SLACKER (Richard Linklater, 1991).
With an anti-narrative strategy slightly reminiscent of Schnitzler's
La Ronde, Slacker follows the meanderings of various offbeat
denizens of Austin, Texas, during a single day--each one encountering
another character at some point, who we then follow for awhile until
he or she encounters another character, who we follow in turn, and so
on. Actually the pattern is more like a spiral or a squiggly line than
Schnitzler's circle-- Linklater is not interested in fate, but in chance--and
since many of the characters spout humorous, unconventional views on
the nature of reality, the effect is of pleasant, self-reflexive aimlessness.
The film had quite an effect on its release, helping to ignite a minor
surge in independent film in the 90s. The cast of unknowns are mostly
young, and the script's perspective is fresh and casually ironic. This
doesn't sound like some corporate suit's idea of what 20- somethings
sound like, but the real deal. Linklater's long takes, fluid camera
movement, and eccentric cutting, not to mention the plotless script,
challenged the status quo and inspired other filmmakers to try new things.
There's a lot of talk in Slacker, much of it seemingly silly
and inconsequential, but there's also a sense that the indolence of
the film's outsider street/youth culture tends to create more stimulating
ways of viewing the world. Throughout his career, Linklater has been
almost alone in his extensive use of conversation and discussion (often
overtly philosophical) in his films. Here the gab tends towards the
conspiratorial, with conversations about UFOs, the JFK assassination,
and so forth (one very funny character's prediction of ecological disaster
now seems quite realistic, unfortunately), but there is also talk that
is more in the nature of personal rumination, emotional argument, or
off-the-wall artistic abstraction. To fully appreciate the movie, one
needs to accept that it's not going anywhere, and take the position
of a random observer or eavesdropper.
I'm sorry to say that the last third of the picture sags and eventually
becomes a bit tiresome. The first two thirds feature enough clever,
funny, or bizarrely interesting talk to keep the viewer alert. Examples
include the wacko street girl who tries to sell someone a sample of
what she claims is Madonna's pap smear, and an oblique story told on
the back of a series of photographs by a departed roommate of a group
who finds the photos on the floor of his empty room. As the film winds
down, however, Linklater's invention seems to have run out, and it seems
as if we're supposed to be interested in the idea of random encountering
by itself, without the people we meet saying anything memorable. Maybe
this was intended, but I doubt it. Even with a structure this odd, the
film needs a consistent string of funny or thought-provoking words to
make it work. Nevertheless, Slacker is bright and inventive, and definitely
worth seeing.
SALT OF THE EARTH
(Herman J. Biberman, 1954).
Tired of their employers' refusal to make their working conditions
safer, a group of Chicano miners in New Mexico go on strike. When the
company uses the Taft-Hartley act to break the strike, the miners' wives,
noticing a loophole in the court order, take their husbands' places
on the picket line. The story is told from the perspective of Esperanza
(Rosaura Revueltas), the wife of the union foreman (Juan Chacón)
who resists her taking an active role in the strike.
The story behind the film has become more well-known than its content.
Salt of the Earth was made by a group of filmmakers who had been
blacklisted in the anticommunist witch hunts, including the director
Biberman, co-screenwriter Michael Wilson, and producer Paul Jarrico.
The production was continually harassed by the government and the studios.
The film had to be developed and edited in secret. Revueltas, one of
the few professional actors in the cast, was deported, and they had
to go to Mexico to shoot her remaining scenes. Against all these odds,
the picture was finished, but was banned from exhibition. It only managed
to be shown in one New York theater. Only in the 1970s was it finally
revived in the States.
Except for Revueltas, Will Geer (who plays the town sheriff, in charge
of breaking up the picket lines), and a few others, the cast was made
up of non-professionals, many of them from the actual union whose strike
against the Empire Zinc Mine had inspired the story. Although events
that took a long time to transpire are compressed into a shorter period
for narrative purposes, the picture is remarkably faithful to the events,
way of life, and culture being depicted. One might expect that a production
under these kind of pressures would be clumsy and amateurish, but it
tells its story well, with a good narrative rhythm and considerable
emotional power. A few of the performances verge on the wooden, but
the main ones are fine, and Revueltas is marvelous, conveying a believable
mix of shyness, strength, and ultimately heroism.
To watch a film that concerns itself with the lives of working class
people, and in this case a minority population as well, without condescension
or attempts to trick up the story with romance or melodrama, is a rarity
even today. To watch this and realize that it was made in the 1950s
is amazing. We grow used to thinking of an era or decade in terms of
its typical portrayal in the media of the time, and in this way the
dominant modes of entertainment falsify the depth and diversity that
existed.
The most daring and fascinating aspect of this film is its depiction
of sexual politics in the homes of the miners as a mirror of the capitalist
politics they are struggling against in the strike. The miners leave
out any demands for heating or proper sanitation in the home, claiming
that it's of less importance than working conditions at the mine. But
later, when the women are on the picket line and the men have to do
laundry and other household chores, they begin to understand the difficult
conditions that the women have to endure every day. The men also oppose
the women's activism in the strike--Esperanza's husband feels humiliated
to see his wife on a picket line, and he lashes out at her for neglecting
her "proper" role. This feminist angle is so modern that it's hard to
believe you're watching a 1954 movie. Yes, Biberman and company were
ahead of their time, but I also think that we minimize the consciousness
of sizable minorities from earlier times, simply because their voices
were drowned out in the films and history books.
In the end, the message of Salt of the Earth is that of the
old rallying cry, "The people united can never be defeated." On its
own terms, the picture is a moderately engaging social drama--nothing
flashy, just a competent, low-budget movie about a strike. But it seems
brilliant in contrast to the dullness and timidity surrounding it. Would
that such efforts were ordinary, but they were not, and are still not.
7 PLUS SEVEN (Michael Apted, 1970).
After seven years, Apted got the idea of revisiting the fourteen kids
who were the subjects of the TV documentary Seven
Up, a decision that ultimately led to a series of films,
each one made at a seven year interval. The method is the same: ask
the kids about various subjects, pertaining to their personal lives
and to the world in general, with the same seriousness with which you
would ask such questions of adults. But now the boys and girls are 14
years old, a most vulnerable and difficult age, and the result, although
illuminating, is more than a little dispiriting as well.
Apted frequently flashes back to segments of the previous film, and
the contrast is telling. The 7-year-olds, regardless of their economic
status, are almost uniformly energetic and spontaneous. With the onset
of adolescence we see a lot of painful self-consciousness, along with
attempts to appear more adult, whatever that may mean. A few of the
kids constantly hang their heads or otherwise avoid the gaze of the
camera while speaking. A bit of coaching on the part of the interviewer
may have helped with that, but I think Apted purposely refrained from
guiding his subjects so that he could portray them in as unmediated
a way as possible. The star of the film turns out to be one of the rich
kids (Andrew, I think) who is remarkably self-possessed and well-spoken
even while sharing that he wants to go into politics and outlaw strikes.
Overall, the film shows how the ebullience of childhood becomes distorted
over time through social expectations-- these 14-year-olds are a gloomier
bunch than their younger selves, confused and even a bit resentful of
being interviewed at all. We can watch the results, and only guess at
the causes.
ALIAS "LA GRINGA" (Alberto Durant, 1991).
"La Gringa" is a charming Peruvian career criminal (Germán González)
famous for his skill at breaking out of prison (he earned the nickname
after escaping once disguised as a woman). Recaptured yet again, he
is sent to a prison on a remote island, where he meets a professor who
was arrested just for looking at a political leaflet, and imprisoned
with the "terrorists"--Maoist revolutionaries who try to browbeat him
into joining their cause. The thief and the intellectual become friends,
and then La Gringa sees an opportunity to escape.
With an obviously limited budget, Durant crafts an absorbing tale,
part crime thriller, part political allegory. The professor's plight
is exactly that of Peru itself during the Fujimori regime--trapped between
a brutally repressive police state (represented here by the prison warden
and his goons) and an equally brutal guerrilla movement known as The
Shining Path. Both sides see human beings as objects or means to an
end, blind to basic human values of love and decency.
The story is supposedly based on the memoirs of an actual escaped convict,
but the plot unfortunately descends to crude action-hero levels in the
film's last section, when events become completely unbelievable. Up
until then, there are forgivable lapses in credibility, such as the
inmates seeming to wander rather too freely over the island on which
they're imprisoned, but the finale is too much. Yet despite this, the
picture is both enjoyable and memorable, mainly because of the gritty
performance by González, who portrays the moody, intense title
character with utter conviction. In addition, the picture perfectly
captures the way real convicts behave--the actors' expressions, their
eyes, and the way they talk to each other have a special quality of
truth that you rarely see in crime films. Alias "La Gringa" is
not a great work, but it's an unusually stirring little film that in
its best moments manages to transcend its genre.
POOR COW (Kenneth Loach, 1967).
Joy (Carol White) is a new mother, pretty but poor, living in a cheap
London flat with her abusive husband (John Bindon) who ends up going
to prison after a botched robbery. She then takes up with Dave (Terence
Stamp), one of her husband's friends, who is also a thief but is loving
towards her and her son. She makes bad choices, and things hardly ever
go right for her, but she still struggles to get by for the sake of
her little boy.
This was Loach's first feature, and it has the fresh quality, as well
as the unevenness and mistakes in judgment, typical of most first pictures.
The best thing about it is the way it extends the "kitchen sink realism"
school of British cinema into a less dogmatic, more relaxed observational
style. Life in the slums of south London is portrayed frankly and sympathetically,
not merely as a parade of sordid details but as a real lived-in environment
with its own joys and comforts alongside the more negative aspects.
The hand-held camera and the improvisational acting give the picture
a naturalistic quality (although sometimes this comes off as merely
rough), and with the exception of Bindon, who seems to be reading from
cue cards, the acting is good. (One wishes there was more of Stamp,
who is wonderful.)
Carol White negotiates the tricky central role with great skill. She's
beautiful, but she manages to seem believably ordinary, frequently naive
and confused, yet never a victim, at least not in the pitying way we're
used to seeing in less skillful social dramas. Most intriguing is the
way Loach portrays the feminine sex-object role as a spiritual dead
end. Joy seeks love and approval through sex without seeming much aware
of how men use her. In one very telling scene, she's persuaded to be
in a modeling session with a friend, where the women are ogled by lascivious,
manipulative photographers, one of whom admits to another that he has
no film in his camera. Here Loach and co-screenwriter Nell Dunn (adapting
her own novel) show how personal beauty becomes just another way to
discount and demean women.
The soundtrack features occasional pop songs of the day, juxtaposed
ironically with scenes of dreary everyday routines and working class
squalor, and this is effective. On the other hand, a couple of songs
composed and sung for the film by Donovan are played over visual montages
(a stylistic vogue that was just beginning then), and the effect is
jarring. In addition, Loach's attempts at distancing effects, such as
titles for the film's various sections, and White addressing the audience
directly, fall completely flat. The director was still finding his own
voice, and Poor Cow reflects the tentative, hit-or-miss stage
of a film artist's early career. The whole is therefore less than the
sum of its parts. But it's not at all a bad film--some of the parts
are very interesting.
©2005 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
