Monthly Archives: September 2015

  • Damsels in Distress

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Whit Stillman (2011)

    This is the first film I’ve seen by the writer-director Whit Stillman (it’s the first he’s made since 1998).  The setting – Seven Oaks College on the American East Coast – is a world of its own:  archly artificial at first, it comes to acquire its own skewed reality and validity.  The damsels of the title are exceedingly feminine – especially Violet Wister (not her real name), the driving force behind a campaign to bring hope to suicidal students at Seven Oaks and improved hygiene to male ones.   Her companions, who have similarly fragrant names and values, are Heather, Rose and a novitiate, Lily.  The conceit is executed by Stillman with such facility that the film drags a bit sometimes but the eccentricity is well worked out and worked through – the fact that the whole thing is so mildly entertaining almost increases its charm.  It’s a slight drawback that the boys on campus are not only relatively uncomplicated and prone to boorishness but also dull, compared with the girls (not that there seem to be many girls around the place – just the main quartet and a couple of others).  That problem is solved by two off-campus characters – Xavier, who espouses Cathar beliefs largely to justify the way he wants to have sex with Lily, and Charlie, who claims to have paid employment in ‘strategic development’ but turns out to be someone smart and sophisticated enough to pair off with Violet.

    Most of the young cast – though none of the girls is quite as young as she should be – are as likeable as they’re talented.  As the super-educated, flawlessly articulate Violet, Greta Gerwig is outstanding: she has real warmth as well as beautifully controlled wit.  Analeigh Tipton as Lily suggests very well someone who’s increasingly part of the magic circle but also keeps her brain functioning in a less rarefied universe.  Carrie McLemore as Heather is amusing in her attempts to keep faith with the damsels’ philosophy, while enjoying a relationship with a not very bright frat boy called Thor (Billy Magnussen), who can’t distinguish between colours.  Megalyn Echikunwoke (Rose) is lovely to look at but by some way the weakest link.  It may not be all her fault:  her character seems to have more lines that are closer to punchlines than the others (Stillman’s approach is mostly too refined to stoop to anything so vulgar as a punchline).   Even so, Echikunwoke gives off an awareness that she knows the writing’s funny – and that makes her less funny than anyone else.  Adam Brody (Charlie) and Hugo Becker (Xavier) are both excellent – Becker’s apparently deadly serious Cathar spiel is one of the best things in the film.

    The damsels, Violet especially, suggest distant relatives of Thora Birch’s Enid in Ghost World – not least in Stillman’s implying that their clique may be designed partly to hold adulthood at bay.  The costumes, the sugar almond colours of their world as lit by Doug Emmett, and the nostalgic (late 1950s) flavour of Mark Suozzo’s score are a very agreeable combination but they also contribute to this implication.  Violet believes one of the two most potent antidotes to suicidal tendencies is ‘to invent a new international dance craze’.   Damsels in Distress ends with the cast dancing the one she’s invented – the sambola – to a Gershwin song called ‘Things Are Looking Up’, which Fred Astaire sang in the 1937 musical A Damsel in Distress (in which he starred with Joan Fontaine).  Not surprisingly, the second antidote is cosmetic.  Herself feeling down after she finds her sort-of boyfriend Frank (Ryan Metcalf) has been unfaithful to her, Violet leaves the campus and books into a cheap motel for the night.  The motel soap gives her renewed hope and she delivers to some of the staff there – men as well as women – a quiet paean to its restorative scent.  Their reactions suggest that her passion is infectious and Seven Oaks College perhaps not so hermetically sealed after all.

    13 May 2012

  • Triumph of the Will

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Triumph des Willens

    Leni Riefenstahl  (1935)

    The BFI screening was introduced by Toby Haggith, Curator at the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.  Haggith wasn’t the most confident speaker and, as he acknowledged, went on too long – but fair enough:  he had a great many interesting things to say.  He was likeably candid too:  in his admission that he found the film difficult to watch largely because it was so protracted; in his scepticism about Leni Riefenstahl’s post hoc efforts to distance herself from the regime which Triumph of the Will memorialises (she reckons she didn’t know what the Nazis were about).   Haggith talked about the copies of the film held by the Imperial War Museum under the Enemy Property Act and the attempts by Riefenstahl’s lawyers very near the end of her long life to assert ownership of these.  He explained that it was Riefenstahl rather than the Nazi high command who had worked hardest for her to be involved in filming the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.  The extract from Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), which formed the BFI programme note, took a rather different view before going on to describe the extent to which the rally was staged with an eye to Riefenstahl’s capturing it on film.

    At the start of Triumph of the Will, Hitler’s plane materialises, in pompously messianic fashion, from the clouds on its descent into Nuremberg.  Throughout the film, Riefenstahl and Sepp Allgeier, who headed the large photographic team, regularly use a God’s-eye view to impressive effect – not only in shots of military marching formations but also in the way the camera looks down on the massed tents of the Hitler youth assembled for the rally, and in order to convey the vast depth of the hall in which the Nazi leaders deliver their speeches.  The non-aerial camerawork is no less remarkable, picking up the statuary and the medieval buildings of Nuremberg, with swastikas fluttering from them, to convey an impression of historical unity, of the sustained and sustaining spirit of the Fatherland.   Yet I ended up agreeing with Toby Haggith that much of the film is tedious.  If you know (even if you haven’t seen it) that Triumph of the Will is an aestheticised, propagandistic distillation of the Nuremberg Rally, you assume that the film’s opening self-description as a ‘record’ of the event is highly disingenuous.  And so it is, to an extent, yet it often doesn’t feel that way:  the endless parades and marches sometimes go on so long that you seem to be experiencing the event in real time.  I’d guess I’m more antipathetic than many to military displays and party conferences and even to being in an audience that voices its unanimity – but, while I stayed the course, there were several walkouts from NFT1, and in the latter stages of the film’s 110 minutes:  I did wonder if people couldn’t take any more because they were bored rather than outraged.   At the end, I couldn’t honestly remember if I’d seen Triumph in its entirety before.  This amnesia makes me feel guilty.

    I remember during or shortly after Watergate reading a piece in which the writer described the faces of the chief culprits in the Nixon administration as reminding him of those of figures symbolising evil in medieval religious art.  The writer (I can’t remember who it was) implied that he was surprised to be saying this, that in the real world we don’t expect people to be expressionist studies of their souls.  You get a similar impression watching the various speakers who take the stand at Nuremberg:  the banality of evil isn’t much in evidence here.  We may be watching the usual suspects with the benefit of hindsight; even so, they mostly – the less well-known ones anyway – have a well-fed, thuggish similarity that’s powerfully oppressive.  In this company, the three distinctive figures are the lean-and-hungry-looking Goebbels; Hess, physically imposing in a less brutal way than the others and whose dark, burning-eyed zealotry is disquieting not least because he also suggests a more complex personality; and Hitler himself who, as always, appears to be an utterly implausible embodiment of the collective desires of his devotees.

    The soundtrack in the assembly hall is astonishing.  To me, a German sporting crowd voicing passionate support or cheering a victory makes a particular noise – but perhaps it’s the crowds at the Nuremberg rallies that make me feel this.  The noise, a kind of deep-seated bellowing, is frightening because it sounds both masterful and irrational.  By contrast, the Nazi oratory here often seems not only stale but vocally forced.  The delivery of the speeches gets top marks for high-decibel vigour but not for anything else.  There are the dim reversals (‘The state did not create us:  we created the state!’), the increasingly predictable symmetries (‘Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler!’).  It’s the odd, humanly real facet of the rally that, after a while, starts to make more impression than the film’s iconography.  The Nazi leaders had little faith in microphones:  you start thinking how hoarse Hitler must have made himself yelling for so long, so often.

    Toby Haggith described the first television screening of the film in 1992 and the discussion that preceded it.  The participants included George Steiner, who described Triumph of the Will as the only piece of Nazi art to stand the test of time.   While I’m not able to judge the scale of Riefenstahl’s technical innovation and achievement, you can’t fail to be impressed by the metamorphosis of flags into a shimmering sea or of marching hordes into geometric patterns and back to uniform(ed) men again (even if Busby Berkeley had been doing the same kind of thing with chorines before Triumph of the Will was made).  What’s more arguable is how effective the film was – and indeed how much it was used by the Nazis – as propaganda.  The Wikipedia article suggests differences of opinion about this among film historians and I was struck by Haggith’s suggestion that Triumph didn’t need to be brilliant propaganda because the Nazis had already and overwhelmingly won the political arguments in Germany.

    Watching the film made me wonder if it was Teutonism as well as Nazism that I felt hostile towards.  The ‘light-hearted’ scenes of the Nazi campers engaging in physical rough and tumble are among the most gruesome – and the mixture of sugar and martiality in the tunes we hear is a German characteristic that has survived well beyond the death of the Third Reich.   As Toby Haggith promised, the film was followed by a three-minute piece of Allied propaganda, with clips from Triumph of the Will, scored by the Lambeth Walk, put together to make fun of the goose-stepping soldiers, Hitler et al.  The effect was genuinely comic – and a tonic.   I usually feel a resistance to audience applause at BFI (cf yesterday’s viewing of The Chalk Garden) but on this occasion I fully sympathised – even if I didn’t join in.

    13 October 2010

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