The Big Screen (70 page)

Céline et Julie
is a gradual film (three hours, thirteen minutes)—some call it slow, but only if they are out of the habit of looking and noticing. Once you begin to attend, the film grows shorter and quicker by the minute. The friendship between the two women enlists us, and unconventional female friendships are a treat in our pictures. In time you appreciate that 7bis is not exactly a movie house, but a house that has become a movie (like the Overlook Hotel in
The Shining
), and the Madeleine story is a show these two friends must watch in the mounting delirium of continuous performance. I will not give away the ending, except to assure you it is not unhappy. But you cannot settle for the happiness or trust it applies to life in a thorough way that will keep you ensured. The happiness works only if you can leave the house.

Céline et Julie
was never meant to be a wildly popular film, yet its ethos comes from the oldest kinds of romance and adventure that made the motion picture business. The very title of the film is an allusion to those silent comedies where Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle did this and that together. The thought of rescuing a kid is as old as Chaplin. The mixture of thrills and farce is the history of the show. At the same time, this is the work of a fine, learned critic and a lifelong pursuer of movie narrative and its relationship with our dreams.

Rivette had made
Paris Nous Appartient
, a Parisian story about paranoia, thirteen years earlier. He had directed Anna Karina in
La Religieuse
(1966), taken from Diderot, and a great scandal in France. He had made
L' Amour Fou
(1969), about actors, and in
Out One
(1974, a film of over twelve hours), he had encouraged actors to improvise and develop the story of conspiracy. He made
Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau
next as a distillation of his career and his love of cinema, but now paranoia had become bliss. The metaphor for the process of moviegoing is accessible and serene. But there are threats in its world, and I wonder if the little girl is named for the woman murdered and exploited in Hitchcock's
Vertigo
(1958), a character we never meet. But “madeleine” also links Proust and the candies Céline and Julie need to suck before their movie starts to run. In its insight, its sweet analysis, its humor, and its faith in circling stories, and paying close attention, this is just one of those movies from the 1970s that let a cineaste feel he possessed life—until the candy ran out.

I have tried to show how our attitudes to love, identity, desire, and responsibility have been shaped by moviegoing. These topics come together in the large subject of acting: Of whether we are ourselves or someone playing ourselves. And whether the movies have been good for us. The influence of our movies is not just a cultural sidebar, like an evening a week set aside for our fun. It was the engine of our time, the signal of so many screens to come; it is a model for how we look and decide, whether we participate or are content to be spectators.

So I close this section with a comparison of a political leader who became the figure in an astonishing motion picture and a movie star who made it all the way to the White House. The movie is
Hitler: A Film from Germany
(1977), made by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. The career is that of Ronald Reagan, one of the most mysterious and important Americans of the twentieth century. This comparison is not made with any sense that these two men were similar in personality, intent, or impact, or that they stand for some blunt contrast of evil and good. They are together because their public and their world regarded them as figures in history and media, actors playing on the largest stage, the anthology of their own screen moments. They are here because of the unholy mixture of politics and personality from which we suffer, and which is a comprehensive enactment of the technologies considered in this book.

Syberberg was born in Nossendorf in Pomerania in 1935 and was an adolescent in East Germany before settling in Munich at the age of eighteen. He made a few documentaries in the 1960s, notably on the performers Fritz Kortner and Romy Schneider, but then, in the 1970s, he entered on a period of intense activity such as no one could have predicted: he made
Ludwig
:
Requiem for a Virgin King
(1972),
Karl May
(1976), and
The Confessions of Winifred Wagner
(1978), all of which revealed his knowledge of and obsession with the cultural history of modern Germany and its stew of purpose, idealism, neurosis, and insanity. Syberberg is talented beyond doubt, but he often displayed an overweening arrogance that led him into grave troubles later. At the Telluride Film Festival in 1983, when he was there to show his film of
Parsifal
, he declared without irony that he thought one day the Goethe Institute might be renamed the Syberberg Institute. That was a warning of the man who would later damn himself with anti-Semitic remarks and frequent statements exposing his sympathy for some Nazi ideas.

But that is not enough to destroy or restrict his Hitler film; it only brings more interest to it. The work is more than seven hours and displays an ambition Syberberg found lacking in most movies:

It is an orthodoxy of movie history that the new medium effortlessly took over from the stage. Cineastes are expected to despise and avoid the theater. So it's arresting for someone to say, wait a minute, the eloquence and passion of live enactment did not simply lie down under the onslaught of the movies. It has carried on and, at this point, it seems likely to outlive the movie house as a public entertainment and as commentary on the complexities of our experience. The liveness of theater is returning, and paradoxically it is something that Syberberg saw as a newfound destination for film itself. The first thing to be said about his Hitler film, no matter that it is a projected performance, is that it reminds us of the participation of theater and strives to shatter the illusionism, the fetishized reality, of movie house movies.

The shattering exists in its collage: this is a movie where actors, puppets, real speeches, film clips, back projections, dramatization, lecture, and reverie conspire to present the facts about Adolf Hitler and the myriad ways in which he has been understood or digested. Yes, the film is immense and time-consuming, and it requires knowledge of what Hitler did and said and of the German history he looms over—but if Hitler is important, is that too much to ask? The film played outside Germany—in America it was distributed by Francis Coppola's Zoetrope operation, and it had British funding through the BBC—but it is principally a work from and for Germany. Susan Sontag, one of Syberberg's admirers, said he was addressing the cultural melancholy (or self-pity) in which a country or person cannot digest or properly mourn the grief for what it has done. So, Germany, Syberberg says, has moved on after the Holocaust and Hitler without coming to terms with it. You may not agree with that, but the pressing point is to wonder whether America, say, has been through the same necessary mourning over Hiroshima, Iran, Chile, Vietnam…the list goes all the way through Latin America to the Middle East, and it numbers the “trouble spots” where the self-declared source and arbiter of modern liberty has offered comfort for tyrants, neglect of freedom fighters, corruption, and exploitation. In other words, the strangled ongoing documentary that television news has given us over more than fifty years and that has left the United States at the end of its moral tether.

Susan Sontag recognized the intellectual energy and risk in Syberberg's Hitler film—it may be related to this outpouring that he did not do too much afterward. “The film tries to be everything,” she wrote, and it is implicitly a defiance of ordinary documentary, especially its passive mock-aesthetic notion that documentary should deprive itself of words, commentary, and argument—as if it were a flawless testament instead of a mere imprint of appearance. She added: “Syberberg belongs to the race of creators like Wagner, Artaud, Céline, the late Joyce, whose work annihilates other work. All are artists of endless speaking, endless melody—a voice that goes on and on.” Godard is the only political filmmaker to rival Syberberg, but Godard was too tight-lipped. He lacked intellectual generosity or the willingness to seem unsure. You can call Syberberg crazed, arrogant, or crypto-fascist, but you should see his movie, too.
Hitler: A Film from Germany
is the work that most captures the natural helpless montage television has made of history in our age. It is a film, or a version of epic theater, that allows us the feeling that we might examine and admit our own history, instead of being its eternal victims.

Don't we need such a movie about Ronald Reagan? It would have nearly as much to contain as any work on Hitler, and most of the material is so much jollier. Think of all the times Reagan passed in front of our cameras with a wave and a grin and a quick one-liner, and realize how far that flourish had become a gloss for public behavior in fifty years of silly movies. I don't pass judgment on his presidency: he maybe violated the Constitution; he undermined economic morality; but he also presided over the fall of that “evil empire,” the Soviet Union, he survived an assassination attempt, he revived American spirits and gave much of the nation an odd sense of ease or relaxation. He cheered us up, just as he had often lifted a scene in a picture with brisk good nature. Even the people who know the damage of his administrations conclude that he was a good guy, a nice fellow, because that was all he had ever set out to play—no wonder he gave up movie acting after he had to slap Angie Dickinson's face in Don Siegel's television version of
The Killers
(1964). That wasn't nice, or true to Ronnie, and he was determined at all times to resemble himself, to be like Ronald Reagan.

It didn't matter finally whether he was a good or a bad president. For he was the embodiment of that moment in
Network
when Ned Beatty's boss lectures Peter Finch on his responsibilities to corporate America and what he must do and say. “Why me?” asks the amazed Finch—his character's name is Howard Beale. (He wasn't going to take it anymore, but he takes it now.) “Why me?” And Beatty answers, “Because you're on television, dummie!” Reagan had been on television long before anyone thought of the White House, in days when his presidency referred only to the Screen Actors Guild (1947–52).

It was unthinkable then that the American electorate would ever vote for an actor, let alone a minor one. That was a time when Gore Vidal's warning not to vote for anyone who has been told what to say and where to move and when, all his life, still seemed potent and decisive. Since then we've had another actor, the far-fetched Arnold Schwarzenegger, as governor of Californa, no matter that he seemed to spell the state with a capital
K
. There may be other actors who win big jobs. More important, no one can now get office, or run for it, without possessing a viable or actorly television personality. He or she must be presented as a self we can admire. This is not just being “photogenic,” it's being persuasively natural on moving film without seeming stupid. (It's Crosby and not Hope; it's Dean Martin, not Jerry Lewis.) John Kennedy had it. Nixon lacked it. Reagan had it. Obama seemed to have it until he needed it. Will there be an election where no candidate has it?

But Reagan excelled at it because he had served so long as a supporting actor. So he had a modesty, a deference, a supporting-actor openness, that Kennedy or Obama would not permit in themselves. They believed they were well cast in the job. Reagan suspected he was lucky because he had few assets beyond the collected scenarios of Warner Bros. in the 1940s. And the secret to it all is that in these media-ridden times, when there is so little presidential authority left, perhaps we might as well have someone like Reagan, someone who can be on TV. He passed our time pleasantly and left a vague impression of well-being, even when he put his foot in it. The office of the presidency has been blurred and inhibited by television coverage and spin, and by that Reagan ease. How can a president be so relaxed? He doesn't remember everything.