Happy 100th Birthday, Bob Clampett!

Patient Porky (1940)

There's no real overstating the effect Bob Clampett's work has had on me. Far and away my favorite director of animation, Clampett's cartoons were truly looney, unafraid to push gags to their most extreme, or characters to their most unlikeable. His were the first cartoons in which I really sat up and paid attention to whose name the title card bore, and in this way, was as instrumental to me understanding the role of the director as seeing O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Royal Tenenbaums for the first time when they were released. Like the Coens or Wes Anderson, Clampett's style was so distinct that, try as I might, it was difficult to find others like it. Before these guys, I assumed - as, I think, most people do - that there are a set number of styles and genres in which a filmmaker could work. Especially looking at a set of Looney Tunes, one sort of understands the rules of the game, as it were.

There were no rules for Clampett. No barriers. Tex Avery or Frank Tashlin could sometimes be just as wild, sure, but there were territories only Clampett could chart. He brought surrealism to the cartoons, not just his (justly) famous Porky in Wackyland, but through the smallest touches - Daffy Duck whacking himself on the head to create two other Daffy's with whom he could consult in The Daffy Doc, The Little Man From the Draft Board mirroring Daffy's improvised disguise in Draftee Daffy, Daffy looking through a magnifying glass, only to stick his head through it for a closer look in The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, singing cheese and disappearing milk in Porky's Poppa, a falling plane stopping just before it hits the ground because, whadya know, it ran out of gas in Falling Hare. Always a set-up that seemed funny enough on its own, until Clampett shot it into the stratosphere, making it funnier, you could swear, than anything you'd ever seen. No element of reality was off-limits, from the rubbery objects that surrounded the characters to those characters themselves. They could bend, stretch, mold, shrink, multiply, or be removed into several pieces, all with a matter of frames, and somehow it all gelled together in motion. Look at these frames from Falling Hare (1943), after Bugs has just been whacked on the head! Most directors would have his head shake from side to side in rapid succession, maybe with some ghosting elements...

...but this? This is the kind of license only Clampett gave his animators. Kristen Thompson explained it thusly:

Some of the character movements in Clampett's films are so fast and brief that they come across as a flurry of images too fleeting to register. Frozen, they reveal some of the extraordinary means that the director and his animators used to achieve those effects of speed. Clampett was also adept at highly exaggerated reactions and hilarious distortions of the animal body. Watching these cartoons with a finger on the pause button can yield hilarity and teach you a lot about the normally hidden aspects of the art of animation.

I won't say too much about Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, as it's...undeniably uncomfortable in so many respects, but it is such an incredible, absolutely stunning piece of animation, completely out of control and desperate to keep up with its own rhythm. Even amongst Clampett's work, there's nothing like it, and while I might still prefer Draftee Daffy or The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, it's very, very easy to see why many consider it his masterpiece.

And as much as most Looney Tunes prey some way on violence, jealousy, and general bad manners, there was something especially depraved about his work that I sensed on some level even as a kid. I mean, you watch something like The Wacky Wabbit, which ends with Elmer Fudd attempting to physically extract a gold tooth from Bugs Bunny's mouth, that leaves a mark. Draftee Daffy, perhaps his most subversive work, has Daffy cheering on the U.S.A. from the comfort of his own home, but when Uncle Sam comes calling in the form of the Little Man From the Draft Board, he does everything in his power to escape, eventually flying away on a rocket that crashes into the ground and sends him straight to Hell. Old Grey Hare, which imagines Bugs and Elmer Fudd in the future, ends with Bugs digging him own grave, only to shove Elmer into it and bury him alive.

Somehow, the way he extended these gags let them sit a little longer than the onslaught of violence to which we're accustomed in most Looney Tunes. We'd have time to actually wrestle with these, so while the dynamite or getting-whacked-on-the-head gags could still be brushed off, he'd still work in these sort of uncomfortable, extended acts of cruelty that made his versions of these even-then-iconic characters much less than simple mascots. They were our Id, unleashed in spectacularly wild form onscreen. His colors (when he had colors) were a little more washed out, a little grimier, than the bold-color house style of Chuck Jones or Friz Freleng or Robert McKimson, lending his later work an earthy, can't-quite-wash-off-the-dirt feeling. I remember as a kid finding what I now know to be his Bugs uniquely uncomfortable. Whereas Jones' version was sly and sort of reassuring, Clampett's Bugs was dastardly in a decidedly unsafe way.

As for his Daffy, well, to me there is no other version. He still possessed much of the selfishness and bitterness that would come to define him during Jones' reign and, sadly, forever since, but, in addition to lending him the spirit of a real prankster, the expression of this was much looser, more unwieldy, more unpredictable. Draftee Daffy is one of the funniest films I've ever seen, so much so that it's almost impossible to highlight individual moments, but the one that always, always, always get me are when Daffy, certain he is finally rid of the Little Man From the Draft Board (having stuffed him in a safe and put a brick wall around it), yells "so long, Dracula!", jumps on a rocket (atop a sign that says "Use In Case of Induction Only"), and flies away. Some who knew Clampett personally said he really was Daffy Duck in real life, prone to wackiness himself and given to dispatch with problems in bizarre manners - he'd have a meeting with a boss, and if he sensed trouble coming, he might excuse himself to make a phone call and never come back. Perhaps he wished for a similar escape to the one he granted Daffy, but knew, like in his creation, that trouble would rear its ugly head again.

But more than anything, he just makes me laugh, so hard, no matter how many times I've seen a given cartoon. They're so fast-paced, so packed to the brim with seemingly-spontaneous bits of humor, you'd think they were crafted precisely at the pace they play out. How someone could plan these bits out over such a long time (the cartoons usually took about a month to make), yet still make them feel spur-of-the-moment never fails to astound me. There are throwaway gags in his work funnier than most feature films. Elmer Fudd drawing and X, winding up, and then proceeding to dig in an entirely different spot; Daffy answering an especially tall telephone marked for long distance calls; Humphrey Bogart tossing Lauren Bacall an enormous cigarette lighter in a scene played totally seriously; Daffy carrying an entire stretcher by only holding one end, then flipping a coin with one hand; ink spilling from and then refilling a bottle as a ship rocks back and forth...there's no end to it.

Today would've been Bob Clampett's 100th birthday, had he not died in 1984. He lived not without controversy, and was alternately revered and despised by those who worked with him at what would come to be dubbed Termite Terrace. I certainly don't know the truth of the accusations lobbied against him - maybe nobody still living does - but as far as I'm concerned, the work speaks for itself. Whatever favoritism was granted him seems wholly earned. If he stole others' ideas, he either stole all of them or twisted them to such an extent that they were unrecognizable. He left everything else in the dust, and in the process, showed what this form was really capable of - not having a laugh at reality, but having a laugh at complete unreality.

So celebrate his birthday with me by watching a few. Many are available online, or through the excellent Looney Tunes Golden Collections (you can buy the whole lot (six in total) for a mere $100), which remain among my prized DVDs. For now, I leave you with more images from Clampett's work. It should be noted that, according to Bill Melendez (the great animator who went on to bring Peanuts to film, and who worked in Clampett's division), Clampett rarely did the drawing himself, but gave the animators free reign to play on the gags and stories he outlined. He inspired then, and he inspires now.

Super Suits, Molotov Cocktails, and Nude Demons

Depending on whereabouts you live, there are three films of varying quality opening tomorrow. Iron Man Three (I still can't believe that's how the title is presented onscreen) will, of course, be everywhere, and provides a good example of why using reviews as a consumer report is a bad idea. I thought it was just okay, didn't especially care for it, but I totally get why so many others are flipping out over it, and suspect many of you will as well. But I'm pretty up front in my review for Battleship Pretension about loving Iron Man 2, so that should be enough for many to totally write off my opinion, perhaps with good reason.

Much better, however, is Olivier Assayas' Something in the Air (a.k.a. Après mai, which translates to After May, and, given the late-60s French setting, is a much more informative title), which should also be available in some sort of Video-On-Demand capacity for those who don't have a local art house theater. Well worth seeing in either format, for reasons one could explore in my review of that, also at BP.

The best of all of them is both by far the most challenging, and, not coincidentally, the most difficult to see. I'm pretty sure Post Tenebras Lux is only playing at Film Forum in New York, but will be opening at the beginning of June in Los Angeles , and will presumably come someplace else throughout the year. It was in my top ten for last year, and my review, written soon after seeing it, is about as close as I could get to expressing how deeply I loved it while acknowledging that my attempts to understand it were pretty distant at best. I still couldn't explain it, but I've come to understand it deeply, and personally, and I highly recommend it on the very uncertain possibility that you might, too.

Alien's Great-Great-Great-Grandfather?

Sprang brayk forever, y'all.

Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

That Certain Female

Last night I watched Joseph Pevney's 1955 film Female on the Beach, based entirely, I don't mind saying, on a short piece Richard Brody wrote on his blog. Noting that Pevney's "work in film ranges from the ferociously expressive to ridiculous, sometimes in the same sequences," he goes on to write:

Female on the Beach reveals Pevney to have been a good bad director whose way with images ranges from the stodgily conventional to the weirdly idiosyncratic. He has a single tone to offer, one that stretches to fit all but is, nonetheless, alluringly negative. ...

He may have been, at times, deliciously incompetent, but his impulsive or uncontrolled failures came closer to art - and are certainly likelier to spark the imagination of artists - than the calculated successes of those whose greater skill masks lesser inspiration. Such found objects of cinematic wonder converge with a wonder at existence itself.

I certainly agree with Brody's conclusion, as Female on the Beach is, I suppose, nothing special in the overall, but wondrous in a million tiny details. Take, for instance, this image below. Joan Crawford plays a widow who's moving into her late husband's beach house until she and her real estate agent can find a buyer. She's actually never been to the house before, so the agent is showing her around, mentioning, "It's too bad you never lived here. Mr. Markham was very fond of this house, before you were married." And then Crawford throws her this glance, which lasts just a little longer than perhaps a more polite woman would allow...

...as if to say, "what did you know about my husband's fondnesses before we were married?" Brody's point about the fiercely expressive converging with the ridiculous is well taken in just how wide, and how long, Crawford holds this precise expression, which boils over just as Pevney cuts the shot, and the heat.

Where I'm not sure I agree with Brody is when he says, "The essence of [Pevney's] art is, to a great extent, his lack of authority." While he unquestionably is more than open to a certain wildfire element of cinema, there's a passage in Female on the Beach that's as beautifully, and specifically, executed as something out of Hitchcock (Vertigo and the Master of Suspense's own abandonment of emotional control, Marnie, sprang to mind immediately). Mrs. Markham has become friendly, on her own icy terms, with beach bum Drummy (Jeff Chandler), whose relationship with an elderly couple (Cecil Kellaway and Natalie Schafer) is a great deal more sinister than the familial terms on which they present themselves, the nature of which is unmistakable given the way the film opens, but which is explicated a great deal more when Mrs. Markham finds the diary of her former tenant, Mrs. Crandall.

Here, Pevney really shows us what he's made of, using double- and triple-exposure to show intersecting memories (or are they imaginations?). Sometimes they're stately and lyrical, almost something that might be framed at the very sort of beach house around which the film takes place...

...other times they're wildly claustrophobic and sinister, as characters begin to exist on, we acknowledge, two separate planes, but because of the crushing nature of two-dimensional photography, seem to sit side-by-side. In one moment that doesn't quite translate into stills but is boldly evident in motion, Mrs. Crandall comes in and comforts herself. Here, she seems actively concerned over her own well-being (and the eye peering out, just pass us, through the page is certainly cause for concern), even though the two Mrs. Crandalls in this image are far apart, temporally and emotionally.

The extent to which Pevney planned how these images would interact is, of course, impossible to say, but also represents its own kind of authority - the certainty that the total sequence would yield a particular effect, regardless of the particulars, and that it does. Crawford's manner upon arrival is pretty distinctly standoffish, though she rarely descends into outright rudeness; it's a sort of polite contempt, rigid and unrelenting. She has to make a very definite departure from here, and while Crawford is a skilled (and unpredictable) enough performer to sell that transition, Pevney does her, and us, a great service in using such a bold and terrifying sequence to set her off.

That it, coming so early, is perhaps the highlight of the film should not indicate that the film is somehow lesser for peaking early, as the thematic and dramatic waters it then enters are more than vicious and lurid enough to engage. For whatever tameness to which the story may succumb, it always navigates towards some strange, sideways, and (thus?) all the more effective means of expression, often in the images but, not to be discounted, also in the dialogue ("He's very tall, isn't he?" a detective asks Crawford of Drummy, in a manner that makes clear he's talking about everything except the man's height). As straightforward women-in-danger thrillers go (and its placement in a TCM boxset of the same name is not unreasonable), this one is anything but.

Funny Facileness

I've sort of been ducking and dodging discussing the relative "offensiveness" of various comedians (or comic news establishments, as the case may be) over the last few weeks, knowing essentially that there's an issue of context that is often overlooked, but not feeling enthused to the point that, frankly, it'd be worth the possibility that a minor miscommunication could derail the conversation. And I'm fragile. So, so fragile.

But I still think the basic idea is interesting, so it was a welcome surprise to find, while watching Stanley Donen's marvelous Funny Face for the first time last night, an avenue to explore how a piece (be it a stand-up routine, film, comic strip, awards show hosting, tweet, whatever) presents its world view, in spite of what it may be more obviously stating. In the film, bookworm Jo (Audrey Hepburn) is recruited to be a model for a fashion magazine by Dick Avery (Fred Astaire), the outfit's photographer. She has any number of moral and philosophical objections to the whole enterprise, but can't turn down a free trip to Paris, home of her favorite philosopher, Emile Flostre (Michel Auclair), whom she hopes to meet.

While Jo is delighted by the company she quickly discovers (mostly in a place referred to only as "the cafe"), Dick is less impressed, considering them largely to be easily-fooled phonies, not too different from the customer base with which he's more familiar. The parallel, not explicitly stated in the film, is a worthy one to draw, as it's not unusual for someone to take up intellectual pursuits as little more than a fashion statement, though, as someone who likes to think his interest in such matters extends beyond that, I will admit to getting a little touchy when Dick and the magazine's editor-in-chief, Maggie (Kay Thompson), infiltrate Flostre's home in the kind of bohemian disguises that one of the particularly square partners at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce would imagine and proceed to mock even the appearance of honest expression.

Which, in turn, brings me around to the point. Funny Face is pretty relentless in its portrayal of the culture of intellectualism, but that's not our introduction to philosophical theory - that comes through Audrey Hepburn. Sure, by the end, she heads off into the wide world of modeling so that she and Dick can be together forever, but she doesn't abandon her interest in the fictional "empathicalism" movement, noting with joy in one climactic moment that Maggie finally understands it, cementing a slow-forming bond between the two. The ideas succeed, even when their champions fail, even in something as simple as making those ideas understood. The film is not, in my view, making fun of those who honestly pursue deeper issues, but those who reject one contemporary fashions for another, or who, in the case of Flostre, wield intellectualism as a cheap way to get some ladies.

This is a discussion that's probably been going on as long as someone has tried to speak one way while intoning something else (perhaps even the opposite), and I don't expect it to be settled here and now, but suffice to say that it's worth looking past any initial offense you may take, and consider the context in which something is being presented - what has been established, and what will come to be crafted.

Seeking Consensus

I've long expressed frustration towards people who make a big show out of how much they do not care about the Oscars, largely because it seems that if they truly didn't care, they wouldn't say anything at all. For instance, I really do not care about, say...whale watching. Never talk about it. On the other hand, I really, honestly do love and care about the Oscars, so I talk about them all the time. But of the many, many statements made against the Oscars, the most pervasive one seems to be that many of the films that get nominated, and certainly those that win, won't be the ones we'll be talking about in twenty, thirty years. The speaker then lists whatever his or her pet causes are that year, because certainly those will be the ones we'll all remember, and thus these films are more valuable.

Aside from the false premise of a person assuming that even he/she will still be into a given film by then, let alone a large portion of cinephile culture, it's essentially using one consensus to justify the lack of attention by another. It's saying, "man, this group of 6,000 people don't get it, but this group totally does, so there!" Furthermore, neither really reflect the value of the film(s) at hand, and each discount the other's ability to even talk about the right films. The Academy might not highlight the greatest films of its generation, but every list henceforth will in some way overlook films from that same generation.

The history of cinema, and especially its representation, is too varied and esoteric to depend on "the conversation" to dictate the best there is, whether that conversation is happening now or in fifty years. For example, everybody can talk about Gone with the Wind at the drop of a hat, but increasingly few truly consider it to be among the best films ever made. Conversely, I've seen a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies that are now among my favorites ever made, but try to find more than a handful of people who are talking about It's Love I'm After or The Devil and Miss Jones (the former is available from the Warner Archive, the latter is coming out from Olive this year). They're still great films. The amount of conversation generated around any movie doesn't make it any better or worse, and is just as absurd a barometer to use to justify a film's value as any award, let alone the Academy Award (which, as it happens, has ensured we still talk about Around the World in 80 Days in some capacity).

So in the meantime, talk about the films that matter to you. Don't rely on others to pick up the slack.

Like Someone in Love (dir. Abbas Kiarostami)

The disparity between a person’s public face and their private self is not one that many filmmakers even acknowledge, let alone let entire films spring from that, but then, Abbas Kiarostami is not a typical filmmaker. Feeling no obligation to hold his audience’s attention - he’s said that he prefers films that put people to sleep - the Iranian filmmaker has given himself an artistic license to catch his characters at their least guarded, drawing a sharp disparity between how they interact with one another and what they do when they’re “alone.” His latest film, Like Someone in Love, opens with a long sequence in which Akiko (Rin Takanashi), who we come to discover is a prostitute, cycling through several confrontations across space and time, as she speaks with her domineering boyfriend over the phone, her boss and coworker face-to-face, listens to message left by her grandmother, who had hoped to meet up with her during a day-trip to Tokyo, and finally her elderly customer, who gets a little less from their arrangement than perhaps he expected, but who the next morning seems no less pleased.

Akiko’s profession automatically leads one to a sort of comfort with the meaning of the film’s title - the hiring of a prostitute allows a person to behave “like someone in love” - but the allusion is more directly to the pop song written by Jimmy van Heusen and Johnny Burke, the Ella Fitzgerald version of which plays a couple of times in the film. The song is in most ways like any other 1940s standard, with its melancholy tune and romantic lyrics, but it expresses these things by equating the narrator’s actions to those he/she understands to be most commonly associated with love, as though those actions in and of themselves dictate his/her emotional state. “I find myself gazing at stars / Hearing guitars like someone in love / Lately, the things I do astound me / Mostly whenever you’re around me,” thus we must be in love. It’s reverse-engineering emotion - if action is most often dictated by emotion, then my actions must allow me to determine my emotion.

But Akiko doesn’t stop to at least say “hi” to her grandmother, even though she’s been waiting at the train station all day, updating Akiko as to her latest specific whereabouts and impending departure, and even when - most heartbreakingly - Akiko passes by the station and sees her standing, looking hopefully, she simply continues on her route. The way Akiko speaks of her grandmother, and her expression in seeing her stand alone, tells us how she really feels, but she simply continues on her way to see her client, appearing more than happy to be there upon arrival. If anything, Akiko’s actions reveal the exact opposite of her interior state. And that’s just the first twenty, twenty-five minutes of the film. She, like many people, is also in a relationship with a man she seems to hate, and who shows her little affection in return, and who assumes Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), the aforementioned customer, is Akiko’s grandfather, an illusion he is more than willing to uphold. This might seem a more blatant form of the public face/private self divide, but it’s one that’s complicated by the fact that him knowing Akiko’s secret - her profession - allows him to be much closer to her than her “real” grandparents, while their relationship has remained, apparently, uncompromised by the sexual interaction on which it was supposed to be based.

For all of Kiarostami’s talk of putting people to sleep, and the appearance of a “nothing happens” plot, it’s a sign of his mastery over the form that this was one of the more engaging films I saw at AFI Fest, even though, afterwards, I was very much ambivalent about my response. I was hardly swept away by it, but was carried along, gently, at every turn, never feeling as though things were particularly dragging. The film had since lived on, and in the ensuing months, scarcely a day went by that I didn’t consider it on some level, and getting the chance to see it again a few weeks ago very much hardened it in my mind and heart. It is in this way a more rewarding film than some with more outwardly appealing qualities, as it has seemed to last for months instead of the hour-forty-something of its running time.

See, Kiarostami’s preference for films that put their audience to sleep isn’t just a fun bit of baiting. In the rest of the quote, he states, “I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.” The unsettling qualities - the hints at subjects of alienation, emotional exile, and, to some extent, self-abuse - might not be immediately evident, so shrewdly are they disguised and so unadorned are they in their presentation, until one thinks back, or revisits it, and sees that the way the film culminates is not so unexpected, not so jarring, and not purely the result of a dramatic imperative to “do something” with a premise. Using the sound design as the foundation for this climax might seem at first to be a grand formal bargain to excuse a small budget, until one notices how thorough and considered the auroral environment has been all along. Like the actions the characters take, it’s just an outward expression of what’s been going on the whole time.