Sitcom | Television | Roseanne: No Holds Barred

Roseanne is America's greatest sitcom. There, I've said it.

At least in its early years, the show was a perfectly formed, and perfectly performed, slice of working-class America. It was consistently intelligent and emotionally mature. And (as if this matters) it gave Joss Whedon and Judd Apatow their first writing jobs.

I didn't even watch the show when it aired in the '90s but discovering it on DVD has been a revelation. I was reminded of its subtleties this week when I read Roseanne's fascinating account of the behind-the-scenes ructions, posted on New York Magazine's site. Take a few minutes to go and read it too.

And if you need any convincing, here are a few choice extracts:

'The idea that your ego is not ego at all but submission to the will of the Lord starts to dawn on you as you recognize that only by God’s grace did you make it through the raging attack of idea pirates and woman haters, to ascend to the top of Bigshit Showbiz Mountain.'

'I walked into this woman’s office, held the scissors up to show her I meant business, and said, “Bitch, do you want me to cut you?” We stood there for a second or two, just so I could make sure she was receptive to my POV.'

'Imitation is the sincerest form of show business.'

'Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that’s why you won’t be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I’m not bitter.'

All done? Good, wasn't it! Now, for balance, I recommend this rather po-faced response from The Guardian.

Although the network's worries over Roseanne are legendary, what's amazing is that very little of this tension shows up onscreen. In fact, watching seasons back to back on DVD, it's striking that the show has a coherence that's very rare for this era of TV. (Again, I am choosing not to address the last few seasons, when the show was chasing ratings and its star was struggling with mental illness.)

Look at the way each episode begins. I think we learn a lot about television's preoccupations from studying title sequences (that's how I justify the time I spend on Youtube, anyway). Roseanne's one-shot opening is exemplary in the way that it prepares us not just for the show's thematic concerns, but also for its political challenge.



Sorry about the quality of the video, but hopefully you'll have grasped the boisterous to-and-fro of the family unit, the deft sketching of interpersonal relationships and, most importantly, the way the kitchen table is a locus around which discourse occurs. It's a conversation to which we do not have access, true, but the rasping bluesy harmonica conveys its earthiness and its wit. Offsetting the liveliness of the group, the smooth 360° camera movement speaks to their emotional connection.

It is a camera movement that begins and ends with Roseanne, capped off (wonderfully) with her laughter: raucous, unself-conscious, enjoying her family and herself. And this is the nature of that political statement - the show dares to suggest that matriarchy, working-class life, irritation and happiness are all compatible. It's simple enough but I'm struggling to think of anything quite so progressive on our screens today.

Nicolas Pillai
Film Editor

Vincent Price | Film+Television+Radio | Art in the Blood

"Someone called actors 'sculptors in snow'. Very apt. In the end, it's all nothing." - Vincent Price


What a voice! Never mind that tall wide frame and that diabolic brow, what a voice! Vinegary and pointed, loaded with promise, it's the sound of the Snake in Eden.

Earlier this week, Phil Brown wrote of Price's magnificent readings of Poe. I offer this piece as an addendum, a glimpse of the other Vincent, before Corman and before Tim Burton. My Price is the Price of the '40s and the '50s, the smooth operator so often on the verge of hysteria. Look at his vapid gigolo in Laura (1944), clinging onto Judith Anderson after Dana Andrews has gut-punched him. Or his Shakespearean ham in His Kind of Woman (1951), baffling Bob Mitchum by complaining, "Alas! Why must I be plagued by yammering magpies on the eve of battle?" And was there ever an actor more suited to playing Cardinal Richelieu (1948), sneering haughtily at Gene Kelly's D'Artagnan?

Physically, Price called the opening of The Maltese Falcon to mind: "Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the more flexible V of his mouth. His nostrils curled back to make another smaller V. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down - from high flat temples - in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan."

Temperamentally, however, Price was more the heir to George Sanders than to Bogie. Both were cultured and sardonic, and both had played Leslie Charteris' gentlemen adventurer The Saint, Sanders onscreen for RKO, Price for NBC Radio. Price's broadcasts as Simon Templar are breezy and fun, and he handles tough-guy dialogue with just the right sense of self-mockery. And even in these pulpy programmers, we get a glimpse of the man within - each episode ends with a small message from Price the actor, often addressing social concerns of the day. Bob Glickstein draws attention to the coda to Author of Murder in which Price speaks out against the "venom of racial and religious hatred" in '50s America.

While onscreen Price often played vulgarians (see 1950's Champagne for Caesar, in which he menaces the eminently civilised Ronald Colman), offscreen he was that rarest of things, an intellectual film star. Like Edward G. Robinson, he was a great art collector and was passionate about the humanities. In 1951, he donated 90 pieces from his collection, setting up the first 'teaching art collection' in an American community college.

I'll close with two favourite moments of Price ephemera. The first is an unsuccessful pilot entitled Collector's Item (1958), that teamed him with Peter Lorre as crime-fighting antique dealers. Yes, long before Lovejoy, Price and Lorre were risking life and limb in the pursuit of objets d'art. It's a crime that the studio nixed further episodes. Thankfully, the pilot lives on via Youtube!



Lastly, a scene that makes use not just of Price's voice, but of his singing voice. His Professor Rattigan is vain, devious and terrifying. And, despite all that other great work, it's his contribution to Basil the Great Mouse Detective (1986) that most strongly rebuffs the rather despondent claim that "In the end, it's all nothing." As with George Sanders and Shere Khan, as long as children watch Disney films, that voice will survive in memory. And perhaps they'll seek out further works by Vincent Price. That's something.

L | Commentary | Mr & Mrs Harry Place & James Ryan

Coney Island, New York, February, 1901

‘Raindrops keep falling on my head’

Just as the door to Mr Place’s room
begins to close, you glimpse a pistol in
its holster, sort of thing they use out West.
But mindful of his tip, you think no more
of it, until a few days’ later, when
you read how Pinkertons have chanced upon
a photograph of members of the Wild
Bunch outlaw gang. And there he is, him with
the classy broad in tow, the Sundance Kid
no less. You recognise the piercing eyes
from the adjacent suite, Butch Cassidy,
would you believe? You dine on him for weeks.
They leave next day, the Argentine, some say.
Whatever, they are never seen again.

How do we understand figures that span history and myth? In ‘Mr & Mrs Harry Place & James Ryan’, Peter Branson explores those spaces between, connecting perception and memory in his account of Butch Cassidy, Etta Place and Harry Longbaugh.

The poem’s title highlights the question of nomenclature, and of codes approved by society. It also creates a mystery: what is the relationship of this married couple (identified as Mr & Mrs) with James Ryan? What do those ampersands denote? Additional context is provided by a place and a date, and by the lyric of a movie song.

The first of these manages to be both precise and obscure. It gives us a milieu, a certain knowledge that Butch & Etta & Sundance did visit that place, at that time. But we cannot know what they saw, or what they said to one another. Historians cannot even tell us their true relationship. Was Etta the lover of one outlaw, or both? Was she a schoolteacher or a prostitute? And what was her place in the homosocial construct that was ‘Butch & Sundance’?

The 1969 film version of their lives has become the dominant interpretation of those figures, as flip, wisecracking heroes, played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford. And in that movie, Butch and Etta (Katharine Ross) snatch a moment of happiness as they ride a bicycle through the countryside, accompanied by B.J. Thomas’ song. Is Branson condemning this potentially trite moment? Or is he acknowledging Hollywood as one of the ways we understand and approach mythic history?

If I tend toward the second reading it’s because Branson positions us with a bellhop, snatching a glimpse of a pistol as the door swings shut. In doing so, he re-establishes Butch as a figure of mystery, without losing his glamour. When we read of ‘the piercing eyes’, it’s difficult not to think of Paul Newman’s baby blues.

William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay for that 1969 movie, once observed, ‘One of Butch’s weaknesses was he loved having his photograph taken.’ For me, this is a great triumph of Branson’s poem: it focuses us on the idea of imagery, on the way we represent ourselves, and the way others think of us. And Branson is clear-headed enough to recognize this as a carnivorous process – we consume Butch, we ‘dine on him for weeks’.

If the last line asserts the ultimate impossibility of knowing these figures, it does so in the sure knowledge that we do carry their pictures in our heads. And in this small, perfectly formed poem, Branson adds to the imaginative history of Butch, Etta and Sundance: I will not forget the door closing on a glimpse of the West, or the empty rooms they left behind.

Nicolas Pillai
Film Editor

China | Film+Television | Forget it, Jake.

"You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't."

Noah Cross, Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974, Paramount)

There is a famous shot in Chinatown that moves along Jack Nicholson's naked arm, stopping when it reaches his face resting on a pillow. At left of frame, Faye Dunaway watches his post-coital satisfaction. The scene is lit so that their skin seems golden, so that we bask in the beauty of their present moment. But, characteristically for the film, this moment is in thrall to an opaque past.

Dunaway asks Nicholson about his past as a beat cop, when he patrolled the streets of L.A.'s Chinatown. It is a painful memory: Nicholson's character, J.J. Gittes, tried to save a woman from getting hurt. By involving himself, he ensured that she was.

In Polanski's paean to the film noir, the space of Chinatown stands as a metaphor for the unknowable, the uncontrollable. But it also has a contemporary relevance which may not be immediately obvious.

Writing in Movie, Ed Gallafent observed that, "Chinatown is a locale rather than a human population, a context in which Americans find themselves in circumstances not of their own choosing and in which their actions and dreams are frustrated, but for reasons that cannot be made accessible, because the underlying order cannot be understood or represented. In this respect, we may take Chinatown exactly to anticipate the cycle of late 'seventies films overtly set in the Vietnam of the war, with their inability to articulate Vietnamese culture other than as an obscure background to American lives and actions."

It is only in the concluding scenes of the film that we reach Chinatown, and it is in this space that the tragic events of the finale play out. These fatal moments repay a promise that the film has made us - that Chinatown is inescapable, that while Gittes may think he has left his grubby past behind him, forgetting is futile and indeed impossible.

The Oriental space as maze features in a number of Hollywood films of the 80s that do not explicitly reference Vietnam - I am thinking specifically of Hammett (Wim Wenders, 1982, Zoetrope) and Big Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter, 1986, Twentieth Century Fox). These movies, far pulpier than Chinatown, evoke the Victorian anxieties of Sax Rohmer. Orientalist representation ensnares their all-American heroes in variant San Franciscos, depicting cities within cities where the rule of law is imposed by sons of Fu Manchu.

I was surprised to see a similar process at work in Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' Sherlock. In the second episode The Blind Banker (written by Stephen Thompson), the Baker Street duo found themselves in London's Chinatown. One of the precepts of the 2010 series was its assumption that viewers were 'in on the game'. We were supposed to congratulate ourselves for recognizing the references to Rohmer and to the 1977 Doctor Who serial The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

But Sherlock collapsed through its failure to justify a coherent world. If we are to understand that the appeal of the show lies in Sherlock's interaction with the modern world, why are these hoary old Si-Fan cliches cluttering up the place? The internal logic, and metaphorical weight, of Chinatown was missing. Only the stereotype remained, a small echo of a once-rich imagery.

Forget it, Jake...

Radio | Dialogue | Hammett Bends the Spoon

A few years ago, I wrote a radio play that retold Lillian Hellman's partial anecdotes of Dashiell Hammett. This is one of the scenes.

SCENE 4. INT. NIGHT. BEDROOM.

(Dash and Lily are in bed.)

LILY: Were you ever in real danger?

DASH: A few times. I’ve got a dent in my head.

LILY: How’s that?

DASH: Hit with a brick in a dark alley back in ’21.

LILY: (laughing) Ever shoot it out with gangsters?

DASH: Almost once a week.

LILY: I don’t think I believe you much.

DASH: I wasn’t a G-man. angel. Most Pinkerton work was sitting in cars, watching and waiting.

LILY: So how did you get the scars on your legs?

DASH: That was one time when a group of us were sent along to nab a gang that had been stealing dynamite. We broke into the house where they'd shacked up, but they were waiting for us. Someone must have given them the word. Anyhow, one of them sat on me while his friend started whittling away at my leg with a clasp knife.

(FX: Lily lights a cigarette.)

LILY: Got any other good Pinkerton stories?

DASH: All my stories are Pinkerton stories, sweetheart. That’s my problem.

LILY: So why did you quit?

DASH: Lots of reasons. I wanted to concentrate on my writing. And TB. The scars on my lungs were giving me hell. I wanted to concentrate on my breathing too.

(FX: The bedsprings creak as Lily gets out of bed.)

LILY: Time’s getting on. We ought to-

DASH: But I haven’t told you the best Pinkerton story of all yet.

LILY: Tell me when-

DASH: Sit down. You’ll want to hear this one.

LILY: (resignedly) Alright, OK.

DASH: When the regular police force took away a lot of the Pinkerton work, we used to get employed as union busters, strike breakers. In 1917, I got sent out to Butte, Montana. The Anaconda Copper Company was having trouble with a fellow called Frank Little. He was a labour union organizer – part Indian with only one eye but he knew how to work a crowd. He wouldn’t be bluffed or scared off. So an officer for Anaconda Copper offered me five thousand dollars if I would murder Frank Little.

(FX: He stops. Lily dare not speak.)

DASH: I went out on the next train but I heard afterwards that Little was lynched at a railroad crossing a few days later. Anaconda Copper didn’t have any trouble after that. Pretty, isn’t it?

LILY: They couldn’t have made you that offer if you hadn’t been a strikebreaker.

DASH: Yes ma’am. So why do you think I told you about it?

(A long pause.)

LILY: Get dressed. We don’t want to keep my husband waiting.

Nicolas Pillai

Film Editor

Sauce | Film | Kensington Gore

Blood hasn't always been red.

Not in the movies, at least. Before the advent of colour, blood oozed black like sin from the enemies of James Cagney. Black as ink, black as the lost souls of 1930s Hollywood cinema.

In 1957, Hammer Studios released The Curse of Frankenstein in Eastman Colour. Reds blazed from the screen with lurid intensity.

For a good thick dollop of Kensington Gore, mix one part water with three parts corn syrup. Drip in some red food colouring, and maybe some blue. Stir in corn starch for a nice claggy texture.

Or, if you haven't time for that, do what Alfred Hitchcock did when shooting Psycho. Film in black and white and use chocolate sauce.

Nicolas Pillai

Film Editor

A Warm Silkworms Welcome to Nicolas Pillai - Film Editor

Silkworms is no stranger to film. The cinematic, with its heroes, villains and twists, kept creeping into our poetry, prose and music - often. Something needed to be done; it was time to embrace the silverscreen wholehearted, as a category of its own. We decided that we needed a Film Editor to orchestrate such proceedings, and provide ever-insightful articles on the subject. We didn't have to ponder long for a likely candidate, as we had our man off the bat - the verified film-geek, moviemeister and celluloid showdog Nicolas Pillai. As our regular readers will surely remember, he was the chap behind the Magic Lanterns series of mini-essays - they are fantastic and we were sold.

So, allow us to introduce our new Film Editor, Nicolas Pillai. Stay tuned movie fans, things are going to get awesome. His latest Superman article already is. I'd wager even die-hard Superman fans will learn at least one thing. I read it, learnt about twenty.

You can find more regular installments from the brilliant brain of Nicolas over at Squeezegut Alley, his very own blogplace where he discusses film, crime fiction and comic books over a jazz soundtrack.

The End.
Roll Credits.

Leap | Film+Television+Comics | Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

He that is everywhere is nowhere. (Thomas Fuller M.D., Gnomologia, 1732)

The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939)

Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound... (Adventures of Superman, ABC, 1952)

Superman hasn't always been able to fly. Once upon a time, back in Joel Siegel and Jerry Schuster's original stories, he was only capable of super-leaps. He was also a fairly ruthless bastard in those early days. In a strip from 1939, he terrorizes a stool pigeon by dangling him over the city. "Hm-mm! I wonder if we could jump all the way to that building?" Superman asks the poor fellow, adding, "Did you ever wonder how it would feel to fall a great distance and be CRUSHED TO A PULP?"

Needless to say, Superman gets the information he's looking for.

With hindsight, it's disconcerting to see such a well-loved character starting out life as a bullying Übermensch. The clue's in the name of course, but it's difficult not to be a little shocked by lines like, "Cracking your head like an eggshell will be a messy job, but if you insist on being stubborn..." In these first comic-strip outings, the Man of Steel was Spring-Heeled Jack bestriding the earth, a colossus in red underpants.

Over time, the rule-book was rewritten. Now Supes could fly, continuously and without rest. He could even leave the Earth's atmosphere, venturing out into the depths of space in search of his lost homeworld. And with this upgrade came a new source of imagery. He wasn't just a Nietschean avenger anymore; he was an angel. He could look down upon the world from a God's eye view.

It's fair to say that these grandiose ideas were sublimated for most of the strip's early life. But when the character came to be adapted for the motion pictures, the imagery of flight fed upon this crucial metaphor. So too did the achievement of flight, with the technical challenge of its representation becoming a crucial selling point. It's no surprise that the blockbuster hit of 1978 (in which Christopher Reeve filled out the lycra) used the language of faith in its tagline: "You'll believe a man can fly."

Even the earliest screen incarnations emphasized the character's dominion over the skies. In The Mechanical Monsters (1941) and The Bulleteers (1942), two of the Fleischer Studios' brilliant Superman cartoons, striking sequences show our hero soaring above the city, then zipping down into action. Very soon, the Fleischer cartoons recruited Superman into the war, reigning down death on stereotyped Japanese troops.

It was the Fleischer cartoons that first gave Superman flight. The animators, quite understandably, decided that super-bunny-hops looked clumsy onscreen and so adjusted his super-powers accordingly. The majority of the cartoons were rotoscoped, a process that traced the movement of live-action footage onto the hand-drawn cells. Rotoscoping flight, however, was too complex, meaning that the animated flying sequences took on a looser, malleable aspect. With form came plasticity.

For many years, animation remained the only method of picturing flight. Superman's first live-action outing, Columbia's 1948 15-part serial starring Kirk Alyn, switched to animation footage whenever take-off was required. In the more accomplished Adventures of Superman TV series (1952-1958), George Reeves flew on wires, usually against matte shots or back projection.

Budgetary restraints meant that the same shots of Reeves flying were used in each episode, but this creates an interesting sub-textual resonance. The repetition of the same special effects sequences heightens our awareness of their mechanical reproduction. Flight becomes routine and ritualized, making Superman's intervention into each episode a true deus ex machina. On the backlots of Metropolis, the focus is always upon the characters of the Daily Planet newsroom, and the way that they enact B-movie tropes. Episodes frequently end with Clark Kent winking at the camera, as though acknowledging a tacit contract - Superman as shared joke.

The first hour of the Christopher Reeve Superman stands up pretty well today as an attempt to place the character in a pulp-screwball tradition of Americana. It also presented the most sustained religious allegory the franchise had seen so far, with Marlon Brando incarnating a dubious Heavenly Father. The knowingness of the script often worked against it, however. In what must be one of the most cringe-worthy sequences in American film, Superman's first flight with Lois Lane became a soupy Freudian ballet. The movie's tagline cuts both ways - this really has to be seen to be believed.

In the final scene of the movie, Reeve circles the Earth and passing the camera, smiles at us. It's a reassuring moment, a promise that flight is no longer a joke and that omnipotence is benign.

In a post-9/11 world, this omnipotence becomes problematic. Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (2006) attempted to negotiate the character's inefficacy through a period of absence, with his return marking a reinvigoration of the American spirit. But the film ended up seeming glum and sour. Brendan Routh's Superman is castrated, a father without access to his son, doomed to watch over a world that needs him but cannot accommodate him. The final shot repeats Reeve's circuit around the Earth, but omits the smile to camera.

Flying as a metaphor for loneliness? Tiresome stuff - I think I prefer Nasty Superman. Now, where was I? (reaches for Siegel and Schuster) Ah yes, Superman is clawing at a villain's face: "This nose would look perfect, mounted above my mantle piece!"

Marvellous.

Nicolas Pillai

Film Editor

Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns by Nicolas Pillai | Part 4: The Bedroom

 

The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and decency.
The Motion Production Code of 1930.

Bedrooms are always significant in film. Whether characters are dreaming, making love, going to sleep or waking up, bedrooms are always significant.

Maybe it’s because they are such private places, and the things that occur within them are often hidden from us in life. And so scenes in bedrooms hold a special kind of thrill, permitting us access to intimate moments of the characters. Once Hollywood studios began to implement the Hays’ Office’s Production Code in the 1930s, it became common to show married couples occupying separate beds. It was as though America was becoming ashamed of itself.

I was uncomfortable with all of the handwringing, tutting and sneering over conspicuous consumerism and cultural imperialism in this summer’s reviews of Sex and the City 2. It is, I think, noteworthy that the same critics failed to muster the same level of outrage for The Expendables. There are two snobberies at work there, one concerning (excuse the revolting term) 'chick flicks' and one about TV shows that get above themselves. While I’m not interested in defending Carrie & co. here, I do think the film had some very interesting bedroom scenes. And none of them had anything to do with sex.

In the New York sequences of the movie, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) begins to feel that conjugal life in her new apartment is growing stale. The final straw comes when her husband John James Preston (one-time Mr. Big, Chris Noth) buys her a big screen TV for the bedroom. To Carrie, this is the end of romance. He only wants to watch black and white movies, whereas she wants to live in them.

Watching the hitch-hiking scene from It Happened One Night (a film in which attraction begins with lines drawn across a motel bedroom), Carrie worries over her ability to lead an exciting married life. At the end of the film, in the living room again, the couple watch the conclusion to The Talk of the Town, as Cary Grant runs back to kiss Jean Arthur. Carrie has reordered domestic space to her satisfaction.

What’s so wrong with watching TV in bed anyway? In Sex and the City 2, the bedroom becomes less the arena of sexual satisfaction and more the assurance of mutual content. The way this is measured is through the absence of a TV. The bedroom becomes the last refuge from the moving image.

Keep dreaming. Keep watching.

Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns, by Nicolas Pillai | Part 3: The Automobile

In his later films, Hitchcock shot car interiors in front of such alarmingly fake rear projection that it seemed to be his new cinematic signature.
John Waters.

You’re driving through the night. Through the blur of your windshield, the headlights pick out signs for long-forgotten towns. You don’t know where you’re going, but you know what you’re leaving behind.

What’s that up ahead? Palookaville, 5 miles.

Rear projection is one of Hollywood’s most familiar special effects, and one of its most ignored. Confronted with a back projected shot in an old movie, modern audiences usually react in two ways. Some will ignore it, passing it off as a technical limitation of the time. Others will laugh at it, their chuckles hovering somewhere between affection and derision.

Filming car scenes in the studio was largely down to camera size. The bulky equipment needed to film on location was complicated immeasurably in driving scenes. You just couldn’t fit a camera on the front of a moving car. Very occasionally set-ups were used that filmed from trailer platforms, but this was an expensive and time-consuming process. Far better to have the scene shot in the studio, where you could remove variables like weather, wind and the dubious driving ability of your hungover leading man.

What’s rarely mentioned with regard to rear projection is the level of meaning it can bring to a scene. In County Hospital, Stan Laurel is driving Oliver Hardy home in an open-topped car. Through a series of misadventures too complicated to detail, Stan is feeling the effects of a tranquilizer and Ollie’s leg is in plaster. As the sleepy Stan veers their car from lane to lane and Ollie flails around in the back seat, we see the oncoming traffic as back (and front) projection. What’s interesting here is the problem of scale – the surrounding traffic is much larger than in life, dwarfing the hapless twosome. The grotesquely enhanced surroundings make the scene more terrifying than funny. The sequence takes on the imagery of nightmare.

A less dramatic, but equally disconcerting, effect is felt in Vertigo. As James Stewart tracks Kim Novak through San Francisco, his delusional state seems to be reflected by the hazy scenery passing by. Later, in one of Hitchcock’s most celebrated shots, Stewart seems to know this when he kisses Novak, as the camera circles them, transporting him back to the stables of the Mission San Juan Bautista.

For drive-in audiences, back projected scenes must have offered an eerie mirror image. Sitting stationary in their cars, slurping at their shakes, looking up at Hollywood faces clutching steering wheels as they moved through virtual scenery.

Drive careful, now.

Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns, by Nicolas Pillai | Part 2: The City

It’s only a movie, Ingrid!
Alfred Hitchcock, on the set of Spellbound.

Last year, I flew to Detroit for an academic conference, two months before Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate an explosive on a NWA flight. It was my first trip to the USA and, jet-lagged, I stumbled around a city that bore no resemblance to my idea of the American metropolis. This was a city where trees grew up through the roofs of forgotten buildings, where skyscrapers stood derelict as a sad reminder of more luxurious times.

On that first night, I walked through the heart of Detroit’s Metro district, along wide empty streets, feeling eyes watching me from shadowy alleyways. I realized I was lost. I started to panic. Then I turned the corner and stared down the barrel of a tank rumbling towards me. Soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders were marching alongside.

I hadn’t seen a newspaper in two days. I thought martial law had been declared.

Stunned, I backed around the street to a group of onlookers. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked. They smiled pityingly and explained, ‘They’re shooting a movie.’

I’d stumbled onto the set of the remake of Red Dawn. But in that eerie environment, it could just as well have been invasion. I was in a war movie or a zombie movie. I was in Detroit, the abandoned city. I suppose what I’m getting to here is that the city is an entity endlessly recreated in movies. Haven’t you ever walked home at night under the streetlamps and felt that you were on a film set?

One of my few pleasures in Detroit was walking through the steam that came up through manhole covers. Why on earth should I find this pleasurable? Restrain the urge to answer, 'because you’re weird.' I think it’s because I was (okay, tragically) entering into the iconography of the film noir city. That film noir city is entirely a construct of the cinema, the product of a visual expressionism that Hollywood’s émigré directors brought over from Europe. It is a city of night, of shadows, of sin.

The death of Tony Curtis brought these thoughts to the forefront of my mind. In his finest film Sweet Smell of Success he plays Sidney Falco, the weaselly press agent who runs around town doing the dirty work of celebrity columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Incredibly, given that it is one of the sleaziest movies ever made, it is directed by Alexander Mackendrick, the Scot from Ealing Studios. New York is an expressionistic nightmare of neon, wet sidewalks and exhaust pipes.

A drunk gets kicked out of a nightclub. Striding toward him, J. J. Hunsecker booms, 'I love this dirty town!'

So do we. That’s why we keep dreaming about it.

Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns, by Nicolas Pillai | Part 1: The Frontier

Cinemascope – it’s only good for snakes and funerals!
Fritz Lang in Le Mepris

With his luxuriant moustache and shoulder-length hair, the old man looks like a painting by Remington. He sits in shirtsleeves, surrounded by avid listeners, tormenting them each time he sips at his whiskey. His face is cracked and his long frame whittled from harder wood than that of his young audience. This is a man who tamed the Old West, watched the railroad divide the country, chuckled at the first horseless carriage and cricked his neck looking up at aeroplanes. He cannot remember how many men he has killed.

His name is Wyatt Earp and he is probably lying through his teeth. But here, on a Hollywood backlot, it hardly matters. This is how the myths of America are born. One of his audience, the director John Ford, will faithfully transcribe Earp’s romantic version of the Gunfight at the OK Corral onto celluloid as My Darling Clementine.

Print the legend.

Hollywood has always perceived itself as a town for pioneers, rising from nothing out of the desert. And in that environment, the Western became a crucial genre, forever influencing popular culture. The movies propagated a folklore that expounded upon heroism and justice as lustily as any classical text. If you need proof of that influence spilling messily into life, look no further than John Wayne’s misguided involvement in the Vietnam war.

We’re told that nobody watches Westerns anymore, but their influence is everywhere. The cop film frequently draws on the tropes of the frontier town, while science fiction has always ridden the trail, on film and TV. Star Trek was pitched to Desilu as 'Wagon Train in space,' a connection recently restated by Firefly.

The Western is about movement out into the wilderness, the (usually masculine) venture into the wild untamed. It’s striking that these stories frequently showcase technological spectacle. Westerns were the testing ground for stunt techniques. The various widescreen process frequently worked best in the Western idiom. Along with snakes and funerals, add wagon trains, dusty main streets and burning desert skies. I’ve never visited but my guess is that Monument Valley is perpetually in widescreen.

Most recently, Avatar has revived this connection between the Western, science fiction and new technology. James Cameron used motion capture to recycle the plot of Broken Arrow (or, if you’re being less charitable, Ferngully) into a box office smash.

It’s that American dream not just of taming the wilderness but of becoming one with it. Not just conquering the Apache, but earning the Apache’s respect.

Not-So-Mini Essay | Magic Lanterns, by Nicolas Pillai | Introduction

 

Introduction

Part 1: The Frontier

Part 2: The City

Part 3: The Automobile

Part 4: The Bedroom

Written by Nicolas Pillai, Illustrations by JH

  

The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
Don DeLillo

You’re sitting in the dark, surrounded by strangers.  For two hours, you and your companions are subjected to a series of stimuli designed to induce common responses.  Your bodies tense as you feel fear; they relax as you laugh. You are aroused, elated, involved.

Then the lights come up and you find you’ve got a lap full of popcorn.

Going to the cinema has always seemed a perverse occupation to me. Perhaps it’s because I never went as a child. Or perhaps it’s because when I was a child I was taught never to stare. Never mind that they’re fictional, there’s something weird about obsessively ogling people who can’t look back at you. And yet I’ve spent a good proportion of my adult life watching and rewatching films. Our reality is enriched, and significantly affected, by the worlds we observe onscreen.

When moving pictures were first exhibited, the public’s excitement over the new technology drew the concern of moralists. This was an art form that reframed reality, not posed but captured. A commonly repeated, and possibly apocryphal, story is that the first cinema-goers panicked when shown a train approaching the screen. True or not, it speaks to that thrill engendered by cinema: that it can extend beyond its frame, enveloping us in its fictional space.

In Panorama du Gran Canal vu d’un Bateau (1896), we see the moving camera being invented. Shot for the Lumiere Brothers by Alexandre Promio, the film consists of just one simple forty-second shot of movement down a Venetian canal. By placing his tripod in a gondola, Promio redefined movement in film. The camera was no longer static – now when the train rushed toward the screen, the camera hopped aboard.

Promio’s camera moves from left to right, taking in the facades of houses on the canal. Another gondola comes into frame from the right, crossing the field of vision and giving a sense of contrasting movement. We are assured of a world going on beyond the parameters of the image. Unlike its contemporaries, the film is less about pointing the camera at a subject and more about articulating that subject’s relation to the surrounding world.

We fall under a spell when we’re at the pictures. Entranced by the dance of light and shadow, our bodies confined, we open our minds to virtual worlds. In this series of short essays, I want to think about how we interact with the spaces created by film. So please turn off your mobiles. The lights are going down.

As Tony Curtis used to say, I’ll see you after the main feature.

Jazz | Mini Essay | Merrie Melodies by Nicolas Pillai

“There’s nothing to say about the music. Don’t write about the music. The music speaks for itself.” Miles Davis to music critic Ralph J. Gleason.

The performance of jazz is often characterized as humourless, an exercise in, at worst, superiority, at best, virtuosity. Or, to quote the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band, the limits of jazz are “delicious hot, disgusting cold”.

Of course, those limits have been hotly debated since its emergence. The word itself has been the subject of much criticism, with Duke Ellington deploring its seediness and Charles Mingus kicking against its association with “the whole back-of-the-bus bit”. Jazz musicians (or at least, wise jazz musicians) are often leery about pinning down what it is that they do. When asked what jazz was, Fats Waller is said to have replied, “Lady, if you have to ask, forget it.” In answer to the same question, Louis Armstrong gnomically growled, “Jazz is what I play for a living.”

The representation of jazz often insists upon a divide between performers and audience, as though the latter is excluded from the moment of improvisation. Equally, those seeking to politicize jazz can run the risk of simplifying the dialogue between musician and listener. These are the squares who deplore Armstrong’s clowning as Uncle Tom-ism.

Certainly, Hollywood has propagated a lot of unhelpful stereotypes. If we are to believe ‘Blues in the Night’ (1941, Anatole Litvak) or ‘Young Man with a Horn’ (1950, Michael Curtiz, retitled ‘Young Man of Music’ by nervous British distributors), white jazz musicians spend most of their time masochistically fretting about not being black. Black jazz musicians generally mentor, drink, and die.

None of this ever gets close to the joyous exploration that, for me, exemplifies jazz as a musical form, what Whitney Balliett called “the sound of surprise.”

The generosity with which moments such as these are discovered and shared is eloquently conveyed in Gjon Mili’s documentary footage of jazz performance. In particular, look at the beginning of the short film entitled ‘Improvisation’ (1950), a collaborative work with Norman Granz. One of its great pleasures is the opportunity it affords us to observe musicians listening to each other.

In one shot, the venerable tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins essays a solo as Charlie Parker sits and watches. It is a collision of two worlds - swing, and its descendant, bebop. As Hawkins blows a particularly felicitous phrase, Parker smiles off-screen to a fellow musician and nods his head appreciatively toward Hawkins. It’s a wonderful visual record of spontaneous response, of Parker being surprised and amused and impressed all at the same time. It’s as though he’s asking, “Did you dig that too?”

There’s a whole other essay in the inherent self-parody of jazz slang. Here, it’s enough to note that, yes, we do dig Hawk, and we also dig Bird digging Hawk. Like Charlie Parker, we smile, because jazz needn’t always be about laughin’ to keep from cryin’.

Nicolas Pillai