The Hurt Locker

Almost 50 of us attended last night's sneak preview of The Hurt Locker, courtesy of Equinoxe Films. First and foremost, This visceral movie is not for everyone. Some, unable to take it, lurched to the exits when they figured out what was in store. The G&M's Liam Lacey compared it to Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fear (1953). I had the same thought. In both, the audience sits atop a movie, charged with nitroglycerine. But The Hurt Locker will surely show up on almost everyone's top ten list in December. Here's why:

• I loved the miniscule director miniatures of the movie: the damaged, certifiably nuts, courageous leading character (what a breakout performance! who is this guy?); the mangy cats, the passive Arab onlookers, the endless ominous street litter (beneath every shard of paper may lurk bomb), the dopey shrink. Mark Boal, the screenwriter, was embedded with a bomb squad in Baghdad.

• I loved director, Kathryn Bigelow's immersive cinematic panache: the characters themselves ticking time-bombs; the multi-camera handheld documentary look, the near minimalist presence of music, the ominous off screen thwap-thwaps of choppers, the cries in the night. One of the stars gets offed in the first scene.

• I raised this issue after we screened both Hunger and Gomorra, as to whether as citizens of the world we have some responsibility of bearing witness to grim goings on. It's a complex question, one which I never fully answer to my own satisfaction. The Hollywood moguls to this day argue that movies can only be entertainment.

• I found The Hurt Locker spellbinding on other levels: we hear news reports of bombs going off in Baghdad markets; of suicide missions in Palestine; of maniacs in the London tubes, but seeing those incidents up close was indelible. If this were 1940, would filmmakers not have a real obligation to make films of the Holocaust? Would we, the audience, not have an obligation to go see them? In the future, I will not see/hear an Iraqi report of a bomb going off in the future without re-imagining horrors from this film.

• I was also struck by the brutal nature of much mundane daily bread work: the sheer terrifying stuff some people undertake day after day after day. Coal miners in West Virgina, chicken sexers in South Carolina. We never really get it in news reports, but on film the disconnected Jeremy Renner character day after day, doing bomb disposal, what he's paid for, awed me.

• A third note: the sheer incomprehensibility of ground-level war to those poor GI grunts on the ground. They can't identify the enemy, they don't distinguish between Shia and Sunni, they can't comprehend enemy savagery (placing the bomb in the corpse of that kid, rigging one of their own with a time-bomb). The protracted ambush in the desert was extraordinary, grunts firing off round after round into the desert void. And missing most of the time.

• America is bedevilled by a presumption of paranoid rationality. Since God exists....since Arabs are evil... since markets are effective... Which leads inevitably to disastrous consequences. Accompanied by its stone-faced absence of any appreciation for irony, self-awareness, humility for the irrational. A certifiably God-fearing, market-loving nut ran America's foreign policy for eight years. And his VP even moreso! Yet, I don't see the Obama/Clintonites acting with much greater sanity when it comes to deploying their men with guns. D'oh!

Amarcord

Fellini on Memory

Memory is a most mysterious element, almost indefinable, that links us to things we don’t even remember having lived. It constantly incites us to stay in contact with dimensions, events, and sensations, that we can’t define, but that we know actually happened.

We need to distinguish between recollection and memory. There are two kinds of memory, one Proustian, the other Platonic. Recollection or remembrance of things past is banal: events can be recalled or they can be invented, as I’ve done in the majority of my films. Memory on the other hand, is like the soul: it lives before birth. Take Plato’s Phaedo and the slave boy for example. Socrates demonstrates that the untaught child knows Euclid and Pythagoras. In that sense, I too was a slave boy: my Socrates was Rossellini and what I knew intuitively was cinema. Child Federico was father to the man. Memory doesn’t express itself through recollection. It’s a mysterious indefinable component urging us to enter into contact with dimensions, events, sensations we can’t name but that we know, however confusedly, existed before us.

An Artist lives in his memory, constantly remembering people, places and situations that never have existed in the context of his life. The obligation to express in focused on the invention of memories/.

I don’t have a memory of personal recollections. It’s simply more natural for me to invent my own, inspired by the memory of lives and events that never existed, but which feeds on them or calls them into existence. I invented everything including my birth. And this invented self is the only true self I see reflected in the mirror of my films. I invented my youth, my family, relationship with women and with life. I have always invented. The irrepressible urge to invent is because I don’t want anything autobiographical in my films.

***

I am a born liar. For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented

*****

When I was a teenager, I fell in love with movies by falling in love with the movies of Federico Fellini. This week, I noticed that the Cinema du Parc intended to screen La Strada and Amarcord, two of Fellini's best, later this month. So I couldn't resist drawing them to movie mavens attention.

La Strada (1954) was Fellini's first great film, filled with the kind of stuff he used in movie after movie: the circus, the parade, the Jesus figure suspended against the sky, the trumpet (Nino Rota, borrowing Donizetti), the Chaplinesque waif, the carney figures, the seashore. All of them recur again in Amarcord, made 20 years later. So here are two movies that bookend Fellini at the top of his game, his first great one and his last.

Martin Scorsese, who is behind the La Strada's re-release, recalls in a recent article for the New York Times,

"I was enthralled by the film's resolution, where the power of the spirit overwhelms brute force... essentially a story of redemption rooted in the religious aesthetic. The simplicity of the plot harks back to the medieval morality play and, as Marcus points out, to the tradition of commedia dell'arte, with its stock roles and clownish costumes.

The NYT's Vincent Canby once wrote of Amarcord:

Fellini's most marvelous film... It's an extravagantly funny, sometimes dreamlike evocation of a year in the life of a small Italian coastal town in the nineteen-thirties, not as it literally was, perhaps, but as it is recalled by a director with a superstar's access to the resources of the Italian film industry and a piper's command over our imaginations. When Mr. Fellini is working in peak condition, as he is in Amarcord (the vernacular for "I remember" in Romagna), he somehow brings out the best in us. We become more humane, less stuffy, more appreciative of the profound importance of attitudes that in other circumstances would seem merely eccentric if not lunatic.

Roger Ebert:

"It's also absolutely breathtaking filmmaking. Fellini has ranked for a long time among the five or six greatest directors in the world, and of them all, he's the natural. Ingmar Bergman achieves his greatness through thought and soul-searching, Alfred Hitchcock built his films with meticulous craftsmanship, and Luis Buñuel used his fetishes and fantasies to construct barbed jokes about humanity. But Fellini... well, moviemaking for him seems almost effortless, like breathing, and he can orchestrate the most complicated scenes with purity and ease. He's the Willie Mays of movies.

I also attach a short excerpt, remember my own first encounter with La Strada, from my unpublished memoir. Plus some notes I prepared for the McGill MILR session I moderated on Amarcord this winter

Thank goodness movies can distract us from this soggy summer,

peter

***

From My Life the Movie

I explain to my son these days, ‘I’m a refugee from the 40s.’
‘When was that, Dad?’
‘Shortly after the Shakespearean Age... just before television...’
“OH, right... no TELEVISION when you were a kid?... got it, Dad. Back then, what was that like?’
‘Back when we used sundials…’

So nutty was I about Federico Fellini’s La Strada, I watched it unsubtitled in Toronto's Little Italy, understanding not a word of Italian. Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina seeking redemption, a saint working as sinner, a sentimentalist who’s one tough cookie. My bar crowd reminded me of her. She reminded me of them: funny, courageous, sassy low-life, with spunk to thwart the righteous.

Fellini converted me into a movie buff. I became an habitué of a lowlife demi-monde at a time when the drinking age was 21. I greased my hair into a Duck Butt. I wore drapes. I smoked Buckinghams. While pals were clambering after private school fairy princesses, I was falling in love with love, my hormones jouncing like olive oil on a hot skittle. I courted high-energy brainy cool-cat bar babes that got the joke. These wild things were hipsters with their untamed shag, their me-deep uninhibited, fantastical, oft-repeated hardscrabble anecdotes. One was the daughter of Holocaust survivors; another, the abandoned child of Polish Commies deported back to Poland stranding her alone in Canada at 15 years of age; a third, was half-Chinese, a runaway from her South African Baptist God-Squadders.

‘D’ya ever find God’, I once asked her.

‘Not yet, she said, but when I do, I’m plannin’ on givin’ Him a whuppin’ He won’t soon forget’.

Each trip to the York Theatre, a Toronto art house, was a pilgrimage involving elaborate faith, myth and ritual. I snoogled into eroticized screen worlds: South America (Black Orpheus, Wages of Fear), Japan (Woman in the Dunes), France (Lady Chatterley’s Lover), Sweden (Wild Strawberries). Movie parables mind-altered my Methodist values on life and death, female and male, good and evil, Heaven and Hell. Apostates warred against cowardice, avarice, ignorance: High Noon, On the Waterfront, Inherit the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird. As a consequence, I’ve adhered to the Gospel According to St. Cinema for, oh, the last sixty years.