In Which We Are The Only Shadow You Need Concern Yourself With

Tim Burton Was Dead Already

by DICK CHENEY

Dark Shadows
dir. Tim Burton
113 minutes

Dark Shadows cost $150 million dollars, which is about as hard to itemize and account for as the budget of the Pentagon. If that really is how much a film set basically in one, dark decrepit mansion cost to make, then Michelle Pfeiffer potentially received a career encompassing honorarium totalling $69 million, since there is nothing in this movie that suggests that even an ounce of care went into it.

Tim Burton obviously never got his hands on a Hollywood memo that originated in the late 1980s from the office of Robert Towne, Syd Field or Robert McKee. I can reconstruct it almost from memory.

Dear Everyone,

Guys. Writing to let you know that one level of irony is no longer enough.

For example: a baseball player is afflicted with a life-threatening disease, but each time he hits a home run he feels a little better. One level of irony.

Same situation, but the baseball player is a woman. $$$$$$

An alien wants to return to his ancestral home planet and enlists the help of children (small adults) to get there. One level of irony.

Same situation, but the alien resembles a Jewish grandmother. $$$$$$

Two levels of irony, guys. (Or three if it's a remake of an old Ronald Reagan movie.)

Carry on.

I'm not even sure the concept of a vampire out of place contains any irony at all by now, although the concept of Michelle Pfeiffer looking like this at the age of 72 is certainly akin to rain on your wedding day, or a free ride when you've already paid.

you know what you have to do

Dark Shadows concerns Barnabas Collins, a lovesick eighteenth century gentleman who employs a witch (Eva Green) as a maid. Envious of the love he offers to another white girl, she enchants the woman to throw herself off a cliff. Barnabas follows in short order, but instead of dying, he just rolls around next to the corpse of the woman he loves. He's immortal, and upset about it for some reason.

Barnabas returns to the seventies and is extremely surprised by modern inventions like the television. Actually, this is the only new development he is alarmed by at all. In fact, it's almost more astonishing how little has changed since 1792. This itself might have been that elusive second level of irony, but this is Tim Burton we're talking about here. The only new thought he's had since Beetlejuice is, we should add the color purple to that.

But no, you say. Surely Johnny Depp couldn't be doing the exact same voice he used for all eleven Pirates of the Carribbean movies and The Tourist? He must have really thrown himself into the role offered by his close friend and goatee groomer! What wouldn't one dark lion do for another, unless the other dark lion was Grover Norquist?

Depp looks to be half asleep for most of Dark Shadows. It's clear he's only really trying when he's involved in a scene with Helena Bonham Carter, who is so much more beautiful than the other women in the cast that it makes absolutely no sense she's treated like an old woman who wants to replenish her body's vitality with undead platelets.

act bad everyone, act bad!

This is Burton's inner sexist at work — he gives people what he thinks they either want or don't want to see it here, because he lacks the human concept of empathy and he's colorblind as fuck. The fact that he would do this to someone he cares about in real life makes the betrayal even more disturbing.

Try to watch the original Dark Shadows on YouTube. It's hard to decide which of the two is worse, although at least the original was at the time presenting a somewhat novel concept. Dark Shadows appeared during the day like any other soap, although by virtue of the fact it was breaking the conventions of the genre, it managed to stand out and garner an audience. Today the concept itself is utterly normal; what would be genre-defying would be to have a movie not about a vampire living in modernity.

Sometimes you have to zig when others zag. Tim Burton left his first wife for Lisa Marie, and then later when he ditched Lisa Marie she auctioned off all his stuff. This was the only time he zigged, and I guess it didn't turn out too well, so he started to take the gothic thing to the extreme and acted like he made it up.

People would be like, "Tim, you know you didn't invent the whole gothic aesthetic, right?" and he would just sob and prepare a maudlin adaptation of The Bob Newhart Show before leaving it during preproduction. Have you ever seen Tim Burton's visual art? Just squint your eyes at a VHS copy of Edward Scissorhands, twist your penis slightly to the right and you'll get the fucking picture.

designing this room alone cost $40 million dollars

Perhaps the most predictable scene in Dark Shadows occurs when Barnabas manufactures some reason to get high with a bunch of young people. A scene where the main character gets high and the camera pans around the circle as in That 70s Show is now a familiar staple of every picture, I think this even happened in the Margaret Thatcher movie I refused to see because Meryl Streep makes me sad about my life. After he exchanges various insights with stoners on a beach, he murders them and drains their bodies of blood. In the theater, this "idea" did not even get a single laugh or chuckle from the audience. You can't murder someone if they're already dead.

OK see you guys later. And don't watch Veep. It's totally unrealistic.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the former vice president of the United States and a writer living in an undisclosed location. He last wrote in these pages about Game of Thrones. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Home by the Sea" - Genesis (mp3)

"That's All" - Genesis (mp3)

The new album from Genesis was tremendous.

In Which We Fall Victim To Gory Seduction

Blown to Bits

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

In the 2009 documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, filmmakers Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea unravel 185 cans of recovered footage from Clouzot’s unfinished project L’Enfer to tell the story of the legendary French director’s attempt to make what he saw as his most important film. Given an unlimited budget by Columbia Studios and inspired by the op art of the ‘60s, Clouzot set out to make a work whose innovation would surpass that of his young New Wave rivals and once again establish him as a pioneering filmmaker.

Serge Reggiani in a scene from L’Enfer

Set in a lakeside resort town, the film is about a jealous husband Marcel (Serge Reggiani) who becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea that his wife Odette, played by Romy Schneider, is cheating on him. It is through Marcel’s visions of his wife's infidelity that Clouzot endeavored to change the visual vocabulary of cinema. The surviving footage is hypnotic and dazzling.

Schneider is captivating. A siren covered in olive oil and glitter, she patiently seduces Clouzot's camera, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke under pulsating blue and yellow lights — a nightmarish vision of sensuality.

Clouzot and his team of special effects engineers spent months conducting camera tests for L'Enfer. The tests sought to construct a world deformed by jealousy — a discomforting one in which the viewer loses his or her spatial bearings. Relying heavily on kinetic sculpture, op art, mod fashions, and repetition of images and phrases, the crew toiled away in experimentation, becoming what one cameraman calls "experts at optical coitus." In palette and tactility, their kaleidoscopic imagery often resembles the gory seductiveness of a Marilyn Minter artwork.

Romy Schneider during a color test for L’Enfer

L'Enfer was never finished. Reggiani quit the project, Clouzot had a heart attack while filming a scene, and the reservoir where the film was set was drained. But these were just the dramatic final blows to a career dogged by fear.

There had always been a sense of foreboding surrounding Clouzot. It started when, at the age of 27, the director was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium. Clouzot spent the next four years of his life reading voraciously and studying story and plot, and confronting the absoluteness of mortality.

After being released from the hospital, Clouzot found that the German occupation and the subsequent flight of France's Jewish filmmakers had left the country's film industry in shambles. However, through a contact from his previous job as a script translator in Berlin, he got work at a Nazi-run studio, the same one that would produce his first two full-length films, L'Assassin Habite au 21 and Le Corbeau.

Le Corbeau

Le Corbeau, released in 1943, is a deeply paranoid film. The psychic terror of the sanatorium and the horror of World War II had moved Clouzot's work in a dark direction. Opening on an anonymous provincial setting, a town’s new doctor begins receiving poison-pen letters denouncing him as an adulterer and abortionist. Soon everyone in town is receiving the letters, spurring forth a fervor of accusations at each other. The local psychologist compares the villagers' rising levels of fear and suspicion to a fever — a metaphor that occurs throughout Clouzot’s work. The French public was outraged over its critique of the bourgeois paranoia and informant culture of the occupation. After the war, Clouzot's work for the German studio got him blacklisted for several years.

Brigitte Bardot in La Verite

Clouzot resented this punishment, having already had his career sidelined by sickness. He made his comeback, though. The director's mastery of suspense and character earned him ranking among France's premier directors of the time. He was referred to as the French Hitchcock — mostly because of his ability to keep audiences guessing and build tension, but also because of his brutal treatment of actors.

If the script had his characters eating rotten fish (as in Diabolique), then they ate it in real life; if his character was getting manhandled by the police (as in Quai des Orfèvres), then Clouzot would slap him around before the next take. In La Verite, when Brigitte Bardot’s character was supposed to have overdosed on sleeping pills, Clouzot slipped her sleeping pills, saying they were aspirin, to get the dazed, drowsy look her character needed. His manipulation at times was sadistic. His first wife, Vera Clouzot, who — like the schoolteacher she played in Diabolique — suffered from a weak heart, was practically worked to death by her husband.

During the filming of Les Espions, Clouzot made Vera film a physically taxing scene of her character’s mental breakdown 48 times only to then use one of the first takes. She died of a heart attack a few years later at the age of 46.

Vera Clouzot with Simone Signoret in Diabolique

Vera was Brazilian, and she and Clouzot traveled to South America for their honeymoon. The trip helped inspire Clouzot to create Wages of Fear in 1953. A white-knuckle thriller trimmed of all unnecessary frills, Wages of Fear takes place in the fictional Venezuelan town of Las Piedras. In it, a group of expatriate men pass their days in the shade of the village's one bar while scheming of ways to make it out of the isolated region. Their big break comes when the Southern Oil Company, an American company in trouble for their exploitation of the native population, decides to hire a few non-union men for $2,000 to drive two trucks stocked with nitroglycerine across the mountains to an inflamed rig that needs the explosives in order to stop the blaze. Selected for the job are friends Mario and Jo in one truck and the caricatured Italian Luigi and Dutch Bimba in the other.

The majority of the film follows the four men as they rely on machismo and prayers to make it across washed-out roads, hairpin turns and petroleum bogs and claim their paycheck.

Wages of Fear

Wages of Fear seems prescient in its ability to foreshadow the career-long consumptive battle, both physical and mental, that led to Clouzot's downfall on the set of L’Enfer. In the film, again fear manifests itself as a physical ailment. Even if the men do manage to complete the journey, the stress of the mission is guaranteed to leave them changed. One prospective driver, a man from the oil fields of Texas who had seen the effects such a trip can have, ominously warns, "Once you have the fear, it's for life. Your hair turns grey and you shake like palsy."

The drivers and an oil company man before their suicide mission

Since leaving the sanatorium, Clouzot had been plagued by insomnia. As in his bedridden days, he used these sleepless nights to work on his movies. Crew members often complained about his habit of waking up them at 2 a.m. to work on the filmmaker’s latest idea. The lack of sleep made his collaborators resentful and it made Clouzot unpredictable and unstable. The anxiety that comes to one in the middle of the night can be insufferable, and it’s easy to imagine that Clouzot spent many of the nights worrying about the ridicule he had been receiving in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma regarding his detail-obsessed filmmaking. It’s a scenario that brings to mind the conversation between elder Jo to the younger Mario during their trek where Jo tells Mario that he lacks fear because he lacks imagination. “I see the explosion; I see myself blown to bits,” says Jo.

Jo (Charles Vanel) and Mario (Yves Montand) contemplate death by nitroglycerine in Wages of Fear

While filming L'Enfer, Clouzot tried to prove that illness could be controlled, that it could be mapped like coordinates on a grid, that “madness could be conceived as an equation.” In the end, what emerges from the documentary is the story of how a master of French cinema was undone by sickness. It tells of Clouzot's eventual defeat, not to the changing style of filmmaking, but to the pathological symptoms that had plagued him since entering adulthood.

Like a cinematic Marie Curie, whose experiments in radioactivity won her Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry but who later died from aplastic anemia brought on by working with the toxic elements, Clouzot became of victim of the emotions — jealousy, fear, paranoia — that, previously, he had expertly manipulated to create the work that made him such a celebrated filmmaker.

Clouzot on the set of L’Enfer

Henri-Georges Clouzot died in 1977 while listening to Hector Berlioz’s "The Damnation of Faust."

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Red Poison" - Sun Kil Moon (mp3)

"Among the Leaves" - Sun Kil Moon (mp3)

Among the Leaves, the new album from Sun Kil Moon, will be released on May 29th and contains seventeen songs all played on nylon string guitar.

In Which Jean Renoir Keeps The Aspidistra Flying

Renoir & Bazin & Godard & Truffaut

by ALEX CARNEVALE

There is a special and essential cachet attached to unfinished books. Despite their incomplete nature, the tomes naturally have an affinity with puzzles or codes, and because of this the texts themselves are often subject to more than one reading. Also because they are not whole, other individuals feel more assertive about adding or subtracting writing from the original, under the supposition that they are putting together the work the way the author imagined. It is this way with Andre Bazin's seemingly innocent 1971 appreciation of his favorite filmmaker, Jean Renoir.

Even Truffaut's introduction to the volume he edited completely obfuscates the book itself. He writes,

No one should expect me to introduce this book with caution, detachment or equanimity. Andre Bazin and Jean Renoir have meant too much for me to be able to speak of them dispassionately. Thus it is quite natural that I should feel that Jean Renoir by Andre Bazin is the best book on the cinema, written by best critic, about the best director.

Andre Bazin, whose health deteriorated year after year, found the strength to look at films and to comment on them until his last day. The day before his death he wrote one of his best essays — the long analysis of The Crime of M. Lange — having watched the film on television from his bed.

Renoir's work excited Bazin more than any other. He was working on this study of his favorite director when he died. His fragmentary manuscript has been reconstructed and completed by his friends with the assistance of his wife, Janine Bazin.

I am responsible for the final organization of the work, for its division into ten chapters approximating the chronological development of Renoir's work. Obviously Bazin would have done it differently if he had had time. I think he intended to devote a chapter to the themes treated by Renoir, another to his work with actors, another to the adaptation of novels.

In one of his last letters, Bazin wrote me,

I am circling around Renoir by reading the life of Augustus, the novels of Zola: La Bete Humaine and Nana, Maupassant... I will eventually have to approach him more directly but I am now at a point where I know either too much or not enough. Too much to be satisfied with approximations, not yet enough to fill in all the variables of his equations.

I am not far from thinking that the work of Jean Renoir is the work of an infallible filmmaker. To be less extravagant, I will say that Renoir's work has always been guided by a philosophy of life which expresses itself with the aid of something much like a trade secret: sympathy.

Before Bazin's book even begins, Jean Renoir weighs in with a foreword of his own:

The more I travel through life, the more I am convinced that masks are proliferating. I have difficulty finding a woman whose face looks as it really is. Our age is a triumph of make-up. And not only for faces, but more important, for the mind as well.

The modern world is founded on the ever increasing production of material goods. One must keep producing or die. But this process is like the labor of Sisyphus. Forgetting Lavoisier's dictum, "In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost; everything is transformed," we convince ourselves that our earthly machines will succeed in catching up with eternity. But to maintain the level of production on which our daily bread depends, we must ever renew and expand our enterprises.

It turns out that Renoir does not know Bazin very well, other than by his little French beret. He struggles with the same problem the author of Jean Renoir has — knowing too much or too little about his subject. For the final version of Jean Renoir is as much an obliteration of its subject as a celebration.

Almost every section of Jean Renoir contains the same blandishment about the director. Each section begins, "Renoir is the greatest living French director" or "Renoir is unmatched" in such-and-such field. This kind of repetition would be the first accessory sacrificed if the author had been alive to revise his work; here they serve as eerie reminders that the admiration is rehearsed.

Nana The second part of Jean Renoir amounts to lame defenses of The River and Paris Does Strange Things, two films that for various reasons seem to have offended Bazin's sense of the cinema in some way. He waves aside his own objections and Truffaut replaces them, in the book's third section, with Renoir's own autobiographical reminiscences of his days as a young, inexperienced directors, film treatments, and interviews.

Renoir writes,

What I know is that I am beginning to understand how one should work. I know that I am French and that I must work in an absolutely national vein. I know also that in doing this, and only in doing this, can I reach people from other nations and act for international understanding.

I know that the American cinema will collapse because it is no longer American. I know too that we must not spurn the foreigners who come to us with their knowledge and talent; we must absorb them. It is a practice which has served us rather well from Leonardo da Vinci all the way to Picasso. I believe that the cinema is not so much an industry as people would have us believe and that the fat men with their money, their graphs, and green felt tables are going to fall on their faces.

Jean Renoir never made another film after Jean Renoir was published. No one would give him the money.

The best part of Jean Renoir is the book's filmography, an appendix in which Renoir's various projects are taken up by a variety of critics and directors. (Truffaut himself writes the majority of them.) These short discussions of the films innovated the concept of a "recap," for they prove that simply describing a cinematic plot reveals vast differences in character and perception. This is most evident in Truffaut's rundown of The Rules of the Game:

The nine principal characters of The Rules of the Game have a sentimental problem to resolve, and since the film shows them on the eve of a crisis, we will see them behave at their worst. The only sincere person — the pilot Andre Jurieu — awkward in an unfamiliar milieu, unleashes a tragicomedy in which he is the only victim, precisely because he has not followed the rules of the game.

Ludicrous skeletons, the characters of The Rules of the Game, viewed at a critical moment in their decay, forsake the farandole ("It's nice but it's a little old-fashioned") for a danse macabre which assaults the senses. For the ostensible purpose of a party, they are led to disguise themselves, which is to say, to take off their masks. The shadows of the masters and servants mingle and merge in an image of a sybaritic life style which cannot last: man is imperfect, he is a born liar, and besides, "If love is endowed with wings, is it not to flutter?" The Rules of the Game is a profoundly pessimistic film, a bitter and prophetic carnival in which friendship itself is exposed as just another empty game.

The word game is used over 200 times in Truffaut's two page description.

game

At some point in any hagiography, the idolatry itself becomes absurd. In Jean Renoir, there is no evidence of insincerity on the part of Jean Renoir's admirers. No doubt he was their very favorite, the person whose artistic work can be credited in part for giving birth to their own, whether it be new movies or essay-length film criticism. But there is also a movement just as strong away from what Renoir has accomplished; it equates to the difference between the sympathy they admire in Renoir and true empathy.

Admiration, especially the deeply ingrained kind, eventually distances the ardor from its subject. The act of writing a book in celebration of their cinematic hero feels like filing him away in history. None of their work would exist without Renoir, Bazin & Godard & Truffaut find themselves admitting, and having said this, they have finished with the man, eight years before he died in Beverly Hills. As Eric Rohmer puts it in his review of Renoir's Madame Bovary, "the roads that lead to art and truth are different, and it is the point where they cross which has always fascinated Renoir. Each perspective is true, each is false. They complement one another."   

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Peter Berg's Battleship. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Supermoon" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3)

"Seraphim" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3)

The third studio album from Simian Mobile Disco, Unpatterns, was released on May 14th.