Ten reasons why Robert Altman is *the* great modern American filmmaker

The best Xmas gift for film buffs in NYC this winter is MoMA's comprehensive festival of the work of Robert Altman, who is arguably the great modern American filmmaker. The festival includes all of his theatrical features, some of his best television work, and early rarities, from the industrial films made in Kansas City to his tongue-in-cheek Scopitones.

Viewers of the Funhouse TV show will know that I'm a diehard fan and student of Altman's work, thus my attempts to keep up with which of his titles are debuting or being “upgraded” on DVD and Blu-ray (see my reviews here, here, and here).

The last comprehensive Altman retro took place at the Museum of the Moving Image back in the early Nineties. In that case the rarities were grouped together into two or three programs; the MoMA program has distributed them throughout the retro, pairing each rarity with a feature film — thus the cultist has the dilemma of whether to revisit an Altman feature in order to catch a 4- to 20-minute super-rarity (read: items that have near to zero chance of appearing on a DVD).

A few key rarities have already played in the festival but there are plenty more to come in the next month. The most notable are the shorts “Pot au Feu” and “The Kathryn Altman Story,” “Precious Blood” (half of the “2 by South” program that was Altman's first recorded piece of theater), a segment from a Dinah! episode about A Wedding, and Jazz '34.

For those who are newcomers to Altman's work, there are several films that serve as perfect introductions to his style. A short list would have to include Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, Nashville, Three Women (the film that drew me in), Secret Honor, Vincent and Theo, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. I am one of those who really loves O.C. and Stiggs (1987), but realize it works best for those of us who dislike teen movies as much as Altman did.

But now onto the “listicle,” since that bite-sized manner of distilling complicated or detailed information seems to be the preferred way to reach the Net reader. I'm not overly fond of it, and I suspect Altman didn't love it either.

In any case, there are many individuals who could be called “the great American filmmaker” of post-1965 cinema. The most likely figures are trailblazers/geniuses like Kubrick, Cassavetes, Coppola, Scorsese, Malick, Lynch (who was seen on the Oscars, right, telling Altman "you should've won" when Ron Howard beat both of them for Best Director), and (least fave) Spielberg. Others, like Woody Allen, Spike Lee, the Coens, Tim Burton, Clint Eastwood, and Tarantino have made certain films that remain influential. Many independent and “underground” trendsetters changed the face of cinema (Kenneth Anger, Shirley Clarke, to cite just two), but their films were never widely distributed.

Altman’s position is thus very unique in “the Pantheon” — one wonders if Andrew Sarris would have granted him entry, but we’ll never know, as Sarris never updated his hierarchy of American filmmakers after 1968. Right after Nixon became president, Altman solidified his distinct visual style, crafted his films in a highly unique way, and stayed true to his own vision of the world, which permeated everything from socially conscious political commentaries to out-and-out frame-filled farces.

With this list of elements I’m not saying that Altman was better than Kubrick, Cassavetes, Coppola, et al. Instead, I would maintain that he was a filmmaking genius on their level, but his work combined so many different elements that he qualifies as the ultimate modern American filmmaker. Argue and comment if you’d care to. On with the list!

1.) He was an incredibly versatile filmmaker. Altman made comedies, dramas, crime films, musicals, westerns, science fiction, thrillers, military dramas, and uncategorizable “dream films.” The phrase “revisionist” has often been slapped onto his well-regarded Seventies features (which have been the most revived of his films; a few years back a local rep house programmed a much smaller “Altman’s Seventies” retro); he did indeed rework and comment upon classic genres in his genre pics.

2.) There’s an incredible consistency in his work. As I noted in my recent obit for Mike Nichols, a filmmaker should always have a “signature,” a thematic and stylistic identity that runs through their work. From That Cold Day in the Park (1969) to A Prairie Home Companion (2006), Altman created a series of films, TV movies, and plays that all possessed the same “signature.”

3.) He was frequently bashed by the American critical establishment. Both Cassavetes and Altman received wildly negative reviews for some of their best work. Their soldiering on in spite of these bad reviews was one of the reasons they are so significant today, when critics run to throw garlands at the feet of Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and others from their first film onward. I believe the bad reviews they faced made Altman and Cassavetes stronger and more determined filmmakers as a result.

4.) He worked within the major studios, while fighting against them. In interviews Altman never hesitated to criticize the studio chieftans, and yet he was talented (and lucky) enough to work for the majors for a significant part of his career.

The fact that he made The Player (1992) with industry money was a spectacular “fuck you” to Hollywood. When the studios did refuse to work with him, he obtained funding wherever he could, from French and British production companies to game show mogul Mark Goodson (Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean).

5.) He had a distinct visual style. One of the most important aspects of Altman’s work is his visual style. In his films, the camera probes, explores, and pirouettes around the characters. To him a zoom shot serves not only to underline a character’s behavior, but also to isolate him/her from the crowd bustling around them. Altman was a “ringmaster” in a sense (see the end of Brewster McCloud) and his crowd sequences are bravura moments where identities are conveyed in the flash of an instant.

His work with audio was also revolutionary. One of the key elements in his mythology is that he was fired from TV assignments and the movie Countdown (1968) for having characters talk over each other. He often noted that he didn't create this technique – it had been used in the screwball comedies of the Thirties (Hawks loved doing it), and Welles employed it a number of times. When Altman used it, it both simulated and mocked reality — the viewer hears what he/she needs to hear and loses the rest of the noise. His films are indeed “immersive” experiences.

6.) He allowed his actors to improvise. While modern masters Cassavetes and Mike Leigh used the rehearsal period for improvisation to build their characters from scratch, Altman allowed his actors to improvise on-camera, especially in crowd scenes.

Some of the most memorable lines and physical bits of business were created by Altman’s cast members while the camera was rolling. When I interviewed Karen Black (see below), she proudly noted that her best remembered line in Nashville (about Julie Christie, “she can’t even comb her hair”) was something she came up with on the spot.

7.) He didn’t shy away from political messages. Many of Altman’s film tackled American politics, some openly (Nashville, Secret Honor), other more covertly (Thieves Like Us, Streamers, Short Cuts).

Altman’s finest comments on American politics were the Tanner '88 (1988) and Tanner on Tanner (2004) series. Scripted by Garry Trudeau, the Tanner shows spotlighted the negotiations and the compromises that drive American politics. The final plot point of Tanner on Tanner goes straight to the heart of the Democratic party’s standard operating principal: compromise must triumph over integrity.

8.) He “belonged” to different generations. Although Altman was 45 when he had his breakthrough with M*A*S*H* in 1970, his renegade sensibility meshed perfectly with the youth culture of the time, though, as evidenced by that film and his next, the wonderfully odd Brewster McCloud.

Throughout his career, Altman showed an affinity for things from his own era — the jazz in Short Cuts and Kansas City, and the radio shows in Thieves Like Us and A Prairie Home Companion. He also embraced new innovations (super 16mm, digital video), while telling stories that perfectly reflected the disillusionment felt in the youth culture of the Seventies.

9.) He never pandered to adolescent and kiddie viewers. At this moment Hollywood is a machine that cranks out copious amounts of multiplex crap aimed at teens and kids. Altman proudly noted in interviews and in his DVD audio commentaries that he added curses to his films to make certain that teens weren’t allowed to see them. He was not a Spielbergian sentimentalist who believed in crafting family-friendly fiction that plays on the heartstrings.

The only film he made that could be called a kiddie movie was Popeye (1980), which is actually a strange fantasy that entertains adults more than children. His sole “teen movie” is O.C. and Stiggs, a film that mocks teenage behavior and, again, eschews the sentimentality of John Hughes to create an Altmanesque universe inhabited by a variety of weird characters.

10.) He drew inspiration from other art forms and other cultures. Altman was a filmmaker first and foremost, but he also directed stage plays and operas. His filmed plays were experiments in blending theatrical and cinematic techniques, while some of his best “later” works are centered around fine art (Vincent and Theo), literature (Short Cuts), opera (his short piece for Aria and the PBS special “The Real McTeague”), and modern dance (The Company).

Although most of his films coalesce to form an incredible “tapestry” of American life, he set later features in the U.K. and Europe when it became clear that overseas funding was easier to obtain than money from Hollywood. Thus his fashion industry satire Ready to Wear (1994) was set in Paris and his pitch-perfect British class-conscious drama and murder mystery, Gosford Park (2001), was set in an English country house.

And because any tribute to an iconoclast like Altman should have an oddly numbered list, I close out with an eleventh reason why he remains the great modern American filmmaker. Namely the fact that he produced a large body of work.

I revere Cassavetes’ eight personal films and Kubrick’s baker’s dozen of dark, grim masterworks, but Altman left behind an extraordinarily rich heritage (37 theatrical features from ’69 to 2006, plus many TV and stage projects) that can be explored from an infinite number of angles. If you haven’t seen them before, the majority of his films are blissfully unpredictable. If you are already initiated, the bulk of his films are eminently rewatchable.

Like a prolific novelist (or considering his love of Carver, short story writer), Altman left behind a significant body of work that will be “discovered” over and over again for a long time to come. 

The festival at MoMA will continue through Jan. 17.
NOTE: Some of the photos used in this entry came from the Tumblr blog “Fuck Yeah Robert Altman.” The blog has a deep trove of both images and links to recent articles about Altman. 
*****

Some rare clips about and by Altman. First his Jan. 1972 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. This episode is found on the Shout! Factory “Hollywood Greats” Cavett box, and it’s fascinating to note that Cavett’s producers booked as examples of “young Hollywood” Altman (46 years old), Mel Brooks (45 years old), and Peter Bogdanovich (32 years old). The guest of honor, Frank Capra, has a more positive view of the major studios than Altman, who refers to them as morons.

I posted this slice of an interview from the arts-cable show Signature from 1981. Altman is brutally honest about why he is out of fashion in Hollywood. (“I’m tired of car crashes…”)

My interview with Karen Black, who spoke about working with Altman on the stage version of Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean:

Some rarities from Altman’s many decades of work have surfaced on YouTube. The first film credited to Altman as director, an educational item called “Modern Football” (1951). You can see a news item about filmmaker Gary Huggins’ discovery of a print of this film here.

You can find a very shabby-lookin’copy of the silly but fun Corn’s-a-Poppin’(1956) on YT. Altman cowrote this low-budget country-music saga.

Something I’ve been waiting to see for a while, an episode from the 1961-’62 series Bus Stop. Altman directed the dark episode “The Lion Walks Among Us” starring Fabian.

Altman directed several Scopitones (music-videos made for film jukeboxes) for dough. This one features Bobby Troup singing “Girl Talk”:

For a long time this was was *the* Holy Grail for Altman collectors, a Scopitone he directed for an instrumental by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass called “Bittersweet Samba.” The film is called “The Party” (no connection to the Blake Edwards feature) in Altman filmographies:

When Altman suddenly became “hot” again in Hollywood circles, he was asked to direct films for ABC. True to form, he chose the most esoteric material possible, two short plays by Harold Pinter. The first one aired after Moonlighting; the second, “The Room,” to my memory aired on a Saturday night, tucked away at 10:00 p.m. ABC didn’t kill it, however. Film never dies.

Another item from Altman’s later TV career, an episode from the 1997 anthology series Gun personally directed by Altman (he was a producer of the series, which used as its conceit the fact that a particular gun was traveling from person to person):

A TV ad that Altman made for Parisienne cigarettes:

And, in closing, I’ll pick one scene from a wildly underrated Altman film. Here is a brilliant moment about creation, the artist, and madness from Vincent and Theo (1990):

Some notes on the Marcel Hanoun festival at Anthology Film Archives

One of the nicest things about the admittedly small film repertory scene in NYC (four theaters, two museums) is the fact that various retrospectives are held celebrating filmmakers whose work would never be seen otherwise in the U.S. These festivals become a little unwieldy for the attendee, since he/she has to rearrange their life for a few days or weeks to take most of it in. The result, though, is in most cases an overwhelming “ride” into the imagination of an artist whose work has basically been hidden from American viewers.

I've attended a few of these retros over the past few years and have noticed that, after a time, the memories of these events start to blur at the edges. I recently did two episodes of the Funhouse TV show about the 2013 Howard Hawks retro at the Museum of the Moving Image, but for the most part I haven't written about the retros or presented episodes about them on the show, since I am only able to comment on them *after* having sat through the films, and there are usually other things on the menu for the show and blog.

Thus I missed out on documenting on festivals that I became addicted to, including the amazing comprehensive Werner Schroeter retro at MOMA a few years back, as well as several terrific festivals of European directors' work at Anthology Film Archives (including Jean-Daniel Pollet, Carmelo Bene, Ulrike Ottinger, the “Zanzibar group,” and the actor Pierre Clementi).

While immersing myself in the latest festival, a retro of the work of French filmmaker Marcel Hanoun at Anthology, I thought it would make sense for me to “document” my opinions about the films I've seen. Yes, these are highly personal capsule reviews of films that are indeed pretty damned hard to see (written by memory shortly after seeing the films — thus, the aspects of plot mentioned here are 80% certain, rather than 100%). But I post them here to simply record a viewer's opinions, and also to “situate” the filmmaker in question.

I've found that the European filmmakers who are commemorated in these kinds of near-comprehensive retros tend to blend in the memory, so if I can help any reader (or myself, in later years, rereading this...) by offering my gut-level reactions to the work of Marcel Hanoun here, it's worth it.

A SIMPLE STORY (1959). (Viewed on DVD-r.) Hanoun's “greatest hit” is indeed one of his best films, if I can judge by the several I've seen in this “binge” viewing of the retro (yes, I'm always fascinated by the folks who argue that current drama series can be easily binged-on because they are “like good cinema”; maybe it's possible just to skip the “like” part there?). It's a very simply-shot fiction feature about a mother and daughter from Lille wandering around Paris trying to find a place to stay and a job for the mother.

It is a film that conjures emotion in the viewer through its storyline and imagery – Hanoun clearly decided to lose the former in his later works in favor of the latter. There's a documentary-like style to the proceedings, but we are taken out of the “real” world by Hanoun's use of a Bressonian technique, “doubling” the action through narration (read: hearing about what we're watching).

So Hanoun has the mother character narrate the film and tell us what she and others said, while enough of the ambient soundtrack exists so we can hear them saying basically the same thing – in some instances they say slightly different things, which one assumes is important for story reasons (why is the mother not repeating it verbatim – is her memory of the event dim, or does she want to alter the story somehow?).

The film's virtue, and one that Hanoun held to for quite some time, is that it runs just around an hour. Thus it draws the viewer in with its emotional storyline and good performances, while also not belaboring its concept.

OCTOBER IN MADRID (1964). This was seen right after I had left work on a Friday night. The film is a non-linear “account” of a director who can't make the film he envisioned. The Spanish locations are picturesque, and the film's b&w cinematography (plus the fact that this was the one blotchy, unrestored print I saw in this festival) made me pass right into the arms of Morpheus. Not qualified to review it, was out cold for more than half of it.

THE AUTHENTIC TRIAL OF CARL EMMANUEL JUNG (1967). Fortified with caffeine, this title had the opposite effect on me. I stayed awake because Hanoun used a grating technique to illustrate his message. The concept is simple: a fictitious German officer who decided which inmates would live and which would die in a Nazi prison camp in the early Thirties is put on trial in France in the Sixties.

The piece is shot like a filmed play, except that Hanoun “un-synched” his sound because, as the opening narration tells us, this trial would be one held in France to convict a German-speaking man. Thus we watch an hour-long film loaded with portentous dialogue which was post-dubbed so it would intentionally not match the movement of the actors' mouths.

I have indeed seen many dubbed films, but the technique used here is the kind that wears one down after 10-15 minutes. Hanoun also decided to not show a verdict for his fictional Nazi, so while the film does work as a taut trial drama (with the un-synched gimmick detracting from the proceedings, in my opinion), one can't help but think of the other dramas that have gone over the same ground but depicted real-life Nazis on trial. (The Man in the Glass Booth stands as the most fascinating attempt to vary the situation with a fictional narrative.)

The main character is named after the famous psychologist presumably because Jung was initially pro-Nazi; the character here is a different individual whom Hanoun made up. The use of the word “authentic” in the title is without question the most intriguing thing about the picture.

SUMMER (1968). Hanoun's “May '68” film is a super-minimalist affair in which an Italian woman stays at a friend's house in the countryside after having been witness to the havoc in Paris. She writes to a German friend (whom we see/hear reading the letters) and thinks of her ex-boyfriend (whom we see in flashbacks and photos – he is named “Jean-Luc.” A reference to Godard?).

Thus one's reaction to the film depends on one's feelings about watching a pretty Italian woman alone in a house, walking in a field, doing cartwheels in a bikini, walking some more, pondering her relationship, and looking at herself in photos taken on the streets of Paris where she is posed against political graffiti.

One thing becomes clear seeing a number of Hanoun's films: the gent loved classical music and thought of rock as some alien business that had to be depicted in menacing or downright silly terms. Here our protagonist briefly enters a storefront rock club (where the insert from We're Only In It for the Money hangs on the wall, along with the pop poster of Allen Ginsberg wearing an Uncle Sam hat), supplying one of the few “youth culture” moments in a film that betrays no feeling for or against the events of May '68.

WINTER (1970). A beautifully shot color variant on OCTOBER IN MADRID set in Brussels. This time the great Michael Lonsdale is the filmmaker who can't get his film made. We watch he and his collaborator talk about what they'd like to do, see ravishing locations in Bruges, and witness the relationship between he and his wife unravel. The result is eye-catching, but sleep-inducing.

SPRING (1970). The film that made attending the festival worthwhile. A terrific minimalist film, crammed with narrative incident and characters one could actually get a handle on. Two plotlines are cut together: a fugitive from the police (Michael Lonsdale), whom we later learn murdered his wife, takes refuge in various parts of the countryside, while a young girl (Veronique Andries) who lives with her stern grandmother (who kills and skins a rabbit in real time on-camera) matures through the absorption of creepy fairy tales, experiments with cursing and smoking, and the arrival of her first period.

All of Hanoun's visual devices are at play here – flipping from b&w to color and back; making the camera into a presence in a room (it serves as a mirror for the characters, or a window, or... you get the idea); his obsession with the beauty of the countryside and its inherent menace. The dialogue appears primarily in the scenes featuring the little girl; Lonsdale has one, possibly two scenes with dialogue.

The element that makes the film so compelling is not only the notion of suspense in the Lonsdale plot, but the fact that the girl lives in a world that is picturesque yet disturbing and somehow alien (in the sequence where she practices smoking and cursing, she puts on a little clay eye-mask when doing so in front of a mirror).

There is one difference between this and the other Hanoun films I've seen: the script is credited to Hanoun and Catherine Binet (who is fourth-billed in the film as an actress; I believe she plays the girl's teacher, who imparts creepy fairy tales to her students). Binet was a scripter and editor who was the partner of novelist/filmmaker George Perec (Life: a User's Manual) and appeared as herself in the documentary “Les Vamps Fantastiques” (!). Binet's contribution clearly made SPRING a very different film from Hanoun's others. The result is a compelling and involving work that still adheres to Hanoun's minimalist approach.

AUTUMN (1972). Hanoun made this film alone, and we're back in concept-land. The actors, playing two filmmakers (a director, played by Lonsdale again, and his editor, played by an actress known simply as “Tamia”), stare into the camera because we, the audience, are the film they are watching on an editing machine. For some reason, though, these filmmakers are watching a film that seems to be pretty much finished, since they stare at us for long (lonnnng) periods of time.

What Hanoun does to reinforce his concept is to turn off the visuals (a blank screen) whenever Lonsdale or Tamia turn off the editing machine. (At that point we listen to phone calls.) When they are not editing, but the machine is on, Hanoun plays with overdubs on the soundtrack, gives us all-too-brief glimpses of the characters' fantasies, and quick-cut sequences of the couple talking.

There is a random quality to what happens throughout – a factor that often is transformed into visual poetry in the works of Godard, but in Hanoun seems to indicate that he took what had happened to him before the film shoot and would try to shoehorn it into the production. Here Lonsdale talks about shooting home movies, and we then see what are clearly Hanoun's own movies of a family outing. At the film's end we see footage of autumn in the woods, first in real time, then as fast-forwarded through by an editing machine – then the "countershot," the editing machine itself. The filmmakers are evidently done with their project.

All in all, the film isn't the ordeal that it could have been, but pretension appears throughout, primarily in speeches Lonsdale gives his editor, dispensing what we can only imagine are nuggets of Hanoun's own wisdom (a major one being that “cinema is the art of subtraction”). Perhaps the most noteworthy thing here is that Lonsdale's character declares that his fave filmmakers are Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, Visconti, and one he claims not too many people know, Chris Marker.

Considering where the film was being shown, it was noteworthy to see an Anthology Film Archives schedule hanging on the wall behind the two actors throughout the film.

THE GAZE (1977). Anthology's description of this film wisely mentioned to potential viewers that it's a film about sex that is not pornography or erotica. This is true. The actors have real sexual intercourse on-camera, but here is the “plot,” such as it is: a woman in bed with her lover in a hotel in Belgium leaves the room to visit a local museum to see a collection of paintings by Bruegel. A second woman, with fuzzy hair that matches the man's curly mane, comes into the hotel room and the two fuck for the rest of the picture, while the woman at the museum stares at us (the audience in this case standing in for the Bruegel painting she is obsessed with). We study details of the painting, as well as the lovers' bodies as they have sex. 

The sex is indeed depicted in an unsexy fashion (and a lot of their anatomy winds up being hidden beneath their partner's hair); Hanoun does add short images of the man's erect penis, presumably to show that the couple is indeed doing it for real. The study of the painting — and the truly oddball images where the woman staring at it is joined by others who slither up and down into and out of frame behind her —is far more interesting. The film's one bravura moment only lasts a few seconds: the figure of Icarus in the Bruegel painting "comes to life" via animation, and we see his legs kick in the water.

There are times during THE GAZE that one could easily take the film for a parody of an “art film.” This I believe comes from the fact that Hanoun didn't like to display a sense of humor. There is a playfulness about Godard and Marker's work, a wildly dark humor in Fassbinder's, even glimmers of humor in the "transcendent trio," Dreyer, Ozu, and Bresson.

Hanoun took his work very seriously, and thus when the fuzzy-haired girl here is suddenly seen wearing wings while fucking (relating to the Bruegel painting, which depicts Icarus) or a black man suddenly appears in place of our hero (thus paralleling the constant play between b&w and color), we want to laugh but Hanoun doesn't want us to (which of course makes us want to even more).

LA NUIT CLAIRE (1979). (Viewed on DVD-r.) Offering the other side of the unsexy sex that appeared onscreen in Gaze, this film is more concerned with love and passion. It tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, plus another mythological couple, and a modern-day equivalent. The style is very much that of (natch) Cocteau and the avant-garde filmmakers of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

There are surprises in store, though, as the film begins with much walking in barren landscapes (a visual trope in Sixties/Seventies experimental cinema), but the last third truly is a mind-bender. After Orpheus screws up and loses Eurydice forever, the women warriors known as the Maenads kill and eat him and another man (I assume the other man is the male member of the modern-day couple; then again, I have given up on truly getting a handle on the characters in Hanoun’s work).

At this point the film becomes a savage weird outing along the lines of Sweet Movie or Pollet’s Le Sang (another French rarity seen only at the Anthology). The women feast on the two men at a giant banquet table (aided by a hungry cat). The actresses savor the meat and viscera for several minutes, until the leader of the group takes Orpheus’ head and ventures into the water with it, swinging it around wildly.

Definitely a departure from all of the other work in the festival, the film is the strangest damned thing I saw in my hours of Hanoun-watching. He counterpoints his mythological material with the rehearsal of an opera about Orpheus, thus the reversion to gore, viscera, and painted warrior-women comes as a major surprise.

CELLO (2012). Hanoun’s last feature, made when he was not in good health, is a digital-video project that finds him and two actresses reading a text he had written. Their voices are overlaid at points, and we see them working with the camera crew on the shoot. For their part, the crew isn’t i.d.’ed on credits, but instead introduce themselves on-camera in this manner: “sound engineer on ‘Marcel asked me.’ ” (Evidently the crew liked working with M. Hanoun.)

The title Cello turns out to be a nickname Hanoun was given as a young man, a diminutive for Marcel. To further tie the phrase into the feature, he shows a woman playing a classical instrument but admits it’s a viola de gamba, not a cello.

The effect of this film is elegiac, as could be expected from an 83-year-old man making his final project. As I noted recently on the Funhouse TV show when giving the “U.S. TV debut” to scenes from Fellini’s Voce Della Luna, artists’ last works may not be their best (in some cases, very far from it), but they do contain much insight into the person’s view of life and the creative process, as well as offering much in the way of genuine emotion.

Here Hanoun uses his favorite techniques: nature shots punctuate some of the very long passages of the actors reading, and the performers do acknowledge the camera, but in this case we are given the “countershot” throughout and see the small video crew of young people “asked by Marcel” at work.

CODA (posted 6/6/14):
After I did my Anthology blitz, I searched the Internet (you know, this thing that everyone is so gaga about) to see how Hanoun was represented on here. It turns out that he authorized people to post many of his films on two sites, YouTube and Vimeo, and that there are also helpful articles on him in French and a very well-written one in English.

I was most interested in seeing his "Jesus film," a 1977 feature called La verite sur l'imaginaire passion d'un inconnu, one of his few vintage features shot on film that was not included in the Anthology retro. The film is indeed on Vimeo, albeit with no English subtitles. The picture was indeed another surprise, as it is seemingly, despite its "blasphemous" union of modern elements with the Christ saga, a solemn, almost reverent retelling of the tale.

In Autumn, Lonsdale singles out Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew for praise as a very special, beautiful film. Hanoun followed along similar lines in inconnu, although he did include an element not tried by any noted filmmaker (that I'm aware of): casting a woman (actress Anne Wiazemsky, in all of her pouting beauty) as Christ. In fact, she alternates the role with an actor (Michel Morat, right), so that there are two Christs in the film.

Here, a woman finds Christ on a crucifix by the side of the road and we backtrack to see his life, from John the Baptist on. Hanoun described the plot this way: "At dawn one morning on a wooden cross, a girl, stupid or visionary, discovers a dead crucified man at the entrance of a small village in the South of France. We are in 1977. Is it possible to listen to Jesus' Word and hear It in 1977? What possible options are there for the Suffering Man who uses the Word as a weapon?"

Hanoun switches between his he-Christ and she-Christ, having them alternate lines and at points speak with each other's voices. At one particularly odd point, Morat is shown looking "at" Wiazemsky. As noted throughout this piece, Hanoun eschewed the shot/countershot method of depicting a conversation in favor of both characters speaking directly to the camera.

The one truly odd element (unless I missed a stray French line, most of the dialogue seems to be "dialogue" taken directly from the gospel of St. John) is that Lonsdale plays Pontius Pilate as a TV newsman, seen in a darkened TV studio. Later on, he interacts with both Christs, each in their turn. The entire film can be seen on Vimeo (without English subs, thus the importance of the Anthology retro!).



Hanoun definitely did want his work, especially his later features and videos, available for free on the Net (except the "season quartet," which is supposed to appear on DVD). He had not one but three official sites: marcelhanoun.com, marcel-hanoun.com, and macinematheque.com.

Hanoun's official YT account is here. And here is a very clear print of A Simple Story. All of the embeds below are unfortunately unsubtitled.



His one mainstream production, The Eighth Day, with Emmanuelle Riva:



The Authentic Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung:  



The Vimeo account containing his work is far more inclusive (probably because YouTube is run by Americans, and thus has a moronic attitude toward nudity). Here one gets a clear look at the later work that wasn't included in the Anthology festival (and, again, will most likely remain unsubtitled for a long time to come). That account can be found here.

Although I didn't wind up becoming as obsessed with Hanoun's work as I did with Moullet, Pollet, Clementi, and Schroeter, I'm very glad I took the time to attend Anthology's Hanoun retro. The AFA programmers again excelled at finding rare films and presenting them to the NYC viewing audience (which was, naturally enough, quite small, except for THE GAZE). The projectionists and the young man who did a particularly fine job of keeping the "soft-titling" in synch with the films deserve special commendation (the titles were in synch even when the print of OCTOBER IN MADRID tore at two different points).

"Soft-titling" is a process whereby we watch a pristine print of the film ("sans titres"), and the English subs are put below the screen on an added piece of cloth (or polyvinyl, or whatever film screens are made of). The titles are on a computer program that is "paged through" by a person in the theater or projection booth who moves them ahead via a laptop. It's an invaluable and important process that I have only seen at the Anthology and at Film Forum for the "Tutto Fellini" fest back in the early Nineties.

The former main film curator of the Museum of Modern Art once told me in correspondence that MOMA will never use soft-titling because the audience members (many of whom, remember, just wander in from an exhibition in the museum and don't know what they're watching) "don't like it." I had mentioned the process because MOMA was showing several films in different festivals at that time without English subtitles, including one Bunuel film that had played with soft-titling at AFA a few months before.

Thus, it is all the more important that Anthology (whose budget is much, much, much smaller than MOMA) does use the technique to subtitle extremely rare foreign films that will probably never, ever be subtitled on the Net (even in the veritable fount of amazing material that is "the Torrents") or on DVD.
 
But back to Hanoun: The surprises in the retro, and the two superb films, were worth the moments where his techniques seemed gratingly transparent, or where mine eyes just decided to shut down for a while. Simple Story and Spring are indeed terrific, and his work is worth a look for all fans of French and avant-garde cinema.