Talk on Hollywood Eighties Cinema, 02.10., Cinemateque Luxembourg. Thanks again, Marc Scheffen... and of course, Nikolaus Perneczky, who I hope will find himself in some of the following!
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Good evening and thank you very
much for the invitation.
I’ll beginn with a short
warning: I will not, today, talk about the film you are about to see
afterwards, Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies, but I’ll rather
concentrate on some other films, that will be shown over the next few
months.
But first, some general remarks
about my interest in the 1980s. The project that finally became the
film series “The Real Eighties” at Austrian film museum, and
which has afterwards, in turn, inspired other film series in Zurich,
Berlin, and now, of course, Luxembourg, must have started about four
or five years ago. I don’t remember exactly, what brought up our
idea to revisit - or maybe rather: to really discover for the first
time - the Hollywood cinema of the 1980s. If my memory serves me
right, one of the first revelations was a comedy film produced by
John Hughes, rediscovered by my colleague Nikolaus Perneczky: Some
Kind of Wonderful, a coming of age film and a love story driven by
class consciousness. Suddenly, we found, in the very middle of pop
cinema, a fascinating kernel of social realism. Some Kind of
Wonderful isn’t part of the series playing here… but I think,
that its opening segment nevertheless is a perfect start for this short journey
through some of the decade’s most interesting films.
Mary Stuart Masterson on the
Drums, Eric Stolz on the wrong side of the tracks, walking almost
head-on into a moving train on the way towards a social and erotic
fantasy he will ultimately reject. When seeing this intro and the
film that followed it, we started to realise something that now,
several years and about 500 films from the American Eighties later,
feels like an almost banal truism to us: that the dynamics and
vitality evident in so much Eighties Hollywood Cinema isn’t just
surface glittering, or capital talking to itself; on the contrary, it
is on the one hand deeply connected with the tradition of american
genre cinema - in this case both the romantic comedy and the coming
of age film, and on the other hand, it must be seen as a
working through of the social tensions of the USA in the Reagan era.
Nikolaus Perneczky and I, the two
main curators of the viennese series, are part of a group of Berlin
based curators. With this group, we had previously worked on several film series concerned with political cinema, especially from non-western
countries. But this is not the only reason why the American Eighties
took us by surprise. The main reason may be a generational one. Both
Nikolaus und I were born in the 1980s - but we are not really
“children of the eighties”: we were a few years too young to
really experience firsthand the popular culture - and especially
the cinema - of the decade. When we discovered cinema and
film history in the 1990s (or, in my case, for the most part even
later), Hollywood cinema of the 1980s wasn’t exactly terra
incognita for us; but it never became a prime focus for our
cinephilia: of course, we knew there were some interesting directors
like John Carpenter, Walter Hill, there were Blade Runner and Blue
Velvet; but besides that? We always suspected, that there had to be
more to it than just a huge wasteland of Spielbergian blockbusters...
But it wasn’t really the first place to look for unknown pleasures.
We were always much more fascinated with the films of New Hollywood,
or with the classical Genre cinema, of the 30ies, 40ies and 50ies, or
with the Underground and Independent film movements. And that’s
just american cinema…
Once again: this is not to say,
that the Hollywood Cinema of the Eighties is some kind of unknown
wonderland no one has ever heard of. On the contrary: the problem
might be, that many people think that there has been already
everything said about this decade. The dominant cinephile history,
that many people might still take for granted, goes like this: the
late sixties and early seventies were a period of bliss for american
cinema, were filmmakers enjoyed an unparalleled degree of freedom to
break away from narrative and formal traditions in order to
experiment with more personal ways of filmmaking. Already in the late
seventies and with full force in the Eighties, the Empire stroke
back, with the Hollywood Industry establishing a new paradigm of
blockbuster filmmaking that destroyed or marginalised to the point of
invisibility everything that stood in its way. For some critics, this
development mirrored the social change in the era of the so-called
reagonomics, which replaced the somewhat social-democratic policies
of the New Deal with a stronger emphasis on the free market and
resulted in the destruction of large parts of the public
infrastructure.
While this line of arguing might
not be completely wrong, it is certainly not sufficent when thinking
about film history and its complex relationship with political
history and social change. Here’s neither the time nor the place to
try to esablish a fully fledged defense of American Eighties cinema -
anyways, the best possible defense is the rediscovery of the films
themselves; which is the main aim of the program here at the
Cinemateque that you are invited to follow over the next few months.
Here I want to focus on iconic scenes from three of these upcoming
movies and on some thoughts on the topic of outsiderness.
But first, let me get back once
more to a moment from the opening of Some Kind of Wonderful:
When the train passes Eric Stoltz, there’s a moment when he, and
with him the camera, turns back towards the leaving machine. A short,
almost invisible window of opportunity is opening up: Eric’s
charakter might just jump on the train and leave his rather miserable
existence as a working-class misfit in a snobbish
middle-to-upper-class environment. One might even imagine, that he
would have done just that, if he had lived a few decades earlier:
leave everything behind, go out into the world, start afresh. But
this is no longer possible in the cinema of the 1980s. The cinema of
the 1980s that we discovered while working on this project is a
cinema of outsiders in a world without an outside.
So let’s move on to another
outsider: Kurt Russel as Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s science fiction classic Escape from New York.
[my clip was much longer...]
In this scene, Snake Plissken
flies his plane not out of, but into New York. He has some 21 hours
time to find the president who has been abducted by radicals;
otherwise both he and probably the whole world will cease to exist.
Escape from New York shows, how
uncompromising and bleak commercial cinema could look like in the
early 1980s. The New York Carpenter envisions is an urban wasteland,
populated by outcasts and gangsters, most of them easily recognizable
as perverted remnants of the social movements of earlier decades:
badly aged hippies, paranoid radicals, a Black Power movement that
has turned into a fascist organisation. Carpenter’s New York is
also a prison, walled in but not yet completely controlled by
mainstream society. Utopia has, over the course of a few short years,
turned into nightmare. Plissken embodies the new type of hero this
new world order demands: cynical, self-sufficent, pragmatic. Isolated
and iluminated he descents on this garish city from above, guided by
the electronic imaging techniques which became ubiquitous in the
1980s. Perfectly detached from his environment, Plissken is neither
an angel of death nor an angel of mercy - nothing but a professional
doing his job. Nothing to gain but the possibility to live another
day.
The next scene is from Walter
Hill’s Southern Comfort, a film which is generally thought to be a
metaphor for the Vietnam War, but which is set in the swamps of
Louisiana. The scene takes place near the end of the film, but I
think it doesn’t give anything important away. The two members of the Louisiana
National guard, who arrive at the village at the beginning of the
scene already went through hell, after a routine training mission
turned into a desperate fight for their lives, when they and their
colleges enraged some mysterious locals by steeling their canoos and
killing one of them. Afterwards, these city boys, who wanted nothing
but a weekend away from their stressful and over-complicated everyday
life, were hunted down by enemies, who are nearly invisible - at
first. Out in the swamps, the local cajun seemed almost animalistic,
like creatures from another, uncivilized, earlier time. The upcoming scene represents a fascinating break, turning these earlier
projections and fears on its head: Suddenly, the two survivors are
confronted with a real communit. - filmed by Hill in an almost
ethnografic manner, with an emphasis on social rituals and the
details of material existence.
While Snake Plissken flies into a
decaying metropolis thoroughly destroyed by modernity, the
protagonists of Southern Comfort are being confronted with a vision
of a civil society untouched by the alienation and the loss of social
cohesion that comes with modernity. But at the same time, the scene
isn’t nostalgic at all. The protagonists keep their distance from
their surroundings - with a very good reason: they soon realize, that
they didn’t discover some hidden paradise in which one can retreat
from the menacing outside world. Instead, the whole scene is infused
with a sense of thread, which creeps in very subtle, by way of some
sideway glances and the ever-repeating banjo-music. So, it becomes a
very ambivalent, hard to read scene: on the one hand, it represents
an surprisingly honest and open-minded confrontation with the hidden
other, that lurks not somewhere far away in South-East Asia but is situated
right inside the vast and multi-faced american motherland. On the
other hand, it rejects all idealization of this other, hidden America
and ultimately reaches once again the conclusion: there is no
outside, and their is especially no turning back towards the good old
days.
I’ll finish this presentation
with a clip, that, on first glance, feels completely different, almost like a renewal of the very same social contract, the films of Carpenter and Hill rejected. It is
from Michael Mann’s Thief.
[again, my clip was longer...]
This might look like the end of
the film, but of course, it isn’t. Frank, the professional
safebreaker at the center of the film, has, for one single, fleeting
moment realized his ambition, formulated earlier very clearly: he no
longer wants to be an outsider, a drifter, a loner - in short: he no
longer wants to be someone out of a New Hollywood film. But rather a
respected member of society, complete with house, car, wife and kids.
Even while the camera tilts upwards, towards the horizon, we realise,
that this isn’t going to happen. The realization of the American
Dream, in its freshly updated version of the early 1980s, remains out
of reach for Frank. Not only because of the rules of the genre, the
gangster film, which insists on punishing its heros again and again
for the very same thing, it celebrates them for: the reposession, and
maybe even more important, the destruction of private property. But
also, I think, because of the actor playing Frank.
James Caan, with his
characteristic, but not in any conventional way handsome face and his
massiv, everything but elegant frame, just isn’t a “body of the
eighties”. Not surprisingly, Thief remained his only relevant film
of the decade. The male action stars of the 1980s, from Arnold
Schwarzenegger to Dolph Lundgren, are hyper-masculinist, but in a
rather surreal, comic-book-like way. Caan represents an older concept
of masculinity: less flashy and exuberant, but still connected to
personal, biografical pain and to hard bodily labor. Indeed, in
Thief, criminals are highly specialised professionals - and the
break-in scene especially evokes just those heavy industries, that
shut down more or less completely in the US over the course of the
1970s and 1980s. The strange mismatch between Caan and Frank's proletarian work ethos on the one hand, and the highly stylized
surfaces of Michael Mann’s visual style on the other hand might be
the most important driving force behind the film. In the end, Frank
remains what he was at the beginning: just another outsider in a
world without an outside.
What you’ll see now - Bruce Beresford’s country music melodrama Tender Mercies - might be a pretty steep change of pace after these clips. But I think, it develops, in a much more somber and relaxed way, some very similar ideas about both the impossibility and the necessity of outsiderness, this time before the beautiful backdrop of rural Texas. It features Robert Duvall in one of the great performances of the decade as an aging country singer and recovering alcoholic; another outsider, another body of the Seventies, confronted with the sober truth of the Eighties. It is also my personal favorite in the selection. And with this, I wish you a good projection.
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