As a restoration artist, I am often responsible for the initial assembly of a film. This means putting all the reels together and removing each reel's heads and tails (also known as leader). I always find it interesting to see what’s on the . . .
Wednesday, 30 September 2015
Katniss Flies on Final Poster for 'Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2'
Nothing can prepare you for the end. Bold tagline. Lionsgate has released the flashy final poster artwork for Francis Lawrence's The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, the conclusion and grand finale in the Hunger Games series that started in 2012. This poster features Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, flying with her bow and arrow and glorious red armor, with a flaming mockingjay appearing behind her. I really like the poster just before this, with the blue mockingjay on her shoulder, but this one is the sort of epic grand finale poster they need to end with. It's worth checking out as we count down these last few weeks before release.
Here's the final poster for Francis Lawrence's The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, from @THG:
Watch the full theatrical trailer for THG: Mockingjay - Part 2 here, and view the "For Prim" trailer here.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 is once again directed by Francis Lawrence and written by Peter Craig & Danny Strong. With the nation of Panem in a full scale war, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) confronts President Snow (Donald Sutherland) in the final showdown. Teamed with Gale (Liam Hemsworth), Finnick (Sam Claflin), and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) – Katniss goes off on a mission with the unit from District 13 as they risk their lives to stage an assassination attempt on President Snow who has become increasingly obsessed with destroying her. The mortal traps, enemies, and moral choices that await Katniss will challenge her more than any arena she faced before. Lionsgate will release this finale on November 20th.
6 Filmmaking Tips From Martin Scorsese
In his review of Mean Streets, Roger Ebert claimed that Martin Scorsese had the potential to become the American Fellini in ten years. It probably didn’t really take that long.
Scorsese is a living library of film, but he isn’t a dusty repository of knowledge. He’s a vibrant, imaginative creator who might know more about movies than anyone else on the planet, and that makes him uniquely qualified to be both prolific and proficient.
Over the course of his career, he’s created indelible works bursting with anger, violence, fragility, care, and wonder. Never content to stick with one story mode, he’s run the gamut of styles and substance. So here’s a free bit of film school (for filmmakers and fans alike) from our American Fellini.
Never Stop Looking For Inspiration (Because You’re Gonna Need It)
Scorsese: One night I was watching late-night films on . . . I think it was on Showtime. There was this film called Yeelen [1987]. The picture had just started at 2:30 in the morning, and the image was very captivating, and I watched the whole thing. I discovered that it was directed by Souleymane Cissé and came from Mali. I got so excited. I had seen Ousmane Sembène’s films from Senegal-he was the first to put African cinema on the map, in the ’60s-but I hadn’t seen anything quite like this . . . the poetry of the film. I’ve seen many, many movies over the years, and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films. This was one of them.
Spike Lee: So you’re telling me that Martin Scorsese, the father of cinema, needs inspiration to make more films?
Scorsese: Well, it gets you excited again. Sometimes when you’re heavy into the shooting or editing of a picture, you get to the point where you don’t know if you could ever do it again. Then suddenly you get excited by seeing somebody else’s work. So it’s been almost 20 years now with the Film Foundation. We’ve participated in restoring maybe 475 American films.
That’s from a conversation in “Interview” magazine between Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese where an important distinction is made. It’s easy to see master filmmakers as endless wells of imagination, but stone sharpens stone, and that well needs to be replenished. The key? No matter how natural a storyteller, no matter how much experience, there will always be a need to find that creative spark.
You’re Never Going to Get the Money You Want
“I think there’s only one or two films where I’ve had all the financial support I needed. All the rest, I wish I’d had the money to shoot another ten days.”
This might seem obvious, but there’s also something freeing about knowing deep down that there will be very real limitations on trying to achieve.
The flipside for fans is to keep in mind that most filmmakers (or at least Scorsese) always creates a final product that could have used more time and more money to make just a bit better. Perfection is out of reach, but excellence is not.
Your Personal Story Matters
Scorsese’s movies are reflections of his past and his personality. He draws a lot of script pages – specifically from his time growing up in New York and inside Catholicism – from intimate experiences and curiosity. That doesn’t simply apply to subject matter. It also applies to tone:
“I’m not interested in a realistic look – not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.”
Curiously, in that same interview with Ebert, Scorsese discusses his use of non-realistic elements – including the fabled 48 frames per second used to make De Niro in Taxi Driver look “a monster, a robot, King Kong coming to save Fay Wray…”
Fantastic Fest 2015: Jeremy Saulnier's Brutally Fantastic 'Green Room'
Simple motivations that lead to very complicated situations, driven by generally inept protagonists: that's where up-and-coming writer/director Jeremy Saulnier excels. Whether it's an unassuming Halloween party or the simple revenge of the death of a loved one, his films layer intriguing characters with engaging events, and none of the results are predictable. So, too, is the case with the ultraviolent Green Room, Saulnier's latest. It's another brutal, suspenseful and daring entry into Saulnier's self-described "inept protagonist" trilogy in which choices made just make bad choices worse and worse all the way to the absolute worst-possible outcome. Much like his other films, though, Green Room is as smart as it is thrilling, just as rough as it is comical. In a nutshell, it's Saulnier's most accomplished gem to date.
The inept protagonist(s) this time around – again, Saulnier's words, not mine – are the members of a punk rock band. They're down on their luck, they're van is out of gas, and their wallets are growing empty. The band siphons gas as they try to make it to one, more gig, so they can make enough money to drive back home. The gig they make isn't what they expected, and the band finds themselves in the deep, secluded woods of Oregon at a skinhead bar where the owners, employees, and much of the crowd is made up of a small group of elitist Neo-Nazis. It's probably not the best location in which to stumble upon a murder scene in the green room, but that particular bump in their road is exactly what the band comes across. It isn't long before a fight for survival – or, at the very least, a fight against horrible dismemberment – ensues.
Saulnier's films, Murder Party and Blue Ruin before this, move at a break-neck pace from frame one. That isn't to say his films are loaded with incessant action, far from it. Every scene that makes up a Saulnier film, however, is driven by the development of his characters and dilemmas. The opening scene of Green Room, though short and simple, tells us so much about the band we're following as well as the dynamic of its five members. Everyone's motivation is easily determined, simply stated, and naturally understood, and the villains, victims, and heroes Saulnier creates all have a highly organic air about them. They're real people inadvertently getting themselves into real situations.
"Really dangerous situations" is what I probably should have said, and Saulnier once again proves he isn't one to shy away from caking on the violence. Once Green Room turns from set-up to action, all basic rules for your typical siege movie fly right out the window. That's one of the filmmaker's gifts when it comes to his brand of storytelling. The outcomes and left turns his screenplays take are cleverly contrived and smartly plotted, but they are never easy to predict. With Green Room, a film whose simple, single-location shares more with Murder Party than Blue Ruin, Saulnier always has the viewer on their toes.
The deaths in the film come at the most surprising of times and generally executed in the most brutal fashion imaginable. That goes for band members and club employees alike creating one hell of a violent tornado that runs all the way through Green Room's tight 94 minute running time. There isn't any fat to be trimmed, no bloated moments of exposition to keep the audience updated. The film is an endless storm of swinging blades and gnashing teeth and ripped-up flesh. Green Room is as brutal in its violence than even the most audacious horror film, and it's all presented with an ample amount of humor.
Much of that humor comes from the natural dynamic of the characters, Saulnier filling the roles with some remarkable talent. Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, and Callum Turner portray the band members, who have a natural charisma between them. The actors all project an organic awareness of one another and sense of humor with each other that helps them grow into realistic characters. Imogen Poots is equally witty and grounded as an audience member who unfortunately gets trapped along with the band.
On the reverse side, the actors portraying the skinheads have the same level of camaraderie within their rankings. Saulnier does a fine job establishing their reasons as well as their actions, the internal hierarchy of the group also developing as the film progresses. There's even room for a little sympathy when it comes to a few of them. Leading this charge is Sir Patrick Stewart, who fills the role the Neo-Nazi leader with a natural intensity. He doesn't have to scream. He doesn't have to perform drastic acts of violence. With a casual conversation and the low, unassuming voice to match, Stewart defines the menace in his character for which he's aiming.
Stewart's incredible performance could be viewed as the high mark for the film, but Green Room excels at so much it's just one of an endless stream of positive notes. As brutally violent as the film gets, Saulnier never loses his grip on its sense of levity, making Green Room a prime candidate for fans of midnight movies. It's not just surface-level entertainment, though, either. Saulnier has certainly proven himself and continues to do so with films that are engaging, escapist, and extremely intelligent. Subject matter aside, Green Room is Saulnier's most punk rock work to date.
Follow Jeremy on Twitter - @JeremyKKirk
The Ways The Walk Is At War With Itself
Sony Pictures
The Walk is one of this year’s most theatrically necessary Hollywood movies. You have to see it on the giant screen, meaning IMAX, and you have to see it in 3D. Or else just don’t bother. Yes, that is a big contradiction. I’m telling you to see it for full cost and most complete experience or to totally skip it forever. It’s not that the story isn’t worthy of the small screen, but if the story is all you want you’re better off with James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire. Or even the sourced memoir “To Reach the Clouds.”
If you’re interested in the spectacle of seeing Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire act between the Twin Towers recreated, of watching the phenomenal feat as if you were there, from the ground as one of the spectators and as one of the accomplices atop the towers and even from Petit’s point of view on the wire itself, then see The Walk in only the most optimal way (I can’t comment on the virtual reality supplement to The Walk being additionally necessary, but it sounds like it is).
The movie is not perfect, and its problems include a number of issues we can take with the visually splendorous climax, but that climax is really exhilarating as it’s happening to you. If it’s worth getting to, through the less-entertaining first half, then it certainly outweighs the movie’s other faults. And afterward, the imperfections, particularly the ways The Walk is itself already full of contradiction, are worthy of consideration. I don’t think they ruin the movie, yet they do challenge us in our appreciation.
Here are some of those ways in which I believe The Walk is in conflict with itself:
Sony Pictures
Much is better suited for a small screen
The Walk may be an IMAX essential for a good portion of its 123-minute running time, but a lot of it also seems shot with much smaller screens in mind. Never mind the criticisms about how flat the story is or how jarring Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s French accent is or how much whimsical mime and unicycling you have to sit through to get to the good stuff. And never mind the titular walk supposedly making viewers queasy. The amount of close ups, especially on Gordon-Levitt as Petit and Charlotte Le Bon as his girlfriend, Annie, is what made me sick in IMAX size. We don’t need to see even the most egotistical character’s head that symbolically humongous. Also, subtitles, which director Robert Zemeckis humorously tries to get away from as much as possible, are typically a terrible thing in IMAX.
Sony Pictures
3D is not the height of cinematic depiction of heights
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it’s not always as clever. While not actually even a true depiction of height and depth given that it’s all crafted with computer effects, the walk of The Walk still aims for realism, both in its meticulous detail and its employment of 3D to make us sense the physical space — the distance of the ground and the surrounding scope of the city. But as thrilling as it is to have the realistic feeling of being more than 100 stories above the ground, it’s not particularly a creative cinematic representation. Without the benefit of CG, Alfred Hitchcock regularly found ways to employ models, physical illusion and in-camera trickery — most famously with the dolly zoom effect named for his film Vertigo — to not exactly realistically show us height and depth but present them in dramatically interesting ways. The 3D is spectacular but also kind of too perfect.
There’s irony in all that CG
Again, let me stress that the effects on display in The Walk are magnificent. The craft put into rendering the World Trade Center and all of the surrounding area, near and far, is extraordinary. Many times I forgot I was looking at nothing but CG buildings and CG landscapes and believed I was back in a world and time in which the Twin Towers still exist. What a great trick! Ironically, it’s all for a movie about a guy whose work consisted of physical spectacle without trickery. Not that we should expect Gordon-Levitt to perform the act himself, let alone expect for Zemeckis to construct exact replica towers to document that performance faithfully. It just winds up being funny to consciously think about how the magic of movies is manipulating us right after the main character makes an emotional stand against using a safety wire. I don’t want to address the merits of Man on Wire over The Walk too much here, but while it doesn’t have rolling footage of the act, there’s still a greater sense of amazement to see the photographs in the doc than it is to watch the faked version in Zemeckis’s version.
Sony Pictures
Its final tribute is missing something
Speaking of photographs of the real deal, I’m actually astonished that there’s ultimately no genuine shots of the World Trade Center. I guess there’s some old pictures in magazines and newspapers that Petit looks at in the movie, but I was expecting some sort of proper tribute at the end, maybe during the end credits. Don’t tell me that would have put too much focus on the tragedy of 9/11 or the buildings in general, taking away from this specific story. The movie already respectfully hints at all that through Gordon-Levitt’s final words from his perch in the Statue of Liberty torch. The movie is in part a tribute to the Twin Towers but without showing the real thing it treats them like ghosts. Maybe that’s fine, as I suppose the digital versions are not much different than the Tribute in Light, but those vertical blue streams weren’t intended to make us think we were seeing the real towers. I don’t know that there should be shots of the actual World Trade Center, just noting that it feels a bit lacking without one.
Sony Pictures
There’s an incomplete attention to detail
This final point will be seen as awfully nitpicky, no different than spotting a goof in any other movie. But this isn’t just any movie. The Walk looks like the result of production designers (led by Naomi Shohan) painstakingly focused on getting every detail right. You might as well be when tasked with digitally recreating an entire city as backdrop for a lot of the action. I don’t have 1974 Manhattan so memorized from above that I could confirm that every building in the landscape shots were authentic, but I assume it’s all square. Unfortunately, right before the movie ends, there’s a shot of a Chinatown J/M/Z subway stop that I’m certain is not authentic. In fact, the Z train didn’t even exist yet, those lines weren’t collectively designated a brown color yet and as far as I can recall, there wasn’t ever a station labeled “Chinatown” in such a way. So it’s not just that they would have used a sign they found today. It probably wouldn’t have stuck with me and bothered me so much if it wasn’t so late in the movie, but it was especially glaring because of how perfectly precise the rest of the film at least seems to be.
'Where to Invade Next' To Be Released By Brand New Indie Distributor
This is big! The press release announcing the distribution of Michael Moore's new documentary Where to Invade Next is also the announcement of a brand new indie distributor. Alamo Drafthouse Founder and CEO Tim League, who also runs Drafthouse Films, is teaming up with Former RADiUS Founders and Co-Presidents Tom Quinn and Jason Janego to launch a brand new distribution label. Moore describes his new distributor as a "cinematic Dream Team, consisting of three of this country's most beloved film geeks and movie advocates, individuals who are much-admired by the indie filmmaking community." Indeed! This is excellent news, and I can't wait to see the documentary, which received rave reviews at TIFF.
Moore's Where to Invade Next will be the first big release from the new indie distributor. "Together with Michael Moore and his extraordinary new film we hope to remind Americans they have the inalienable right to laugh, especially in an election year. We're thrilled about our new label and can't think of a better film or filmmaker to launch with." The actual name of the new company and more details will be revealed later on.
Moore describes his new distributor as a "cinematic Dream Team, consisting of three of this country's most beloved film geeks and movie advocates, individuals who are much-admired by the indie filmmaking community. It is clear to me that they want to forge something new for a new century. They decided it was time to rethink the way movies are made, doing it with filmmakers who create their best work in a supportive environment, unfettered by a traditional studio system. I believe that Tom, Jason, and Tim, are poised to revolutionize film distribution by creating an entirely different movie-going experience for the audience."
The feature documentary profiles the "current state of the nation in a form that is quintessential Moore: provocative, impassioned and very funny." Most of the reviews hinted that it's a look at how many other countries are solving problems and doing things better than in America. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival - watch the teaser trailer here. It's also playing at the New York Film Festival coming up this weekend. This is very exciting news! Not only is it great to see another distribution company launch with smart people running it, but they're preparing to launch with a film that's getting a lot of good buzz. We'll be watching to see how everything develops from here, and will follow up once they announce the actual name.
Watch: Michael Mohan's Short Film 'Pink Grapefruit' on Relationships
"I'm excited to be forced to get to know you." From filmmaker Michael Mohan comes a charming short film about romance and relationships titled Pink Grapefruit, starring Wendy McColm who goes on a blind date that doesn't go as planned at first. The cast includes Nora Kirkpatrick and Matt Peters, plus Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. It's an interesting twist on the typical idea of a romance or even a blind date, and it works well as a refreshing short film that makes you think about relationships and how everything is supposed to work can be different. Watch out - it is NSFW so wait until you're home. But it's a great short.
A young married couple brings two of their single friends out to Palm Springs for a long weekend. It does not go as planned. The short premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and also played at SXSW. Pink Grapefruit is directed by filmmaker Michael Mohan (follow @michaelmohan), from a script co-written by Chris Levitus & Michael Mohan. From the New Yorker, Mohan says of the short: "We want to show how our past relationships shape the person we ultimately become." Adding that "you should probably wait until you get home to watch it so nobody in your immediate vicinity thinks you're a creep." Thoughts?
First Trailer for Horror Thriller 'The Forest' Starring Natalie Dormer
Stay on the path! Gramercy Pictures has debuted a trailer for the supernatural horror thriller The Forest, starring Natalie Dormer as a young woman who goes searching for her twin sister in the mysterious Aokigahara Forest in Japan. There is another film about this same forest in Japan, titled The Sea of Trees with Matthew McConaughey from director Gus Van Sant, which tells a more dramatic tale. This is the more creepy, horrific one with ghosts and weird things happening to her. The cast includes Taylor Kinney, Eoin Macken and Yukiyoshi Ozawa. I'm not so sure about this, seems a bit wacky to me. Give it a look below.
Here's the first official trailer for Jason Zada's The Forest, on MTV's YouTube (via The Playlist):
A supernatural thriller set in the legendary Aokigahara Forest in Japan. A young American woman, Sara (Natalie Dormer of “Game of Thrones” and The Hunger Games), goes in search of her twin sister, who has mysteriously disappeared. Despite everyone's warnings to "stay on the path," Sara enters the forest determined to discover the truth about her sister’s fate – only to be confronted by the angry and tormented souls of the dead that prey on anyone who wanders into the forest. The Forest is directed by Jason Zada, from a screenplay by Sarah Cornwell, Nick Antosca, based on an idea by David S. Goyer. Gramercy Pictures will release The Forest in select theaters starting January 8th, 2016 - early next year. Anyone interested?
Would a Remake of The Exorcist Necessarily Be Bad?
Hold onto your tomatoes for a second.
When Deadline originally reported that Morgan Creek was going to co-ordinate on a remake of The Exorcist, I had the same response as everyone else: vomit-launching disgust. Yes, we’re living through a minefield of remake announcements, waiting everyday for news that something we love will be “updated” or “re-imagined” or “exploited for its name recognition value,” but the added bile-gurgling component to the prospect of seeing William Friedkin‘s dramatic horror masterpiece remade is that there’s zero room for improvement.
It’s a non-starter artistically, and judging by the sequels, it’s probably not a great financial decision either.
Fortunately, a concerned citizen spoke out against the potential remake:
Dear HitFix…correction: I COMPLETELY denounce a remake of The Exorcist by Morgan Creek.
— William Friedkin (@WilliamFriedkin) September 26, 2015
That prompted Morgan Creek to respond, claiming that, “despite what was printed,” they will “NEVER EVER attempt to remake The Exorcist.” The Caps Lock lets you know they mean it. Except they probably don’t.
The original Deadline article used information and quotations directly from Morgan Creek CEO Jim Robinson, discussing the production house’s aim to sell its library to companies who want to remake Ace Ventura and Major League and, you know, The Exorcist. What’s more, I’d bet a month’s salary that it wasn’t so much a news item as it was a purchased article to pimp Morgan Creek’s sale to Deadline’s audience.
If they’re liquidating their library, it’s hard to believe that they’ll cling tightly to a few titles out of respect for the masterpieces. So maybe when they say they will NEVER EVER remake The Exorcist, it’s because they will only be selling it to someone else who’s going to remake it.
Point being, we’re not out of the woods yet.
However, as a person with no power or say in the matter, and whose voice will never convince management one way or the other, I’d like to consider the possibility of making a good remake of The Exorcist. There are at least two reasons why it’s not as far-fetched as our jerking knees would have us believe.
For one, it’s been stated repeatedly over the last few years by enthusiasts that we’re living in a new Golden Age of Horror. From the indie world of The Babadook, It Follows, You’re Next, We Are What We Are, We Are Still Here, Housebound, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Big Bad Wolves, Late Phases and on and on and on — and, to a lesser extent, the mainstream studio successes of The Conjuring and Sinister — smart, engaging, scary films are cropping up regularly. It’s practically the ’70s again.
That also means that the talent is out there to tackle an Exorcist remake. In our hypothetical world where a company is hell bent on making it, we could do far worse than the current talent pool of Jennifer Kent, James Wan, Kim Jee-woon, J.A. Bayona, David Robert Mitchell, Ana Lily Amirpour, Scott Derrickson, Tomas Alfredson, Sean Byrne, Matt Reeves, Ti West, Adam Wingard, Benson & Moorhead, Carol Morley and others.
That’s not even counting the heavier hitters like Guillermo del Toro and any seasoned dramatic filmmakers who might want to hang out with horror for a while. After all, Friedkin came on board after making The French Connection, so throw open the doors of your imagination to storytellers who understand tension and loss, but who may not have worked with pea soup yet.
I’m not saying that all of them would be the right fit, or that all of them would even be interested, but the skills are out there, and they’re fairly priced. I don’t at all mind imagining Kent’s moody deterioration, Mitchell’s sympathetic character angles, or Wan’s throwback eeriness injected into the well-loved story of a girl telling Max von Sydow what his mother does for fun in Hell, and that’s just the baseline of what skilled filmmakers might do with these figures.
The second main reason to be optimistic (or to fake it at least), is that almost every exorcism movie is essentially a remake of The Exorcist, and there have been some great ones in the intervening years. There have also been some truly, truly heinous ones, but even with the DNA of The Exorcist firmly in tact, The Last Exorcism, Requiem and others worked well.
The big fear with the specter of an Exorcist remake haunting us is that some schlubby production company (or, worse, one of the Big Six) will mine it for parts, plucking an unknown music video director out of obscurity and into an impossible job. They won’t pick someone interesting, right? Someone who might actually do a great job?
On that front, I concede. It’s possible to dream up an Exorcist remake that doesn’t suck because of the filmmakers (and actors) currently making fantastic horror, but reality isn’t that kind. The studio will more likely view the entire endeavor as a cheap cash crop, exploiting the relatively mainstream fascination with bullshit like a “live televised exorcism” and ghost hunting shows, happy to give control to the lowest bidder with a pulse. This is what we envision when we hear the news.
At the very least, I wanted to prove that a great remake is possible, but when it comes to the reality of the situation, I’m with Friedkin. Who wouldn’t be? Sadly, it seems likely that we’ll get a remake announcement one of these days. My only hope is that whatever studio decides to do it will take it seriously and take advantage of the filmmakers out there who at least have a chance at doing it justice. It would be better for fans and, shockingly, be better for the studio, too.
NIGHTMARE ALLEY: Do we hear what he hears?
DB here:
In the 1940s, American cinema turned wildly subjective. Visions, daydreams, nightmares, optical and auditory POV, inner monologues, flashbacks, and stream-of-consciousness montages were popping up everywhere. Sometimes these techniques rendered what it felt like to be the character at that moment. At other times, they were occasions for gags, or padding, or spikes of emotion, or flamboyant spectacle.
Sometimes they were just weird.
Siren song
One of the most intriguing passages in Forties films comes at a climactic moment in Nightmare Alley (1947, the year I was born). Spoilers ahead.
Stan Carlisle has been involved in a complicated swindle with the help of psychologist Lilith Ritter. He has entrusted her with $150,000 in cash extracted from their mark. When the plan goes wrong, he reclaims the money and heads for the railroad station to meet his girlfriend Molly.
In the cab en route to the station, Stan discovers that the wad of cash Lilith has given him consists of 150 singles. He returns to her apartment to confront her. There Lilith suddenly goes coldly clinical, declaring that Stan is deluded. Just as he thinks he killed a man in Texas, and he has imagined that she’s involved in his swindle. She denies any collusion with him, but does hint that she could get him indicted for the killing.
Since he has been growing more anxious, her calm stream of lies unnerves him. And since she records all her sessions with her patients, she has his first visit as a confession to the Texas killing. She has been careful to never record their swindle plot.
As Stan gets more panicky, we hear a police siren. He reacts, but Lilith does not. She claims not to hear it; she says he’s just imagining it, like everything else. When she offers to take him to a hospital, he pulls away and flees, without his money.
Here’s the scene.
Is the siren objectively in the scene, or is it in Stan’s head?
Lilith says she doesn’t hear the siren, so it might be subjective, manifesting Stan’s guilty conscience. And all the psychologist’s talk about hallucinations may have induced one in him. But the siren isn’t distorted in the way most auditory imaginings are; it seems plausibly part of the story world. And many viewers (including me, on my first viewing) assume that Lilith or her servant Jane has called the police, and the cops are now arriving. Lilith could be pretending not to hear the siren in order to convince Stan he’s loco. She does tell him to stay for a sedative.
There are several oddities here besides the siren. For one thing, Jane has made her entrance keeping Stan covered with her pistol. When Stan and Jane leave the bedroom, we see Jane hovering in the background.
As Lilith comes out she cocks her head screen left, signaling to Jane, and swivels the pistol firmly toward Stan.
Once Stan and Lilith get into their argument, though, Jane is no longer seen or heard. She’s last glimpsed as a sleeve on its way offscreen.
We never see Jane definitely exit the room. Is she there or not? Did Lilith’s head gesture mean “Stand over there to keep him covered” or “Go off and call the police”? The film’s continuity script (typically a transcript of the editor’s version with dialogue and effects but without music) says only “Jane crosses and exits scene.” That could mean she leaves the room or merely leaves the frame.
Moreover, we learn from cinematographer Lee Garmes, who shot Nightmare Alley, that Goulding preferred clearly signaled entrances and exits.
He had no idea of camera; he concentrated on the actors. He had the camera follow the action all the time. He was the only director I’ve known whose actors never came in and out of the sideline of a frame. They either came in a door or down a flight of stairs or from behind a piece of furniture. He liked their entrances and exits to be photographed. I like that; they didn’t just disappear somewhere out of the frame-line as they so often do.
“Disappear somewhere out of the frame-line” is just what Jane does.
Jane’s presence or absence matters because of the quarrel that ensues. When Lilith announces her betrayal of Sam, we might expect the muscular Stan to attack her, slapping her around like the good noir sucker he is. But he meekly takes her assault. True, he’s coming apart, but maybe he’s holding back partly because Jane still has him covered from offscreen. That assumption seems validated at one point, when Stan’s nervous glance sharply off right suggests that she’s still there with her pistol. It’s after that glance that he warns Lilith not to call the cops.
Of course he could be imagining Jane in another room calling the police. On the other hand, if we assume that Jane remains offscreen, Lilith’s cool story about Stan’s breakdown becomes motivated as a performance in front of a witness who can back her up.
Maybe the handling of Jane is just clumsy direction on Goulding’s part? Or just conciseness? Still, there’s that siren. If Jane is in the room all the while, and we don’t hear her telephone the cops offscreen, the siren can’t be the result of a call for help. And it’s not clear that Lilith had the time to phone the police after Stan left the bedroom.
So maybe the siren is indeed in Stan’s head. Or if it’s objectively in the story world, then maybe it’s just a coincidence. (Chicago has plenty of sirens.) In this case, Lilith takes advantage of the siren to weaken Stan’s grip even more. A further complication: The siren cuts off as Stan flees, but there’s no indication that the cops have arrived outside. And in another oddity, we see Lilith turn slightly toward the camera when she denies hearing the sound. Is this a mark of evasion, like blinking?
In sum: The siren is either subjective or it’s objective. If it’s subjective, it’s at variance with most subjective sound of the period in not being signaled clearly as such. If it’s objective, it’s either the result of somebody calling the cops from offscreen, or it’s just coincidental.
Which is it? Usually a Forties film is pretty explicit when we’re in a character’s head, if only in retrospect (e.g., the staircase “death” in Possessed, 1947). Nightmare Alley seems to fudge things here.
When being a geek isn’t chic
Am I over-thinking this? The commentators on the Eureka! DVD, noir experts Alain Silver and James Ursini, puzzle over the siren too. I think that when Lilith denies hearing it, most viewers feel a bump: after all, we hear it too. But soon, I think, most of us take it as a real siren and assume that Lilith seizes on it as another way to convince Stan he’s breaking down. As for Jane, we just forget about her.
Look at the overall film, though, and the subjectivity possibility gains a curious strength. The siren can be taken as part of a peculiar pattern running through the film. To show you what I mean, I need to rehash a fairly complicated plot. Bear with me.
Stan Carlisle, an ambitious carnival worker, is conducting an affair with Zeena, the fortune-teller, while her partner Pete sinks into alcoholism. Stan accidentally kills Pete by giving him a bottle of wood alcohol instead of moonshine. Partnering with Zeena, Stan masters a code system for a mind-reading act. Soon he has left Zeena behind and married the carnival entertainer Molly, who becomes his confederate in a ritzier nightclub mentalist act. But Stan is plagued by memories of Pete’s death. He visits a psychologist, Lilith, to whom he tells his guilt feelings.
Stan conceives a grand scheme to turn faith healer, using his skills at illusion and fake spiritualism. (“The spook racket: I was made for it.”) He manages to deceive the rich Ezra Grindle, who asks to see his deceased lover. The scheme, in which Molly impersonates a spirit, fails and Stan has to flee, hoping to take with him the money he’s already wormed out of Grindle. Lilith blocks that in the scene I’ve excerpted.
Stan leaves Molly and begins to spiral downward into drunkenness. By the film’s end he’s ready to take on the job of the geek, the subhuman carnival freak who bites heads off chickens. Originally Stan had despised the geek, but now, in order to be guaranteed a bottle a day, he declares: “I was made for it.” Only Molly’s tender concern holds out hope Stan might claw his way back.
I said the plot was complicated, but it rests on a set of fairly simple substitutions. The opening situation gives us two couples, Zeena and Pete, Molly and the strong man Bruno. Initially Stan was odd man out, paralleled by the geek (also on the fringes of the action). Stan replaces Pete as first Zeena’s lover and then her stage partner. But once Stan knows the mentalist codes, he can replace Zeena with Molly, whom Bruno surrenders. Later Zeena and Bruno will form a couple. In Stan’s rise, Molly gets replaced by Lilith, his partner in crime, if not in romance. When Stan’s swindle fails, he goes on the run, alone again. Pete was established as one step up from geekdom; without Molly, he said, he’d be a geek. Now Stan becomes the new Pete. Drinking around a campfire with bums, he even repeats Pete’s cold-reading spiel word for word and gesture for gesture, with a bottle of booze as the crystal ball.
Stan finally sinks to the bottom, willing to serve as a carnival geek for the standard bottle a day. Molly now plays Zeena to the new Pete.
The pattern of sound leading up to the siren scene centers on the geek. In the crucial scene in which Stan gives Pete the rubbing alcohol, the geek’s cries punctuate the action as he dashes around in the distance; like Pete, he needs his daily bottle. But we hear those cries three more times later, when the action has left the carnival. The cries are displaced from their original source, and more insistent on each appearance.
The first time, they’re very faint. Zeena and Bruno have called on Stan and Molly in their nightclub dressing room. Zeena has brought out her Tarot deck and seeing Stan’s future she warns him not to try the big thing he’s contemplating. (It’s the fleecing of the grieving Grindle.) Worse, her cards bring up the Hanged Man, the same card that Zeena turned up for Pete. Once the association with Pete has returned, it’s hard to exorcise.
Angry, Stan forces Zeena and Bruno out, and as he stands at the door, with the music rising, we can hear the distant cries of the geek. In the next scene, the association with Pete is strengthened. Stan is getting a massage and the smell of the rubbing alcohol reminds him of the night of Pete’s death. Now, more strongly, we hear the geek.
The motif-cluster is Pete’s death/Hanged Man/rubbing alcohol/the geek. This is brought back again, most obviously, when on his downward path Stan is holed up in a hotel room and instead of eating starts to guzzle a bottle of gin.
The compulsive drinking, along with Stan’s disheveled life, marks another stage in his conversion into Pete, and the geek’s cries are heard most plaintively now.
So what do we make of the geek’s cries in these scenes? If we take them as subjective, as Stan’s auditory flashbacks or imaginings, then the siren moment gathers a new force. If we’ve had access to Stan’s mental soundscape earlier, maybe we have it again when he “hears” the police coming. After several instances of subjective sound, we’re more prepared to take the siren as subjective too—and to wonder a bit about it even after we’ve concluded that it’s probably objectively in the scene.
That feint would be an interesting storytelling maneuver in itself. Yet other factors complicate things.
The geek goes Greek
In 1940s movies, there’s plenty of subjective sound. Often we understand that a sound is subjective by virtue of its acoustic quality; it may be given extra reverb or distorted in other ways. We also take it as subjective because the sound clearly isn’t coming from the scene. We often remember it from prior scenes and so treat it as an auditory flashback. But there are visual cues for subjective sound too. The two primary ones are a close view of the character whose mind we’re in, and an expression on the character’s face that indicates some intense feeling.
In The Fallen Sparrow (1943), Kit recalls his months in a Spanish prison chiefly through the scraping limp of one of his captors passing in the hall. When we’re given access to that acoustic memory, we get fairly close shots of Kit’s agitation.
In an interesting parallel to Nightmare Alley, when Kit is with Whitney, he thinks he hears the scraping footbeat again.
It might be a genuine offscreen sound, since we have reason to believe that his torturer has followed him to New York. (In the climax, the sound will be actual, not imaginary.) But at this point Whitney says she doesn’t hear the noise, and neither do we. This indicates that Kit is imagining it. The filmmakers faced a problem comparable to that in the Nightmare Alley scene. If the sound had played for us as well as for Kit, and Whitney said she didn’t hear it, the options are three: we’re in Kit’s head, though she isn’t; it’s real and she truly didn’t hear it; or it’s real and she’s lying (as Lilith may be). We couldn’t be absolutely sure we were in Kit’s head if the sound had been included, but when it’s not on the track, we know he’s hallucinating.
There are several norms to consider here. First, typically the close shot is timed to coincide with the subjective sound, indicating that the character registers the sound when we do. That happens in The Fallen Sparrow, but not in Nightmare Alley. We notice the siren before Stan does, which suggests that it’s objective.
Second, the shot isolating the character favors our taking a sound as subjective. But when another character is in the shot, it’s harder to construe as subjective. Accordingly, in The Fallen Sparrow, the shot that includes both Kit and Whitney inclines the filmmakers to treat the shot as objective and the sound as purely private, as inaudible to us as it is to her. In Nightmare Alley, the siren does indeed start over a close-up of Stan, but it continues over a reverse-shot of Lilith and soon enough, over a shot of the two of them.
Finally, our sense of subjectivity depends partly on the intrinsic norm each movie sets up. In The Fallen Sparrow the scraping footstep takes its place in long stretches of inner monologue which vocalize Kit’s thoughts. Because we’ve had intimate access to his mind, we’re likely to accept the footstep we hear as subjective as well. But Nightmare Alley doesn’t include inner monologues. We never access Stan’s stream of thought, so the geek cries are the only moments we might be plunging into his mind–at least, until (perhaps) the siren scene.
The siren scene hangs uncertainly between subjectivity and objectivity, tilting toward objectivity but also casting some doubts on it. What about the geek sounds? They’re even more complicated. They seem to hang between subjectivity and–well, something else.
Take the first instance. Stan is at the doorway and the camera tracks in to him as the musical score emerges. The geek noises slip in, and Stan pauses, as if reflecting.
That seems like a fairly standard cue for subjectivity: Stan has associated the Tarot cards and Pete’s death with the geek’s cries. Because of the faintness of the noise (some people seem not to notice it, as if the score nearly drowns it out), the narration might even be hinting that Stan’s memory of the night of Pete’s death is barely conscious.
In the light of the later occurrences, I’d propose another possibility. Given that we’ve never been in Stan’s head before, the sound might be more addressed to us than to him, reminding us of an association he doesn’t sense at all. This moment might almost be the film’s way of taking us aside and flagging a motif that will develop later–and in ambiguous ways.
In the rubdown scene, we see Stan, anxiously reacting to the smell of alcohol, in a fairly close view as the geek’s cries are heard.
In great anxiety, he leaps off the rubbing table. But perhaps he’s reacting just to the smell of alcohol, not to his memory of the geek. Again, the geek sounds are smoothly merged with a burst in the musical score.
Most characters who hear imaginary sounds report them to the people around them. But Stan hasn’t said anything, as far as we know, to Molly about twice hearing the geek. When Stan tells Lilith of the two earlier scenes during his therapy session, he mentions only being disturbed by Zeena and the cards, and the way the alcohol reminded him of Pete.
He doesn’t mention hearing the geek’s cries. So again we might ask if these cries aren’t subjective but rather something like a nondiegetic score–the soundtrack reminding us of something Stan isn’t remembering.
The last recall of the geek’s cries is presented while Stan is gulping gin. The noise starts in a medium shot before the camera retreats to a distant view.
If the cries make him feel tormented, he doesn’t give much sign of it. And if we were supposed to penetrate his mind, where the geek noises might reside, the camera would typically track in more tightly (as it does in The Fallen Sparrow). Instead, it withdraws, again raising the possibility that the geek’s shrieks are a commentary, not a recollection. Perhaps the cries are more like the Greek chorus warning us of an outcome to which the protagonist is oblivious.
What are we left with? Mixed signals, I think. The geek’s cries and the police siren hover in a space that many films worked within but seldom treated so freely. The cries can be taken as subjective, but they lack robust cues for that function. In other respects, they suggest expressive commentary. As the alcohol reminds Stan of Pete’s death, the cries do the same for us, while prophesying Stan’s fate. And the siren, while probably objective, makes us hesitate partly because we’re not sure the police have been called and partly because we’ve had ambivalent sound cues earlier. For a moment it might seem to be, as Lilith says, Stan’s first full-blown hallucination.
The continuity script for Nightmare Alley duly notes the siren’s sound, and the geek’s cries are noted in the scene of Pete’s death. But there’s no mention of geek cries in any of the three scenes I’ve considered. Perhaps director Edmund Goulding shot the film without planning to include the geek sounds at all. Perhaps they were added in postproduction. Someone late in the production process may have decided to anticipate Stan’s final degradation through ever more vivid echoes of the poisoning scene. Nightmare Alley would become an example of innovation by last-minute intervention.
Usually a 1940s film respects the distinctions, the either/or options, that are offered by the era’s stylistic menu. Accordingly, a sound is clearly objective or clearly subjective. But sometimes a film oscillates between the choices, or blurs the distinctions among them. We’re most familiar with this slipperiness when music shifts between being diegetic (sourced in the story space) and being nondiegetic (added to the story world “from outside”). This sort of looseness can be found elsewhere in 1940s storytelling. A film may start with one narrator and end with another, or none, or an uncertainly identified one. A flashback may never close, or loop back to its beginning without returning to the frame story. The outliers coax us to study how the ordinary cases work and note how much we take their conventions for granted.
We can learn as much about storytelling strategies from the ambivalent films as from the trim and polished ones. And in a movie called Nightmare Alley, we can’t regret that the haunting wail of the geek wafts through it as both a reminder of death and an anticipation of destiny. Its shape-shifting sound fits a movie that wants to unsettle us.
Fussbudget film analysis: I was made for it.
The continuity script for Nightmare Alley is available as a pdf file on the Eureka! DVD of the film.
Lee Garmes’ remark about explicit entrances and exits is quoted in Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen (Thames & Hudson, 70), 49-50. For background on the making of the film see Matthew Kennedy, Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory: Hollywood’s Genius Bad Boy (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 241-252. There’s a detailed and intriguing psychoanalytic interpretation of the film at Randomaniac.
Actually, the scene in The Fallen Sparrow is a little more complicated than I indicate here, but I didn’t want to get into the weeds. The essential point holds, though: when one character thinks that a sound is veridical, and another character is present but doesn’t hear it, the filmic narration can confirm or disconfirm or ambiguate the source of the sound.
Thanks to conversations with Kristin, Jeff Smith, and Jim Healy about the film. Woody Haut’s lengthy discussion of the film for the Eureka! disc is reprinted on his website.
I discuss extrinsic and intrinsic norms of narration in Chapters 4 and 8 of Narration in the Fiction Film.
For other example of fruitful anomalies in the period, see “Innovation by accident,” “Twice-Told Tales: Mildred Pierce,” and the Laura discussion in “Dead Man Talking.”
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