DVD Review: The Tin Drum (Criterion Collection)

This article was first published at Blogcritics

In spite of the critical success of Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum, the first volume of The Danzig Trilogy, after its publication in 1959, for many years it was considered a daunting if not impossible project to adapt to the screen.  There was the great span of time it covered, the proper tone required to handle its fantastic events, as well as the salacious nature of some of the content. But even more problematical was the novel's central character Oskar Matzerath, a child who on his third birthday refuses to grow any further. He it seemed would have been impossible to cast. That director Volker Schlöndorff and his collaborating screen writer Jean-Claude Carrière were able to come up with a script that impressed Grass with its possibilities and then find a child actor small enough in starure, yet old enough to play Oskar is among the most remarkable things about this most remarkable film.

Originally released in 1979, the film which won both the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film was a shortened version of Schlöndorff's initial cut which ran well over the producer's requirement that it run no more than two and a quarter hours. With the film's great success, Schlöndorff wanted to restore the cuts, but producers were adamant that it would be a mistake to tamper with a winner. When in 2009 Schlöndorff was made aware that the original film negative which was being stored in Berlin was about to be destroyed, he agreed to take charge of it and convinced the powers that be to restore the cuts, adding  about 30 minutes to the film's running time. 

This restored director approved high-definition digital transfer of the complete version with a newly translated English subtitles is the centerpiece of the new two disc set in the Criterion Collection.

Although the film begins with a scene in which Oskar's grandmother squatting in a potato field hides a man running from a pair of decidedly Keystone-type Kops under her skirts, the man who is to become Oskar's grandfather, most of the narrative takes place after Oskar's birth, the period after WWI and the rise of the Nazis in what was then the free city of Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk. While the novel carries through to 1959, the film ends in 1945 with the Russian invasion of the city and the removal of much of the populace. Of the terms used to characterize the film, absurdist and surreal are the most apt. Schlöndorff, talking about Grass's reaction to their initial screenplay, says that he found it too logical. It needed to emphasize the fantastic. In the end it had to be treated as dark or black comedy, almost slapstick.

Oskar's refusal to grow up, when on his third birthday he receives what is to become his ubiquitous tin drum, is seen as a rejection of the responsibilities that come with adulthood. He wants a darker version of a Peter Pan-like freedom to do as he pleases. Not only does he want to march to his own drum, he wants everyone else to march to it as well. When he discovers that his high pitched screams can shatter glass, he learns that he can manage the adults and get them to do what he wants, without any responsibility for his behavior.  On the other hand, given the childish often immoral behavior of the adults around him, his rejection makes sense. His mother, father and uncle are engaged in a love triangle. They do little to keep their sexual peccadilloes quiet. The German neighbors and townsfolk fall prey to the Nazi pomp and propaganda. If this is what it is like to be an adult, why not remain a child?

Punctuating Oskar's narrative of some of the major historical events of first half of the last century are a series of memorable set pieces, unforgettable moments and images that will bury themselves deep in the consciousness: Oskar's birth as we emerge with him out of his mother's womb almost fully grown, the horse's head filled with eels pulled out  of the ocean by a fisherman as the family walks the beach, the Nazi rally that turns into a waltz fest, the Nazi attack on the nuns walking on the beach. Not to mention the troublesome sexuality of the scene in the bath house between Oskar and Maria the young girl who is destined to become his stepmother—a scene, along with one or two others that was to create some trouble for the film with censors in Canada and Oklahoma.

The Tin Drum is a challenging film that defies easy interpretation. It depicts a world in chaos, a world where traditional values have lost their meaning, and if there are any new ones they aren't working. It is that world where that famous beast has already slouched toward Bethlehem and been born. Schlödorff presents an insane vision of that insane world, a nightmarish vision that is shocking in its visceral accuracy.

Besides the trailer, this new Criterion Collection set includes an illuminating hour long interview with Schlöndorff filmed in 2012, a recording of Grass reading the passage from the novel describing Oskar's disruption of the Nazi rally illustrated by the scene in the film, and a number of early French television interviews with Schlödorff, Carrière and a few of the actors, most notably David Bennent who plays Oskar. The accompanying booklet has an essay, "Bang the Drum Loudly," by critic Geoffrey Macnab and some comments from Grass about the adaptation. It does not include the documentary Banned in Oklahoma which was included as bonus material in Criterion's 2004 release.

DVD Review: Certified Copy (Criterion Collection)

This article was first published at Blogcritics

Iranian ex-pat auteur Abbas Kiarostami's 2010 exploration of the mysteries of the male female relationship in the context of authenticity in art, Certified Copy, is now available as a two disc set in The Criterion Collection.  Disc One has a "director-approved" digital master and the film's trailer.  The second disc has the rarely seen The Report, Kiarostami's second feature from 1977 encoded from an old analog video master made from a subtitled theatrical print damaged from heavy use.  The original was destroyed during the Iranian Revolution.  The quality of the print is poor, but clearly better than nothing for those interested in the trajectory of the director's work.  Also included are a 2012 interview with the Kiarostami and an Italian documentary feature on the making of the film, Let's See "Copia conforme".  Finally the package includes an excellent introductory essay on the director and the film by critic Godfrey Cheshire.

The Criterion Collection gives you your money's worth.  You watch it all and you come away stuffed with information.  More often than not this is a good thing, but there are times when—well, think of the dodgy repletion after a Thanksgiving turkey with too many trimmings.  If you watch all the bonus material, you will learn an awful lot about the film, perhaps too much.  Certified Copy is a film filled with interpretive possibilities, the more you know about what the artists—the actors, the writer/director—think, the more those possibilities shrink.  In interviews they all pay lip service to the need for the audience to draw its own conclusions about characters, about themes, about meaning.  In practice, their ideas and comments are nearly impossible to ignore.  Of course, no one is making you watch the bonus material.  While some of it is interesting and informative, nothing there is essential, and I, for one, am sorry I watched it.

If Certified Copy is a great film, and it is a great film, its greatness lies in its inscrutability.  As I watched, the cinematic ancestor it brought to mind was the Alain Resnais classic Last Year at Marienbad, perhaps the ultimate film enigma.  Technically there were things like the slow pace, the moving camera, the intense close ups. Then there were things like the importance of the setting—as Resnais' camera moves through the rococo hallways of the hotel, Kiarostami  has his actors, Juliette Binoche and William Shimell, drive through the Tuscan countryside, walk through the village of Lucignano and its museums. Most interesting of all by way of analogy, however, is the sense of fractured time in both films and the sense of some elaborate game being played between a woman who has no name and a man she both loves and hates, fears and is drawn to.

What happened last year at Marienbad?   What happened fifteen years ago in Tuscany?  Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the script for Mairienbad, were very clear in the case of their film, that that was not a meaningful question.  Ontologically, there was no such thing as a last year.  All there was was a film.  In life there is a last year, in a film there is only what appears on the screen.  Moreover it is not for the artist to tell the audience what a work of art means. Robbe-Grillet is famed as a believer in the dictum that art doesn't mean, art is. 

In some sense, Kiarostami would seem to agree, the trouble is that the more he talks in his interviews, the more he seems to indicate that in fact there is one reading of the relationship between the central characters in the film, that time sequence may not be indicated directly, but once he mentions how he views it, it claims authority. Some viewers will welcome certainty; others, myself included, favor ambiguity. I guess I prefer what I thought I was seeing to what the director thought he was showing me.

Enough about the intrusion of external material, it is after all the film that's the thing, and while some will find it slow going, others will be thoroughly engrossed.  Whether it is dealing with an aesthetic question like the value of a copy in relation to an original work of art—a question which focuses the initial relationship between Binoche's character and Shimell's James Miller who has written a book on the subject, or the nature of the emotional relationship between the two, it offers no easy answers.  We follow the pair as they meet the day after, a lecture in which Miller is promoting his book.  She takes him on a tour of the area to pass the time before his scheduled departure at nine and eventually they wind up in Lucignano, a village famous for weddings.  At first their conversation runs to intellectual argumentation—the witty by play of strangers getting to know one another.  As the day progresses, if it is in fact one day, the stakes are raised, their conflicts become more intense; they become the kinds of conflicts that grow over years.  It is as much the universal conflict between the sexes as it is between the two specifics individuals: in a sense they are copies, themselves.

Book Review: War Horse: The Making of the Motion Picture

This article was first published at Blogcritics.

Michael Morpurgo's 1982 young adult novel War Horse, certainly moderately successful at the time, has sky rocketed in acclaim in recent years both in its own right and perhaps even more importantly as an inspiration for artistic adaptation.  First there was the theatrical tour de force adapted for Great Britain's National Theatre by Nick Stafford, which in its Broadway incarnation was the winner of the Tony Award for Best Play and is still running at Lincoln Center.  And now, opening on Christmas Day comes the much ballyhooed film adaptation by director Stephen Spielberg. 

Perhaps because of the National Theatre production's innovative solution to the problem of putting horses on the stage through the use of giant puppets, it generated a fascinating documentary called Making War Horse.  The film, available on DVD, besides dealing with the story itself, stresses the creation of the puppets in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company and the training of the puppeteers necessary to create the illusion of lifelike horses.  Not to be outdone, the film too has generated not a documentary as of yet but an elegant "pictorial moviebook," War Horse: The Making of the Motion Picture. No puppets it's true, but more than 140 brilliant photos from the film in their place. 

Divided into three sections the book takes you on a visual journey first through the film's story, then its production and finally gives a short nod to the history of horses in warfare.  "Joey's Journey" outlines the basic plot of the movie with stills from the film, comments from the filmmakers and even an excerpt or two from the script.  There are individual photos of the large cast and brilliant shots of the British countryside.  But the really exciting visuals are those capturing the interaction of men and the horses first on the farm and then at war. 

The second section takes you behind the scenes.  While it does provide some interesting insights like the ten different horses playing the role of Joey and the shot of the makeup artist working on one of the equine actors, the whole section runs little more than a dozen pages, much of it taken up with commentary.  "The History of War Horses" uses illustrations from history to highlight the role of horses from ancient Egypt through World War 1, with the emphasis on the latter.  As history it is little more than a sketch, and at best will whet the interested reader's appetite for something more substantial.  Still this is after all a book about the making of a movie, and one can't expect a historical dissertation.

There are forewords by Spielberg, producer Kathleen Kennedy, who seems to have been the originator of the project, screenwriter Richard Curtis, and author Morpurgo.  Curtis has an interesting tidbit about how his film Four Weddings and a Funeral beat out Spielberg's Schindler's List for a French foreign film award, the kind of anecdote you can dine out on.  Morpurgo talks about the writing of the novel and somewhat fetchingly confesses his preference for cows over horses at the time he was writing.  One imagines recent developments may well have changed his mind.

If the film manages to garner the same kind of critical acclaim as the play, this is a book that may well share that popularity.  Although it is quite well done in its own right, it seems to me that its success is clearly tied directly to the success of the film.

Book Review: Music on Film: A Hard Day's Night, by Ray Morton

Article first published as Book Review: A Hard Day's Night: Music on Film Series by Ray Morton on Blogcritics.

Limelight's Music on Film series attempts to pack most everything an interested reader would like to know about a single film associated with music into a convenient pocket sized book. The little books are not aimed at scholars. They do include bibliographical information, but they do not document sources either in the text or in end notes. They are equally interested in the celebrity gossip and the facts about the production. This is a series by and large meant for the general audience.

Joining his earlier study of Amadeus is author Ray Morton's look at the 1964 Beatles classic A Hard Day's Night. Essentially, the book's main point seems to be that director Richard Lester and the Beatles managed to produce a masterpiece despite low expectations from the studio and the business people who greenlighted the project. United Artists decided to back a film with the band on the theory that they could profit from a cast album even thought they though the band wasn't successful enough to make the actual film profitable. They engaged Lester as director and Walter Shenson to produce with the understanding that they come up with a film that was cheap and quick. They wanted to make sure it came to theaters before the band's novelty flamed out.

What screen writer Alun Owen, Lester, and the team he and Shenson came up with was an innovative film that in many ways changed the whole concept of the rock music movie model forever and had a lasting effect on the way those films are still done today. The fact that the Beatles were now going to make their American splash with their appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show more than likely would have made whatever they came up with a success; that they came up with a work of genius was gravy.

Morton talks about the band's beginnings and the early personnel changes. He deals with the early successes and then he gets to the actual film. There is a chapter about the initial idea for a movie and its implementation. He explains how the idea of a fictionalized documentary based on the Beatles' actual claustrophobic life escaping from the teenage mobs that haunted their every move came about. He describes the creative team and how they came on board. He talks about the music, how it was chosen and how it was used in the film. Then he gives a blow by blow analysis of the nearly two months of shooting, some insight into the post production, and a short discussion of its critical reception.

Of course he throws in any interesting little tidbit about the shooting that he can dig up. For example, a 13-year old Phil Collins turns up as an extra in the movies concert scene. The noise was so loud that a recent filling in the tooth of a cinematographer throbbed so violently that the tooth suffered nerve damage and had to be pulled. Paul had a scene in which he popped in on an actress rehearsing which was eventually cut from the film in part at least because his acting was too stiff. For the most part the boys were at their best when they were being themselves. They had winning personalities which came across on the screen.

Morton explains Lester's feelings about each of the four. Paul was trying too hard to be a "good" actor. Ringo was the most natural. John, he felt, had the most electrifying personality, and George was "the most accurate performer." In general their TV experience must have helped in making them comfortable in front of the camera, and though their inexperience necessitated some accommodations, their natural effervescence made up for any technical problems. In the end Richard Lester and the Beatles were able to create a film that was so good it transformed its genre and Ray Morton was able to create a nice little book to explain how they did it.

Lifeline Pictures - Silence the Voices - Trailer

Lifeline Pictures - Silence the Voices - Trailer

Film shot last fall.