The Big Screen (56 page)

Vivre Sa Vie
is a test case, but the issue of presence or being was everywhere. The availability of the lightweight Arriflex camera and the Nagra tape recorder had helped enable a whole “cinema vérité” movement, a series of documentaries aimed in the first instance at television, but wishing to be “in the room” with some important event, recording without intervening. Its exponents included Robert Drew, D. A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, and Ricky Leacock, who had once assisted Robert J. Flaherty (Murnau's colleague on
Tabu
) on a classic documentary,
Louisiana Story
(1948), more picturesque than journalistic.

These films and their new withdrawn but devouring style won a lot of attention:
Primary
(1960) was about the race between John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin in 1960;
The Chair
(1963) observed a man on death row; and
Jane
(1962) was a portrait of the young actress Jane Fonda rehearsing a Broadway play. The hope for nonintervention was not always realized. Some reckoned that Fonda's play flopped because her performing energy had been depleted by the nagging documentary presence. On the other hand, Kennedy, a natural or even desirous actor, relished the treatment, and when, a few years later, he rose at a state banquet to introduce himself as the man who had accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, he seemed to have assumed the charm of Cary Grant, and the timing—things that Grant himself was candid about never quite understanding or possessing for himself.

But part of the Kennedy mystique was a camera-ready persona that no one had quite noticed in politics before. It helped that he was said to have won the television debate with Richard Nixon (while losing on radio) because his cinematic ease had outstripped what he said. People wanted to see JFK.

The power of television, in newscast or documentary, to show us something was hard to resist. In Britain in the late 1950s, John Freeman invented a series called
Face to Face
, one of the first significant interview shows with famous people. It was talking-head television before that term grew stale. And Freeman admitted a strategy: he would ask his subject a question; the subject would give his or her answer; and then Freeman would wait until the pause made the subject so anxious he or she blurted something else out—the thing he or she hadn't meant to say or wanted to admit. Sometimes a person broke down, and audiences had never seen that before outside dramas. The voyeurism and the live moment were overwhelming.

Another thing to see in 1961 was the new communications satellite. It was called Telstar, and the first time it worked for an audience in Britain, on July 23, 1962, the wavery picture suddenly solidified and there we were at an afternoon baseball game in Wrigley Field, Chicago (the Cubs and the Phillies). You could see America now, and it was intoxicating. Some spectators in Chicago, alerted to the occasion, smiled and waved at the camera. For the first time, the hypothetical simultaneity of life—the idea that we are all doing everything at the same time—felt real. Today, we take such power and intimacy for granted so we may no longer notice it, much less be touched. But it was invented, just like every other step in the movie process, and the first time was a thrill beyond words.

In 1962, Chris Marker made a short film called
La Jetée
. He was an extraordinary figure, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1921 (not in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, as he once confided to me). He was a writer, a member of the Resistance, and then a traveling essayist filmmaker. In the 1950s he made engaging films about China, Siberia, Cuba, and Israel. Then he did
La Jetée
. It is a science-fiction story composed of still photographs. But within the body of the film, amid the stills, there is a moment, a few seconds, when one photograph—of a woman (the actress was Hélène Chatelain)—breaks into life or real time. It's not that she does anything. It's just that she is alive, or that time is passing through her. Anyone who has seen
La Jetée
knows the instant is nearly spiritual, and feels the lesson—that this thing movie, this passing light, is a gift to us.

Let's mention something else from 1962: the poignant screen test Marilyn Monroe made for
Something's Gotta Give
, the film she was fired from only two months before her death. The test is in color but silent. She wears a white dress with a black floral pattern and she is talking to the director George Cukor. She is herself, not the character for the film, and as beautiful and confident as she ever managed on film, as if aware it was her best shot. Some said that, in the last couple of years, Monroe was so drugged that she had difficulty focusing her eyes. That doesn't show in this test. She is presence itself and suggests she might have been a smart woman and not just “Marilyn.”

In late November 1963, in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, a man named Abraham Zapruder was out with his 8 mm camera. A president passed by in a motorcade, and Zapruder did his best to film him. The 486 frames he recorded would be the best record of the assassination of JFK; it may be that no single shot from the 1960s was scrutinized as closely or used so often to describe passing time. The Warren Commission and every critique of their report relied on the film and its timeline, and we were soon asking ourselves where gunfire had come from if a body recoiled this way or that. Neurologists and ballistics experts had their answers, but moviegoers were sure they
knew
how guys who had been shot fell.

Two days later, live on television, in the muddle of the basement at Dallas police headquarters, a man came out of the crowd, thrust a gun at the body of Lee Harvey Oswald, held by guards, and fired. Now we knew why we had been watching television so much. We were waiting for reality to turn into our story. The devastation at the death of Kennedy and the readiness to accept the idea of a deranged lone gunman went to hell. This looked like film noir, no matter that it might have been filmed by Ricky Leacock or Jean-Luc Godard instead of an unknown man with a camera.

Godard's willingness simply to film Anna Karina and let a movie grow around her was not an isolated gesture. In Manhattan in the early 1960s, Andy Warhol had felt the appeal of letting time and some very humdrum activity unfold in front of a camera that might be screwed to the floor, or unattended (like an early surveillance system). Warhol the painter and conceptual artist fell on the camera with drained glee because it made “art” so much easier. You turned the thing on and it happened; if something occurred in front of the camera that was a bonus—especially if the people were pretty, yet not professional, not fierce. Stars were archaic, Warhol thought, because of their foolish ambition and earnestness, and because you had to pay them. But a “star” might be made, with quotes for earrings, if he or she didn't care about anything. So Warhol sometimes sounded like Louis B. Mayer on Novocaine. He was a new studio boss, and his whole enterprise was shooting film and getting the “talent” fucked. Many people were horrified by the lavish tedium of it all, but an insight existed in the hours and miles of film: looking was cool, if you stayed awake. If not, just film
Sleep
.

Ronald Tavel was Andy's scenarist from 1964 to 1966, so long as nothing happened in the movies:

Warhol was happiest with “a sloppy, offhand, garbagy look,” and a film like
Rio Bravo
, say, had still been resolved to look professional and elegant. But within
Rio Bravo
, there was a comparable relaxation over plot and character and things to say. It was a forerunner of a Factory movie, where you came close—and wanted to get closer?—to prolonged coverage of Angie Dickinson, say, talking to herself over what it was all about. Furthermore, in Edie Sedgwick, Andy had hooked up with a persona who might put her own quotation marks to rest. Edie was cute and of the moment. The painter Robert Rauschenberg said, “Her physicality was so refreshing she exposed all the dishonesty in the room”—and that hope is key to many films of the 1960s. No one could trust the moment would last long (Edie was dead by 1971, at the age of twenty-eight), but she was a media rage in those mid-and late '60s. People wanted to look at her, and she did all she could—twisting, writhing, pouting, staring back, wearing clothes, or not—to keep the camera running.

If anyone had had the nerve they might have put Edie Sedgwick and Jeanne Moreau together—Moreau could have been Edie's mother, if she'd had the child at fifteen. Of course, Jeanne Moreau was and is a very professional star of the international cinema, an actress in the old sense and clever at it, but a new face, too. In 1958, aged thirty, she had done
Elevator to the Scaffold
for Louis Malle (her lover). She played the girlfriend to Maurice Ronet, who has committed a perfect murder. Moreau is on the streets of Paris at night expecting to meet him. But an elevator jams, and Ronet is trapped. There then follows a passage, shot on the streets at dusk by Henri Decaë, with Moreau waiting and growing more anxious. Her drawn face in the streetlights becomes the movie.

Nothing happens except for the building of tension and the feeling of her anxiety. It is sufficient, and it was the moment with which Moreau gained stardom. Then Malle went further. He screened the footage and asked Miles Davis to improvise a blues as he watched. That track was laid on the scene. There are happy pictures of Miles and Moreau. But the “married” print, the mixed moment, made something richer than its separate elements. You could have gone further: you could have had another shot of Edie at home blowing her nose and waiting, crosscut with Moreau on the street, Miles wailing, and Edie wondering, “Is Momma coming home?” This is just making pictures, I know, but people were beginning to see that actual films could be composed or gathered in this way.

For a few years, Moreau was the look, more even than Jean Seberg, Anna Karina, or Edie Sedgwick. And in her skill and knowingness, it was a face closer to that of Katharine Hepburn. But for extended moments, very good directors wanted to use her, like Edie, for the face itself, for the vérité and the moment. So she was the capricious bundle of contradictions, as fatalistic as she was vivacious, in Truffaut's
Jules and Jim
(1962)—she made that picture a great hit. But for moments in Malle's
Les Amants
(1958) she was just a face in bed in the gloom having a pioneering orgasm. In Joseph Losey's
Eve
(1962), wallowing in her bath, exposing her armpit hair, she was a serpent the man should never have brought into the house.

In
La Notte
, made by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1961, she is the wife to Marcello Mastroianni's successful but disenchanted writer in Milan. Their friend is dying in the hospital. Yet Marcello is too weak and complacent to resist a sexual overture from a deranged female patient. The marriage is slipping away. So Antonioni has Moreau's character simply walk the streets of Milan in the summer afternoon, with nothing else to do. In story terms, it is a zero, except in establishing her unhappiness and her isolation. Beyond that, the director asks her to stroll, without too much design, though he has the camera follow her in unfailingly elegant shots. She notices things. She sees men watching her. She peels a piece of old plaster from a wall. She sees a fight develop and is intrigued, until the men fighting want to fix on her. Then she meets up with Marcello and they decide to go to this party they dread, but a place where important people will be. Including Monica Vitti (though they don't know about her yet).

La Notte
(1961) is the middle film in a trilogy, along with
L' Avventura
(1960) and
L'Ecliss
e (1962). We have met Antonioni already, the maker of documentaries in the late 1940s, and features of growing interest in the 1950s—
Cronaca di un Amore
(1950),
La Signora Senza Camelie
(1953),
Le Amiche
(1955), and
Il Grido
(1957). Then some greater ambition overtook him. He met a screenwriter, Tonino Guerra, and an actress, Monica Vitti—in this age, so many films partook of a love affair between a director and an actress. These ties were real, consummated, and difficult, but they were love affairs with cinema, too, a way of testifying to the pitch of desire and attraction involved in looking.
L' Avventura
is all about looking.