Men in Black and White

Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power

As a young man, my father would occasionally skip school, a Catholic school run by fearsomely strict priests of the Salesian order, to go to the movies. They had double feature matinees back then, so he’d spend a good four hours enthralled by the actors of his time. He was fortunate that his youth and young adulthood came during the golden age of Hollywood, the forties and early fifties, which would produce some of the greatest actors, male and female, the movies have ever seen.  He collected a small, cloth-bound notebook filled with pieces of film; tokens from the guy who ran the movie projector. Little slides he took much care of, labeled and kept with his movie magazine collections. Our treasures now.

My father was said to resemble the actor Tyrone Power when he was young. I’ve seen the pictures and can tell this is so. I can imagine what an ego boost that must have been. As he introduced me to many of his favorite actors and films, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been for the men of his generation to grow up facing the larger than life screen personas of the male actors of his time. Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Ray Milland, Paul Newman, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, James Dean, Peter Lore, Monty Clift, Burt Lancaster, and more were the men on the screen that young men of his time tried to emulate. Talk about setting the bar high for male role models!



Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird and Duel in the Sun

When these actors played good men, they were perfection. Who wouldn’t love to have a father like Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird? Gary Cooper was the epitome of the moral, intelligent and brave man in most of his films, the kind who would face the Miller gang alone when all the townspeople he had protected turned their backs on him in High Noon. Clark Gable, my father’s favorite, was also the fearless, honorable gentleman, with just enough malice about him to make him even more attractive; insuperable as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.  

But when these actors played troubled men, they were even more amazing. Gregory Peck himself was wonderfully ruthless as Lewt McCaines in King Vidor’s great cowboy romance Duel in the Sun (the duel is not between two men). Fifty years before Nicolas Cage played an alcoholic writer in Leaving Las Vegas, Ray Milland had already brought such despair and drama to the part of the alcoholic writer living a hellish three days in in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, a role that won him an Oscar and the movie a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay award. Yet even the young rebels of those times, like James Dean, Marlon Brando or Paul Newman, with films like Rebel without a Cause, On the Waterfront, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, always had an undertone of goodness, a moral code of justice and equilibrium.

 

Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, James Dean

Back then, on the screen, life was after all a world of black and white, good and evil; a Manichean world, holding all the complexities of life at bay. It’s not hard to envision how everyone living with those complexities, the grey in between, were like a tidal wave pushing against the dam.  These actors themselves, when they were off screen, were just men, working their way through life, like my father. Their acting all the more marvelous because of how different many of them were to their screen personas.

 

Eventually the dike broke, the dam yielded; color, complexity and reality filled the screen, which is all good. Oddly, I still occasionally want to turn  to these marvelous films to find those men of black and white which I, too, ultimately grew to admire.

 

 

Still Caricatures After All These Years

James Franco in Spring Breakers

It’s hard not to sound prudish when writing about how blatant sexism along with violence have become such a staple in many films, even so called art house films.  Movies like the recently released Spring Breakers, which has received great reviews from respected movie critics (“Beach movie done as art film”, “gleefully debauched”, “mesmerizing”… it’s even on the cover of Cahiers du Cinema). Maybe they like it because it’s directed by art house critic favorite Harmony Korine, or maybe because the movie critics writing the reviews happen to be male.

It’s a film about young women “gone wild” on sex and drugs (as it seems young women do during Spring Breaks these days, according to the entertainment industry), in this case ultimately falling into crime and “in sex” with their male boss. It’s a movie like so many B films made today and, more and more, those made by once serious directors, like Oliver Stone with his film Savages or most of the Tarantino films, where women are secondary characters who have beautiful bodies and very low IQs. In this movie James Franco does the acting, as the critics point out, and the “Disney Girls” do the showing. 

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers in his review of Spring Breakers writes: “The promise of nudity and girl-on-girl action among Disney hotties Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical), Selena Gomez (Wizards of Waverly Place) and Ashley Benson (Pretty Little Liars) is just a porny tease.” So that clarifies the audience this film is targeting.  Or, as another critic wrote, referring to the female actors in Spring Breakers: “The wholesome ingénues would get their all-grown-up moment.” Growing up to become what, exactly? Not Meryl Streep or Emmanuelle Riva. Certainly not role models for all the young girls who admired them and made them stars to being with. That doesn’t seem to bother as many women actors as it should these days.

People will argue that films reflect society, they don’t shape it and that these art house directors are just masterful and creative in brining reality to the screen. Either way, the outcome is the same: in too many films these days women are still the Other -in Simone de Beauvoir’s use of the term in The Second Sex- they are portrayed as caricatures of people, antiquated stereotypes. So, if not creating the sexist stereotypes, these films are certainly perpetuating them by repeating them, to the dehumanization of us all.

In an interview with the Spring Breakers director, Korine states: “There’s also beauty in horror”.    I read this and feel the greatest generational gap ever. What beauty can there possibly be in horror? Just how “chic” and artsy can horror and misogyny be? Sadly the horror is usually directed at women on film and, so much more tragically, in real life. How resigned are women in the twenty-first century to their role as the Other in society that there is so much silence towards making and praising films that objectify women?

In the words of the president of the National Organization for Women (which, since 1923, is still fighting to get a constitutional amendment for the equality of women passed): “Sadly, the degradation of women and girls is ubiquitous in our society. The term "rape culture" is used to describe the casual debasement we all experience and witness every day. In fact, it has become such a part of our lives that it is often invisible.”

Images are powerful. Probably like never before has it mattered so much how women are portrayed in film and media, given our era of instant communication, of texting and “sexting”; where movies, shows and pictures are in the palm of our hands, and there is almost a voyeuristic quality to social media. The more movies, TV shows or commercials are made that objectify women, the harder it will be for women to reclaim self-respect; to be the Self, not the Other, to stop being reduced to caricatures of human beings.

 

Superstar

The world of western art is full of the figure of Jesus Christ. The art form that is film is no exception. I’m influenced to write a post about this now I guess because of how we have been immersed this month in the incredible media hype surrounding the election of the new Pope; or maybe because Holy Week is around the corner and this is that time of year when we, who have been raised Catholic, begin a period of silent mourning, and turn to our favorite forms of art for company and solace.

Unlike some of the spectacular paintings and music made about Christ, the art of cinema is unfortunately not filled with many great movies about Jesus. Many movies have been made about Him, some of them have gone on to become “classics”, like Ben Hur, The Robe,  The Greatest Story Ever Told (the fabulous Max Von Sydow as a… Swedish Christ?), but few really stand out as works of art. Since in this case, with religion in the midst, it is everyone’s opinion what constitutes a work of art, I’m going to write about three films about Christ that   I feel come closer to the mark in one way or another: Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jesus Christ Superstar by Norman Jewison, and The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson.

The Gospel According to Matthew , The Passion of the Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar

 

My favorite among the three is the one made by the Marxist, atheist Pasolini.  When The Gospel According to Matthew was released in 1964, it was criticized by both the Marxists on the left and the extreme conservative religious right; the former because they felt betrayed by a great Marxist filmmaker who would make a film about a religious hero, including his miracles; the latter because of this amazingly eclectic, unusual, and very down-to-earth vision of the Christ. Pasolini’s response to the criticism from the left (probably the only ones that he really cared about) was that his film was "A reaction against the conformity of Marxism. The mystery of life and death and of suffering — and particularly of religion ... is something that Marxists do not want to consider. But these are and have always been questions of great importance for human beings.”

The film is made in the fabulous style of Italian neorealism, and most of the actors that appear in the movie were non-professional. As an interesting fact, the cast included Italian intellectuals, poets and philosophers, and I’ve read that Pasolini was even considering casting the poets Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg as Christ for his movie. He finally cast a Spanish student in the role.

The Gospel According to Matthew

 The result is a movie that, without romanticizing the story, without making Christ appear “heavenly” and preachy, captures the essence of Christ, his teachings and his gentleness, but also his anger at injustice; Christ is shown in some scenes, movie critics have pointed out, with the furor of  a union organizer or a war protester. Visually, the movie, filmed in black and white, is fascinating because it contains elements from different time periods and places; Jesus wears his hair short and doesn’t have much of a beard, as Jewish men of his time did, but the Roman soldiers wear costume influenced by art from the Renaissance. Pasolini himself later said of his film that it was "The life of Christ plus 2,000 years of storytelling about the life of Christ”.

The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film festival, was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Art Direction, but singularly also won the first prize of the International Catholic Office of the Cinema, which screened the film inside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Another interesting fact is that The Gospel According to Mathew was mostly filmed in the poor, desolate Italian district of Basilicata and its capital city Matera, with its famous ancient cave dwellings (the Sassi di Matera). Forty years later, Mel Gibson returned to this district and used some of the very locations to film The Passion of the Christ.

The criticism that Mel Gibson received for his film The Passion of the Christ were directed not at the film as art form but, like with Pasolini’s film, at its content and depiction of the story of Christ. The movie has been called anti-Semitic and was condemned for being so extremely violent, to the point that at the movie theatre where I saw it for the first time, in Minnesota, there was actually a sign on the counter where one purchased the tickets with  a bizzare warning about the violence in the film, something I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since.
 

The Passion of the Christ

I do not like gory, grisly violence in films, but I tolerate it when I feel the director had no other choice but to use it (for example, the opening battle among gangs scene in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York or the scenes in the Roman circus in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator). I don’t think this was the case with The Passion of the Christ. The extreme violence could have been avoided. Unlike Pasolini’s Gospel that focuses on Christ’s teachings and his meaning, Gibson has chosen to focus on Christ’s physical suffering and the violence surrounding his death.  In what I find kind of ironic, the Marxist atheist captures Christ’s spirituality and the conservative Catholic, that is Gibson, captured the materialistic realism of his death.

The violence and shocking gruesomeness is what I do not like about The Passion of the Christ. I do, however, understand Mel Gibson’s wish to be truthful to the story to the extreme detail of every wound inflicted, and I understand he did extensive research on the instruments of torture used by the Romans in those times. It is this fidelity to the materialistic aspects of the story that make the movie unique overall. What I like about the movie is some of this fidelity; this is a movie that is well directed, well-acted and has some very beautiful scenes, like the one between Jesus and his mother when he is still a carpenter making her a table, or the scene of the last supper with his apostles; it is also a movie in Aramaic and Latin. We finally have a movie where the Roman soldiers aren’t speaking English and don’t have British accents! But it is hard to watch this movie more than once because of its gore.

Jesus Christ Superstar has none of the pretentions of the other two films I’ve written about. It does not begin to try to be a faithful representation of the time or place of the story of Christ, and it doesn’t want to focus on his teachings. It is a lovely metaphor of the meaning of Christ and his passion.  The movie was shot in Israel, in the ruins of Advat, but any fidelity to the times stops there.

Norman Jewison, a protestant Christian notwithstanding his last name, has always made films with strong social justice content.  He is also a wonder of a director for taking musicals to the screen, having also directed the award winning Fiddler on the Roof.  In taking Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera to the screen, he fills it with dynamism and modern symbolism, bringing the story closer to the youth of the time when it opened in 1973, myself included. It also is non-temporal, but in a symbolic way.

 

Jesus Christ Superstar

 

The Roman soldiers are wearing army fatigues, military tanks and war machinery drive Judas to betray Christ; drug and guns dealers are the ones thrown out of the temple by Jesus.  And his followers are in bell bottom jeans, and they dance in joyous celebration with Simon singing : “you’ll get the power and the glory, forever and ever and ever”. It seems that these movies will guarantee just that, they will ensure, in this modern day art form,  that Jesus Christ continues to be a superstar.

 

 

                                                                                        

 

 

 

Everyday Heroines

Silkwood, Rabbit Proof Fence, North Country

When International Women’s Day comes around, it is always a little depressing to think about where women stand in our society in terms of empowerment, participation, health and image. And, as it relates to this blog, where they are and how they are portrayed in the media and films.  We’ve come a long way, the optimists will say; we’ve got a long way to go and we’re even sliding back, the realists will counter.

The United Nations developed the Gender Inequality Index (GII) to measure women’s disadvantage across 146 countries. The index looks at three dimensions—reproductive health, empowerment,and the labor market. Health is measured by the maternal mortality ratio and the adolescent fertility rate; empowerment by things like secondary and higher education attainment levels or share of parliamentary seats, and labor by participation in the work force. With respect to just this last indicator, in the United States women’s participation in the US labor force reached 60 percent by 2000, however this figure has declined to 46.7 percent and the Department of Labor does not expect it to increase by 2018. It is no wonder that while the United States ranks 4^th among the “Very High Human Development” countries in the United Nations’ Human Development Index, it ranks 47^th  in terms of Gender equality.

It shows. The media and movies certainly reflect this. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that only 5% of movie directors were women in 2011; this is a decrease from the reported 9% of female movie directors in 1998. This is important not only in terms of women’s presence in the different spheres of movie making, but also because, this source finds, when there was at least one woman involved with directing or writing for a film, there were more female characters on screen.  And this is very relevant: in the 100 top grossing films of 2007, 2008, and 2009, women represented only one-third of speaking characters for all three years.

 Women actors, the report indicates, are relegated mainly to genres like romantic comedy and romantic drama, some documentaries. But what is more, female characters are more likely to be depicted wearing sexy clothing or partially nude, and young women in particular are cast as hypersexualized in films. Historically, female characters are typically younger than their male counterparts, white and more likely to have an employment status that was undefined.

 How important is all this? It certainly helps perpetuate the more demeaning and negative stereotypes of women. This rises to levels of great concern when we realize that, according to the same source, American teenagers spend an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes absorbing media in just one day –including TV, music, movies, internet and magazines. The influence, then, is tremendous. [For more on the media and women, I recommend the web site: http://www.missrepresentation.org]

Thankfully, movies are a wonderful and powerful source to denounce gender inequality and, though  not many, there are some very good films that do just that.  Of growing importance are those films that speak of gender inequality in countries that rank the lowest on the Gender Inequality Index:  films like A Separation, The Circle, Two Women or The Stoning of Soraya M., from Iran; Latin American films like Madeinusa, New Zealand films like Whale Rider, or African films like Moolaadé about female genital mutilation.

There are also some fascinating and strong female characters in films. In the world of fictional characters, we only wish there were more like Alien’s Rippley, Winter’s Bone Ree, Clarice Sterling in The Silence of the Lambs, Louise Sayer in Thelma and Louise,  Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest), and for a younger generation, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.

But top most among my favorite films about strong and fascinating women are those based on the outstanding feats of real life, everyday heroines, women like Karen Silkwood  on whom the movie Silkwood was based, exposing blatant worker safety violations in a nuclear plant; Josie Jenson that inspired the film North Country, the woman who brought the first major successful sexual harassment case in the United States, against a mining company; or the three aboriginal girls, Molly Graig, Daisy Graig and Gracie Fields, in Rabbit Proof Fence, who set off on a trek across the Outback, defying the racial cruelty of their time.

Certainly these women, their stories and the films they inspire are what brings out the hopeful and optimistic in us, and make International Women’s Day worth celebrating!

 

 

 

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Robot and Us

Frank Langella in Robot and Frank

Our human relationships are increasingly being transformed by technology in this tablet-holding, text-loving, internet-addicted world. All things indicate that they’re not improving.  We seem to be moving beyond individualism into egoistic hedonism.  And how beautifully this is presented by Jake Schreier and Christopher D. Ford in the film Robot and Frank!  

 

The film takes place in the “near future” where a devoted, if not loving, son gives his aged father a robot programed to care for him. The father lives alone and is falling prey to some severe form of memory loss, like senile dementia or Alzheimer’s; as well as depression, obviously.  The twist is that in the past the father was a jewel thief and evaded taxes as well, for which he had done extensive jail time; so he was not the best role model or family man to his son and daughter. The father was a self-centered, egoistical man who hurt his family.  His family still loves him just enough, but they do so now on their terms. The children are grown up, busy with their own interesting selves, and give their father the crumbs of their lives basically through technology.

Frank Langella plays the somewhat demented, extremely lonely and regret-filled father, and he is just wonderful at it! The screenplay is tremendously moving, funny at times, and above all thought-provoking. How have we, in the western, “first world”, arrived at a time where we are so bought into ourselves, our interests, career-advancement, and “me-time” that we are no longer willing to “sacrifice”  it to care for our mothers and fathers; to give them real companionship and care?  

 

I gather that this is a theme that we will see coming up more frequently in films given the aging boomer population and the rising self-centeredness of the technology-addicted millennials. The father-children relationship in Robot and Frank reminds me a bit of the daughter in Amour ,who comes to see her elderly parents every once in a while, when it is convenient for her, yet berates the father, who is the sole care-giver of the mother, for not doing a better job!

 

The irony, in Robot and Frank is that Frank’s daughter travels to distant lands on humanitarian missions and only returns to physically visit her father when her “principles” are called into question by her brother’s gift of a robot companion. She raves against the inhumanity that is technology, but it is only via the satellite that she is really comfortable with her father: on her terms, on her time, when she controls the communication…so distant in every way.  The brother is a little better because, after all, there is the whole father-son relationship gone wrong in childhood thing that keeps him driving up to see his dad and, ultimately, gives him what turns out to be a true gift. 

 

On a side in the film, a precious volume of Don Quixote is stolen from a library that is being replaced by computers. The book is a relic,  filled with old-fashioned ideals of chivalry and sacrifice, lost in a world where nobody goes looking for the thief that stole this treasure, but actively pursue jewel heists.

Ultimately, much to the children's dismay, Frank bonds with Robot more than he ever did with his children. And the relationship between this man and machine is possibly the most moving one of the whole film. That says it all.