Lion's Love

 

Director Agnès Varda

LION’S LOVE          B-                                                                                                              aka:  Lion’s Love (…and Lies)                                                                                                        France  USA  (112 mi)  1969  d: Agnès Varda

Actors are like lions.  Indeed, they used to be called lions.                                                      —Agnès Varda, Agnès Varda: Interviews | T. Jefferson Kline | download, edited by T. Jefferson Kline (272 pages), 2014

From a small sample of Varda’s California films, arguably the weirdest film in the Varda repertoire, this is a dated film that doesn’t hold up well over time, where the promoted idealism was passé in the span of a decade, already recycled into new ideas and concepts, yet it is a paean to a golden era referenced in song, “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius,” Hair the Musical - The Age of Aquarius at West End LIVE ... YouTube (2:55).  Using a bunch of transplants from the East coast art scene, Varda creates a time capsule for the 60’s American counterculture when Vietnam and Civil Rights protests dominated the headlines, while taking the country by storm was the anthem-like rock musical Hair, with Varda using the two original Broadway stars in this movie, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who created the music and starred in the original production, while also adding Viva from Andy Warhol’s staple of underground performers.  The 60’s was the era when Andy Warhol became a pop art superstar, creating an environment for free-spirited artists in his New York Factory, making underground films where dozens of Warhol superstars improvised in front of cameras, usually on drugs and often unclothed, where the prominence of nudity was pushing the envelope of social acceptability, usually playing in tiny underground theaters that could barely pass the health codes.  Additionally, there were regular appearances of The Living Theatre, the oldest experimental theatrical group in the country, where their claim to fame was touring college campuses around the country creating scandalous appearances, as inevitably the show would end with all the performers stripping naked, asking audience members to join in, and then they’d march out the theater spilling out into the streets where they would immediately get arrested.  It would be hard to fathom that kind of lewd activity occurring today, but in the late 60’s when this film was made, it would have been hard to miss.  Equally representative of the era was a decade of political assassinations, first with President Kennedy in November, 1963, Malcolm X in February 1965, Martin Luther King in April 1968, and then two months later Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles during his political run for President in June 1968, the same week this film was being shot and in the same town.  Varda was in Los Angeles when her husband Jacques Demy was invited to Hollywood to make MODEL SHOP (1969), an often misunderstood and underappreciated film, with Varda incorporating newsreel footage into this film, where politicans are viewed as particularly wealthy and well-versed actors, who come and go in the nation’s conscience like movie stars from a distant era that fade from memory, recusitated each time we see them again onscreen, gaining resonance with each new generation, as the characters sit around and watch the political tragedy unfold on television, a medium that dominates American life, holding them all transfixed for a brief moment in time.  Like many of Varda’s films, it’s a work about different things all strung together, combining the transience of Hollywood and politics through an intersection of mixed mediums, like surrealist painting, portrait photography, avant-garde theater, experimental film, and television, combining audio and visual, even introducing a few songs, given a Godardian twist for good measure, offering elements of contradictions, exploring what Varda describes as themes of historical truth and lies (television) along with collective mythomania and truth (Hollywood).  The icing on the cake, perhaps, is the presence of independent film director Shirley Clarke making a brief visit to Los Angeles, serving as a stand-in for the director, finding it difficult to raise funds for a new film, “I’m supposed to be making a movie using movie stars as real people,” but it comes with restrictions on the final cut, with the studio insisting upon retaining their rights to make changes, a compromise she’s not willing to make, as she insists on making her own films.  The story was actually a proposed Varda film about American hippies entitled PEACE AND LOVE which was never made, with Varda claiming it might have been easier if she’d compromised, but she would have lost her autonomy and the films would have looked nothing like her own.  “I didn’t have a career,” she reflected recently in an interview, “I made films.  It’s very different.” 

The film takes place in a rented villa in the Hollywood Hills, a very loosely structured film with Viva in a ménage à trois with her two boyfriends offering a reverie on sexual relationships, viewing themselves as the Holy Trinity, each loving the other two in an attempt to expand and redefine the terms of a relationship.  Blending documentary with fiction, the film opens and closes with bits and pieces of Michael McClure’s avant-garde play The Beard, The Beard by Michael McClure - Warholstars (Jim Morrison can be seen in the audience), an imagined fictional confrontation between Jean Harlow (Billie Dixon) and Billy the Kid (Richard Bright) that was viewed at the time as lewdly obscene, with the police bringing obscenity charges that were later dropped, but the playwright and the actors went to jail, while the subject matter generated demonstrations outside the theater by conservatives, and the Los Angeles theater was ultimately burned to the ground.  What’s shown, however, leaves out the crude sexual language and is completely harmless, more of a battle of the sexes, an exaggerated farce veering into a misogynist melodrama.  The use of dolls and puppets mysteriously given voice lead to our human threesome who engage in lighthearted banter throughout the entire movie, all of which feels improvised, so if there was a script it is only a scant outline.  Even Varda intrudes into her own picture, seen behind the camera at one point, referred to directly by Viva, calling her by her first name, heard again in the final scene, even making two brief appearances in front of the camera.  Broken down into equal thirds, the film accentuates a dizzying absurdity to their Southern California lifestyle that borders on comical, with Dr. Pepper the cure for all their ills, yet nearly every attempt at cleverness or originality falls flat on its face, as they each demand to be the center of attention, literally spilling all over themselves to be seen by the camera, mostly behaving like uncontrolled little children, which turns especially detestable when they actually bring in children, stuffing them with candy and sweets and soda, where their permissiveness is pretty sickening, as their full-fledged narcissism couldn’t be more obnoxiously offensive, yet perfectly represents the pot-consuming vacuous airhead culture of Los Angeles, dressed up in a bohemian flair, but feels utterly tiresome, seemingly going nowhere, drudging up empty banalities.  The introduction of Robert Kennedy giving a stirring victory speech the week he won the California Presidential primary, his most significant primary victory, combining progressive anti-war politics with a burgeoning youth movement, boldly awakens the film to a different reality, offering the significance of political promise and its quick demise, as an entire movement was lost with the June 5th assassination of Robert Kennedy.  He provided aspiration and garnered great hope that the Presidential campaign could be re-energized with new ideals and values that were altogether missing from the campaign.  Those dreams died with his abrupt death, offering pictures of yet another televised Kennedy funeral where the stoic family once again shows extraordinary strength and grace, with kind words of condolence offered by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King.  And finally the film offers a nostalgic history lesson of Hollywood, as narrated by Carlos Clarens, a Cuban film historian who takes us through a magical mystery tour of Hollywood, at its birth “an orange grove with breakfast served by the Ritz,” where streets have the name of former movie stars in a town where actors used to be called lions, even an unseen chorus chimes in out of nowhere, viewed through the lens of the Larry Edmunds Bookshop, Book Store | Larry Edmunds Bookshop | United States, which serves as the epicenter for classic movie history in the absence of an existing Hollywood museum, located midway between Hollywood/Vine and Grauman’s Chinese Theater (renamed TCL Chinese Theater), not far from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with a brief cameo by Peter Bogdanovich holding up his own book on John Ford to hide his face.     

From the maker of Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) (1962), made a year earlier than Antonioni’s infamous Zabriskie Point (1970) that showed the radicalization of America, both are European comments on the American youth movement, where even the magazine covers bear a strange resemblance, with Antonioni’s stars gracing the cover of Look magazine while Varda’s appear naked on the first issue of Warhol’s Interview magazine.  The film is basically a series of impressions that are amusingly self-indulgent, combining early elements of the French New Wave with the evolving Underground movement in America, but is short on substance, with suggestions that too much freedom can be just plain irritating, where one character (James Rado) bleakly utters, “There are no messages, only mistakes.”  A recurring theme in the household is waking up in the morning, as they have no shades or blinds, so they cover the window each night with a brightly colored cloth that allows a filtered sunlight to seep through, but someone inevitably rips the cloth down, where an overwhelming burst of sunlight overtakes them in short order, which may be a metaphor for too much light, where their habitual indolence of never leaving the house leads to an all-consuming decadence, hardly the cultural trendsetters they aspire to be.  They frolic in an outdoor pool, with Viva laying naked atop a raft while the two men flirtatiously compete with each other to gain her attention.  It’s mostly silliness, though when the histrionic Viva gets going it’s hard to get a word in edgewise, where they actually have to yell at her to shut up at one point, where their theatrics can be a bit overwhelming, spiraling into anarchy and chaos.  Similarly, when the three of them read The Confessions of Thomas Aquinas, an early autobiographical appeal to convert to Christianity, they literally speak over one another, creating confusion, where all content is lost.  The presence of Shirley Clarke shifts from a stand-in for the director to a fictionalized portrayal, where Varda asks her to portray a director taking an overdose of sleeping pills in a suicide attempt, which she initially refuses to do, forcing Varda herself in front of the camera, but Clarke finally agrees to do the scene, creating a montage of the paramedics coming to rush her to the hospital (where she quickly recovers), coinciding with the June 6th early morning death of Robert Kennedy and a June 3rd assassination attempt on the life of Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas, an unstable member of the Warhol fringe (reports have Viva on the phone with Warhol while having her hair done at the time of the shooting), and after two months in a hospital Warhol recovered from a gunshot wound, but his health deteriorated significantly after that, turning him into an overly frail recluse, dying 19 years later.  The promise of freedom in the hippie peace and love movement just a year or so earlier was undermined and eradicated by America’s right-wing gun violence that simply eliminated the most potent American voices of the left.  The whimsical opening is met by a theme of tragedy and violence, followed by what is arguably the most coherently entertaining aspect of the film, delving into the history of Hollywood with a joyous panache, filled with plenty of Varda color and spectacle, making it her own take on the city she is only temporarily visiting, uniquely blending the mythologies of Hollywood with the American counterculture, ending on Viva in an extended shot that amounts to a Warhol screen test, where even a perplexed Eddie Constantine makes a cameo appearance.  This whole thing is tediously overlong and so frickin’ crazy that it has an endearing quality about it.  There’s a Brechtian aspect of theatrical artificiality, where the German playwright Bertolt Brecht had his own dealings with Hollywood, with well over 200 movie and television writing credits to his name, including THE THREEPENNY OPERA (1931), but his apt description for the industry was a “marketplace of lies.”  When asked to describe what this film is all about, she offers (Agnès Varda: Interviews | T. Jefferson Kline | download), “I could give you twenty different answers that would all be more or less true and more or less limited.  I wanted my film to express two great currents in America:  sex and politics.  The film, which I’d prefer to call a collage, is about:  nostalgia for the stars of yesteryear and, as I’ve already said, the political stars; my attempt to make a film in Hollywood; a certain mysticism, the mysticism of the hippies; Hollywood, the magical city with its typical streets, enormous boulevards and enormous studios; the end of youth since the characters are too old to be hippies, too young to be adults; and contradictions—between political events and private life.”

The Cool World

THE COOL WORLD            A-                   
USA  (105 mi)  1964  d:  Shirley Clarke

There goes Duke, he’s a real cold killer.   
—from the imagination of Duke (Hampton Clanton)

A landmark film, coming on the heels of John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959 – both versions), each set on the streets of New York where the documentary style, cinéma vérité reality brings the city to life in ways never seen before, so vividly depicted that it actually becomes the lead character of the film.  This is a true radical work, however, using an in-your-face experimental style that is never comfortable, where the freewheeling visual style matches the frenetic intensity of the Dizzy Gillespie jazz-driven musical soundtrack, written by Mal Waldron, along with the starkly superficial, plainly dubbed in spots, overlapping, improvised speech patterns of non-professionals that at times suggests the need for subtitles, that might be more representative of the first, rarely seen, entirely improvised, and perhaps more amateurish version of the Cassavetes’ film that fellow avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas preferred.  From the opening shot of a Black Muslim street preacher who doggedly derides and degrades the white man’s place in the world, this is truly something different to behold, especially coming years before the rise of the Black Panthers or any Black Power movement in America, and must have been stunning to behold when it was released.  Made immediately prior to Michael Roemer's Nothing But a Man (1964), among the best American black-themed films ever made, each starring the first two roles of actress Gloria Foster, both films currently in the Library of Congress National Registry, which contains few black films, though both interestingly enough were written by white Jewish men.  Adapted from the novel by Warren Miller, set entirely on the streets of Harlem, the novel was a favorite of Harlem-born author James Baldwin who couldn’t tell if the author was black or white, this film predates Claude Brown’s epic street novel Manchild in the Promised Land, released in 1965, which similarly features young men growing up too fast, told with a lightning speed quickness that provides a visceral, spontaneous feel for the rhythm of life on the streets of Harlem.  

Literally a story about a young teenage boy who wants to buy a gun, thinking this is the way to ensure his young gang will be protected from outside interference, namely other gangs, and where he envisions respect as he passes down the street, until he realizes too late that this is a foolhardy plan.  Instead the film rises and falls on small incidental details of each passing day, where friends meet on the street, or a young street gang meets in a clubhouse, playing music, smoking pot, drinking, and having sex with a girl Luanne, Yolanda Rodríguez in her only screen appearance, brought in as exclusive property of the gang.  The aggressive intensity of the film is mildly offset with nocturnal images of the city set to a smooth jazz score, luminous impressionistic moments of quiet before each day bursts with energy anew.  The oldest gang member Blood (Clarence Williams, later Linc from TV’s The Mod Squad) initially intimidates and manipulates the younger members, but they soon realize he’s rarely around to enforce his gang rules, so Duke (Hampton Clanton) quickly rises to the leadership position, supplanting Blood, who becomes an addict, seen here as the lowliest, most pathetic dregs of the earth.  As the leader, Duke is pestered into providing the game plan for taking out their rival gang, which he assumes will be no problem with a gun, but he can’t raise the $50 bucks needed to buy it from an older gang lord named Priest (Carl Lee, script co-writer, later seen in SUPERFLY [1972]). 

Along the way Duke takes Luanne to the ocean for the first time in her life, as it’s something she’s always wanted to see but never realized it was accessible by subway.  The Coney Island scenes are memorable for the mad rush of energy they provide, where they soon realize there’s a life outside the few city blocks where they live, leaving Duke more hesitant than ever to carry out his own plans of gang revenge.  The aggressive nature of the film will surprise viewers, as will the jarring or at times hard-to-hear overlapping layers of dialogue which were recorded before the era where director Robert Altman specialized in this specific cinema technique.  While Altman reduced the actual words to secondary status, making character the central focus of the film, Clarke’s improvised dialogue provides windows into her various characters, many of whom continue to be introduced as the film evolves.  Duke also has narrated passages that flow over the sea change of street activities captured by Baird Bryant’s highly active camera.  This is nearly a first person, stream-of-consciousness, coming-of-age story that encounters unexpected difficulties each passing day, each of which changes the landscape for this young man, whose future slips farther and farther away from his grasp, instead capable of living only in the present.  By the finale, by the sheer audacity of filmmaking bravado, the audience has lifelong impressions of Harlem that are surprisingly authentic, even when seen 40 years after the film was made.  Of interest, this film was produced by documentarian Frederick Wiseman and working with Shirley Clarke represents his initial entry into the film business.

Ornette: Made in America

Shirley Clarke with Ornette Coleman












Ornette Coleman, William S. Burroughs, and Buckminster Fuller (left to right)

ORNETTE:  MADE IN AMERICA                 B             
USA  (85 mi)  1985  d:  Shirley Clarke

A film twenty years in the making, as Shirley Clarke went over a decade without making any films at all after PORTRAIT OF JASON (1967), initiating a film about jazz with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whom she met in the 60’s through Yoko Ono, but the project floundered until she discovered the video camera in the 80’s, making a few shorts before returning to this film.  Video techniques play a prominent role in the making of the film, as it allows the director to mix and match how she wants to effect the screen image, mixing realistic images with animation and elements of surrealism, creating an otherworldly effect, which matches the endlessly expanding universe that at least partially explains the music of Ornette Coleman.  Seen in the opening sequence receiving an honorary plaque from the mayor and a key (which astronaut Alan Bean had taken to the moon and back) to the city of Fort Worth, his home town, his first hometown appearance in 25 years, the site of a world premiere of his “Skies in America,” a combined jazz and symphonic work utilizing his regular combo along with the Fort Worth Symphony.  In fact, much of the documentary is a recording of this performance which is the centerpiece of the film.  In it we hear Coleman’s free jazz style, which is completely non-melodic, played at such a rapid tempo with such quickly maneuvering improvisation that some are apt to question whether it even qualifies as music.  During the 50’s, other musicians walked off the stage in defiance when he played, some destroyed his instruments, while others physically attacked and beat him, deemed a jazz pariah, and to some an embarrassment, receiving some of the harshest music criticism along with fellow avant garde pioneer, pianist Cecil Taylor.  Both seem to play in abrasive clusters, characterized by an extremely energetic and physically aggressive approach to sound, never allowing it to remain static, but continually challenging the listener’s capability to comprehend.  Even today, more than half a century later, the jury is still out on that.  But this is not the focus of the film, which instead allows his music, and Clarke’s visual style, to continually expand what the audience is used to.

One of the surprises is realizing just how much of Coleman’s music is written composition, similar to filmmaker John Cassavetes, where both are attributed to using an improvisational style of art, yet each carefully compose and scrutinize every note and word ahead of time.  However, neither artist believes it ends there, as they constantly tinker and adjust and rewrite, allowing the work to breathe like a living organism, where it’s never really cemented in time.  Coleman rarely plays jazz standards, concentrating on his own compositions, where there seems to be an endless flow of enormous sound.  Ironically, Coleman’s demeanor is that of a quiet and unassuming man, not at all vain, egotistic or reflective of the assaultive power of his work, where his mind is continually tinkering with new ideas and perceptions, heavily influenced by Buckminster Fuller, an inventor, futurist, and theorist, and also beat writer William S. Burroughs who is seen performing a reading dedicated to Coleman.  Fuller, however, best represents what feels to Coleman like an ever expanding but mathematically ordered universe, where Clarke shoots a string ensemble sequence inside one of his geodesic domes.  Coleman was particularly influenced by Fuller’s view that there was no up or down, but simply the concept of outward, as we are all effected by being inside or outside the gravitational pull, where he has always been driven to push his music outside orthodox realms, like a spaceship breaking through the boundaries of gravity.  Clarke has some fun with animated sequences of Coleman in a sporty The Jetsons style space ship juxtaposed over grainy images of Neil Armstrong’s moon walk.  During these space images, it was hard not to think of equally controversial jazz leader Sun Ra, whose musical mantra was always “Space is the place,” often seen performing in concerts dressed as a space traveler, with the band wearing an equally distinctive science fiction uniform, where he was an ardent believer that avant garde artists took themselves much too seriously.                          

One of the more questionable ideas was using a child actor to play Coleman as a young child, where he wanders alone by the train tracks carrying a saxophone, images which are interjected periodically throughout the film, rather manipulatively reminding us of the roots but also the pathos of poverty.  Some of her other ideas are equally misguided, using abstract expressionist video techniques coinciding with abstract streams of Coleman’s music which have a diminutive rather than enhancing effect.  Somewhat mysteriously, Clarke may actually misunderstand the musical artform, as she accompanies the music with some trippy psychedelic sequences that may have seemed cutting edge at the time, but they’re completely out of synch with the awesome power of Coleman’s music.  Like many greatly misunderstood artists in their youth, Coleman’s refusal to acquiesce to popular tastes led to a reversal of critical opinion, calling him an uncompromising jazz genius later in his lifetime.  Clarke’s film, showing different stages of his career from 1968 to 1983, doesn’t really capitalize on this clamor of support, where Coleman’s innovation clearly outshines that of the film director, who strains to keep up, using quick cuts, some unusual editing, where time moves simultaneously backwards and forwards, never in a traditional linear fashion, which makes this a somewhat rare and unusual documentary, but one that fails to honor the unique stature of the featured artist. 

Too little information is provided about the man, too few interviews, too few performances, no archival footage, and barely a hint at the peculiar path he took to greatness.  Only one interview from a jazz critic in New York gets it right, recalling a magical moment in New York on a snowy night when Coleman broke out in Charlie Parker style, often copied but never equaled, yet Coleman matched that same eccentric passion and precision, playing on into the night, never once faltering, matching the near impossible physical and technical demands of one of the most heralded musical greats in all of jazz.  Yet when asked to explain his unforgettable performance afterwards, Coleman nonchalantly indicated he likes to do that every once in awhile “just for fun.”  Clarke began her artistic career as a dancer and studied with the Martha Graham Dance Company, among other dance luminaries, developing an artistic kinship to jazz as a free form artistic expression, perhaps similar to what she was trying to accomplish in film.  Her first films were dance movies, becoming more radically experimental, adding racial issues and a social conscience, often blurring the lines between fiction and documentary.  This was Clarke’s last work, failing to capture the energy and imagination of her 60’s films like The Cool World (1964), which also happens to have an exceptional jazz musical soundtrack from Mal Waldron.  Nonetheless, flawed as it is, the fusion between Ornette Coleman and Shirley Clarke can’t help but generate interest, both unheralded yet rare artists whose stature has only grown over time, where this unusual film is a part of jazz and cinema history.