Archeological dig: Susan Oliver … Susan who?

I didn’t grow up in the U.S., but we did watch a lot of American TV shows in Buenos Aires:  our favorites in the 60s were El hombre del rifle, Randall el justiciero, Bonanza, Los Beverly ricos,  La ley del revolver, Bat Masterson, Annie Oakley, Rin Tin Tin, Father Knows Best, El Zorro, Aventuras en el paraiso, all of them shown in the afternoon.  We were too young to watch the evening series: Los defensores, El fugitivo, Perry Mason, Ben Casey, Dr. Kildaire, Los intocables, La dimension desconocida, Ruta 66, 77 Sunset Strip, La caldera del Diablo.  We only knew their titles in Spanish, and since they were dubbed in Spanish too, we could not practice the English learned in school every morning.  My sisters and I have fond recollections of these shows; we can still hum their catchy tunes: “Tombstone territory …” was a favorite, as was the music imitating galloping horses in .

Bonanza

All this to say that we did not know the names, lives and gossip associated with these American television stars.  So it’s not a surprise that I have no recollection of the name and beautiful features of one interesting lady, Susan Oliver.  Her IMDb credits run several pages –127 entries listing guest roles in these and many other series, from the 1960s to the 80s.   You can quickly sketch a familiar story: one of those young actresses coming from New York to Los Angeles; a contract with Warner Bros; a few roles in features (she’s the cohort of Yvette Mimieux, Angie Dickinson and Eva-Marie Saint), a passage through the directing workshop a the AFI, some TV directing and death of cancer at 58.  The jump into stardom – at the tail end of the studio system in the fifties - never materialized.  One is reminded of her story watching the recent and ultimately heart-breaking Academy-award documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, a beautiful portrait of back-up singers whose solo careers never pan out.

Susan Oliver, the stage name of Charlotte Gercke (1932-1990), is the subject of a fascinating documentary by George A. Pappy Jr., one of my students in the MA in Screenwriting at Cal State Northridge a few years ago.  This is George’s third feature-length film, and his first documentary.  It deserves the best of luck, including a theatrical release and a solid cable life, besides DVD and VOD releases.  It makes you laugh and cry, and ponder the price life exacts on your dreams and aspirations, and how a good or bad choice (its nature becoming obvious in hindsight) can change one’s course. 

A triumph of research, clip choices and editing, the documentary combines two threads, the biographic and the historic, involving thirty years of film and television, from the 50s to the 80s.     Utilizing archival materials, including family photos and memorabilia found on E-Bay, and well chosen talking heads, ranging from family, friends and experts, the director – who also wrote and produced the documentary – structures the story in  Kane narrative around a mystery: who was Susan Oliver? (I asked some friends, very knowledgeable about American popular culture, and they couldn’t quite place her.  They did recall the sexy Green Girl of the title, the character Vina in a two-part episode of the first season of Star Trek (1966-69).  

The audience builds an image of this classy blue-eyed blonde, with a raspy voice, by combining multiple perspectives, all of them with something interesting to comment.   Each case is nicely – and sometimes very cleverly – illustrated by a myriad film and TV clips – from Butterfield 8 (1960) and The Disorderly Orderly (1964) to series everybody my age watched in American television growing up.  

The ‘Rosebud’ of this film is a poignant line from a friend: “She was a square that did not fit into the circle”. The wisely placed emotional climax of the film is the actress’ last phone message, a tacit and elegant farewell to life, acknowledging its joys and sorrows.  (I may not have been the only one wiping off  a tear …)

The Green Girl is also a case study on how to handle a film biography, sifting through massive materials – in this case 80 hours of television series, some better preserved than others – and looking for thematic tie-ins. Even though there is no narrator, the way the film has been edited allows for a clear understanding of Oliver’s life and times, with the best lines from the interviewees pushing the story forward.  Editor Amy Glickman Brown, a graduate from the Tisch School of the Arts, should take all the credit, the director noted in the Q&A after the film, shown in the Royal Laemmle, West Los Angeles, on Saturday March 15.  She handled vast materials, with various sound and visual quality issues, creatively and in a mere ten-week period.  The music is by Lyle Workman, an accomplished musician and a relative of Susan Oliver; it showcases the dramatic essence of the story, that of an actress born ten years too late – she arrives in Hollywood when the studio system is collapsing – or ten years too early – before women started to be more visible behind the camera.

George Pappy, who financed The Green Girl with Kickstarter and Indigogo campaigns, joins the ranks of directors/producers who become their own distributors in the digital age. He plans to attend the market at the Canadian International Documentary Festival next month in Toronto, and is working on a VOD release by the summer. 

In the cyber world, the way to know more about this film is by clicking on the following links:        http://www.thegreengirlmovie.com/

http://www.facebook.com/GreenGirlMovie

Someone in HBO documentaries should be paying attention to a work that could smartly complement their recent showing of Love, Marilyn, a well-known story unconventionally told by Liz Garbus.

Before the flood: Noah reaches the screen

Before the (film) flood: biblical hero or a conflicted superhero?

 The case of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, to be released in the U.S. at the end of March, can be tackled from at least two different but complementary perspectives. 

One is the numbers’ perspective.  It is related to the stunning box-office success of The Passion of the Christ in 2004, that opened the door to projects interested in capturing that same massive audience, which in the US can be characterized as Christian, conservative, evangelical.  The film’s success was also linked to an innovative marketing campaign that connected with a mass audience intimately familiar with the story.  Subsequent films did not yield the box-office the studios had expected, like The Nativity Story (2006).  Noah is going after the audience that responded warmly to Mel Gibson’s
film.

The other perspective has to do with storytelling and poetic license – the esthetic approach. Noah is one of the great heroes of the Hebrew Scriptures, together with Moses and David.  They can - and have - received the ‘hero’ treatment in the Hollywood tradition of the great spectacles.  Cecil B. De Mille’s two versions of Moses in The Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956) are emblematic of this treatment: the films offer a ‘literal’ approach to story and characters, using cutting-edge special effects at the time.  The 1950s and 60s biblical epics function the same way, by treading on a familiar territory – whether historical in the films about Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), or imaginative fictionalizations, like Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953) and Ben-Hur (1959).  Biblical stories go back to the beginnings of Hollywood, with D.W.Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), which makes the teachings and Passion of Christ the moral linchpin of the film.

In my opinion, this literal approach – which also implies a biblical interpretation traditionally agreed upon by the Jewish and Christian faithful – also coincided with the shared moral and cultural landscape, rooted in Judeo-Christian values, in place until the fractures of the 1960s.   There is no such shared consensus today.  That’s why a film such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) was polemical:  it proposed a radical interpretation of the human side of the Lord, an ordinary man without a mission, and Saint Paul as a political operator.  The transcendental dimension of Christ, the Son of God, did not exist.

According to what I have read, Noah offers not only a non-traditional interpretation, but also a modern context and agenda - the environment and overpopulation – that may err on the side of secularism, putting a question mark on the religious dimension of the story.  Painting Noah as a conflicted hero, along the lines of the recent Batman, Superman and Thor, will not endear the film to audiences with set expectations about story, character and above all, meaning.

This Noah seems more pitched at the youth quadrant – The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Avatar folks – with its state-of-the art special effects and self-doubting superheroes.

There might be a disconnect between the faith-based audience Paramount studios wants to reach, and a film that is primarily an epic struggle of survival and family.  The parallel with last year’s World War Z is relevant, since before this expensive film opened, its potential box-office success was a big unknown for Paramount.

Personally, I am intrigued by the handling of Noah’s story, a topic that is integral to the larger story of God’s covenant with humankind – at the Judeo-Christian heart of the Western civilization.  I am also curious to see if the film understands Noah – if not literally, as director Aronofsky has noted – as an emblematic human figure engaged in a personal relationship with a God who created us to his image and resemblance.  

The 64th Berlinale: Mitteleuropa makes a comeback

Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.  Martin Scorsese *

Voila a heartfelt explanation about the pull of movies.  I have been coming to the Berlin Film Festival since 1985, and every year I land at Tegel airport with the same sense of excitement.  Politics, history, the state of European affairs, friendships, have always been ingredients in the mix. But the lure of flickering lights in the darkness of a theater has never abated.

This giant beanstalk growing into the February skies of a big city has already taken me to intriguing places, worlds and characters that I have enjoyed exploring, mightily enhanced by that library of Alexandria called the IPad.

A few thought about the films in competition.

Providing the star wattage for the red carpet of the opening night on February 7 was the quirky Wes Anderson’s historical fantasy The Grand Budapest Hotel. Recreating the Mitteleuropa of Berlin, Vienna and Prague, that nourished the filmmakers, painters, composers that we teach in film classes – Herr Lubitsch in Hollywood, then Ophuls and Wilder and those exiles in Los Angeles – Anderson finds inspiration in Stefan Zweig.  A Proust moment for me, because my grandmother loved the work of this Austrian; and I remember vividly her discussing his memoir, The World of Yesterday (1942), about the collapse of a cultural and artistic mindset. The Grand Budapest Hotel is both a wink to the shipwreck of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the winds of two wars (yes, all stereotypes are there) and a valentine to classical Hollywood. But the sensibility –the mix and match, the plot, the visual style, the exaggerations – is post-modern and a tad obvious. Wes Anderson can only recreate the world of Central Europe Lubistch so lovingly replicated in the Los Angeles lots. Or to say it differently, the sets of The Shop around the Corner look more Hungarian than the production design possibilities offered by Babelsberg, the former UFA studios south of Berlin.  The movie provides for a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney with a knockout cast of veteran comedians, is mostly a WWII comedy about the team of art historians put together to salvage and recover artwork from German and eventual Soviet plunder. (The first account of these thrilling adventures I read was The Rape of Europa and a subsequent documentary a few years ago).   It’s a strange picture (there was a quick boo in the press screening I attended), structured around a series of anecdotes – mostly funny, some tragic, with a dash of thwarted romance involving a stiff Cate Blanchett and a straight arrow Matt Damon as a Met curator. One can see the time-honored conventions of the WWII films from the 1940s to the 70s – the thrilling ones like The Longest Day, and the silly ones, such as The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes – in the handling of a group of men initially mismatched to the task.  The best moments are the interaction of Bill Murray and Bob Balaban, and all the appearances of John Goodman. Lacking the brilliant savagery of Inglorious Basterds, or the poignancy of Saving Private Ryan, The Monuments Men is a divertimento, fun to watch.  The book and documentary are much more gripping, as the b&w photos of the real men shown over the credit sequence imply.  Can’t wait to read the copy I bought at the Filmmuseum, on the flight home.

The German entry Beloved Sisters was another crowd pleaser.  Directed by the veteran Dominik Graf as a three-hour television miniseries, the story centers around a young Friederich Schiller and his relationship with two sisters, one of which he married while the  other became his biographer.  It’s a fictionalized account based on historical speculation – the director discussed it in the press conference – about the romantic triangle entangling the literary giant, over thirteen years until his death at age 45.   German television has the resources, the talents and the craft to recreate daily life in Weimar and the countryside in the late eighteenth century, on location, making the conflicts believable.  It’s Jane Austen auf Deutsch – great costumes, an intriguing conflict, and excellent dramatic writing.  I can’t help but think that if we were in the 1950s, a young Truffaut would have vilified this ‘tradition de qualite’.  I would have paid no attention to this malcontent’s comments.

* Martin Scorsese, “The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema”, The New York Review of Book, 15 August 2013.  I’ve uploaded it on my class website, http://www.csun.edu/~med61203/

 ______________

On German styles

 German presence in the competition section of the Berlinale has been – for my money – unusually strong this year.  Two were my favorites.

Quite a splash – on a formal and thematic level – was created by Kreuzweg (Via Crucis) an austere theological drama directed by Dietrich Bruggemann and co-written with his sister Anna.  The filmmaker and his sibling – young, blond, on the casual side of things – came up with a stunning piece of filmmaking, probing a radical understanding of sacrifice and the communion of saints within a Catholic frame of reference.  Out of left field.  Like Kieslowski’s modern-day take on the Ten Commandments, the Bruggemann siblings link the 14 Stations of the Cross – a particularly Catholic and moving Holy Week tradition reliving Our Lord’s journey to a criminal’s death – to a modern day young girl’s decision to offer her life so that her baby brother can be cured.  

Each of the stations is one long take, some fifteen minutes long, and all except three with a stationary camera.  In the meticulously staged movement of the characters – driving a car, at the dinner table, in a doctor’s office, a church and a hospital – the film lays out the theological groundwork in the form of exacting conversations between the protagonist - aptly or obviously named Maria – and the priest preparing her for Confirmation (Florian Stetter, the Schiller of Beloved Sisters) and her iron-steeled mother.  Operating from fundamentalist premises, these two figures of authority are gauging a battle for the soul of a kid who longs for beauty and goodness and is struggling to get there.

The correspondence between the suffering of Christ and the Via Dolorosa of this young girl is made terrifyingly explicit in the titles of each episode.  Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest becomes an indispensable reference since the literary original and the film adaptation are also examining questions of mercy and grace – the two unspoken issues at play in Kreuzweg – none of which grows in the hearts of the adult antagonists, who live their faith from an arid platform of duty.  Unlike Bunuel, who went for the jugular in Nazarin, showing how a Christian living the Gospel to the extreme should behave, Kreuzweg describes how the lack of radical joy and openness to the other  – the message perhaps that most identifies Cardinal Bergoglio since becoming Pope Francis last March - leads to spiritual starvation. 

What is a fecund way to live the faith, the Bruggemann siblings seem to be asking when all has come to an end.  Their response is theologically opaque; no hopeful plunge into  “Tout est grace”, like Diary of a Country Priest.  And from a cinematographic viewpoint, the Bruggemanns also look through a glass, darkly:  a slow crane shot rises to a gray sky from the tomb where Maria has been laid to rest.  A hint, perhaps, that the sacrifice has been accepted and the mysterious workings of grace have saved the soul. In the upward mobility of the camera may be hidden the response.

Another approach to cinematic language is at play in Zwischen Welten (Inbetween Worlds), a no-nonsense film by Feo Aladag.  You wouldn’t know by the name that you are dealing with a cool beautiful blond, with a Ph.D. and an acting career, who spent two months last year in Afghanistan with a small crew, including a superb female cinematographer, illustrating the drama contained in the title.  One could be tempted to describe her as a Germanic Kathryn Bigelow exploring a male universe unhinged by violence. But Ms. Aladag’s Sturm und Drang is of a different nature.  The film is an effectively built counterpoint between a young Afghani translator (Mohsin Ahmady) and the German commander (Ronald Zehrfeld) of a small German unit in charge of helping the local militia defend their village from Al-Qaeda.  This interaction succeeds on a dramatic and psychological level because Aladag quietly pursues a documentary-style strategy - location shooting, extensive use of real time, extensive research– that pays on handsomely by creating a Middle Eastern world alien to the Europeans and fraught with danger for an Afghani who works for the occupying forces.  On the German side of the equation, the film doggedly explores the conflicting demands of duty and humanity, of following orders and obeying the conscience; on the Afghani, the translator’s unreachable goals of a safe, stable world (his visa requests for Germany and the US keep getting rejected) ultimately lead to tragedy. 

Interestingly, Zwischen Welten eschews both the blunt political commentary and the melodramatic temptations of effects-laden context-free war films like The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty (there is a space for these works, I know).  It’s a film worth watching.