Indiana recalls visions of the heartland American dream, although its also part of the Rust Belt, its cities and towns convulsing from the death throes of the manufacturing economy. Significantly, she breaks down in Oregon, presumably near Portland, one of the capitals of the so-called "creative class", the heroes of a new post-modern, green economy. The cultural cache of Portland is well known. In addition to being a hipster haven, it is, like similarly touted places such as Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle, a hoped-for capital generator in an otherwise bleak national economic landscape. Yet Wendy finds it as inhospitable as anywhere else, bereft of opportunity and indifferent to her tough charm, perhaps not hip enough to find an outlet for commodification. It is, of course, a well-known reality that Oregon's economy sucks, and the state has long tried to persuade folks to visit, but not move there (echoes of the Joad family arriving in California?) Finally, Wendy heads north to the wilds of Alaska in a freight car, like the hobos of yore. Alaska in the popular imagination remains the last American frontier, a vast wilderness not entirely integrated into American capitalism, and perhaps for that reason appearing as a dim beacon of hope for the down and out of the lower 48. This myth, popularized by Jack London, has not diminished much; however, we can not help but dread as the credits role what miserable fate likely awaits Wendy there.

Wendy's America is one of no jobs and no opportunities, a physically ugly post-sprawl landscape of ubiquitous stand-alone drug stores and failing neighborhoods. Its people are worn, suspicious, yet generous in a pitch, as Wendy discovers in the saintly yet pathetic gestures of the elderly security guard she encounters. Unlike the guardian angels of old- those father figures, be it police officer or kindly stranger, who provide the crucial link that brings the struggling protagonist back into meritocratic society- Wally the guard's ultimate effort for Wendy is absolutely impotent (a fistful of crumpled small bills), for he too is just a paycheck away from destitution. But in a film as bleak and unsentimental as Wendy and Lucy, a little of the milk of human kindness goes a long way.

The levelling of the late capitalist American landscape moves us seamlessly from Wendy's anonymous streets to the same worn storefronts and broken concrete parking lots of Randy the Ram's New Jersey. For all its razzle dazzle veneer, The Wrestler's tone is remarkably similar to that of Wendy and Lucy. If Wendy is the still beautiful naif yet to feel the full grind of the machine, Mickey Rourke's Randy is the mangled lump of flesh that it has spit out. Wendy's ordeal still unfolds on the tension between the atmosphere of possibility (beautifully enhanced by the film's simple and haunting hummed theme) and the slog of bureaucratic indifference. Randy's struggle is dramatized on the body itself, where not even the occasional snatches of northwestern beauty afforded to Wendy can adorn.

It remains unclear in the narrative what drove Randy to the ring, but over several decades The Ram- the professional showman wrestler- has subsumed any previous identity. What Randy and his peers understand, but the fans don't, is that wrestling is a job like any other in capitalist society, with its hierarchies, potential rewards, and probable insecurity. While everyone knows pro wrestling is fake, Aronofsky's effort to absolutely strip it of spectacle is admirable. Of course, the director's over-reliance on conventional narrative devices, especially the redemption theme played out alternately with his estranged daughter and stripper love interest, builds up another form of spectacle. Fortunately we can leave The Wrestler's faults aside for this analysis.

In Randy the Ram we see an exaggerated account of the role of work and the worker. The slog of the punch clock might be replaced by the ultraviolence of the squared circle, but the exploitation, alienation, and harm to the person are amply on display. Fortunately, many of us do not have to undergo being stapled or thrown onto shards of glass at the office, but these are apt metaphors for the absolute sacrificing of personal autonomy we surrender. Indeed, as the Ram's personal confusion and pain dramatizes, our very sense of self and identity is fractured in capitalist society; divided between the alienated time we sell our labor power, the time we have remaining to pursue alienated pleasures, and the potential, tantalizing possiblity that hovers above all of finally uniting the interests of self and society beyond waged exploitation. The late capitalist twist of The Wrestler's portrayal of work is what Randy does outside the ring. There is the second job at a supermarket, as well as petty self-promotion and flea marketing of the fragments of his fame. Indeed, the trend from the single-paycheck American dream to today is one of holding more and more lower waged jobs, and in the off-time speculating in small time entrepreurship on EBay or the interstate flea market. Randy and his damaged peers selling dvds and personal photos at a VFW Hall reminds one of nothing so much as the dismal yard sales dotting state highways in the rural south on saturday mornings- families trying to sell off worthless junk for grocery money. Wrestlers don't earn pensions, but then again, who does these days?

Aronofsky sharply dramatizes this fractured identity and the violence of even the most mundane workplace in the crucial scene in which Randy has quit the ring to work at a supermarket deli counter. To the imagined cheering of fans he emerges- through sheets of filthy plastic and to work behind the counter, serving not pain unto his opponents, but potato salad to elderly penny pinchers. Following a quick montage in which it seems Randy has found his rhythm shovelling salad and slicing meat, a customer recognizes him. He denies he's the Ram, but the question of identity broached, he slams a fist into the slicer, effectively ending his brief grocery vocation and forcing him back to the ring. Although his outburst is extreme in its bloodiness, the humiliations and occupational dangers of this type of service job are very real. From the mundane to the extreme, the deli counter to the spectacular entertainment sector, the postmodern worker has not escaped from the dangers of the industrial workplace, but has been stripped of the benefits and job security won there. It should be added that Randy's only emotional connection is made to a worker in a similarly precarious, body-oriented line, over which the threat of violence hangs- the stripper Cassidy.

Wendy and Randy, then, despite their differences, both find themselves on the precarious shit end of late capitalism. Petty hustling and theft, extreme risk-taking, marginalized roles in consumption and production- these are not exceptions to their existence, but absolutely necessary for survival. Reichart's approach is more naturalistic and sparse then Aronofsky's, but both owe something to the dour humanism of the Neorealists. As Wendy abandons Lucy to hop a lonely train North, one is reminded of the memorable ending to Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D., also involving a desperate title character, their dog and a train. Whereas De Sica's classic protagonist is a discarded old man whose sole canine companion saves him in a moment of grace from suicide by train, Wendy is separated from Lucy with no clear resolution. Without even the consolation of a long life well lived, she sets off, alone, a youth whose potential stands to be wasted in a cold place far away from home.

Wendy and Lucy

Umberto and Flick