The Girl and the Spider

Henriette Confurius as Mara in The Girl and the Spider

Ramon and Silvan Zurcher's The Girl and the Spider is a worthy follow up to The Strange Little Cat. Lisa, a twenty something resident of Bern, is leaving the apartment she shares with Mara to move into another flat with her boyfriend, Markus. The film chronicles the moving out and in process, plus a wingding put on to celebrate the move. The film features over a dozen characters, some denizens of the two apartment complexes, as they cross paths, often literally, with Mara and Lisa.

The film also focuses, like the Zurcher brother's first film, on the animals that share these lofts with the humans. A parallel is drawn between the two. The human characters, like the so-called lesser beasts, mark their territory and leave their imprint. This is especially true of Mara who is obviously none too happy with Lisa's departure and acts out her resentment in various petty, passive aggressive ways. The film is full of micro aggressions and fleeting flirtations by all the characters, man or beast. As in The Strange Little Cat, the Zurcher's present the space of the film as a field of conflict in which the various members of the animal kingdom, ever watchful of each other, vie for dominion. 

Book Review: City of Nets by Otto Friedrich

Bertolt Brecht testifying before HUAC

Otto Friedrich's City of Nets is an impressive survey history of Hollywood in the 1940s. By a survey history, I mean Friedrich did not do any primary research for the book, but relied on secondary sources. Friedrich takes a perverse pride in having done no interviews for the book. As he puts:

         Surely there is no one of any importance in Hollywood, dead or alive, who has not been

          interrogated over and over again. And in no other field of history, not in Hitler's Berlin

          or in Roosevelt's Washington, have so many interviews grown into so many

          ghost-written autobiographies. (pg. xi)

                              

Almost forty years have elapsed since Friedrich wrote these words and we have been even more deluged since. I recently plowed my way through the 768 pages of Hollywood: The Oral History and was shocked by how few nuggets I gleaned and how anodyne the result was. Still, I will read almost anything about the titans of Hollywood's Golden Age. Peter Biskind's My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles is scurrilous bunkum, but it conveys the spirit of the subjects. So, you pays your money and you take your chance.

Friedrich majored in history at Harvard and gives City of Nets a sense of historical sweep. The book is the best survey history I've read since Eric Foner's Reconstruction. Friedrich is tart and economical, a much more stylish writer than most historians. Friedrich worked primarily as a journalist, he was The Saturday Evening Post's last managing editor, and City of Nets' bibliography is impressively lengthy and wide-ranging: from Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon to Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience, from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to Lana Turner's Lana: The Lady, The Legend, The Truth. Friedrich is a scrupulous and appropriately incredulous scholar. When perspectives differ on events, he is only too glad to provide contrasting viewpoints. He is especially strong on the Hollywood émigré community, American anti-Semitism, and the decline of the film business. Some aspects of the book have dated. City of Nets' sections on HUAC and the rise of the blacklist don't give us as full and rich picture as J. Hoberman's An Army of Phantoms.

The only facet of the book that stuck in my craw was Friedrich's condescension to the fruits of Hollywood labor. Neil Gabler picked up on this in his 1986 review in The New York Times. Friedrich opines that "MGM was in the business of producing rubbish." (pg. 318) A flippant judgement that I might be more inclined to agree with if he had replaced the word rubbish with kitsch. I do take exception to his opinion that "To Have and Have Not wasn't a particularly good movie." (pg. 242) Friedrich's  highbrow view of Hollywood's output was, and still is, commonplace amongst American intellectuals. It is why Friedrich gravitates to portraying practitioners of what were then known as the high arts who ended up in Hollywood: Faulkner, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Mann, and Brecht whose Mahagonny provides City of Nets with its title. Émigré directors are mentioned once in passing: Siodmak, Renoir, Clair, Ophuls, and Duvivier. Douglas Sirk draws nary a mention.

Despite my auteurist demurrals, City of Nets is a worthy book. It belongs on the shelf with those authors who have given us the most compelling portraits of twentieth century LA: Hammett, Chandler, Babitz, Didion, Ellroy, Mosely and Jean Stein's West Of Eden.  

Tomorrow

                
Joseph Anthony's Tomorrow, from 1972, contains an unforgettable performance by Robert Duvall, but I found it to be a barely satisfactory film. I've always regarded Horton Foote as too corny for my taste and his adaptation defangs Faulkner. The film seems to emanate from the 1950s, not because it is in black and white or because it is crude technically, but because it suffers from an Actors Studio staginess. The lead female, Olga Bellin, channels Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie and this upends most of her scenes.

Apparently, from what I've read, no one on the set could control Ms. Bellin. The fault lies then with Mr. Anthony not being a strong enough director. A contention I feel qualified to maker just by seeing one of his other films, the pallid The Rainmaker. Anthony captures actors' performances, but little else. The camera setups frame actors reciting dialogue, but lend little to scenes except decorative realism. When the camera pans, it simply follows the action. Anthony never endeavors to use film technique expressively. Now I don't feel one needs to employ camera movement or jazzy editing to make an expressive film, Dreyer's Gertrud is an equally pacific film that I find cinematically provocative and moving, but a director should employ cinematic mean for cinematic ends.

If I am being overly harsh on this film, it is because it is a muffed opportunity. Duvall, who played the part on stage, burrows so deeply into the role that he seems to personify the virtues of love and endurance that Faulkner sought to portray. His great performance is reason enough to see Tomorrow.