Two masters, building with precious time

There are collaborations and there are collaborations. In the movies, as in the theatre, collaboration is usually something that occurs over a handful of hectic weeks, often between artists who just met. The result can be brilliant or banal, but it must be arrived at under duress. Time is money, and those who can’t become galvanized by pressure enter into a life in the movies or the theatre at their peril. That stage director André Gregory and playwright-actor Wallace Shawn have been able to collaborate on projects over much longer periods—most recently a period of 15 years!—is evidence of an uncommon devotion to the vagaries of long-term creative exchange. Okay, that and, most likely, some degree of privilege. But this privilege has not been squandered. On the contrary, their collaborations have resulted in some legendary theatrical experiences and three singular, spellbinding, rule-breaking works of cinema, all of which have been collected in André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films, Criterion’s inspired new multi-disc collection. Taken as a whole, these films not only chronicle the cinematic manifestations of Gregory and Shawn’s more than 40-year relationship; they also function as a testament to the still-untapped potential for the movies and the theatre to inform each other in aesthetic, formal and thematic terms and, perhaps most importantly, in their processes.

My Dinner With André (1981) has been around and been beloved for an awful long time now—can we all finally agree that a talky movie is not an inherently inferior thing? That listening can also provide cinematic rapture? I can’t think of a better rainy afternoon movie. Nor can I imagine many of Richard Linklater’s finest and most innovative films (Slacker, Waking Life, the Before… series) being made without this precedent. Directed by Louis Malle and written by Gregory and Shawn, who play “André Gregory” and “Wallace Shawn” respectively, Dinner unfolds almost entirely around a single table, occupied by two men and occasionally loomed over by a blinking waiter with an amusing resemblance to Samuel Beckett. Dinner is about dialogue, and thus a study in contrasts: between the opening shot of an oil barrel on an abandoned, dingy street and the refined restaurant where our characters meet, eat and converse; between the easy elegance of Gregory, speaking in mellifluous tones of strange experiences in exotic locales in search of transcendence, and the squat, chinless Shawn, dressed all in beige, mostly listening and posing questions as a way of managing his unease—until he finally reveals his mixture of fascination and contempt for what could be deemed as Gregory’s misguided mysticism, spurred by an apparent nervous breakdown.

Gregory tells of going to the Sahara with a Japanese monk; undertaking deeply ambiguous theatrical exercises with Jerzy Grotowski; tracking uncanny coincidences in old copies of Minotaur; the ostensibly fascist overtones of The Little Prince. Gregory compares a few too many things to Nazis and the Holocaust and over the course of this often very funny but also very serious film. He comes off as both a fool and a wise man. He seems above all to want to be present in the world, and the feeling of being present, of heightened senses, is exactly what Dinner offers. Every time I watch it at home I think I’m going to hit pause at some point, to watch it in parts—and every time I lose track of time and take it all in in a single uninterrupted viewing.

Where the source material for Dinner was its creators’ relationship and personal experiences, the next two films look to works from two of the 19^th century’s most canonical playwrights. Vanya on 42^nd Street (1994), also directed by Malle, transplants Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya to a crumbling Manhattan theatre long out of use, where Gregory and a group of actors—Shawn, Julianne Moore, Larry Pine, and others—invite us to a sort of open rehearsal for a project that they have been exploring, with no particular plan for production, for the preceding five years. The actors use only a handful of props and dress in their own clothes. Their transition from talking about their lives to performing the text—in an adaptation credited to David Mamet—is so seamless you might not notice they’ve started until they begin to call each other by names different from their own. These roles have been lived in. We are transported. “A hundred years from now, will they remember us with a kind word?” one characters asks. This film was made almost exactly 100 years after Chekhov wrote Uncle Vanya, and his characters, all of them stuck in the countryside, in marriages or longings or business agreements they find deeply dissatisfying, are simultaneously so specific and so universal. The camerawork is subtle, beautiful and fluid, a marriage of theatrical intimacy with cinematic intimacy, documentary immediacy with exquisite artifice.

A Master Builder (2014) is Shawn’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s strange, difficult, alluring Master Builder Solness, devleoped by Gregory and the cast over a decade and a half and finally translated to the screen by Jonathan Demme. (Malle died in 1995.) Shawn plays Solness, an aging, ferocious architect who, in Gregory and Shawn’s interpretation, is on his deathbed, visited by what we suppose is an apparition of a young woman (Lisa Joyce) who by turns seems worshipful and oddly threatening, a mischievous angel. She recounts for him an occasion ten years previous on which he erected a church in her town, climbed its spire, kissed her 12-year-old lips, and promised her that one day he would build castles in the sky for them to inhabit. Whether out of guilt, self-disgust, dementia or the story’s falseness, Solness has forgotten all of this, but then remembers it, or participates in the fantasy, as she tells it back to him. Meanwhile Solness denies a talented young assistant the praise he so deserves and requires so as to forward his own career. Solness placates his unhappy wife (Julie Haggarty), who seems to both resent his neglect and dread his demise. Employing tight close-ups, ostentatious zooms and sudden impressionistic cutaways to views from a moving car, Demme’s approach, though working with Vanya’s ace cinematographer Declan Quinn, is entirely different from those taken by Malle in the preceding films, yet it is extremely effective for this project, taut and tense, riveting even, despite the play’s endless ambiguities and lengthy conversations. Demme has described A Master Builder as a haunted house story, and this is ultimately how it feels, a medley of phantoms, palpable objects and places, and carnal experience.

Criterion’s supplements are especially superlative—and too numerous to list here. Most are interviews outlining the extremely interesting development processes that I’ve only mentioned here. But I think my favourite is a conversation between Gregory, Shawn and Fran Lebowitz, touching on topics such as the truth and myth of “playing yourself,” the importance of small theatre, how the past is never really past, and working on something long enough to explore every cliché and then throw it away.

           

Modern love in the shadow of the city

The final film in what would retroactively be considered a sort of loose trilogy—three inimitable modernist films about modern eros, modern cities, modern business, and modern ennui—L’eclisse (1962), for all its wandering ways, does indeed infuse the air with some sense of conclusion. The story of a young translator who slips out of one love story and into another, it was Michelangelo Antonioni’s last film in black and white and it pushed his proposition regarding landscape, architecture and objects as narrative tools on par with actors to dizzying heights: the dominance of a lampshade, a column, an unfinished building or an immense cloud in a given frame needs to be regarded as content, not décor. (Is L’eclisse, so light on plot, boring? Only if you have no interest whatsoever in looking at things.)  L’avventura (1960) famously shaped itself around a mystery never resolved, but L’eclisse, in its exquisite final sequence, in which Antonioni leads us on a tour of places already visited the story’s lovers—places now punctured with their absence—actually leaps ahead of the action to imply an inevitable ending. The lovers are last seen together swearing to see each other again later that night, the next day, the day after, and so on, but Antonioni’s ingenious closing montage uses landscape, architecture, objects and our memory of them to acknowledge that this love story will soon draw to a close that need not be dramatized here.

We meet Vittoria (Monica Vitta, one of Antonioni’s chief collaborators during this time) on the morning that she breaks it off with her fiancé (Francisco Rabal). Whatever tempests accompanied their negotiations dwindled into weary resignation by the time we catch up with them. That exhausted morning gives way to a frenetic afternoon in which Vittoria visits the Roman stock exchange to find her mother and meet the handsome, energetic young stockbroker (Alain Delon) her mother employs—a future lover to eclipse the past one. Romances perish, fortunes are lost and a stolen car becomes a watery death trap over the course of L’eclisse, but where such drama would normally occupy the foreground of a conventional drama, Antonioni places no special emphasis on them. Instead he’s interested in studying Vittoria as she drifts through the world, and in her largely happenstance way studies that world. No one explores and marvels over urban topography like Antonioni, and Vitti was his most captivating surrogate. In a film fraught with unease, Vittoria can frequently be found discovering peculiar sources of wonder: the staggered percussive musique concrete of flagpoles swaying in a wee-hour breeze or a day’s journey by small plane to Verona (the setting of the most famous story of star-crossed love in history). Vitti is angular and fascinatingly gorgeous, but more importantly she conveys a stubborn, almost naïve wakefulness in these films that are always in danger of feeling merely defeated. Her gaze is ever-curious, her slender hands always curling around things, if never quite grasping them firmly. Is Antonioni directing her or she him? The Antonioni-Vitti collaboration is among the most important in cinema history.

Criterion’s new DVD/BD release of L’eclisse comes out this week. The transfer looks immaculate and the best supplements include an audio commentary from film scholar Richard Peña, a video essay and interview with Italian film critic Adriano Aprà and Antonioni’s friend Carlo di Carlo, and a written essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

            

A very particular collaboration

Here are some of the films Ingmar Bergman made with Liv Ullman: Persona (1966), Shame (1968), Hour of the Wolf (1968), The Passion of Anna (1969), Cries and Whispers (1972), Scenes From a Marriage (1973), Autumn Sonata (1978), Saraband (2003). If you know just one or two of the films on this list—to which I should add Faithless (2000), the excellent film Ullman directed from Bergman’s script—you probably know that we’re surveying one of the great collaborations in cinema history. Great not only because Bergman was a visionary director and Ullman an actress of singular gifts, but because each of those films were elevated and deepened by their creative dialogue. Actors were far more essential to Bergman’s cinema that is the case with most of the great auteurs, and Ullman was so much more than a muse.

Begrman and Ullman were married for a time, and had a child—another collaboration—and theirs is a fascinating, at times chilling love story. He was over 20 years her senior, a notoriously difficult, neurotic, particular man already on his fourth wife—whom he’d leave for Ullman, just as Ullman would leave her first husband for him. He bought a house for them on Fårö, the island where they shot Persona and many subsequent films, and surrounded it with a high stone fence. He wanted to keep her there and she needed to spread her wings, which in time she did, embarking on an international career with few filmic highlights that didn’t possess his signature, but with numerous successes in the theatre. They remained close friends and creative allies until his death in 2007. Their relationship deserves serious investigation. It deserves so much more than the narrow, sentimental gloss it gets in Dheeraj Akolkar’s Liv & Ingmar.

The film’s chapters are given titles like ‘Love,’ ‘Loneliness’ and ‘Pain.’ The music feels best suited to a soap opera or a commercial for long distance rates. There are shots of tastefully arranged photos and letters which Ullman’s hand gently glides across, and shots of Ullman gazing solemnly from a beach or an empty stage, or through the window of a car. In short, this documentary, about people who made some of the most austere and emotionally brutal films ever made, is super-cheesy. More importantly, it seems largely devoid of curiosity. Ullman is the only interview subject. Akolkar apparently spoke to no one else, not even Bibi Andersson, Ullman’s frequent co-star, and another of Bergman’s actress-lovers. There are no archival interviews with Bergman or cinematographer Sven Nykvist, his other great collaborator. There’s almost nothing about the nature of Bergman and Ullman’s working life—which surely can’t be separated from their love story—how it was negotiated, given their intimacy, how characters and stories were developed, and so on. It’s hardly the case that Ullman isn’t articulate on these subjects—though only a fraction of the duration of Liv & Ingmar, the interview Ullman gives on Criterion’s new Persona DVD/BD (see previous post) brims with insight into their process.

There is a moment near the film’s end in which Ullman describes following an impulse to go visit Bergman on the last day of his life. The scene is almost unbearably moving, but what makes it so moving—the phenomena of having someone whose life is so utterly intertwined with yours—only emphasizes all that this film lacks.    

                   

"The final collaboration is between the finished film and its audience": Jennifer Baichwal and Ed Burtynsky on Watermark

Xiaolangdi Dam #1, Yellow River, 

Henan Province, China 2011. ©Edward Burtynsky

We fade-in on what I can only describe as hurtling meteors of water, deep earth-brown, white and opal, thunderous, not cascading but raging with such primal force as though giving birth to a planet. Then cut to tiles of cracked earth, the very absence of moisture, and an old woman whose face and voice seem to echo the desert floor. She speaks of a time when there was a river and fish in this place, before the government took the water away, rerouting it and leaving perpetual drought behind. This is the stuff of Chinatown, corruption, neglect, the commandeering of resources, though what I can’t get out of my head after seeing the opening scenes of Watermark is a Talking Heads song, their most popular: Water dissolving and water removing/ There is water at the bottom of the ocean/ Remove the water, carry the water…

Rice Terraces #2, Western Yunnan Province, 

China 2012. ©Edward Burtynsky

Water is this film’s fathomless subject. It’s more than a lazy metaphor to call the experience of seeing and hearing Watermark immersive. Co-directed by prolific filmmaker Jennifer Bacihwal and renown photographer Edward Burtynsky—whose work was the subject of Baichwal’s widely lauded Manufactured Landscapes—the film picks you up and sweeps you away, to 1,700-year-old Yunnan rice paddies; to kids performing cartwheels on Huntington Beach; to 30-million pilgrims bathing their sins away in the Ganges; to the Ogallala Aquifer and its land art for the viewing pleasure of gods and pilots; to the to a Bangladeshi tannery’s toxic runoff, which leads to a river where women bathe; to a subterranean industrial vampire city in China; to a boat stranded in the middle of a vast desert. The cinematography, courtesy of Baichwal’s producer, husband and regular shooter Nick de Pencier, alternates between stunning and exquisitely lulling—I could happily drift off to dreamland every night watching and listening to Watermark’s final river-run. But the film is also brimming with urgent stories of what’s happening to the water we depend on for survival.

Kumbh Mela #1, Haridwar, India, 2010. 

©Edward Burtynsky

There’s an interesting tension between the medium Burtynsky typically works in versus that of Baichwal.  Still photography renders water almost as sculpture, a surfaced thing, something frozen in time. Whereas in movies water becomes a force of emotion, drama, movement. (I think immediately of Wild River, or, from last year, Leviathan, The Deep or All is Lost.) Burtynsky, whose 30-year career has surveyed the myriad ways mankind has manipulated the earth and its resources, was already well into his Water book project when he and Baichwal decided to make this film together, which offers fascinating contrasts between still and moving images. Theirs is a collaboration founded on looking at the same subject through complimentary yet distinct lenses. I spoke with Baichwal and Burtynsky in September, on the morning following Watermark’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film has since received a number of honours, including placement in Canada's Top Ten. Just last night, Baichwal and Burtynsky were given the award for Best Canadian Film by the Toronto Film Critics Association at their surprisingly rockin' annual gala. 

Baichwal and Burtynsky

JB: In Manufactured Landscapes Ed was, in a sense, the film’s subject or its inspiration, whereas Watermark credits you two equally as co-directors. How did you two divide the workload?

Jennifer Baichwal: Ed had a head start—he was working on Water for two years before we got together. Once we were making a film we continued to location scout as a team. And once we found our locations we agreed that things had to be rooted. That meant finding people. So on some days Ed might be sorting out that one big money-shot of the dam while Nick and I would follow the workers home for lunch. I felt we needed those daily life details to root the aerial shots or we would have floated away. Sometimes we all worked on the broader pictures together and sometimes we didn’t. It was very organic in that respect. Then in the editing room it became a very day-to-day collaboration between [editor] Roland [Schlimme] and I. Then Ed and Nick would come in for screenings of the various assemblies and we would discuss. In a nutshell, Ed did a lot of the heavy lifting at the beginning and I did it at the end.

JB: I read the piece in The Globe & Mail this morning and it struck me as funny, how it would describe certain moments in Watermark as obviously bearing the Burtynsky signature, while for me those exact same moments feel entirely in keeping with your work, Jennifer. All of which, I suppose, functions as a testament to the harmony of your collaboration.

JBa: I suspect one of the reasons why we came together in the first place is because we have similar perspectives.

Edward Burtynsky: And neither of us has oversized egos. There was no need to enforce a calm discussion as to how we were going to work. It came easily.

JB: I spend time in Mexico City, where water is a valuable commodity and only rich or stupid people can think of it as something that doesn’t need to be rationed. But there’s something about being surrounded by water that makes it hard for many ostensibly ecologically conscious Canadians to reconcile themselves to the fact that it may very soon be scarce. Something I love about the opening of Watermark is the way it offers you these incredible images of deluge and follows them with images of drought. That contrast plants a useful seed in the viewers’ minds, I think.

JBa: From the very beginning we talked about illumination through juxtaposition. On one level those two places depicted in the opening have nothing to do with each other, but on another they’re directly related because it’s all about control of water. The Colorado River Delta is the result of control. These kinds of juxtapositions became our version of narrative.

Colorado River Delta #2, 

Near San Felipe, Baja, Mexico 2011. ©Edward Burtynsky

EB: Abundance versus scarcity, East versus West, pristine versus tainted—meaning can be coaxed out of contrast. In one place water is contaminated and placed in a sewage ditch. In another we have Oscar Dennis talk about how water is integrated into a First Nations view of the cycle of life. And it’s not that we’re wagging a finger at those working in the Bangladeshi leather tannery—they’re making those shoes for us. We’ve just managed to export most of our nastiest industries to the developing world.

JB: When writing about Watermark I find myself avoiding the word documentary. Not because it doesn’t fulfill the requirements of the form in many regards, but because certain viewers equate documentary with activist or didactic films. I keep bumping up against this insistence that everything be clearly spelled out, as though viewers play no critical role.

JBa: We keep bumping up against that too. To be sure, in Watermark there are hard facts that are interesting and pertinent, things you need to know to contextualize what you’re looking at. For example, Owens Lake is the largest source of dust pollution in the U.S. I didn’t know that when we were filming there. That information gives you an important tool—it doesn’t, however, tell you what to think. I don’t know how often I’ve had to make the argument that the documentary form doesn’t need to be defined by journalistic criteria. It’s a question about truth. Just watch the news. I mean, who in their right mind thinks that everything on the news is true?

EB: I think our work falls somewhere on the spectrum between what, say, Al Gore or, in a more exaggerated way, Michael Moore do, which is to barrage you with damning facts, and something like Samsara, which is entirely non-verbal filmmaking in which the visuals carry the freight. I like the idea of a film functioning like a showing of my work, where the viewer has to complete the meaning. The more you bring to furthering your understanding of what’s in the picture, the more you bring to the picture itself. Last night we had dinner with various people who had attended the premiere and I was enjoying listening to the comments. Everyone seems to have a different idea as to what the film is about. Really, the final collaboration is between the finished film and its audience.