Heroes, old and new: "The Assassin", "Karski" and "Bridge of Spies", screened in Los Angeles

All the roads lead to Rome. That is, one way or the other, filmmakers come to Los Angeles as in a pilgrimage. What could be more interesting than viewing the latest work of three disparate directors and hear them talk about the challenges and joys of bringing their films from idea to screen – all in three consecutive days?

It all began with Hou Hsiao-Hsien at the UCLA film school, on Thursday, October 15.It was part of the Taiwanese filmmaker’s whirlwind tour of New York and Los Angeles, to promote the release of his (phenomenal) martial arts film The Assassin, Hou’s first picture in eight years, and Taiwan’s submission for best foreign film in 2015.

 Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, one of the sponsors of the event, introduced the film as an example of Hou’s deftly weaving of humanism and lyricism in the recreation of China past and present. I was enchanted by the film’s fragmented and tactile exploration of how an enigmatic killer becomes humanized by seeing her designated victims as parents of children and metaphorically, overseers of larger communities. It’s one individual’s journey to an understanding of shared humanity. The intricacies of Chinese history ten centuries ago may elude this viewer, but the “transcendental style in film” once discussed by Paul Schrader shines through silk screens, wuxia swordplay, elegant pictorialism and unhurried long takes. What percolates in The Assassin is a sense of beauty that ties nature with the everyday – a similar effect, I thought, to the one created by Yoji Yamada in his samurai trilogy of the early 2000s.  In this rejection of violence as a political methodology, Hou goes beyond the boundaries of China, historical and contemporary, while asserting that the individual, a subject with moral autonomy, matters.

After the screening, Hou recounted to the audience his long-standing interest in the history and literature of the Tang dynasty, which he got to explore in college. He felt it was now or never to make his first wuxia film, working from thoroughly researched sources to stage a story, set in the 9^th century, that looked and ‘felt’ the time period. He shot in celluloid, using natural light, guiding the acting and delivery of the actors to evoke a bygone but real era, grounded in the portrait of emotions and the subjective. As if it needed explanation, the director said that his personal philosophy is ‘do not kill. T he photo taken by my friend and colleague Vivian Umino captures a thoughtful director talking to attentive film students.  An afternoon to remember.

The following day, Friday, October 16, the CSUN Cinematheque hosted an event organized by the Polish Film Festival of Los Angeles.  The film screened was Karski (2014), written and directed by Magdalena Lazarkiewicz, the sister of Agnieszka Holland, seen in the photo on the left.

Made on a small budget for Polish television, Karski is a gem of a film, a blend of fiction and documentary like Warsaw Uprising (2014, directed by Jan Komasa) equally powerful and refreshing in its use of archival material.  It tells the story of Jan Karski, the hero of the Polish Underground in WWII, who brought a first-hand account of the Holocaust to the governments of Great Britain and the United States. 

Jan Karski was also the subject of Claude Lanzmann’s The Karski Report, of 2010, which the director of Shoah put together from materials compiled but not used in his landmark documentary series of 1985. He gives an interesting profile of Karski, then a professor of political science at Georgetown university, in his memoir The Patagonian Hare  (2012). 

Lazarkiewicz’film devised a fictional frame: two young directors, formerly a couple, have been commissioned to make a television documentary on Jan Karski, and are trying to figure out the way to do it. Inside this plot device unfold two distinctive documentary strands:  archival materials on the Polish war hero, and the reenactments of key scenes with an actor playing Karski as an underground emissary: interrogation by brutal Nazi officer, meetings with Polish Jewish leaders and a visit to the Warsaw ghetto, laced with heart-breaking archival footage.  The narrative advances by jumping back and forth from the fictional frame to the documentary threads in surprisingly effective ways. The film changes the color palette, aspect ratio and camera style, and foregrounds self-reflexive techniques. 

 Very quickly we realize we are in 8 ½ territory – a film about the making of a film, where one mirrors the other in its gestation and development. But we are also treated to a Polish Citizen Kane – explicitly alluded to, with self-deprecating humor: Who is Karski?  To this is tacked a historical question, with moral urgency: How relevant are Karski and his message today?  This provides the bridge to connect WWII Polish matters to the political landscape of the country today, marked by the reemergence of nationalism.  Important films about the Holocaust are referenced as well, like Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List and Agnieszka Holland’s recent In Darkness.  This self-reflexive work cannot be encapsulated by a single term: it is neither a documentary nor a fiction film, or even their unproblematic intersection, as Bill Nichols studies in Introduction to Documentary.

Magdalena Lazarkiewicz, a blonde petite like her sister, engaged in a lively conversation with the film students about the formal challenges presented by the subject matter.  She acknowledged a great admiration for Jan Karski, voicing this through the female director in the film. The lack of budget pushed Lazarkiewicz and a close group of collaborators – including her son who scored it  - to make do with three locations, spurring their creativity.  The constraints of Karski-the-film (and those suffered by the actual historical character in German-occupied Poland) mirror those of the filmmaker (even though, as she noted to a curious student, the film was tightly scripted, allowing for dialogue improvisations only during the rehearsal period).

The ending of Karski is particularly moving: after a sequence of violence against squatters in the fictional framing device, that convincingly mixes newsreel footage with a verité-style staging of the action, we see the real Jan Karski in Yad Vashem, the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem.  He proudly proclaims his identity, shaped by the storms of the twentieth century in Europe: “Jan Karski … a Catholic, a Pole, an American, from now on also an Israeli. Gloria, gloria in excelsis Deo.

 An unexpected contrast and complement to Karski was the showing of Bridge of Spies, Spielberg’s foray into the Cold War era, at the Samuel Goldwyn theatre of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, on Saturday, October 18.  The director, the writer Matt Charman, and the production and costume designers came in after the film to discuss it with a young writer from Entertainment Weekly, who was well prepared and kept things moving until 11pm.  From the front row we could see Spielberg, in jacket, tie and athletic shoes, sporting an Apple watch, warmly discussing the film with his collaborators. 

Like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich and Lincoln, Bridge of Spies tells the  story of an individuals who stands up for what is right, against all odds, following his conscience.  He is not, however, a simple, uncomplicated hero. He is made of the stuff of Western heroes magnificently explored by Ford and Hawks, with whom Spielberg has been carrying a conversation for many years. Tom Hanks is James Donovan, the Irish-American lawyer from Brooklyn that reluctantly agrees to defend Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy played by Mark Rylance (how not to be nominated for his performance of a lonely but steely man who has seen it all?).  A former counselor at the Nuremberg trials, Donovan believes in American exceptionalism, standing up for due process and the law.  What makes the descendants of disparate nationalities Americans, he argues, is the “rule book” called the Constitution.  With this patriotic message in place, Donovan becomes a modern John Wayne  - ‘some things a man just can’t get around’. Donovan is a reluctant hero who comes to admire the resolve of the spy.  And like in Schindler’s List , there is an increasing perception of humanity in the antagonist, however opaque his motivations remain.

The opening sequence is a lesson for our film students: Rudolf Abel is shown three times, simultaneously: himself, his reflection on a mirror and as the subject of the portrait he is touching up.  Voilà the question, asked in purely visual terms: what is a spy? 

The most gripping scenes take place in Berlin, in the spectacular reconstruction of the building of the Wall – which began in summer 1961, but moved here to a bitter winter. The sets were reconstructed in Poland, and the cold seems for real, and so does the cold of Tom Hanks, who like E.T. says time and again that he wants to go home. The drama of the Cold War on individuals and families is played out dramatically – recalling Aristotle’s observation that poetry is more truthful that history.  The brief wordless moment when Donovan observes people shot trying to climb the wall towards the West is mirrored in the last scene when kids playing in Brooklyn, seen from the subway, jumping over fences, undisturbed.

The film takes a turn towards the absurd with the deft intervention of the Coen brothers in the screenplay:  their brush strokes bring in, updated, the zany comedy of Billy Wilder’s Eins Zwei Drei  - referenced in the marquee of a theater in the reconstructed Checkpoint Charlie - especially in the scenes involving the separate negotiations between Donovan, the Soviets and the East Germans.  Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is present in that same marquee, and also in the absurd and sharp dialogue of the Berlin scenes.  Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, another spy thriller, is shyly in the shadows, as is The Spy who Came in from the Cold, two classic Cold War era films that unfold in Berlin.

he film takes a turn towards the absurd with the deft intervention of the Coen brothers in the screenplay:

Spielberg and the young British writer who pitched him the story and was hired to write the screenplay discussed the research and casting process.  Particularly touching was the involvement of Donovan’s son in rounding the profile of a hero whom the writer discovered as a footnote in WWII and Cold War era books.  Spielberg brought into the conversation his own father, who fought also fought in the war and was fond of saying to a young Steven growing up in Phoenix in the 1960s: “We are going to win this war [the Cold War] because we have a better conversation”.  When the director mentioned that Spielberg senior was turning 99 next month, the audience clapped warmly. 

Looking for common threads this past weekend, one comes to mind very quickly: these three films, the result of different sensibilities and cultures, have in common an inquiry about the nature of heroism, and the many connections that tie the historical context of these heroes – a woman in the 9^th century, two men in the 20^th - to the present times. All three, with various styles and narrative strategies, show us heroes that come to their mission as a result of curve balls. And it is all done with the milk of human kindness.

The weekend turned out to be one where unexpectedly all kinds of film connections were made.  Perhaps it would be better to say, like Flannery O’Connor, that ‘everything that rises must converge’.