1999, 102 min., colour, Dolby stereo
Lenfilm, zero film, Fusion Product
with the participation of Fabrica, ARTE/WDR, Filmboard Berlin/Brandenburg GmbH, Fondation Montecinemaverita
scenario Yu.Arabov
camera: A.Fedorov, A.Rodionov
art director: S.Kokovkin
sound: V.Persov, S.Moshkov
editor: L.Semenova
cast: E.Rufanova, L.Mozgovoi
Ένα απειλητικό κάστρο προβάλλει μέσα απ' τα σύννεφα. Mια γυναίκα χορεύει γυμνή στα μεγαλόπρεπα μπαλκόνια του. Ξέρει ότι την παρακολουθούν, και κουνάει το χέρι όλο ελπίδα, χαιρετώντας τους αόρατους φρουρούς. H ανήσυχη Eύα περιμένει τον αγαπημένο της "’ντι". H μονότονη γαλήνη του απομονωμένου αυτού καταφυγίου διαλύεται με την άφιξη του Φίρερ, του Mάρτιν Mπόρμαν, δεξιού του χεριού, καθώς και του υπουργού προπαγάνδας Γκέμπελς, συνοδευόμενου από τη δουλοπρεπή σύζυγό του. Eίναι μια ήσυχη μέρα, με συζητήσεις στο τραπέζι και περιπάτους μέσα από τα εκθαμβωτικά τοπία των βαυαρικών ’λπεων. O Mπόρμαν έχει απαγορεύσει οποιαδήποτε αναφορά στον πόλεμο, κι ας είναι άνοιξη του 1942. O μόνος άνθρωπος που τολμά να εναντιωθεί στον Φίρερ αυτή την ταραγμένη περίοδο, είναι η Eύα...
In his new film Alexander Sokurov shows a day in the ghostly and inaccessible House built on the Mountain for the man of Power — the Power that has already done its horrible and catastrophically destructive work over the world and man. The characters of this parable bear historical names, which are notorious all over the world — Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Martin Borman and others. The Mountain, as all the other characters, also has a real prototype: Kelstein mountain in the Alps where in 1939 'the nest for the Furer' — Kelsteinhaus — was erected in the style of the Third Reich romanticism.
The Hitlerian theme first appeared in Russian cinema art in the years of the Second World War and was tightly connected with the plan to denounce Nazism. In the country, which had suffered the most terrible aggression from the Nazi Germany, the most popular art — cinema — was creating a superficial, caricature-like image of 'the possessed Furer'. Hitler, at first as a character of short satirical movies of the war years, later as a conventionally symbolic character of Soviet war epics made after the war, was deliberately deprived of any psychological depth.
The psychological aspect — the aspect of an author's view — first appeared in Sokurov's short documentary Sonata for Hitler (1979-1989) made up of German newsreel. Fascism and, on a greater scale, the totalitarian state as a source of the personal catastrophe of a dictator and the tragedy of a deceived and disgraced nation — this was the theme the director developed in his documentary, having in mind parallels to the history of Russia.
Not the political but the humanitarian aspect was of interest for Sokurov in the other documentary about the war against Fascism called And Nothing More (1982-1987). Leaders of countries and common people on the ruins of war, where battlefields and devastated cities are as lifeless as the comfortable background of international top-level talks, — this is the image of the post-war world restored by the director on the basis of old newsreel. The artistic method of Sokurov as a documentary-maker (he has made more than 20 documentaries) is unique because he does not interpret the document, but moulds out of it a completely independent elaborate form, saturated with emotion. In 1980-1990s the director created a series of documentaries which he called elegies.
Dealing with the course of historical events, literary plots, biographies of famous or unknown people, Sokurov is primarily interested in turning points, such as the most tragic and inevitable transition period in man's existence — from life to death. Therefore all the attempts of the state or one man to influence other people's destinies are presented by Sokurov in the light of the bitterly ironic, poised author's view. Man's nature is beyond his own control: he is just a homeless, destitute child of the unknown powers. Whoever the protagonist of Sokurov may be — a degraded Soviet militiaman (The Degraded, 1980) or a member of British intelligentsia of the first decade of the 20 century from G.B.Shaw's play (Painful Indifference, 1983-1987), Flaubert's heroine Emma Bovary (Save and Protect, 1990) or Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov (Whispering Pages, 1993) — the director so to say reaches him or her in the moment of lasting spiritual agony — after the catastrophe. Decay as the consequence of an act of the will is a constant subject of the majority of Sokurov's works.
This theme is further developed in Moloch. In this film Hitler is presented as a product of the decay of the whole epoch of culture — as a personification of the highest possible stage of Power, as a symbol of the absurdity of all the universal desires of man.
The main principles of the epoch of Modern: the ideas of the transmutation of life, narcisstic voluntarism of a creative personality and vital aesthetics, imposed upon mass consciousness as instructions for action, were transformed into their opposite — the oppression of whole nations, the cult of a leader and everlasting war. The war in Sokurov's film is doing its destructive work in the souls and bodies of those who conduct the war, although the real battlefield is the distant and almost unfamiliar for the characters background against which they lead their comfortable life. The author chooses the direction, opposite to the historical screen: he looks into the recesses of the human nature, which is polar to the devilish mechanism of Power. Sokurov's tragic grotesque, presented on the material of the Hitlerian Germany, touches the problems of the contemporary world, irrespectively of geography and political system — no matter whether it is Russia or the USA. If we put together the parts of two well-known formulas: The Twilight of Gods by Friedrich Nietzsche and The Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl (in 1936 she made a film under such title as a tribute to Hitler), we shall have a formula of the contemporary world, found by Alexander Sokurov: The Twilight of the Will. This is the diagnosis made by the artist.
Among the monochrome images of mould and decay, dominating in the film, the only contrast spot of life is Eva. The voice of her love — demanding and anxious, mocking and desperate, the voice of nature itself, is opposed to the withering away rhythm of the absurd dialogues, castrated scheme of ritual relations, in the centre of which there is not a man, but 'the father of the nation'. This voice of humiliated yet not eliminated femininity leads the tragic theme in the duet of the main characters — Adi and Eva.
The psychological style of acting in grotesque, absurd, even comic yet seriously thought-out situations has given complicated tasks to the performers — actors from drama theatres of St. Petersburg. This is the first film by Sokurov where all the main parts were played by professional actors: in his previous ten feature films the director often preferred to cast non-professionals. Hitler is played by the well-known St. Petersburg actor Leonid Mozgovoy who also starred in Stone (1992) in the make-up of Anton Chekhov. Eva is played by the actress Elena Rufanova.
In-door shootings were done in the pavilions and workshops of Lenfilm studio, nature shootings were conducted in the mountains of Bavaria. The film was scored for sound in Germany by actors from Berlin theatres.
Alexandra Tuchinskaya
Prizes and awards:
Award for Best Script from the 52th International Film Festival in Cannes — Yury Arabov, script for Moloch.
" This is a disconcerting film: claustrophobic, primal, sexual, it calls to mind the paintings of Francis Bacon or Edvard Munch. Rarely has the human body been so effectively photographed in all its complexities: its beauty, its sensuality, its horror, its anger."
"Ο άνθρωπος τρώει τον άνθρωπο και τα σκυλιά τρώνε εμας, η απέραντη σιωπή που μέσα της συνειδητοποιείς τα όρια της ανθρώπινης εξέλιξης. Θα ήθελα να μπορούσα να είχα γράψει το soundtrack αυτής της ταινίας."
Κωνσταντίνος Βήτα
Cary Grant embodied the elegance, charm, and sophistication of Hollywood in its golden years. His good looks, charisma, and ambiguous sexuality enchanted women and men alike. As the star-struck comedian Steve Lawrence once said, "When Cary Grant walked into a room, not only did the women primp, the men straightened their ties."
Born Archibald Alexander Leach on January 18, 1904, near Bristol, England, Grant began his career in vaudeville. In 1932 he signed with Paramount and moved to Hollywood, where he developed the debonair persona that made him famous.
After appearing in half a dozen films, his big break came when the sultry Mae West handpicked him to star with her in She Done Him Wrong (1933). Based on West's Broadway hit Diamond Lil, the film made Grant a bankable star.
Appearing in seventy-two films from 1932 to 1966, Cary Grant combined urbanity with a down-to-earth charm. Starring with the most ravishing female stars of the time, such as Katharine and Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Deborah Kerr, and Ingrid Bergman, Grant exuded romance, refinement, and, perhaps most surprisingly, humor. As C.K. Dexter Haven in George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1941), with Katharine Hepburn, he added the crucial sophistication necessary to screwball comedy.
Most directors Grant worked with, including the celebrated Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Peter Bogdanovich, were content simply to use Grant as the elegant leading man audiences adored. But Alfred Hitchcock was attracted to the actor's darker side. Grant gave some of his best performances in Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), and North by Northwest (1959), playing brooding, enigmatic, and troubled characters.
Rumors of Grant's homosexuality swirled early in his career and followed him throughout his life. Grant and his close friends consistently denied rumors of his homosexuality or bisexuality. Although he had many failed relationships with women (he married five times) and numerous gay friends, including William Haines and Australian artist Jack Kelly (later a set designer professionally known as Orry-Kelly), with whom he lived briefly in Greenwich Village, there is no conclusive evidence that Grant was bisexual.
The rumors of Grant's bisexuality were sparked principally by his close friendship with Randolph Scott, his live-in companion and co-star in My Favorite Wife (1940). The two shared a Santa Monica beach home from 1935 to 1942.
Paramount started an intense publicity campaign, including photos of them in domestic scenes, promoting Grant and Scott as the epitome of Hollywood's new young man. More camp than intimate, these staged photos offer no real insight into the private nature of their relationship. They stopped living together when Grant married his second wife, Barbara Hutton, but the two remained close friends throughout their lives.
Although most of his career was spent playing a static archetype, Grant was unafraid to take risks, professionally or privately. He is credited with using the word "gay" for the first time in a homosexual context on screen. In Bringing Up Baby (1938), Grant plays a shy paleontologist against Katharine Hepburn's spoiled New York heiress. During one scene, Grant appears in a frilly pink dressing gown and to incredulous observers delivers his famous line "because I just went gay all of a sudden."
Grant sported women's clothing again in the less well-known film I Was a Male War Bride (1949). He also became the first Hollywood star to admit to using LSD as part of psychotherapy in the late 1950s.
Knowing his audience did not want to see him age, Grant retired from films in the 1960s, secure as one of Hollywood's brightest stars. He died on November 29, 1986.
His Girl Friday (1940) is Howard Hawks' speedy and hysterically funny, modern-style screwball comedy, and one of the best examples of its kind in film history. Although it has an 92-minute running time, the breath-taking, fast-paced film has more than enough dialogue for a 3-hour movie. The film marked the beginning of a number of screwball comedies in the 1940s that emphasized the conflict for women in deciding between love/marriage and professional careers.
The original film version of His Girl Friday was director Lewis Milestone's big hit The Front Page (1931), produced by Howard Hughes and released by United Artists. [Milestone had won the Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards for the previous year's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).] This second screen version's screenplay, again by Charles Lederer, brilliantly transformed Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's newspaper classic - the George S. Kaufman-directed 1928 Broadway smash-hit play The Front Page, with a major script change.
One of the main male characters in the earlier film, Hildebrand 'Hildy' Johnson (played by Pat O'Brien), became female - renamed Hildegard Johnson (played by Rosalind Russell), to star opposite the major actor, Cary Grant. [Grant was the leading man from Hawks' two previous films: the male-dominated action film Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938), and had appeared in other romantic comedies at the time (i.e., The Awful Truth (1937), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and My Favorite Wife (1940)).] Other changes in the script involved removing topical references to the 1920s, and jokes about Prohibition.
The gender swap brought an entirely new angle to the film, making it more than a satirical view and social commentary on the operation of a newsroom under the management of a hard-boiled, smart-alec managing editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant in this version, Adolphe Menjou in the earlier film), and providing an additional feminine-romance angle.
This madcap, giddy film - originally titled The Bigger They Are, is best remembered for its overlapping dialogue and simultaneous conversations, rapid-fire delivery, breakneck speed, word gags, sexual innuendo, plot twists, "in" jokes, mugging, jousting, sarcastic insults, frantic pace and farcical script. With its plot about a ruthless editor, a marriage renewed by divorce and the threat of re-marriage, a politically corrupt city, and a questionable judicial system, the romantic comedy is both a love story and a sophisticated battle of the sexes (and duel of wits).
This screwball masterpiece lacked even a single Academy Award nomination. Cary Grant's un-nominated performance as the suave, calculating and exploitative managing editor, who attempts to lure and maneuver his ex-wife (and star reporter) back with the opportunity to write a breaking, front page news-story, is a tour de force of comedy - combining cartoonish faces, silent-film pantomime, slapstick, witty word-play, and irony into one remarkable characterization. Likewise, Rosalind Russell's role as the ace news-reporter to her ex-husband and ex-managing editor, who is wooed back from marrying a staid, dull, but devoted insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), is her greatest comedic portrayal, following her similar role in The Women (1939). Film posters exclaimed how she holds up as Grant's equal: "SHE LEARNED ABOUT MEN FROM HIM." [Ironically, Grant's other film in this same year, The Philadelphia Story (1940), had a similar plot about him trying to win back his ex-wife (Katharine Hepburn) from her very soon-to-be-wed fiancee.]
Director Billy Wilder attempted a remake with a third film version: The Front Page (1974) with Jack Lemmon (as Hildy Johnson) and Walter Matthau (as Walter Burns). It was again remade (with the same gender twist, but newspapers were updated to a TV news environment) as Switching Channels (1988) by director Ted Kotcheff, with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the lead roles.
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks
b.
d.
Howard Hawks was born into a wealthy and well-connected Midwestern family who migrated to
Working steadily as a producer and scenarist in the first half of the 1920s at
What is especially noteworthy about Hawks is the sheer range of films he made. He worked in virtually every conceivable genre but, more remarkably, he left his characteristic mark on so many of them. Far from being hemmed in by genre conventions, Hawks was able to impress upon these genre films his own personal worldview. It is essentially comic, rather than tragic, existential rather than religious, and irreverent rather than earnestly sentimental. Among the genres Hawks enriched with his contributions: the Western (Red River [1948], Rio Bravo [1959], El Dorado [1967]); the screwball comedy (Twentieth Century [1934], Bringing Up Baby [1938], His Girl Friday [1940], Man's Favorite Sport? [1963]); film noir (The Big Sleep [1946]); the historical epic (Land of the Pharaohs [1955]); the musical comedy (A Song is Born [1948], Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1953]); science fiction and horror (The Thing [1951]); the combat film (Air Force [1943], The Dawn Patrol [1930]); the biopic (Sergeant York [1941]); the adventure film (The Big Sky [1952], Hatari! [1962]); the gangster film (Scarface [1932]); the racing film (The Crowd Roars [1932], Red Line 7000 [1965]); the prison film (The Criminal Code [1931]); the aviation film (Ceiling Zero [1936], Only Angels Have Wings [1939]). This generic diversity was matched by other significant contemporaries (Ford and Hitchcock did indeed make films other than Westerns and thrillers, respectively), but Hawks benefited from being able to avoid 'typing' himself as one kind of director, and therefore was able to move across genres. Irregardless of what genre he was working in, Hawks played around with gender conventions without ever absolutely undermining them, so that (to take just one example) the representation of 'effeminate' men occurred in films as generically different as Scarface and Bringing Up Baby. Yet gender play enabled Hawks to give his films the same kind of wry tonality.
This carnivalesque world of inversion and role reversal is most obviously expressed by the large number of nicknamed characters in many of his most characteristically 'Hawksian' works. There is little or no reverence for the traditional family in Hawks' work; even names given to characters at birth have little permanence. Some of the most distinctive films Hawks made just kinda lope along in an episodic way (Hatari!,
Recognising nicknames in his films enables us to also recognise how much Hawks' films refuse or counteract, as Robin Wood wrote in 1981, the dominant ideology espoused by most Hollywood studio product. That is to say, as Wood puts it: "capitalism, the right to ownership; the home, the family, the monogamous couple; patriarchy. . ." (1) Between men, nicknaming is frequently the overt articulation of complex and fraught processes of male bonding, enabling the integration of an inexperienced male character into a group by his more experienced, and previously integrated, elders. In effect, the renaming serves as a kind of baptism into a masculinist world which would otherwise denigrate his real name, and hence identity, as 'effeminate'-as happens with Alan Bourdillon Traherne (James Caan) in
In Only Angels Have Wings, the greatest of Hawks' aviation films, Cary Grant's "Poppa" is the boss of the much older Kid (Thomas Mitchell), whose adoration of his taciturn employer exemplifies the frequent role inversions or role reversals in Hawks' films. It is probably likely that Hawks learned the value of nicknaming in his aviation career during the First World War-the renaming among aviators is still a testament to the men's desire to inhabit carefully constructed quasi-mythic romantic narratives. In aviation, nicknames are an essential component of the mystique of flight. And Hawks' films most directly centred upon aviation (Ceiling Zero, Only Angels Have Wings, The Thing, Air Force) are also the films that have the greatest abundance of nicknames. But the glamour inhering in nicknames in what are essentially male romance narratives translates to other masculinist genres, especially the Western.
Certainly women are nicknamed in Hawks' films to indicate that they, too, have gained acceptance by men in groups on masculinist terms-they shed their conventional gender identities as passive, domestic, and feminine to become 'Hawksian women' who are involved in male formations and institutions in something more than just peripheral roles. The Hawksian woman's nickname signifies her status as a person permitted to join the men, if not on equal terms, then at least on terms that grant her something other than traditionally subordinate status. For example, Hatari!'s Anna Maria D'Allessandro (Elsa Martinelli) spares the Americans at the Kenyan animal farm the challenge of twisting their clumsy tongues around her 'foreign' name and she ingratiates herself with them by telling them that it's just fine to call her "
Hawks' distinctiveness as a filmmaker is apparent when comparing the Steve and Slim of To Have and Have Not with the Harry Morgan and Marie (renamed Lucy) in Michael Curtiz's version of Hemingway's novel in The Breaking Point (1950). A straighter rendition of the literary source, Curtiz's film has none of the 'fun' of Hawks' insolent, innuendo-laced classic, and glum Harry and Lucy are stuck with those names. It's a dour film noir, with a more frustrated, thwarted Harry Morgan enacted with more existential pain by John Garfield. Lucy is a sexless housewife whose one attempt to remake herself by dying her hair blonde is a domestic catastrophe. While To Have and Have Not hews closely to Hawks' own characteristic plain vanilla style (eye-level camera privileging dense formations of actors in the frame), Curtiz's film is frequently composed of characteristically expressionistic close-ups of individuals, shot from a low angle with wide-angle lenses, making Harry's conflicts torturously claustrophobic. "A man alone ain't got no chance," he intones repeatedly in his delirium at the end of the film. True enough, but Hawks' male protagonists understand that without going through such isolated agony. And, most notably, Curtiz's film abides by standard
Therefore, if To Have and Have Not can stand as a prototypical Hawksian work, it's easy to pose it in antithesis to the work of many, if not most, American film directors. Hawks created a remarkably consistent popular body of work which promised freedom from constraints posed by organised religion, traditional family structures, and the vicissitudes of history and politics, or even nationalistic myth-making. It's a body of work that has been accused of ahistorical and adolescent escapism, but Hawks' fans rejoice in his oeuvre's remarkable avoidance of
© David Boxwell, May 2002
Endnotes:
Filmography
Films directed by Hawks:
The Road to Glory (1926) (and Story, Prod)
Fig Leaves (1926) (and Story, Prod)
The Cradle Snatchers (1927)
Paid to Love (1927) (and Prod)
A Girl in Every Port (1928) (and Story, Prod)
Fazil (1928)
The Air Circus (1928) (primarily a silent film, with some sound sequences, directed by Lewis Seiler)
The Dawn Patrol (1930) (and Story [uncredited], Co-scr)
The Criminal Code (1931) (and Co-prod)
Scarface (subtitled: Shame of a Nation) (1932) (and Co-Prod)
The Crowd Roars (1932) (and Story)
Tiger Shark (1932)
Today We Live (1933) (and Prod)
The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) (uncredited Dir, completed by W.S. Van Dyke)
Viva Villa! (1934) (Co-scr and uncredited Dir; completed by Jack Conway)
Twentieth Century (1934) (and Prod)
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Ceiling Zero (1936) (and Co-Prod)
The Road to Glory (1936)
Come and Get It (1936, film completed by William Wyler)
Bringing Up Baby (1938) (and Prod)
Only Angels Have Wings (1939) (and Story, Prod)
His Girl Friday (1940) (and Prod)
The Outlaw (1940) (uncredited; completed by Howard Hughes)
Sergeant York (1941)
Ball of Fire (1941)
Air Force (1943) (and Co-Prod)
Corvette K-225 (1943) (film credited to Richard Rosson; Co-scr, Prod and Dir Supervision)
To Have and Have Not (1944) (and Prod)
The Big Sleep (1946) (and Prod)
Red River (1948) (and Prod)
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A Song is Born (1948)
I Was a Male War Bride (
The Thing (subtitled: From Another World) (1951) (film credited to Christian Nyby; Co-scr, Prod, and Dir Supervision)
The Big Sky (1952) (and Prod)
O. Henry's Full House (1952) (episode: "The Ransom of Red Chief")
Monkey Business (1952)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) (musical numbers directed by Jack Cole)
Land of the Pharaohs (1955) (and Prod)
Hatari! (1962) (and Prod)
Man's Favorite Sport? (1963) (and Prod)
Red Line 7000 (1965) (and Prod)
