JOAN BLONDELL: THE FIZZ ON THE SODA—The Evening Class Interview With Matthew Kennedy, Part Two

Part One of my conversation with film historian Matthew Kennedy can be found here.

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Guillén: In the upcoming Pacific Film Archive retrospective Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda, they've included Edmund Goulding's film Nightmare Alley (1947), which I've never seen. In your chapter on the making of that film in your biography of Goulding [Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory: Hollywood's Genius Bad Boy, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004], you emphasized his facility with actors and how he elicited incredible performances out of both his female and his male actors. Can you talk about Nightmare Alley?

Kennedy: I love Nightmare Alley. It's such an odd movie. As I write about it in the book, it's a movie that should never have been made. Its excellence is something of a happy accident, because of the odd and seemingly incongruous elements that came together to make that movie. It came from a really tawdry novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham and it's about a carny, a guy who works at these rundown Midwestern carnivals. The lesser end of the carnival hierarchy involves people who are known as circus "geeks." A geek then doesn't mean what it does today. Back then it involved biting the heads off live chickens basically as a carnival act, a "geek show." This is the kind of degradation we're talking about in these different performances. This book becomes a fascinating look at the absolute underbelly and low end aspects of show business and fame and putting yourself out there in a dark and fatalistic way.

So I read the book and I was thinking, "There's nobody in 1947 that would touch this. It's positively radioactive, given what the Code would say and what it would impose on the content of the film, if they were to try to turn it into that." But, of course, somebody did decide to do that and it was none other than George Jessel, who had produced some very accessible and light and entertaining film musicals. He went to Darryl Zanuck with the novel and said, "I want to turn this into a movie." Zanuck took one look at the book and said, "This is pure filth and it's not going to happen." But somehow Jessel was able to convince him and—even further, as a miracle of persuasion—he was able to convince Zanuck to allow Tyrone Power to star in it. Tyrone Power was, at the time, Fox's number one matinee idol and was doing swashbucklers and great romances in full exploitation of his fantastic good looks. Now he's going to play a carnival heel who is degraded to the status of a geek?! The meetings where Zanuck was persuaded to do that must have been amazing.

Guillén: Wasn't Power hungry for the challenge?

Kennedy: Yes. That was probably a major factor. Power said, "Look. You're giving me the same stuff over and over again. I want to be challenged as an actor." He was very keen on doing it. I'm wondering if Jessel and Power didn't do a one-two attack on Zanuck until Zanuck's resolve was surrendered?

Guillén: I'm always intrigued by actors who get caught up in what I call the Liza-Minnelli-imitating-Dustin-Hoffman school of acting. After Dustin Hoffman did Ratso, every "serious" actor (Minnelli?) wanted to put a scar on their face and do something gutter theatrical. But there is a value in allowing an actor to escape their own good looks to test their chops. In Jungian parlance I guess it would be called enantiodromia. You go so far in one direction—you're a box office matinee idol forever—that you have to break through that image to its less attractive opposite.

Kennedy: You have to break out or you will die of boredom or a broken heart from sheer redundancy.

Guillén: Let's talk about Joan Blondell. Tell me about her performance in Nightmare Alley.

Kennedy: Blondell is one of three females who come in and out of Tyrone Power's life. She's dominant in the first part of the movie as someone who's working in the carnival with him but her husband is a late-stage alcoholic. Power uses the still-attractive Blondell to extract the secret code of how to do this act within the carnival that appears to be mind reading; but, in fact it's not. It's a code. It's how these two people interact with one another so that they can convince the audience that they are, in fact, practicing telepathy.

Guillén: How interesting. Many years ago I was fooling around with Teller of Penn and Teller fame, back before they headed out to New York to seek their fortune. I met him just when they were finishing up their act "Asparagus Valley Cultural Society" at San Francisco's Phoenix Theatre. He did a trick in the act—the Indian pin trick—where he would swallow 100 needles and then pull them out all threaded on a string. I begged him to tell me how he did it but he insisted he couldn't reveal his secrets. I know both of them were very influenced by the carnival circuit and I grew up with a lot of that as well. We were poor and lived on the outskirts of town where the traveling carnivals would pitch their geek and freak tents. I loved them! I remember a man who was half crocodile and a woman who was half horse, all done with mirrors, complete sham, but thoroughly intoxicating to a young child. I actually pulled a real sword out of sword swallower's mouth! I'll never forget the fearful thrill of that!

Kennedy: You would love Nightmare Alley! This is your milieu. You can't miss Nightmare Alley. You have to see it, if you're telling me this.

Guillén: As with Dressler, was there a movie of Blondell's that caught your imagination and enthused you to write a biography about her?

Kennedy: A couple of things brought me to Blondell. Actually, the idea to do this book in particular came to me through her son. I was interviewed about Goulding for a documentary on old Hollywood. I hadn't yet finished the Goulding book but the producer of the documentary was Norman Powell, who was Joan Blondell's son by—technically, biologically, by George Barnes, the great cinematographer—but, he's the adopted son of Dick Powell, who was Joan Blondell's second husband; George Barnes being her first.

We were talking about Goulding all day long for this documentary and at the end of the day—after having much fun taping—Norman said, "Well, maybe you should do a book on my mother?" I knew that his mother was Joan Blondell and when an offer like that drops in your lap—her son suggesting it—well, my biographer brain started to churn, thinking, "Access to wonderful letters. Family stories. Family friends. Photos. This is great. I'll have more opportunity for greater intimacy in writing Blondell's story than I had for Dressler or Goulding; neither of them had kids and there are few people alive who remember them."

I contacted Norman about a year later—I hadn't yet finished the Goulding book—but I said, "Were you serious about my writing a biography of your mom? Because I would really like to do that." I had admired her for a very long time. How I came to her personally is because I am of a certain age that—when I was in junior high—what was on television but Here Come the Brides. It was a short-lived series—only on for two seasons—but, many people in my age range fondly remember that show.

Guillén: It triggered every matrimonial dream you ever had, eh?

Kennedy: [Laughter.] Exactly. They came and went pretty quickly, those dreams. Bobby Sherman was in that show and he was a big bubblegum star. I was attracted to this salty, older character actress, this larger-than-life saloon keeper in the series and—once again—my mother said, "Oh, that's Joan Blondell and she was a regular, really hardworking, reliable, terrific actress at Warner Brothers in the '30s." Again, subliminally or without any great conscious effort my mother educated me on yet another actress. So that's how I first became aware of Joan Blondell and then, of course, later I filled in the gaps with her earlier career.

Guillén: I vaguely remember that television show but probably more for Sherman than Blondell. Admittedly, I'm not that familiar with the body of Blondell's work. I guess I dismissed her for being a supporting actress who tended to play "good" girls.

Kennedy: That's another reason to see Nightmare Alley.

Guillén: She's not a good girl in Nightmare Alley?

Kennedy: Not so good in Nightmare Alley. Also, what amazed me when I actually studied her career is that she wasn't always a supporting actress. She had a leading lady status for 15 years; but, the films were generally B-list films at Warner Brothers, and then even later when she left Warner Brothers and was freelancing at Columbia and MGM and so forth. Even then she was given star billing. It wasn't until after WWII that she became a supporting player.

Guillén: Many of those B-list films have ended up holding up better than their A-list counterparts, having more allure as the years go by, popping up in revival screenings at repertory houses and festivals. Why do you think that is? What's changed in our culture to make these films that were once considered minor more interesting?

Kennedy: I wonder if it's because they feel like they're closer to the real thing? For example, Warner Brothers was great at making movies that were literally pulled from the headlines. In fact, one explanation I was given for that is because they were cheaper. Warner Brothers was very budget-minded as a studio and it cost a lot less to get a story off the headlines as opposed to hiring a writer to draft an adaptation of a novel. Part of the pleasure I get in watching B-list Warner Brothers gangster movies, or Depression-era prohibition dramas of the early '30s, is because I feel I am in touch with the morality of the time, the aesthetics of the time, what was entertaining, what passed for good or at least passable film acting. I get a feeling these movies were probably made in six days and—in some cases—that's true. It's the immediacy of those films, maybe, their unpretentiousness, that makes them attractive today.

Guillén: Interesting. And now the same cheap budget rationale is why we have so many so-called reality TV dramas. No one needs to write a script. Just throw a bunch of ghost hunters in a haunted house one week after the next and call it entertainment. Entertainment has been ratcheted down year after year to approximate a "reality" audiences can relate to. When we look at these B-features of the '30s and '40s, they seem much more accomplished by comparison. As gritty and realistic as they purported to be, they're still somehow romanticized.

Kennedy: That's why black and white is so effective and why I love black and white. That era in particular, the '30s and '40s, had some of the greatest black and white cinematographers. In those film noirs and detective stories there is a realism but—at the same time—an escapism, precisely because there's an absence of color. A lot of female film stars of that era have said they preferred black and white because they looked better. The flaws weren't so obvious. The lighting could be less realistic. But there's a full range of black and white, isn't there? From the gauzy lens to the harsh full-focus sharpness that can actually be pretty unflattering in film noir. But there's always a level of escapism that's not always there with color. Color is what most of us see every day. Even with black and white films that are attempting to be highly realistic, you can always pull yourself out of it ever so slightly by saying, "Oh yeah, it's black and white. It's a movie." I don't see that choice as a fault or a shortcoming. In fact, it's a reminder of the magic of movies.

Guillén: I agree. There's a remove. In terms of the lineup for the Blondell retrospective, did you choose these movies? How did they get chosen?

Kennedy: The programming was ultimately PFA's decision; but, I worked with Charles Silver at MOMA in putting together last December's 13-film retrospective. My suggestions offered something from each part of her career as a good cross-section of comedies and dramas so that—you want to know about Joan Blondell?—see these movies and you'll get a good glimpse from the beginning to the end of her career. Because of availability, PFA is showing nearly every film that was shown at MOMA. So, indirectly, I was part of the programming.

Guillén: You'll be introducing the first two nights of the series: Blonde Crazy (1931) and Night Nurse (1931) on Friday, June 13 and then Footlight Parade (1933) on Sunday, June 15. Perhaps I could ask you to briefly synopsize the films in the series you will not be introducing?

Kennedy: Three On A Match (1932)—if you want gritty pre-Code, they don't come any grittier than Three On A Match. It's part of volume two of TCM's Forbidden Hollywood series and it involves three women who were friends in grade school and then it catches up with them several years later and the different paths their lives have taken. One in particular—played by the shamefully neglected Ann Dvorak—burns a hole through the screen. The three women are Dvorak, Blondell and Bette Davis and, interestingly, of the three the one who makes the least impression is Bette Davis. Her role is quite underwritten. What's also interesting about Three On A Match is that it's only 63 minutes long and it covers something like 15 years. It is the most tight, economical, without-feeling-rushed movie you will ever see. It's a text book lesson in filmmaking efficiency and storytelling; it's absolutely amazing that way.

The King and the Chorus Girl (1937) is a delightful comedy that's been compared to Lubitsch and—as Juliet Clark writes in the PFA notes—it was supposed that Blondell would have probably been great in Lubitsch movies and Blondell herself said her performance in The King and the Chorus Girl was one of her very best, maybe her best, and her favorite. It's not a typical comedy. Basically, she—as the chorus girl—helps this king come down off of his pompous high horse. She's not impressed with his station in life.

Guillén: She's a "so what?" girl?

Kennedy: She's a "so what?" girl, exactly. "You don't impress me." A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945), of course, is Elia Kazan's first movie based on the great Betty Smith novel about tenement life at turn-of-the-century Brooklyn and the coming of age of a young impressionable girl who is showing talent as a writer; it's Betty Smith's story. Joan Blondell was fond of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and she has a meaty role that was, again, one of her very best. In fact, people I've talked to have consistently wondered why she wasn't nominated for an Oscar for the wonderful, full-bodied character that she plays. The answer is: I don't know. I do know that her character—because she had led a promiscuous life and been married many times—really had to be sanitized by the Code, which probably cut into the effectiveness that her character could have had. But she certainly makes everything of it that she can as an actress.

Juliet Clark's notes are truly superb and I don't know how much more I can add to them. There's Always A Woman (1938) was one of the first movies Blondell made after she left Warner Brothers. It was one of a handful of movies she made in partnership with Melvyn Douglas at Columbia. There's Always A Woman shows off Blondell's comic skills very well. You can see that they're roughly trying to imitate A Thin Man with Douglas and Blondell mimicking the roles of Nick and Nora Charles, sophisticates out to solve murders who also have a clear erotic attraction to each other; the forensics-as-sexy trope.

Three Girls About Town (1941) is another Columbia comedy. This is one of those B-list movies that—when I first saw it—I was so enchanted. I was laughing outloud. It's so fast and witty and has great characters and great set-ups. Basically, Blondell's the hostess at a convention—which is, of course, a euphemism perhaps—and she and her sisters, they're named Hope, Faith and Charity, they're working in this particular hotel where a convention's going on. Somebody dies at this convention but the body keeps popping up. It somewhat presages Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry; but, it's much more overtly comic in terms of how they deal with the body. There's one scene that's become somewhat famous where the dead person is playing poker. How they managed to convey this idea is pretty darn funny.

Lizzie (1957) is one of the supporting performances Blondell gave in the '50s after her film career went into hibernation (due to her damaging marriage to Mike Todd). The overwhelming evidence suggests Todd was abusive and, as a result, Blondell was not on the screen for several years. When she came back, she was older, had gained weight, and could no longer command the leading roles. She had transitioned into being a character actress. Film work was not that forthcoming; but, she did land a job in Lizzie. She plays the aunt of a woman with split personalities, specifically Eleanor Parker. Lizzie came out the same year that The Three Faces of Eve came out. There were other films as well dealing with psychiatry and schizophrenia. Lizzie got much less air time and notoriety than The Three Faces of Eve and when you see it, it's clear it was a movie with a shoestring budget. Blondell's character of the aunt is instrumental in why and how Lizzie is the way she is. There are flashbacks that explain how she came to be mentally damaged and, again, Blondell's character figures into that. She plays a very unsympathetic person and does so magnificently.

Opening Night (1978) is provocative. It's a movie I absolutely love; but, I recognize that—because it's John Cassavetes—there are a lot of people who don't care for his movies and find them long and boring.

Guillén: The span of Blondell's career is amazingly represented in this series.

Kennedy: This is why these movies work so well as a set. Not only are you spanning a huge amount of time—the first movie of the series is 1931; the last one is 1978—but her first movie was made one year before Blonde Crazy and her last movie was made one year after Opening Night so this series pretty much covers the entire span of her career. The idea that she started as a contract player at Warner Brothers and finished in a semi-improvisational independent Cassavetes movie is a testament to Blondell's endurance and versatility. Opening Night's a fantastic movie exploring age and regret, being a woman and making art.

Guillén: With the knowledge of the body of Blondell's work—which you clearly possess—can you name one film that is not in this series that you would want people to see?

Kennedy: That's a tough question.

Guillén: It can only be one. [Laughter.]

Kennedy: That's dirty pool! My absolute first reaction is Gold Diggers of 1933 because of the finale "Remember My Forgotten Man"—which is not only the most famous production number or scene of Blondell's career—but, is also an emblematic moment of the Depression. However, the answer I'm going to give is a movie that's much less known and was actually part of the MOMA series. I was sorry it wasn't included at PFA. It's a Warner Brothers movie called Blondie Johnson (1933). It's one of the few times where Warner Brothers said to Blondell, "You are in no uncertain terms the name above the title and you're not co-starring with a man, not supporting somebody, it's a movie about you." She's in every scene. It's a fantastic, low-budget gangster movie where Blondell plays the gangster. She's not the gangster's moll; she's the gangster.

Guillén: Is Blondie Johnson available on DVD?

Kennedy: It's not, unfortunately.

Guillén: I'm quite respectful of how you managed to get two films into that answer.

Kennedy: I did sneak two films in there, didn't I? [Laughter.]

Guillén: Finally, are you a fan of any contemporary films?

Kennedy: Some. I have to say that I don't concentrate on contemporary film as much as I do on older film. I have a friend who teases me that my idea of a new film is anything that came out after 1950 and he's not far off the mark on that!

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Once again I heartily recommend Matthew Kennedy's conversation with Andre Soares at Alternative Film Guide for additional information on Blondell.

JOAN BLONDELL: THE FIZZ ON THE SODA—The Evening Class Interview With Matthew Kennedy, Part One

Matthew Kennedy is a writer, film historian, and anthropologist living in San Francisco. He is the author of three biographies of classic Hollywood: Marie Dressler: A Biography (McFarland, 1999, paperback 2006), Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory: Hollywood's Genius Bad Boy (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), and Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, 2007). He has also contributed to three anthologies: Strategies in Teaching Anthropology (Pearson Prentice Hall, first and fourth editions, 2000 and 2006) and The Queer Encyclopedia of Film and Television (Cleis, 2005). He is film critic for the respected Bright Lights Film Journal, and his articles have appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Performing Arts, and the San Francisco Chronicle. A former modern dancer, arts administrator, and concert producer, he teaches anthropology at the City College of San Francisco and film history at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has been a guest speaker at a number of venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco, and on radio, podcasts, and television. Recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship and a San Francisco Cable Car Media/Journalism Award, he is a member of The Authors Guild and the The Authors League of America. He is represented by Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists in New York.

In his capacity as author of the biography of Joan Blondell and in conjunction with the upcoming Pacific Film Archive ("PFA") retrospective Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda running June 13-29, 2008, I invited Matthew over for flapjacks and spent a most enjoyable morning getting to know him. Our conversation is divided into two parts. The first focuses on his volumes on Marie Dressler and Edmund Goulding and the second focuses on Joan Blondell and the PFA series.

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Michael Guillén: Matthew, how did you become involved in writing film history?

Matthew Kennedy: Well, I can't say I went to school to study film because that wouldn't be true; but, I always loved film as a kid. My Mom loved film and she was a great fan of '30s movies and whatnot, so—if something showed up on TV—I would watch it with her and she would explain, "Now, that's Humphrey Bogart. He was this person and he married that person." Through osmosis—by my Mom being a fan—I became one. I never thought about writing about film until much later. I majored in theater at UCLA and the film department was literally right next door but, for some reason, I never took any classes there or acquainted myself with film.

Guillén: I've long felt someone should write a film essay praising the influence of mothers on young cinephiles. The same thing happened with me: midday matinee TV movies with Mom training me to identify actors. Actors were the first group of people I associated with movies—long before I was won over to the directorial auteurship of filmmaking—precisely because Mother was interested in actors. I suppose that at that time movies were pure escapism for housewives and this body of experience was like a syllabus a mother could hand down to her children.

Kennedy: So well said, Michael. Your observation about mothers and their cinephilic children rings true. My mother was like your mother in at least one way—she talked more about the stars than the specific films. She was a teenager in the '30s; she grew up in the studio era. My grandmother would not let her see "bad" or "naughty" Kay Francis, but she could see Irene Dunne because she was "a lady." My mother laughed in retrospect about her brief crush on Nelson Eddy, but made no apologies for adoring Leslie Howard. I realize now that these personal stories formed the basis of my own exploration into classic films.

On Marie Dressler

Guillén: My understanding is that your film writing kickstarted by watching Marie Dressler as Carlotta Vance in George Cukor's Dinner At Eight (1933), prompting your McFarland biography of her. What was it about her particular performance in that film that motivated you?

Kennedy: It was Dinner At Eight's non-stop wit. I first saw it at the Crest Theatre in Sacramento. I love Marie Dressler and I love that time. I loved the depiction of the Depression as it was happening. The fashions. The argot. The wit of the script. The fantastic priority that films gave back then to great characters; Dressler being one of the all-time greatest.

Guillén: Without any official training, what did that feel like for you to write a book?

Kennedy: It was thrilling actually. To see a book take shape. I don't know if this will sound strange; but, writing is an act of self-realization. It's an act of realizing, "I'm somebody that can write a book." I suppose I put a lot of import into that before I actually did it. I invested this huge amount of meaning into anyone who could actually author a book and now I was one of those people!

Guillén: That's lovely. I, too, believe in dreaming in detail. I find it interesting and honest that you qualify your statement by calling it "strange" because I think most people don't know how to manifest or actualize or self-realize. It's learning how to do that as a writer that is uniquely satisfying.

Kennedy: It was thrilling beyond words and, ironically, it was all about words. Not only was it the idea that I could write a book, but that I enjoyed it so much. The act of research, combing through archives and finding this one-of-a-kind stuff that exists in a special collection in Philadelphia or in Cleveland or in New York—which was the route I took with the Dressler book—was, for me, as fun and exciting and revealing as the writing itself. As soon as this archival material presented itself, the writer in me said, "I cannot wait to put this on the page! I can't wait to render these discrete pieces of information into something coherent." I just love doing that!

Guillén: Your passion clearly comes across in your books. Their thoroughness is nearly sensual. They're meticulously researched; but, the research is offered up in accessible language. Which leads me to ask about your research methodology: as someone who hadn't studied film and who really hadn't written before, how did you know to go about it?

Kennedy: Well, I wish I could say it was carefully thought out; but, that wouldn't be the case. [Laughs.] Again, I hope this doesn't come off as dull in terms of what one actually does; but, with all of them, I start out with basic research sources. I go to film encyclopedias. I start with a capsule biography of Marie Dressler that's half a page long, which lists her credits. The Dressler book was done before I was using the Internet. There was no IMdb that I could use at that time 10-12 years ago. I would start with a skeleton: "What are the easy dates that I can plug in that are high points or low points in this person's life that form a skeleton of chronology?" Because I start with the idea that I'm going to be writing—structurally—a standard cradle-to-grave biography where the toeholds are dates. This is the date that movie was made. This is the date she divorced so-and-so. This is the date she died. This is the date he first went off to war. I mean, any number of things. Then I overlay those with actual moments in history within their lifetime that impacted their life and might also be of interest to the reader.

In the case of all three that I've written about so far—Marie Dressler, Edmund Goulding, Joan Blondell—they all saw the Depression. So 1929 always figures into, "Okay, what was going on with this person and how did they cope with that social reversal?"

Guillén: What is it about the "social reversal" of the Depression that captivates you?

Kennedy: I wonder! It does seem to be a place I keep coming back to. I'm fascinated by the change in social habits. The onset of the Code, certainly, as a representation of film audiences being more and more vocal, perhaps, about film content; that films had to get "cleaner" while America plunged into a Depression could not have been a coincidence. How stars were made and broken by their studios. That genres were being defined and refined—musicals, westerns, mysteries, romantic comedies, documentaries were all actually young once. That some of those movies, those stars, have burned into our collective consciousness, while others have not. And, again, it may have something to do with imagining my parents growing up. All of that simply fascinates me.

Once the skeleton is set, then I start watching the movies. I had a great deal of fun creating my own film festival around finding as many of the movies of these people that I could, some of which are quite rare. From there I search for anybody alive who I might be able to interview. I had mixed success there. I sent out a lot of letters and a lot of them didn't get answered; but, occasionally, someone would say, "I'd love to talk about so-and-so. Please call me." From there it turns into, "Oh, you should also talk to so-and-so…." or "Have you been to this library? I think she left some of her stuff there." A lot of it is just word of mouth where you're simply following leads. That's where the disorganization comes in. For example, with the Dressler book, I did not know that writing that book would take me to Philadelphia. I had no idea at the onset that I'd be going to Washington, D.C.

Guillén: They house archives of her papers?

Kennedy: Dressler had a long career in vaudeville, and there are theater collections in Cleveland and Philadelphia that were invaluable. Philadelphia also has a collection of early Mack Sennett material related to Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) and some of her very early silent films in different collections. It's so much fun because that stuff only exists in one place and in one form so you have to travel. It's not accessible online. It's not reproduced in any books. That's when you really feel you're striking the research mother lode.

Guillén: It's not difficult to access these archives?

Kennedy: No, it isn't actually because they're in various public and private institutions that are available for researchers. It's great fun. So you're dealing with different dates and you're trying to write so that the narrative reads as seamless and complete. Let's see, which metaphors work here? Skeleton and flesh, bricks and mortar? Then it goes through multiple edits, shuffling, whittling. Then it enters the world, and you hope that someone besides your family and friends is reading it. And I am always very happy to see one of my books in someone else's bibliography.

Guillén: It's the weave.

Kennedy: Exactly! It's the weave. It's the connections. It's the building of a literature and a body of knowledge.

On Edmund Goulding

Guillén: Speaking of a body of knowledge, one thing I admire about film historians is when they use biography to embody film history. From Dressler you turned your attention to Edmund Goulding and wrote Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory: Hollywood's Genius Bad Boy. How did that book happen? Dinner At Eight captured your imagination about Dressler? What provided the aesthetic arrest with Goulding?

Kennedy: I like that term "aesthetic arrest"! I finished the Dressler book and I didn't know what I was going to do next. I don't feel that I'm a very good idea person. I wish I had all these great plans for books but it's kind of a struggle. I was speaking to a friend of mine who is also a film historian and I said, "I don't know what to do next. Do you have any ideas?" and he said, "Edmund Goulding." I said, "I know he's a director. I've seen his name." He said, "Just do a little bit of research. I think you'll find him very interesting."

Guillén: Edmund Goulding is beyond interesting.

Kennedy: Indeed! That was an understatement, wasn't it? Even the very fleeting information I found about him in the beginning indicated that he got into some trouble with the studio bosses that had to do with his private life.

Guillén: That caught your attention right away.

Kennedy: [Laughter.] It certainly did; I'll tell you! When I first saw his complete career resume, I was very impressed. Many of the films I recognized but hadn't attached his name to. "He did that one! And that one! Oh my God, those are wonderful movies!" It got more and more interesting, in part because his career easily divides into threes. He had time at MGM. He had time at Warner Brothers. He had time at Fox. In that order. Each phase offers an inside-out approach to understanding the mechanics of those studios and the bosses that he was dealing with—Mayer, Warner and Zanuck—and why he burned his bridges at all three of them eventually. But why also he was such a gifted filmmaker that they kept giving him projects to do, even though he was problematic. One could say that his private life was nobody's business; but, he did get in trouble with the law over certain careless behavior and some very ugly behavior I think around—not exactly sexual assault—but certainly … what would you call it?

Guillén: A lapse in judgment?

Kennedy: A lapse in judgment! Thank you. A lapse in judgment. And he had some serious drinking problems and he was probably doing other drugs as well. None of that's going to sit well in an era of '30s and '40s Hollywood in terms of—should he be found out—he's going to be in big trouble. But he was fascinating.

Guillén: A contemporary parallel might be the career of Robert Downey, Jr. where an artist can be in the thrall of dark vices but the darkness—if surmounted or worked through—becomes a fulcrum for a creative expression that is uniquely your own, precisely for what you've gone through. I'm less judgmental of the dark side in people and am—to a certain extent—appreciative of the value of such dark phases.

What fascinated me when I was reading your book on Goulding was precisely how important and influential he was in Hollywood. Like yourself, I was surprised to discover he had directed Grand Hotel, Dark Victory, Of Human Bondage, etc., etc., but I was also amazed to discover his role in introducing sound technologies to Hollywood movies and in helping silent stars like Gloria Swanson shift into the talkies. I didn't know he had been instrumental in launching the careers of Joan Crawford and David Niven or that he had trysted with a young Tahlulah Bankhead or concealed an on-set crush for Gary Cooper. His contributions are so major that it baffles me that he is relatively unknown. Were it not for your book….

Kennedy: Part of the problem was that he became something of a pariah because of his private life, which occasionally leaked to the press and caused a lot of problems and complaints and so forth. That resulted in people giving him the cold shoulder in his lifetime, but then there's been very little attention paid to him since then. He just sort of fell into obscurity.

Guillén: He'd be a great subject for a movie.

Kennedy: I think so too!

Guillén: Who do you think could play him?

Kennedy: Maybe Robert Downey, Jr.? What's interesting about Goulding too is that his private life seems so at odds with the content and the styles of his films. His films are very lush and romantic. They're about affairs of the heart.

Guillén: And surprisingly moral!

Kennedy: Great moral lessons about love, sacrifice, and honesty. We Are Not Alone is nearly a primer on how to live a life that insures some degree of suffering, but remains noble and true.

Guillén: Who else would know better about these issues than someone who was struggling with them?

Kennedy: But there isn't a direct relationship. It's not like you can see one of his films and go, "Aha! That relates to this event in his life." He was much more subtle than that. And, of course, he'd been given these different projects by the studio heads and so how much of his personal life he could interject, or would want to, is questionable anyway.

Guillén: Also, moviemaking at that time—as we were mentioning earlier with regard to how our mothers used movies to form our moral character—movies were in the service of nation building at that time; they were in the service of establishing our nation's moral character and any film director at the time in tune with the zeitgeist would know what was required; they would know which icons to use to trigger the feelings to deliver the message requisite for filmmaking at that time.

Kennedy: That is definitely the case with Goulding. Especially the women that he directed. He directed Davis and Crawford and Garbo and others so shrewdly and with such keen insight on exactly what you're talking about that their images on the screen turned into and could be cultivated into iconographic, indelible fantasies.

Guillén: He knew how to elicit or manufacture their individual styles of radiance.

Kennedy: Absolutely.

Guillén: When I was reading your book, especially in your descriptions of his interaction with Garbo, I could see her cold glow so clearly. With the studio system's star making apparatus of that time, radiance was everything. The glow of the star was everything. A filmmaker had to know how to do this with these women to make them larger than life and Goulding certainly did. It's something I find largely absent in filmmaking today. There's a tendency in contemporary film to bring everybody down to street level and to make actors egalitarian with their audiences.

Kennedy: Or less attention paid on that kind of fantasy. There are other fantasies going on today with computer generated imagery for over-the-top emotions; but, not the transporting fantasy that you get with black and white, a soft lens, beautiful lighting, where it really does appear—especially, let's say, in Garbo's movies—as if she's lit from within. It's not a reflection of light that's coming at her; it's coming out of her almost.

* * *

I strongly recommend Matthew Kennedy's conversations with Andre Soares at Alternative Film Guide, a fantastic blog full of profiles and interviews, including further discussions on both Marie Dressler and Edmund Goulding.

Continue to Part Two of this conversation.

HOLEHEAD08—Tokyo Gore Police Added As Closing Night Film!

IndieFest's 5th Annual Another Hole in the Head Film Festival is well under way for the next two weeks. I've already written up Machine Girl, Exte: Hair Extensions, and Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer; over at the SF Bay Guardian, Cheryl Eddy's wiped the regurgitated fly goop off herself after watching Circulation and Homeworld; and Dennis Harvey—having been chased by zombies around the block and back—remains nonplussed and offers a wry travel guide at SF360.

And because Holehead08 just can't have too many cool Japanese flicks at the festival, they've added a new Closing Night Film: the West Coast Premiere of Yoshihiro Nishimura's Tokyo Gore Police, screening Sunday, June 22, 2008, 8:00PM at the Brava Theater.

Yoshihiro Nishimura, who has crafted the FX for Holehead08's Machine Girl and Exte: Hair Extensions, tests his directorial chop-chops with Tokyo Gore Police, which Todd Brown at Twitch announced earlier this year, following up with a gallery of behind-the-scenes photos, trailers one and two, and the announcement of its East Coast premiere at New York's 2008 Asian Film Festival.

I like Grady Hendrix's subdued reaction: "Tokyo Gore Police is what happens to Machine Girl when it's been put in the hyper-evolvo chamber for a thousand years, blasted with atomic radiation, rubbed with mysterious balms from the land of Gadzooks! and has crystal meth pumping through its veins instead of blood. Think Starship Troopers meets Peter Jackson's Dead Alive with Shinya Tsukamoto and David Cronenberg's mutant dwarf freak baby standing on its back and howling."

No topping that!

Cross-published on Twitch.

DEAD CHANNELS—White Hot & Warped Wednesdays!

With all the talk going on over at Girish Shambu's site about whether or not horror films are good for you and what constitutes good revulsion over bad (to quote theologian Martin Buber: "You seek to compare?"), I thought now would be as good as any to announce Dead Channels 2008 two-month summer film series White Hot & Warped Wednesdays, venued at the Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th Street, San Francisco.

White Hot & Warped Wednesdays begins with a jolt on Wednesday, June 18, 2008. Plug yourself in to Sean Abley's electrifying Socket, screening at both 7:00PM and 9:15PM. Though tickets are available at the door, seating is limited so advance tickets are highly recommended.

Socket is presented with the kind co-operation of TLA Releasing and is a tip of the hat to San Francisco's June Pride. Producer Doug Prinzivalli will be on hand to introduce the film and participate in post-screening Q&As. Evening Class readers might recall that I interviewed Socket's director Sean Abley a while back. Kudos to Dead Channels for giving San Francisco a chance to look at Socket; especially since—in a serious lapse of judgment—Frameline32 rejected it. (They chose Jaymes Thompson's The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror instead, which—though co-produced by Abley, who likewise plays a cameo in the film—is a bland, inferior vehicle.) Socket's got much more charge. Incidentally, my screener got handed around to so many therapists working with substance abuse—who praised its responsible depiction of the downward spiral of both substance and sex addiction—that I feared never getting it back!

Dead Channels has declared Wednesday, July 2, 2008 as International Zombie Night by hosting the Bay Area premiere of Omar Ali Khan's Zibahkhana (Hell's Ground), the gory, global film festival favorite from Pakistan. Brace yourself for a night of action packed mayhem, villainy, and chucky Fulci-esque exotica in this unique hybrid. Twitch—of course—has been all over this for years. Todd reported on it in early August 2006 and then followed through in April 2007 when the film began to get good buzz on the festival circuit. Michael Wells dispatched to Twitch from the 2007 New York Asian Film Festival, offering his reaction to Hell's Ground and a report on the Q&A with director Khan. Kurt Halfyard caught Hell's Ground at last year's Fantasia Film Festival and wrote that "something that should feel old-hat is born again surprisingly fresh." Omar Ali Khan gives Hell's Ground a "rich and welcome exoticism to world audiences while giving teens from Karachi a film to call their own."

Here's the Hell's Ground trailer and Dreadmedia's video review.





But wait, there's more! On July 16, 2008, Tommy Wiseau's The Room is coming to San Francisco fresh from its four-year engagement in Los Angeles. The management and staff of Dead Channels guarantee that this screening will be one of the strangest viewing experiences you will ever have! Amazingly, Twitch hasn't had its eye on this one but its cult cachet—as graphed out by Wikipedia—certainly makes it sound worthwhile viewing. Reportedly, "it's so bad it's actually painfully funny to watch."

"But we believe that it's not actually 'bad'," Bruce Fletcher qualifies, "at least in a negative way. Rather, The Room is an unforgettable work of hypnotic brilliance. It's what might happen if the late Stanley Kubrick had set out to make the last-word on 'BadFilm'. Wiseau's amazing movie is so inherently wrong on so many levels that viewing it unleashes an undeniable subliminal power—and might actually be an astounding work of cinematic art. We're not kidding, you'll be pondering, laughing about (and quoting) The Room for weeks."

Mahalo Daily interviews Wiseau. Nihar Patel does the honors for NPR. Elina Shatkin for LAist. With his usual comic flair, Matt Singer does a good job of situating The Room's L.A. context at Termite Art. "The Room is a beautiful lesson in how to make the worst movie imaginable," writes Nick Knittel for Speakeasy. "Take terrible actors, give them a cringe-worthy script, and throw in an idea of filmmaking that must have been lifted from a Wishbone episode, and you get something that approaches the instant-schlock classic of this movie." Jonathan Kiefer dubs Wiseau "the Orson Welles of crap", explaining, "Sometimes the cream rises to the top. Other times, crap floats." Okaaaaaay. I guess this is one I'm just going to have to see for myself. Thanks, Bruce???



The Evening Class will be sure to let you know when the last two titles in the White Hot & Warped Wednesdays film series are announced.

Cross-published on Twitch.

SOULSMITH: PHIL COUSINEAU—Myths to Live By: A Tribute to Joseph Campbell

I collect filing cabinets like other people collect DVDs or stamps. They stand in my library like sentinels sternly protecting my past and—opening their drawers—my past appears deceptively organized in rows of folders overstuffed, often overflowing, with paper. Long before I adopted the ease of electronic storage, I collected paper. As is usually the case with the tao of synchronicity, the other morning I was looking for something unrelated and came across my transcript of notes I'd taken at the 1989 commemoratory symposium Myths To Live By: A Tribute to Joseph Campbell, sponsored by U.C. Berkeley Extension and coordinated by Lynne Kaufman. I had completely forgotten about these notes, including that Phil Cousineau had shown outtakes from The Hero's Journey. How coincidental that I should find them now just as I'm commencing my overview of Phil's work! To accompany my previous entry on Phil, I offer these notes, transferred from the filing cabinet in which they have quietly hidden for nearly 20 years to my most recent—and perhaps favorite—filing cabinet: The Evening Class.

* * *

Lynne Kaufman's brochure notes state: "Joseph Campbell was fond of quoting Carl Jung's statement that the most important question we can ask ourselves is what myth we are living. This Saturday symposium brings together a diverse group of people—writers, poets, dancers, filmmakers, all close friends and colleagues of Joseph Campbell—to explore that question of their lives and work, and to foster participants' own self-exploration. Through lecture, performance, film, and discussion, speakers and participants examine the central myths that give meaning and structure to our lives and that help us, in Joseph Campbell's words, to become 'transparent to the transcendent.' "

Arriving early by taxi to the Scottish Rites Temple, the symposium's venue, I was amazed to already see a line forming at 7:45 A.M. As one of the first into the lecture hall, I was able to claim my favorite seat up front on the aisle. I spotted Phil Cousineau but left him alone since the program notes indicated he would be first to speak and I could see he was earnestly setting up the equipment to project his outtakes of The Hero's Journey.

Glancing over the program notes, I meditated on Campbell's assertion: "Myths come from where the heart is and where the experience is . . . Myth is a metaphor that points beyond the image to a mystery."

Introducing the day's event, Lynne Kaufman admitted to being overcome with emotion. The combination of speakers, the full house, the energy of the crowd, all felt "right" to her. Campbell's widow, Jean Erdmann Campbell, had just arrived that morning from Hawaii and had given Lynne a fragrant lei to wear; its perfume wafting all around her.

Lynne's association with Joseph Campbell began in the late 60's at the Esalen Institute where she heard him speak on the Arthurian legends and the quest for the Holy Grail. She was struck (as so many have been, including myself) with that part in the story where the Knights of the Round Table decide to quest for the Holy Grail and further decide that it would be disgraceful for them to enter the forest as a group and that they were each to enter at a place where it was darkest for them and where there was no trail. This inspired Lynne to take off on her own individual creativity, to become the playwright she had long dreamed of being, and to work with Campbell on seminars and symposiums over the ensuing 20 years. She recalled these programs covering a wide range of topics, including a birthday party at the Palace of Fine Arts when he turned 80 (which I was blessed to attend). Campbell wrote her after that birthday celebration to tell her that the image of it would stay with him through Purgatory until he passed the pearly gates. Lynne's audience laughed. How appropriate that Campbell would not send himself directly to Heaven without undergoing some initiation first. Lynne, along with Barbara McClintock, was one of Campbell's surrogate daughters in the Bay Area and he dedicated his book, The Inner Reaches Of Outer Space, to both of them.

Lynne then introduced Phil Cousineau who arrived on stage dressed in gangster fashion—dark blue shirt, red tie, black jacket, grey slacks. Phil started out his talk with a quote from Tennessee Williams: "Snatching the eternal out of the fleeting is the greatest trick." If that is the greatest trick, Phil offered, then Joseph Campbell was the greatest trickster.

His association with Campbell, like Lynne's, began at the Esalen Institute at roughly the same time. He was working 80 hours a week as a house painter and struggling to write in the evenings. It was Campbell's now-infamous advice to "follow your own bliss" that affected Phil deeply and turned his life around. Campbell's truism encouraged Phil to plunge into freelancing activities, which led him towards filmmaking, writing and, eventually, to co-producing The Hero's Journey. During the filming, Phil became good friends with Campbell and—as I've noted elsewhere—Phil takes great pride in profiling Campbell as a life-loving human individual; a man who could discourse deeply, intellectually, on the great themes of existence and then turn around and enjoy a glass of Glenlevit among friends.

Phil felt Campbell’s biography should have been entitled Metaphorphasis because of Campbell's great love for metaphor and metamorphasis. Having recently read Phil's manuscript Deadlines, and his gift for word play, I enjoyed this excellent titular suggestion. Phil relayed Jean Erdmann Campbell's description of Campbell's habit of pacing the floor, searching for the right word, the right turn of phrase, the word which (if captured) succeeded in sending a frisson shiver up the spine. This diligence made Campbell an eloquent writer.

Admitting to an "embarrassment of riches" when it came to the 15 hours of film and 52 hours of videotape gathered during the process of interviewing Campbell for The Hero's Journey, Cousineau detailed the enormous task of condensing this footage into a one-hour documentary. The outtakes he chose to screen for the symposium addressed Campbell's sources of inspiration and his working methodology, including how computers changed his life. Phil, in fact, was present the day Campbell sat down to work on a new computer for the first time. He remembered it clearly. He was in San Diego working on the documentary when a friend of Stuart Brown's, co-producer of the documentary, phoned to say he had just gotten a new computer and wanted them to rush over to look at it. This friend advised Campbell that—if he used word processing software—it would change his life. Campbell made it clear he was too old to have his life changed and was quite content with the way it was; however, he agreed to take a look at the machine. After watching Stuart's friend fiddle around with it for a while, Campbell slapped his forehead and painfully admitted, "You don't know what you're doing to me!"

Although Campbell did eventually purchase a computer, he never regretted nor denied the importance of all the years he had spent reading and reviewing by handwritten notes what he had read. He qualified that though computers are a wellspring of information, it's not only information that is involved in research and studying; it is the experience of information that is important; how the information affects your life; how you choose to assimilate and use the information. Computers cannot give you this. They're valuable for access of information. When it comes to footnotes and knowing the exact pages where quotes have been taken, then a computer is an indispensible tool, but, in and of itself, computers have little to do with how you experience information.

Campbell named his computer Parsifal after the main hero of the Grail legend. He likened the power of the computer to that of genies in the bottle. They can be either helpful and/or troublesome. Up until the purchase of his computer, Campbell always used a pencil. He considered the costly investment in a computer to be an incredible substitute for the pencil.

As for his working methods, during the years of the depression when Campbell was unemployed, he created a discipline for himself of researching in four daily four-hour slots. He would read and research for three hours out of each slot and allow himself personal time for the fourth hour. He found that reading and working consistently in this fashion for five years straight provided him the base of knowledge from which all of his subsequent studies diverged. This reminded me of when I first met Joseph Campbell and earnestly begged him to tell me how I could become just like him when I grew up. He laughed and said, "So you want to be like me when you grow up, eh?" Yes, I assured him, I do. Then you will have to read, he said, you will have to read constantly.

When Campbell was hired to teach at Sarah Lawrence College, he found that the opportunity to be in an all-women's college promoted his belief that the proper approach towards mythic material was not historical—when and where things had been written (as was promoted by the academics of his time)—but personal, how these myths were relevant to our lives. His female students made it clear that this is what interested them and what they wanted to learn. He credits his Sarah Lawrence students for helping him to break free of academic conventions to this more direct approach.

Then began for Campbell what he called "a real season of writing" with "very, very exciting, wonderful, wonderful material." The writing projects were prolonged interwoven projects, which covered a span of several years.

Campbell recalled: "So I get a phone call from my friend he says, 'Joe, Simon & Schuster is interested in a book on mythology and if you get up on your high horse and knock them down, he says, I'll never talk to you again.' So we arrange for a publisher's luncheon and, yes, we'd like a book on mythology. Well, what kind of book do you want? A sort of modern Bullfinch. Well, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. He said what would you like to do? I said I'd like to write a book on how to read a myth. Some self-help book? Yeah. Okay. Write out a presentation and we'll talk about it.

"So I went home. Jean was on tour at the time. I spent one night just typing up a presentation of an idea for a book. And brought it up and—oh my God—I got a marvelous contract: $250 on signing, $250 when the book's half-finished, $250 on turning it in. So I worked for four or five years. It was The Hero With A Thousand Faces. What it is, is my first lecture to my students at Sarah Lawrence College."

Simon & Schuster rejected the book, as did a subsequent publisher, but, when Campbell offered the manuscript to Bollingen, they called it a "honey" and were happy to publish it.

At the same time the Indologist, Heinrich Zimmer, had left Europe during the Hitler years because of his opposition to the regime. He moved to the United States but was unable to land a teaching position since few departments dealt with Eastern material. Eventually, he was given a small room at Columbia to conduct his lectures, which Campbell attended. He recalled that at Zimmer's first lecture there were only four people in attendance: himself, the librarian who had arranged for the room, a woman with overwhelming perfume, and a nondescript fourth person. Zimmer made it clear to Campbell how pleased he was to see him there and—even though he was only teaching to four people, Campbell said—Zimmer acted as if he were teaching to a full auditorium. Tragically, Zimmer died a few years later from an improperly-diagnosed case of pneumonia. Zimmer's widow then approached Campbell to edit his Columbia lectures, which Campbell agreed to do.

Also at the same time, Campbell was asked to write the introduction and commentary to Maud Oakes and Jeff King's study of Navajo sandpainting, Where The Two Came To Their Father: A Navajo War Ceremonial. During this period of opportunity, Campbell discovered as he hopped from one writing project to another: "Whether it was Finnegan's Wake or the Navajo material, or the Hindu material or Heinrich Zimmer's . . . it was all the same material. . . .[T]his was when I realized—and nobody can tell me anything differently—that there's one mythology in the world, and it has inflected in the various cultures in terms of their historical and social circumstances and needs, and particular local ethic systems . . . but it's one mythology."

I appreciated so much hearing Campbell discuss his working methods. Phil accented the image of Campbell's role as scholar by relaying how Alan Watts once asked Joseph Campbell what his meditation was. Joseph replied, "I underline sentences."

Phil further described Campbell as an animateur, an individual who is able to animate dense intellectual material. Phil is convinced Campbell would have preferred this term to "popularizer." For myself, it was Campbell's artistry as an animateur that inspired me to work with the Maya material in such a way as to bring it to a wider public.

After the National Arts Club banquet where Campbell was awarded the Medal of Honor for his publication The Way Of The Animal Powers, Cousineau conversed with Richard Adams. Over Glenlevit, Adams admitted to Phil that the one thing he couldn't understand is that Shakespeare had never read Joseph Campbell!

Phil stressed that in the last decade of Campbell's life many people began to admit his influence upon their work. George Lucas claimed much of the Star Wars trilogy stemmed from his reading of The Hero With A Thousand Faces and David Byrne of the Talking Heads attributed influence to Campbell, as did the Grateful Dead. Phil was with Campbell when he was invited to attend his first Grateful Dead concert. Campbell described it as a modern example of a Dionysian frenzy and, inversely, a backstage Deadhead described Campbell as the "Jerry Garcia of mythology" because of his ability to play with mythological themes like Garcia played guitar riffs. Campbell had never heard of the word "riff" before, liked it, and said he would use it in his future work.

I was grateful for Phil's presentation, not only because these previously-unseen clips of Campbell made it seem that Campbell was physically present in the room with us again, but because Phil's own commentary and remembrances accentuated Joseph Campbell's humanity; Joseph Campbell the man. That Phil had been launched into his own career by the inspiration of Campbell's work matched not only my own sojourn but that of many others, making us all part of a comraderie influenced by this incredible individual.

Phil wrapped up his presentation with an anecdote he once related to Campbell about an experience he had ono a cross-country motorcycle trip. He stopped into a little town in New Mexico called Tombstone and hiked up to Tombstone's Boothill Cemetery where he found a gravestone with this inscription: "Be what you is and not what you ain't; otherwise, you ain't what you is." Campbell laughed when Cousineau shared this experience with him and agreed that, yes, that's exactly right.

If anyone has taken Campbell's advice of following a path with heart, following personal bliss, it has been Phil Cousineau. I am so honored to have befriended him.

During the first break I congratulated Phil on his fine talk. He grasped my hand firmly, grinned, "You made it!" (knowing the difficulty I was having getting a ticket) and I admitted that, yeah, I was a lucky so-and-so. During a later conversation in the day, Phil advised he has found someone to finance the first printing of Deadlines, which he had tightened up even more since the manuscript he loaned me; but, Deadlines seemed like an echo to him now since he has been working feverishly and had recently completed the companion book to the Campbell documentary. I look forward to finally seeing Phil's books in print!

* * *

All these years later, that final sentence makes me smile wistfully to myself. Were we really so young once? Has Phil really written 23 books since then? Am I really like the narrator in William Goyen's House of Breath who said that looking at himself now and looking at himself then, he felt like he was two people divided by a huge chasm, each wondering who the other could possibly be?

IN ROTATION—Long Pauses

With its frequent forays into music, politics, literature and the visual arts—along with its keen attention to cinema—Darren Hughes' Long Pauses requires a broad sensibility. In his most recent entry, Darren interviews Lee Isaac Chung—the director of Munyurangabo—for Sojourners magazine.

Munyurangabo was—hands down—one of my favorite films at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, where I likewise sat down to talk with Chung and his collaborator Samuel Anderson. I'm really glad Darren liked the film as much as I did and—as I recently mentioned to Rob Davis at his Errata website—it's always enlightening to see how colleagues approach interview subjects alternately. With much more of a Christian focus, Darren highlights the passage from Isaiah 51:19-20 that serves as Munyurangabo's epigraph: "These double calamities have come upon you; Who can comfort you? Ruin and destruction, famine and sword; Who can console you? Your sons have fainted. They lie at the head of every street, like antelope caught in a net. They are filled with the wrath of the Lord and the rebuke of your God." This passage had been quoted to Chung by a Christian survivor of the Rwandan genocide.

Responding to Darren's query of whether Munyurangabo is an Old Testament film or a New Testament film, Chung referenced Angelus Novus, Paul Klee's 1920 water color, which—while it was in his possession—Walter Benjamin interpreted as "a usable metaphor for history" in Thesis IX of his Theses on the Philosophy of History: "A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one perceives the angel of history. His face is towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

Benjamin's applied interpretation of Klee's Angelus Novus has proven effective. Picking up Chung's cue, Darren skillfully wove Angelus Novus—admittedly more Benjamin than Klee—into his piece on Munyurangabo, much like Lines Magazine used it as a lens to focus on Sri Lanka. At the University of Chicago's Critical Inquiry, O. K. Werckmeister considers the "continuous ideological debate about the political validation of intellectual culture among nonpoliticians" and decides that Benjamin's interpretation of Angelus Novus has become a "composite literary icon for left-wing intellectuals with uncertain political aspirations." I find all of this quite fascinating and am thankful that Darren has steered me to these concerns.

Darren has had two other articles published by Sojourners; both equally fine reads. Earlier this year, he critiqued Ron Austin's In a New Light: Spirituality and the Media Arts. Back in 2005, in a piece entitled "Fallen Creatures In a Fallen World"—how Augustinian a title can you get?—Darren profiled the films of John Cassavetes, whose work Darren sees as "a powerful corrective to Hollywood's superficiality."

New Flags Interviews Max Goldberg

"[T]here are critics who I read whose erudition boggles my mind, if I’m reading Jonathan Rosenbaum or the really great Australian critic Adrian Martin, I feel like they’re doing a totally different thing than I am. I feel like I’m the hack saxophone player watching John Coltrane play."--Max Goldberg.

Ashraf Rijal interviews his ol' college mate at his site New Flags, where--wonder of wonders--I discover Max used to play in a college band Stop Plate Tectonics.

KINO21—The Evening Class Interview With Konrad Steiner (Pt. 2)

Kino21 completes its exploration of the experimental films of Warren Sonbert—curated by Konrad Steiner and Johnny Ray Huston—tomorrow evening, Thursday, June 5 at Artists Television Access, 8:00PM, $6. Here at The Evening Class, we continue our conversation with Kino21 co-curator Konrad Steiner. The first installment can be found here.

* * *

Michael Guillén: In Max Goldberg's SF360 write-up on Kino21, he laid out where the name came from and the organization's mission statement. That piece went up in late August of last year around the time you were screening Nathaniel Dorsky's films at SF Camerawork. What's been going on with the organization since then?

Konrad Steiner: We've pretty much stayed the course from what the intention was as we stated it in that context, which was to keep the experimental also a little bit politicized and to recognize that our turf, our purview, is engaged filmmaking rather than formalist filmmaking. Formalist work can be wonderful, enlightening and blow your mind; but, we're at a period in the culture in this country where it's a little hard to countenance that. There's a sense of responsibility that's saying, "What kind of work is being done to try to engage people's consciousness of the world rather than just consciousness of their perceptions?"

Guillén: Just so I'm clear, when you say "formalist", what exactly do you mean?

Steiner: I mean experimental; hardcore avant-garde experiments in form. That's great stuff, and other people might be interested in showing that, but—within that realm—there are people who are trying to experiment with both form as it's applied to subject. My co-curator Irina Leimbacher is particularly interested in experimental documentary. We pursue that to some extent. We had a show with Ken Jacobs' film Perfect Film and Craig Baldwin's film RocketKitKongoKit; both of which are highly charged politically. One was about the assassination of Malcolm X and the other about the takeover of the Congo by a German rocket company.

Guillén: You've also screened some of Chris Marker's work?

Steiner: Yes, last Spring we screened Grin Without A Cat, which is basically about the history of the Left. But the next show was a Bruce Baillie film that was an extremely personal, made in the early '70s but with a '60s-style lush visual documentary about going through death and birth.

Guillén: As someone who's long been involved in the experimental film scene and who's had a chance to gauge audience reception, are you feeling that audiences are wanting more of a political engagement in experimental film? Are they getting tired of—as you say—formalist exercises?

Steiner: There are audiences for that. There are plenty of niche markets for all of those things. I have to say, it's a hard sell in the sense that you can't really try to pitch an experimental documentary because people's entertainment dollar is coveted by the many venues around the city, or just staying home and renting a DVD. So it has to somehow be topical or—in the case of Marker—someone who has a reputation and people haven't seen this film because it's rare. Then they'll come out. But the genre in itself doesn't get anybody excited.

Guillén: Within the context of alternate exhibition itself being a kind of art form, is there an aesthetic that is formed out of the archival value of films when you group them together? Does that generate a more resonant gestalt? In other words, if you saw these films individually, would they resonate as much as if you were presenting them contextually within a body of work?

Steiner: There's a hierarchy of structures, right? There's the Show, where you put things together that might inflect each others' reading. For example, we did this show called "Regime Change", which our nation is involved in—right?—in a few countries right now and has been involved in forever, trying to change the political map of the world. The idea was to get films that were dealing with that topic within the realm of the impression from below, rather than the political analysis from above. We tried to pick films that were current. The Marker film was older; but, it gave a sense of historical lineage of this kind of work. What happens to people when the government falls? There is a way that you can make a show that traces the lineage of an awareness through audiovisual work—not through didacticism or through voiceover telling you what to think about an image—but, through image work and sound work itself. So there's that kind of thing.

But then there's also the idea of the calendar at a higher level of structure: what shows are on in your whole calendar? Within a show there are the group of films that you pick for a show, but then also across shows; what is the arc that you're showing? What is the spectrum of the work? That's why we showed a Baillie film right after we showed a Marker film right after we showed an Yvonne Rainer film, which is sort of a triangulation of three wildly different aesthetics. It's the idea that filmmakers use documentary as a personal medium, rather than as a conventional documentary style medium, like P.O.V. or Frontline or any number of other continuing series of documentary styles. If you take it and say, "I'm going to do this my way", you get an incredible variety of vantage points on political events and personal events and how those interlink. The value is in the variety.

Guillén: A word I use in my inconography studies a lot—and which you frequently use—is "polyvalent." Polyvalence is essential in understanding anything singular and it strikes me that your programming is purposely polyvalent.

Steiner: Yes, and another word I would apply to this discussion is "pluralistic." By having a layer of show after show after show, we don't have a "party line" particularly. We recognize that these points of view are all valid. We're in this mix of having to reconcile them. How do they all co-exist? How does Bruce Baillie make a film that is almost like a drug trip? And we vouch for that? And then Chris Marker does an overview of how the Left has failed over and over again in the 20th Century and we vouch for that as well. We love both of those. There is a pluralist spirit in that.

Guillén: Though I unfortunately missed it, I was also intrigued by your program of Lebanese experimental shorts. Why did Kino21 feel compelled to showcase experimental shorts from another geographic region altogether?

Steiner: I would defer to Irina on that since she programmed that show. But I can say a few things about it that interest me. Laura Marks brought a series of films from Lebanon and it was interesting to think of the term "experimental" and wonder if that was an export, or whether it's an indigenous expression? If something is experimental, do we know what that means in another culture? That's the interest in showing experimental work from another culture. It isn't necessarily the same thing. Here "experimental" might mean doing something fancy with the montage; but it's couched within an avant-garde tradition, a local tradition to that community. With all the talk about globalization and everything, it gets lost that there are still local lineages of work. Something that we might understand as conventional, we might be misunderstanding.

It's also how it's framed. If we say, "These are Lebanese films" then your expectation might be, "Oh, I'm expecting to see some straightforward explanation of what's up in Lebanon"; but then, they're not. They're about questioning what the image is to people. One of the films investigated photographs via two aspects. One aspect was of digital video images of current situations in Lebanon but one of the other aspects was of photographs of the Bedouin that were taken a century ago. What was interesting about this film to me was the introduction of a technology into a culture. The Bedouins had no idea of what a photograph was and they were being photographed in a documentary way. These images were totally set up by the people who were taking them but what did they say about the people they were taking pictures of? The interaction of a technology and a culture is parallel to the interaction of a history of filmmaking within a culture and what a gesture means in that culture.

Guillén: Are their forums or festivals for international experimental filmmaking?

Steiner: There are a lot of festivals. There's no lack of that. But people speak different languages and people have seen different things. When I use the word "lineage", I mean the lineage of what have you seen? What are you familiar with? What is informing your work? And it isn't necessarily just verbal knowledge.

Guillén: Kino21 was also involved in the Heinz Emigholz series at Pacific Film Archives, no?

Steiner: I tried to get him to the Bay Area three years ago.

Guillén: Was your interest in bringing Emigholz to the Bay Area because his films border on experimental documentary (even though he discounted that categorization when I interviewed him)?

Steiner: He's not a documentary filmmaker. I wouldn't think of him that way. My interest in Emigholz was that I had never seen anyone do what he was doing. He had guts, that's the easiest way I can put it. He's very courageous to make films that do not offer you what you came in to expect. They're billed as films about architecture but—after you watch them—you say, "I didn't learn anything, in a conventional Wikipedia-type way!" But you are enraptured.

You've only seen his architecture films but Emigholz has a lot of other kinds of work, which I've seen. I wanted to do a whole retrospective but we didn't have the money, it would have been too expensive, so it ended up that he was "packaged" on this tour as films about photography and architecture.

Guillén: I believe interest had gelled around Schindler's Houses. I can understand why he was touring on the architectural ticket.

Steiner: No, it makes sense. In terms of trying to get as many of the films here as possible, talking with Kathy Geritz at PFA and Adam Hyman in LA, we realized that Emigholz's range of work was too broad for a short series. To say, "Here's an important visual artist. He works in many media. He's a scriptwriter, a graphic artist, a filmmaker, an illustrator..."—it wasn't something we could do in four shows, and hope that people would get it. We had to focus it. I would really have wanted to do more of his narrative features and his incredibly animated graphic films—that was my interest—but, you do what you can.