Keeping Busy...

I realize I haven't updated in over a month, much to my personal dissatisfaction. There's nothing I'd love more than to publish two or three posts a day here, but commitment to such a task can be difficult when one is working two jobs, taking graduate courses, conducting thesis research, and preparing a conference paper.

This is not to say I've given up watching films. Indeed, lately I've seen a number of provocative titles (including John Cassavetes's Gloria, Akira Kurosawa's High and Low, Kenji Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy, and Alain Cavalier's Thérèse) that I am eagerly anticipating to write more about in the near future. Also, in recent months a kind friend in France has generously sent me several films by Jacques Rivette that I would like to address here, particularly in context of my personal attempts as a non-French speaker to watch these films without the aid of English subtitles.

And I promise I won't say anything about the Polanski arrest.

Departures (2008)

A recent winner at the 2008 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, the latest feature by Yôjirô Takita—about a concert cellist (Masahiro Motoki) who gives up his music career to become a nokanshi (a type of Japanese corpse beautifier)—has been faulted by a number of critics for its blatant accessibility and excessive sentimentality. Such traits, which Yôjirô’s film certainly possesses in spades, undoubtedly earned the film its Oscar, but they don’t provide it much credential from Oscar-wary critics like Japanese scholar Tony Rayns, who in his review at Film Comment attributes the film’s success at the Academy Awards to the members’ “feeling their mortality” and dubs the film “a paean to the good-looking corpse.” Although Rayns’s comments are certainly meant to be derogatory, they at least identify a key component to understanding Yôjirô’s film that has been missed by most critics: namely, the implicit relation between the film’s sentimental mechanics and the film’s own subject matter of what is essentially “sentimentalizing” the dead bodies of loved ones.


One of the reasons why A.I. Artificial Intelligence remains my favorite (and, in a self-reflexive sense, I think the most moving) film by Steven Spielberg is that its theme of “artificial love,” as manifested in the character of the child-robot David (played by Haley Joel Osment), repeatedly calls into question the manufactured emotions that Spielberg himself often attempts to induce from audiences in such manipulative heart-tuggers like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and even A.I. itself via its controversial ending. In a similar sense Yôjirô’s film, although no less sentimental than any of Spielberg’s historical pageants, constantly draws attention to its manipulative techniques by repeatedly depicting the painstaking efforts of its protagonist to beautify corpses. The watchful family members at each funeral visitation thus become surrogates for the film viewers themselves, with Yôjirô’s film only working insofar as its audience members, like the mourners depicted in the film, are willing to surrender their disbelief to the illusory spectacle before them. When at one point Masahiro fails to apply the proper makeup to a dead teenage girl, thereby breaking the spell of momentary aliveness that the ritual is supposed to create, it throws the girl’s family members into an uproar—one can’t help but wonder if Yojiro is anticipating the negative reactions by critics who don’t recognize the qualities they wish to see in his staged exhibition.


Much of the film’s emotional manipulation can be attributed to the heartfelt score by Joe Hisaishi, a composer perhaps better known for his enchanting work in the films of Hiyao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle) and Takeshi “Beat” Kitano (Kikujiro, Fireworks). Yet even Hisaishi’s score, while undeniably serving to complement its protagonist’s feelings during a few choice montages, retains a certain diegetic quality in its connection to the protagonist’s occasional playing of his cello. Like the onscreen introduction of the film score’s orchestra in Richard Linklater's Waking Life, we are always aware in Departures that the music we hear, however manipulative and sentimental, is ultimately manufactured. To complement Hisaishi’s sentimental score, Yojiro utilizes a number of simple poetic devices in his film’s imagery, most of them involving animals—an octopus floating at the surface of a river, two salmon swimming against the stream, and a flight of birds which serve as a visual rhyme to the flames of a cremator. These scenes, similar to Hisaishi’s music, come across as obvious (yet no less moving) sentimental gestures, explicitly placed in the film to manipulate one’s emotions; they make up, in effect, the “makeup” of Yôjirô’s ceremonial film, decorating its otherwise inconsequential misé en scene so that we, the viewers, may better recognize the universal human emotions lying underneath the effects.


What’s finally poignant about Yôjirô’s sentimental techniques is that they make accessible a subject matter—dealing with death—that remains a taboo topic in Japan, if not also an uncomfortable topic everywhere else. (We in the U.S. are “grown up” enough to treat death with offhand, cynical laughter, as perhaps most aptly demonstrated in Alan Ball’s dreary but descriptive Six Feet Under, but this only serves to expose our underlying fears.) In other words, by treating death with an accessible type of cinematic formalism (the mix of sweeping melodies and straightforward imagery that indeed earns Oscars), Yôjirô positions his film as a statement of true cultural protest—a plea to receive death with the same kind of universal acknowledgment that movies typically bestow upon other, more "comforting" phases of life, such as birth, coming-of-age, and marriage.

The Advantages of Remaining Parallel

In Italo Calvino’s short story “The Form of Space” (from Cosmicomics), three celestial “characters”—Qfwfq, Ursula H’x, and Lieutenant Fenimore—find themselves falling down parallel trajectories within the infinite reaches of outer space. Qfwfq, longing for intimacy with the beautiful Ursula, laments,

I too, naturally, dreamed only of meeting Ursula H’x, but since, in my fall, I was following a straight line absolutely parallel to the one she followed, it seemed inappropriate to reveal such an unattainable desire.

Because his orbit runs parallel to the object of his love, thus eliminating the chances that they will ever intersect, Qfwfq tries to repress his amorous affection for Ursula. Why, after all, reveal to her a wish that can never be granted, a desire that can never be fulfilled? Qfwfq cannot bear to reveal his love to Ursula, for fear of explicating the impossible. His passion is disguised, masked in his belief that it is impractical and ultimately unattainable. Better, Qfwfq believes, to remain content with the parallel relationship he has with Ursula and consequently learn to adjust his self to the continuous space that lies between their respective bodies.

= = =

In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes remains ambivalent about the ability of the subject, through either sacrificial chivalry or some kind of masochistic impulse, to completely disguise his feelings for the object of his love, since the very act of disguising always refers to the desire itself. As Barthes himself so aptly puts it,

Yet to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.

The subject, even in his repression (such as in Qfwfq’s concealment of his love for Ursula), must nevertheless make his repression known—his repression is not really an action but a sign. The subject, in other words, wants to communicate to his secret love how much he is sacrificing in not communicating his passion, as contradictory as this statement may be: You must know how much I am giving up by my refusal to let you know how much I feel for you.

In order to make known what is concealed, to establish a presence of love through its very absence, the subject finds ways to communicate his feelings outside of the direct route, perhaps by exhibiting a new personality or by withdrawing longer than usual from his beloved’s company. Fortunately, the creative subject need not go to such rash extremes—he may hide his passion in his work, his paintings, his music, or his writing. (Calvino hides in metaphors; Barthes in poststructuralism.) In this modern and increasingly indiscreet age, blogs are an agreeable choice for simultaneous disclosure/nondisclosure of one’s passion, since in this medium the subject may intimately address his beloved in a manner disguised as public forum: I pretend this is merely another post in a long series of other innocuous posts, but between you and me we both know it is more than that. Or, to defer once again to Barthes:

Larvatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask. Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator: […] no amorous oblation without a final theater: the sign is always victorious.

= = =

Secretly, Qfwfq anticipates a meeting with Ursula in the distant future, believing “there was always the possibility that, if our two parallels continued to infinity, the moment would come when they would touch.” It is his longing for this glorious “touch” with Ursula that motivates Qfwfq in his present state:

This eventuality gave me some hope; indeed, it kept me in a state of constant excitement. I don’t mind telling you I had dreamed so much of a meeting of our parallels, in great detail, that it was no part of my experience, as if I had actually lived it.

Is Qfwfq’s hope for an eventual “meeting of our parallels” false? In Euclidean geometry, certainly, but subsequent mathematical theory tells us that in hyperbolic space two parallel geodesics may actually intersect as their limits approach infinity. A cause for celebration? Perhaps, but infinity is still infinity, and there is no telling how long it may take these two lovers to reach their eventual connection—it may very well last a number of human lifetimes (it’s a good thing these aren’t mortal beings Calvino is discussing).

Still, Qfwfq hopes, and it is this hope that sustains him. He anticipates the intersection, which—like the use of foreshadowing in a novel—pushes his movement to a predetermined ending, no matter how far away this ending may be. Qfwfq is motivated by his expectation of the intersecting climax, perhaps slightly aware of this climax’s inability to equal its own anticipation. A self-fulfilling prophecy, after all, is not fulfilled in its eventual occurrence but rather in its initial prediction.

= = =

Gérard Genette, in his Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, remarks on Vladimir Jankélévitch’s notion of the “primultimateness” of the anticipated first time:

[T]hat is, the fact that the first time, to the very extent to which one experiences its inaugural value intensely, is at the same time always (already) a last time—if only because it is forever the last to have been the first, and after it, inevitably, the sway of repetition and habit begins.

Genette applies Jankélévitch’s idea to Swann and Odette’s first kiss in Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past, particularly to the following passage from the novel, in which Swann briefly hesitates just as he is about to fulfill his long-anticipated desire of claiming Odette:

Perhaps, moreover, Swann himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now for the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveller strives to bear away with him in memory the view of a country to which he many never return.

In finally gaining the physical Odette, Swann also loses a part of the Odette he loved: the Odette whose far-reaching proximity motivated Swann to pursue her; the Odette who, in some sense, walked parallel to Swann, ever distant and yet constantly near.

= = =

Although Qfwfq is somewhat jealous in his suspicion that Ursula and Fenimore might have once intersected in their past, he finds some relief in the geometrical relativity of the situation:

On reflecting, however, I reasoned that if Ursula and the Lieutenant had once occupied the same point in space, this meant that their respective lines of fall had since been moving apart and presumably were still moving apart. Now, in this slow but constant removal from the Lieutenant, it was more than likely that Ursula was coming closer to me; so the Lieutenant had little to boast of in his past conjunctions: I was the one at whom the future smiled.

Indeed, even if Qfwfq and Ursula are continuously parallel to one another, this will at least allow Qfwfq to retain a closer distance to his beloved than all of Ursula’s previous intersecting lovers—despite the momentary bliss of touch they felt in their direct contact with Ursula, these intersectors will overtime only drift further and further apart from her. But in their parallel trajectories, Qfwfq and Ursula, although seemingly separate until infinity, will never ever lose the closeness they possess at their stable distance. By staying apart, they will remain, in a very real sense, always together.

And who knows? Maybe infinity is just around the corner.

Une femme mariée (1964)

Jean-Luc Godard’s sparsely decorated drama “en noir et blanc,” about a Parisian woman (Macha Méril) who drifts back and forth between her husband (Phlippe Leroy) and an actor she is having an affair with (Bernard Noel), is perhaps the most naturalistic expression of the director’s particular fixations. Every literary, political, and philosophical reference is seamlessly integrated into (rather than interposed over) the characters’ personalities and emotions; at one point Godard even goes so far as to bring in the woman’s young stepson in order to expound on the concept of childhood. The sexism of Godard’s early period isn’t entirely absent here—he seems to take for granted the belief that women live in the present while men live in their memories (something I’m sure certain female friends of mine might dispute)—but this is also one of Godard’s most considerable self-examinations of his own male gaze (much more than the comparably innocuous A Woman is a Woman), as is particularly evident in the film’s literal deconstruction of the female body in the opening sequence as well as its continuous critical assessment of lingerie ads’ influence on female identity. What Godard seems mainly concerned with here is not anything specifically related to gender but rather how the present age’s emphasis on l’amour fou serves to distract its participants from their own historical past—a point made brilliantly clear when Méril and her lover arrange a secret rendezvous at a screening of Alain Resnais’s Holocaust documentary Nuit et brouillard (1955), promptly leaving the movie theater to make love after they have met.

Mon oncle (1958)

Jacques Tati’s first successful foray into color (after initially attempting in 1948 to film Jour de fête using the ill-fated Thomson-Color process) is very much a transitional film, incorporating both the rural countryside of his previous Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and the complete modernization of his subsequent Play Time (1967). The tension caused by this fusion of these two distinct geographical/chronological regions is part of what makes the film the most unsettling of the three—Tati’s depiction of modern living is almost frightening in its cold, inhuman impracticability, particularly when it is contrasted to the warm, carefree atmosphere of the country town in which Tati’s ineffable Hulot resides. Yet what’s finally remarkable (yet entirely characteristic) of the film is its universal generosity: although Tati regards the modern age with some reservations, he nonetheless avoids simpleminded hierarchal dichotomies (e.g., “new = bad, old = good”) and instead exhibits a childlike, liberal openness to the peculiarities of new technology, thereby offering contemporary France the same inquisitive fondness that he bestows upon the nation’s past. As Tati sees it, both eras have their incongruities (notice how long it takes Hulot to reach his flat in his supposedly “more practical” small-town apartment) as well as their pleasures (for all the functional absurdity of the film’s modernized home, Tati clearly displays an architect’s appreciation of its geometrically-correct design, even going so far as to affectionately anthropomorphize the residence at one instance by supplying it a pair of eyes). Tati’s complete openness to his formal environment ultimately provides what feels like an infinite number of pleasures—among them a dog’s encounter with a protruding fish head, a boys’ lamppost game, a bouncing pitcher, and a terrific running gag involving a fountain (which serves as a pointed commentary on class biases)—all of them discrete in occurrence and yet continuous within the unifying context that is Tati’s perpetually generous worldview.

Le gai savoir (1969)

With no narrative to speak of (that, after all, would be too bourgeois), Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto meet in a darkened room to discuss Marxism, word associations, and the filmmaking process itself in this radically deconstructive exercise by Jean-Luc Godard, one of his first purely essayistic ventures. Like the similarly plotless La chinoise (1967), the film is concerned—sometimes excessively so—with the poststructuralist différance that exists between theory and action, image and sound, and other such relationships, which Godard explicates through a series of playful experimental techniques. His systematic procedure leads to some intriguing cultural provocations (Godard’s politicization of comic strips and nudes is quite fascinating), fun visual games (animation is provided by an etch-a-sketch at one point), and genuinely creative formal effects, such as when Berto is filmed reading poetry in front of a backdrop of illustrated comic-book superheroes and is then overlapped by Léaud making misogynistic statements on the soundtrack (it's an interposition of an interposition, basically). The film can also be intermittently insufferable, especially when Godard darkens the screen for well over five minutes, making one wonder if Brecht himself would have known what to make of such alienating intervals. Still, despite its rough spots, the amount of conviction on display is fairly invigorating: for all his abstractness, what remains consistently clear about Godard is his belief in the inseparability of cinematic and political expression, with this film standing as one of his purest theoretical models.

The Cinema of Isolation: A History of

Physical Disability in the Movies

I've been paging through Martin F. Norden's fascinating study the past few days, which traces the presentation of individuals with disabilities in movies from the silent film period up to the early '90s. As someone who took a number of courses in special education for my bachelor's degree, I can appreciate Norden's sensitivity in using people-first language (e.g., referring to "a person with disabilities" rather than "a disabled person") and especially his emphasis on the dominant society's role in perpetuating handicaps for those outside the "norm"—the book is not merely about movies featuring people with disabilities but is more significantly concerned with how these movies shape and influence, for better or worse, cultural conceptions on what it means to be "disabled." Norden primarily confines his analysis to Hollywood fare (a more accurate reading of the title might be A History of Physical Disability in American Movies) and consequently misses some good opportunities to engage with other countries' cinematic depictions of disability, such as Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's (to my mind) controversial The Peddler (1987) as well as the majority of films by Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel. On the other hand, Norden's restriction to U.S. films allows him to better link these features to the national political movements at the time of their release, thus emphasizing cinema's distinct role as a living document of its time and place. From what I've read so far, the only thing the book truly lacks is a newer edition—I'd particularly be interested to see what Norden would make of Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder's outrageously satirical Pumpkin (2002).

eXistenZ (1999)

Given the unparalleled amount of personal conviction he puts into every project, it may come as a surprise to some that since 1983 Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has only been responsible for the original story of two feature films: the visionary Videodrome and this equally imaginative exploration of the delicate barrier between technology and reality. Comparisons to The Matrix were inevitable when the film was initially released, but in retrospect Cronenberg’s solemn, meditative approach seems to have had a more enduring impact than the Wachowski brothers’ hip and flashy but now somewhat dated aesthetic. This is superficially a standard sci-fi thriller about a security guard (Jude Law) who helps an on-the-run game designer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) by “porting” into her contaminated game pod, but Cronenberg masterfully utilizes the material to provide a metaphorical commentary on modern society’s fears, particularly sex addiction and the possibility of venereal disease. (Law’s virginal gamer, for example, is paranoid of being infected by his surgically-installed bioport and remains continuously hesitant to surrender his willpower to the game’s overtly sensual environment.) The film is explicitly a continuation of the themes of bodily horror and identity dissolution that Cronenberg has been fascinated with since the start of his career (such as in Shivers and Rabid) and that he would subsequently mine, with subtler but no less powerful intensity, in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Of his entire film oeuvre, however, this may just be Cronenberg’s most successful fusion of his cerebral and visceral qualities, where every detail—from a three-headed amphibian-like creature to a gun made of human teeth—carries a charged, lasting significance.

Boarding Gate (2007)

The remarkably eclectic Olivier Assayas (whose latest film is the serene family drama Summer Hours) returns to the corporate-cum-global intrigue of his 1996 Irma Vep with far less substantial impact in this unpredictable (hastily written?) thriller about a former prostitute (Asia Argento) who goes on the run after murdering an ex-lover (Michael Madsen). Like his forefathers in the French Nouvelle vague, Assayas, a former writer for Les cahiers du cinéma from 1979 to 1985, appears to be utilizing traditional genre mechanics as a way to comment on the cinematic medium itself, perhaps striving for a more modernized variation of Godard's À bout de souffle. What significance this commentary has, however, is questionable—Assayas often seems too invested in his own sense of hipness (such as giving Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon a rather awkward cameo) to allow the type of distance needed for self-critique. Nevertheless, the performances offered by Madsen and Argento are quite extraordinary, especially Argento’s: she exhibits a chameleonlike ability to instantaneously shift behavioral tones that perfectly complements the improvisatory style of Assayas’s camerawork, thus providing the film a unifying structure that it apparently lacks in all other aspects.

Eastern Promises (2007)

Beginning with his 2002 psychological thriller Spider (although certainly foreshadowed in his 1988 Dead Ringers), David Cronenberg has increasingly abandoned the sci-fi elements of his roots for a subtler and arguably more disturbing investigation of sensual horror in a realistic context; the themes are still the same (making Cronenberg one of the true auteurs working today in the film business), but their shift from a fantastical to a real-world environment makes them linger more profoundly. This mafia-crime drama—the director’s most purely physical film yet—must have looked fairly straightforward on paper, but in Cronenberg’s hands it becomes a haunting and deeply unsettling meditation on the fragility of human life. Tattoos, in their symbolic function as both a self-inflicted identifiable marker and a type of permanently-engraved protest against one’s mortality, are put to particularly poetic use here, with Cronenberg collaborating with Steven Knight on the latter’s original script to extend the body-art motif throughout the entire film—like the video tapes in Videodrome and the bioports in eXistenZ, the tattoos presented here become yet another technological extension of the human being’s sense of identity, fusing with the body to form a “new flesh.” Cronenberg visually complements the marking of tattoos with the fatal cutting of human skin (knives, in their uncomfortably close proximity, are the only weapons used in the film), which culminates to a brutal fight scene in a bathhouse where blood and flesh mix in startling ways. The cast is uniformly excellent, especially Armin Mueller-Stahl and Viggo Mortensen, both of whom demonstrate the now-rare ability among actors to commit oneself wholly to a character without succumbing to the type of self-absorbed showboating that tends to receive awards these days (the fact that Daniel Day-Lewis’s over-the-top stand-up routine in There Will Be Blood won an Oscar over Mortensen’s remarkable performance here only proves my point). Featuring one of Howard Shore’s most mournful scores (with Nicola Benedetti on violin) and utilizing an off-kilter voiceover narration that rivals Jean-Luc Godard’s experimentations with overlapping soundtrack in its destabilizing nature, this is a troubling but strangely compassionate film, exhibiting Cronenberg at the height of his singular talents and remaining an object lesson in how a director can remain personal in even the most seemingly generic of material.

Richard Pryor:

Live on the Sunset Strip (1982)

Although his performance is not as radically deconstructive as in his earlier Live in Concert (1979), Richard Pryor’s 1982 concert film (tactfully shot by Joe Layton) is still one of the best examples in any format of stand-up comedy as confessional act. Pryor may at times be vulgar, but it’s vulgarity of the most self-deprecating, even humbling kind—he knows he’s just as much of a “bad motherfucker” as anyone else. Unlike the currently popular Sacha Baron Cohen and Stephen Colbert, whose audacious antics are always negated by the safety net of their fictionalized personas, Pryor draws humor from his own vulnerability, which includes (but is not limited to) the vulnerability of being black in America. By constantly putting his own personal dignity at risk, Pryor never comes across as polemical and manages to achieve moments of genuine liberation—one need only witness how he handles his drug addiction here to understand why Pryor will always remain timeless whereas Cohen and Colbert will only thrive as long as our internet-induced society continues to believe that its insecurity can be eliminated by well-designed avators rather than simply being open with others. Hilarious, wise, and even tender (his discussion of his visit to Africa and why he stopped using the word nigger is especially moving), Pryor’s performance is a healthy reminder that the first step towards self-healing is honesty.

Family Destruction and Genre Deconstruction

in the Westerns of Anthony Mann

Note: The following is a term paper I wrote last fall for a class on Hollywood films of the 1950s, which is still the only film course I've ever taken. Some of my analysis is a bit sketchy; I was just becoming familiar with critical theories like poststructuralism at the time, which explains how I rather ignorantly manage to utilize the term "deconstruction" without ever mentioning Jacques Derrida. Nevertheless, I think the paper is worth publishing here, if only for the attention it gives to The Man from Laramie, The Last Frontier, and Man of the West, which I believe are still rather underrated (if not so much in the Mann canon, then in the Western genre as a whole). This is also the most in-depth analysis I've ever completed on any film and/or filmmaker, so I consider it somewhat of a personal accomplishment.

The fears of communist infiltration and inevitable apocalypse that swept America during the 1950s proved to be perfect testing grounds for a filmmaker like Anthony Mann, who sowed his own seeds of destruction in the series of Westerns he made during the decade. Although the U.S. government remained suspect of subversive themes in issue-laden Hollywood films, it mostly overlooked popular film genres like the Western, perhaps believing them to be too formulaic in their termite-like appeal, as film critic and painter Manny Farber might have put it, to pose much of a threat. Within the Westerns that Mann made in the ‘50s, the director was free to explore and critique such American-idealized notions as the family, community, and the idea of tradition in general, using the genre as a safe haven for his oftentimes subversive preoccupations. As demonstrated in three of Mann’s later films of the decade—The Man from Laramie, The Last Frontier, and Man of the West—the disintegration and gradual destruction of the family unit acts as a recurring thematic motif, becoming a metaphor for both the self-conflicting psychological states of Mann’s protagonists as well as the inherent, discordant nature of the Western genre itself. By subversively playing his themes of familial/psychological destruction against the more archetypical mechanics of the Western film (particularly in his evocative mise en scène), Mann deconstructs the genre and reveals the supposedly safe construction of the traditional Western to be, like the family unit itself, unfit for the complexity of the modern world.


How should one characterize America in the 1950s and, more specifically, Hollywood films of the period? The labels “repressive” and “conformist” tend to be applied to this decade, yet such definitions risk misrepresenting much of the decade’s culture, just as America’s current tendency to judge foreign countries solely by their governments (i.e., Iran) misrepresents the voices of those countries’ citizens. Similarly, the government-imposed presence of the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the 1950s, as sparked by Cold War paranoia, may misleadingly suggest that all Hollywood films of the period were conformist and lacked boldness of expression. But the truth of the matter is that many visionary directors thrived within this supposedly repressed period; using popular genre as an unsuspected “safe haven,” filmmakers such as Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller often subverted the 1950s status quo beneath the carefully-constructed, traditional surface of genre mechanics, sometimes even using the genre against itself. Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (1950), for example, remains one of the few American films—even to this day—to address WWII Japanese internment camps, despite its patriotic implications of being a “war film.” Ray, on the other hand, often addressed the feeling of being an outsider in a conformist world, perhaps most evident in Bigger Than Life (1956), a film that cleverly disguises its genuine bitterness for masculine standards of patriarchy within the superficial plot device of medication misusage. Because both films fell into easily-identifiable genre categories—war film and family melodrama, respectively—they remained externally conformist to the public’s eye while simultaneously exploring deep, disturbing issues at their core.


One film genre that particularly changed beneath its deceptively stable coating was the Western, due in no small part to the films that Anthony Mann directed in the 1950s. By working in the Western, Mann not only tackled an exceedingly popular genre but also one that, according to John H. Lenihan, is more than any other genre “involved with fundamental American beliefs about individualism and social progress” (4). In other words, the Western was not merely a distinct genre—it was a distinctly American genre, one that incorporated its country’s sense of values as an integral part of its thematic, if not also aesthetic, structure. Yet the Westerns of the 1950s, under the guidance of trailblazers like Mann, were becoming more violent, more neurotic, and more psychological; the genre, as Drew Casper stresses, was beginning to undermine “the classical conception of the western hero as a brave, just, courteous medieval knight of the plains, shifting and/or enlarging the story’s concentration from a heroic male as protector of the community to a destabilized male in need of the community’s help” (336). In Mann’s films, however, the community—usually signified by the family unit—is just as destabilized as the central protagonist, oftentimes serving as the source of chaos rather than an escape from it. The traditional dichotomy between the wilderness and civilization in the Western genre, as partitioned by Jim Kitses in his book Horizons West (12), was becoming increasingly blurred; from Mann’s point-of-view, the family/community seemed just as teeming with distrust and betrayal as the wild, open frontier.

Although it is not essential to contextualize Mann in his respective historical milieu in order to appreciate his Westerns, it does provide some enlightenment on the recurring theme of family conflict in his films. In her study Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Elaine Tyler May writes of the values that post-WWII Americans placed in the family. Many Americans, May explains, sought “the protective walls of the modern home, [where] worrisome developments like sexual liberation, women’s emancipation, and affluence would lead not to decadence but to a wholesome family life” (19-20). Yet these ‘protective walls’ became less and less stable as America approached the paranoia of the Cold War era, which perpetuated a sense of distrust among Americans, even within the once-trustworthy boundaries of one’s own home. The additional panic of an encroaching nuclear apocalypse situated itself nicely within the fear of family disintegration. As noted in a 1951 article by Harvard physician Charles Water Clarke, an atomic bomb explosion would result in families becoming “separated and lost from each other in confusion,” where “[s]upports of normal family and community life would be broken down…” (May 93). In this sense the self-destruction caused by atomic explosion became a fitting metaphor for the self-destruction of the American family.


With this fear of family destruction in the national consciousness, the issue naturally made its way into numerous Hollywood films of the 1950s, even giving birth to “rebellious teenager” films like Laslo Benedek’s The Wild One and Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. Although Mann, too, incorporated the theme of family conflict into his Westerns, it was not likely out of any conscious desire to make a statement about this contemporary issue. In her insightful biography on the director, Jeanne Basinger asserts that Mann “avoided making films which contained overt moral and political significance” (4). Mann’s intentions were rather more expressionistic, using the theme of family destruction to complement the violent, psychological nature of his films’ aesthetic. Westerns, writes Philip French, tend to “coalesce in the memory into one vast, repetitious movie” (7), and this proves particularly true in Mann’s case. Beginning in two of his first films in the genre, Winchester ’73 and The Furies, Mann’s thematic motif of family destruction keeps reoccurring, such that each repetition of the theme builds to a kind of Freudian neurosis. This leaves no rest for Mann’s protagonists, for the moment their struggle is over in one film the characters are karmatically inserted into yet another film, experiencing more pain and betrayal than they did in their last incarnation. Mann’s films throughout the ‘50s tend to grow increasingly darker with each release, with the level of familial violence heightening in every subsequent film and finally reaching its climax in Man of the West.

Before exploring the theme of family destruction further, the presence of the screenwriter in Mann’s films should be addressed. Mann worked with a variety of writers during his career, particularly Borden Chase (Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, The Far Country) and Philip Yordan (The Man from Laramie, The Last Frontier). To thereby credit Mann as the sole author of his films’ themes would be to completely ignore the collaborate aspect of his filmmaking. Yet Mann did exhibit some personal influence over his choice of scripts—when he was unhappy with the initial script for Winchester ’73, for example, Mann insisted on having Chase do a rewrite (Basinger 79). Even at this early stage in his career, Mann gained a certain control over his writing material, thus supporting the notion that the persistent theme of family destruction in his Westerns is not merely a coincidence but an intentional motif. (As evident in The Last Frontier and Man of the West, Mann nonetheless still experienced considerable studio interference with some of his original thematic wishes.) Family conflict is so strong and prevalent in Mann’s work that it’s difficult to believe he wasn’t somehow involved in shaping of the theme in film after film; one can only wonder how Andrew Sarris, in his section on Mann in The American Cinema, inexplicably failed to identify this “consistent thematic pattern” (98).

Even if Mann didn’t have influence on his scripts, he would still remain an auteur, if only for his distinct mise en scène. Mann understood that cinema is primarily a visual medium, possessing unique qualities of its own. Rather than making a pointless attempt to “film” the experience of reading a novel or seeing a play, he instead “planned each film as if the story would emerge from the images as clearly as it would from the dialogue” (Basinger 3). Additionally, Mann seemed to have a keen sense of Jane Tompkins’s assertion in her book West of Everything that, in the Western genre, “words are immaterial, only objects are real” (49). In Mann’s Westerns reality is found in objects, in the physical elements of his terrain; indeed, as Manny Farber asserted, “the Mann films use American objects and terrain—guns, cliffs, boulders, an 1865 locomotive, telephone wires—with more cruel intimacy than any other filmmaker” (17). It is this intimacy in Mann’s films that ultimately brings the visual back to the thematic; the image and story are not merely connected, they are one and the same. In Mann’s films, there is no other way to present the primary narrative; the story, as Basinger notes, “is the total image” (14). Like Marshall McLuhan’s oft-quoted assertion that the medium is indistinguishable from its message, Mann’s Westerns communicate their themes of family conflict and destruction within (rather than simply through) his mise en scène —an environment which not only incorporates the filmed physical landscape but also the filmmaking process itself, with its close-ups, long shots, framing, cutting, and other aspects all playing integral roles in Mann’s cinematic environment. These singularly film-related elements work together to bring into existence the violent and psychological themes of Mann’s films; to separate these themes from their cinematic presentation is to completely miss the essence of Mann’s work.

Mann’s portrayal of the family/community in his Westerns has led to various critical interpretations. John H. Lenihan, author of Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film, simplifies Mann’s vision of the community as “progressive, a source of individual stability and sanity, in contrast with the harsh and violent wilderness where loneliness, physical hardship, and raw emotion overcome the hero” (108). But Lenihan’s analysis fails to consider how often this dichotomy between community (stability) and the wilderness (instability) becomes blurred in Mann’s Westerns. Rather, the family structure (i.e., community) more often than not either contributes to or is the very source of its protagonists’ ‘physical hardship’ and ‘raw emotion.’ More persuasive is Kitses’s argument that, in Mann’s darkest films, he “suggests that the community exiles or destroys its best features, [with] anarchy and evil disguised as order forcing out reason and humanity” (157). From the dysfunctional family units in The Man from Laramie and Man of the West (not to mention The Naked Spur) to the oppressive symbol of the fort in The Last Frontier, Mann again and again implies a communal order gradually unraveling itself, causing its own downfall through brotherly feuds, marital breakdown, and flawed patriarchy.


The destruction of family in Mann’s Westerns ultimately becomes a metaphor for the destruction of self, with every familial conflict representing a kind of psychological struggle that often ends in acts of personal annihilation. The act of killing for Mann’s protagonists thus takes on a greater resonance and has a considerably personal impact. “Essentially brothers under the skin,” Kitses writes of Mann’s heroes and villains, “we kill at our peril, destroying a part of ourselves, staining our hands with the blood of the victim for ever thereafter” (149). If Westerns, as Tompkins notes, tend to play to a “Wild West of the psyche” (6), then Mann’s films are exemplary models, incorporating the theme of familial/communal disintegration to suggest a similar sense of disorder in their protagonists’ mental states. Indeed, as numerous critics have observed, Mann’s very mise en scène often reflects this disturbed psychological state of its protagonists. “In Mann,” writes author Dennis Bingham, “the wilderness could be said to double for the unconscious; it is the primal scene, the site of the return of the repressed” (56). Having worked in film noir during the 1940s, Mann seemed to incorporate much of the psychological form of that genre into his later films; he brought, as David Boxwell stresses in his biographical article on Mann at Senses of Cinema, “a noir sensibility to the Western unlike any other director.”

What translated particularly well in Mann’s Westerns was the film noir genre’s utilization of the physical environment to express a Freudian landscape. In Mann’s Westerns, Basinger asserts, “the physical space becomes the equivalent of psychological space” (71). Even Andrew Sarris, who only accords Mann a “This Far Side of Paradise” ranking in The American Cinema, nonetheless remains fascinated with the director’s handling of landscape, which he likens to the work of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (98). Indeed, this proves an apt comparison: like Antonioni’s psychological use of landscapes in such films as L’avventura, Eclipse, and The Passenger, Mann understands how the physical environment in a film—from its rocks and water to buildings and forts—can be a powerful visual evocation of his characters’ inner feelings and emotions.


By nesting the themes of family and psychological destruction into his mise en scène, Mann consequently chips away at the mechanics of the Western genre itself. This destruction, or deconstruction, takes many of the traditional myths of the genre—such as Kitses’s aforementioned dichotomy between the wilderness and civilization—and defamiliarizes them. “Mann’s response to the Western,” writes Kitses, “was not a response to history, as with Ford and Peckinpah, but to its archetypal form, the mythic patterns deeply embedded in the plots and characters of the genre that can shape and structure the action” (155). Mann’s deconstruction is thus a purely cinematic one, incorporating the popular mechanics of the Western genre in his films so that he can then pit them against themselves. By introducing elements not normally associated with the Western film—neurotic heroes, sympathetic villains, and an increased sense of violence and psychological struggle—Mann continuously alerts the viewers to and questions the long-accepted myths of the Western tradition. The subversive aspects of Mann’s films serve as a contrast to the more archetypal ones, bringing the latter into the light and revealing them for the myths that they are. His deconstruction of the Western becomes akin to the demythologizing technique outlined by Roland Barthes, where one subverts the unconscious myths of a culture by making them more clear and visible. In his essay "Myth Today" (published in 1956), Barthes claims that “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth” (123). In his continual revealing of Western myths via the introducing of modern elements in his films, Mann thus suggests the ‘artificiality’ of these myths in a complex, multivalent universe.

Any of Mann’s Westerns of the 1950s could be picked apart for how they integrate the theme of family/psychological destruction with the subsequent process of genre deconstruction, but three films that play with this procedure quite provocatively are The Man from Laramie (1955), The Last Frontier (1955), and Man of the West (1958). Although Mann’s earlier Westerns certainly exhibit clear themes of family conflict (Winchester ‘73 and The Furies) and psychological drama (The Naked Spur), these later three films convey Mann’s thematic motifs with considerably greater violence and an overall darker sensibility. It’s perhaps not surprising that these three films also uniquely share Mann’s expressive use of Cinemascope, since the widened space serves as a perfect apparatus for Mann’s increasingly widening vision. Cinemascope essentially gave Mann more room to evoke, as mentioned earlier by Farber, his ‘cruel intimacy’ from physical objects; within the extended horizontal frame, Mann’s heroes become increasingly isolated and overpowered by the physical elements that surround them, which heightens the films’ psychological impact. Cinemascope, writes Basinger, also allowed Mann to “increase the complexity of his compositions” and to use “its wider space and potential for greater depth [in strengthening] his theme of duality, or the link between hero and villain” (101). This proves particularly true in The Man from Laramie, The Last Frontier, and Man of the West, three films that often blur the division between protagonist and antagonist, suggesting a universe that ranges beyond simple, black-and-white dichotomies.


Along with The Naked Spur, Mann’s The Man from Laramie, The Last Frontier, and Man of the West are arguably his most complex and multilayered Westerns. Only The Naked Spur, however, has gained considerable attention from authors and scholars; the other three, outside of Kitses’s and Basinger’s perceptive analyses, remain largely underrated and undervalued. Each of these films are thus worth examining individually and in substantial detail, as the following analyses will attempt to accomplish.

The Man from Laramie

Made in 1955, just when Cinemascope was a brand new process, The Man from Laramie concerns the efforts of a lone wanderer named Will Lockhart (played by James Stewart) to avenge the death of his brother, the latter of whom was killed by a group of raiding Indians. In an interesting twist to the usual revenge formula, Philip Yordan and Frank Burt’s screenplay has Stewart seek out the unknown individual who sold the Indians rifles rather than the Indians themselves. This theme of “indirect” vengeance could be faulted for its racist assumption that Native Americans are too naïve to be held responsible for murder, yet it tellingly situates the central conflict as one between two members of the same race. Uninterested in finding the Indians who directly caused his brother’s death, Stewart neurotically reasons that the true culprit must be someone of his own skin, someone biologically closer to him than a Native American—a “brother” must be taken for a brother, in other words. Stewart’s visit to a small town, in fact, indirectly causes the fatal breakdown of another family unit: a wealthy cattle baron (Donald Crisp), his unruly son (Alex Nicol), and an “adopted” family member (Arthur Kennedy), who acts as ranch foreman and general caretaker of his vicious “brother.”

From the film’s very first scenes, Mann provides subtle visual hints of Stewart’s presence as a walking act of destruction. When Stewart encounters the remains of an Indian raid, for example, Mann’s camera closes in on Stewart’s distraught expression and then cuts to what seems to be a point-of-view shot. Yet as the camera pans to the left, observing the aftermath of the Indian attack, Stewart again enters the frame, thus revealing the shot as not Stewart’s point-of-view after all. By deceptively causing the viewer to identify with Stewart and then revealing him to be a part of the ruins he is supposedly “seeing,” Mann conveys the psychologically confused state of his character: a man both inside and outside himself, both receiver and giver of destruction. This dual nature of Stewart’s presence complements the film’s blurring of strict hero/villain dichotomies; his performance, as Robert Horton puts it in his article “Mann & Stewart: Two Rode Together,” is one completely “in tune with the film’s multifarious perversity” (46).


Granted, Stewart’s acts of destruction are understandably provoked, beginning in his first encounter with Crisp. Set on a barren, white salt field that suggests a wasteland annihilated by nuclear warfare, Crisp and his gang’s sudden attack of Stewart sets in motion a standard of violence and chaos that never seems to leave in Mann’s subsequent films. What makes the scene particularly effective is Mann’s handling of steadily growing intensity: it begins with Crisp’s riders in the distance, nearly as small as salt themselves in the Cinemascope frame and gradually increasing in proximity to Mann’s fixed camera. This is followed by instances of escalating violence, where the gang first ropes Stewart and drags him through the dust, then sets fire to his wagons, and finally—in one of the film’s most shocking moments—shoots his mules. Mann masterfully captures the psychological intensity of the scene by cutting from Stewart’s look of sheer horror to what is this time a true point-of-view shot, one that bases Stewart’s psychotic sense of terror in the physical, fiery imagery that surrounds him. Basinger calls the scene a “widescreen glimpse of hell” (104), yet it seems more akin to a vision of the apocalypse; perhaps Mann is evoking the Cold War paranoia of the time, particularly in the way this paranoia also suggests a fear of family disintegration, as demonstrated in the film’s eventual developments.


In later scenes, Mann uses violence to increase benevolence over his characters’ motivations. On Stewart and Crisp’s second meeting, for instance, it’s uncanny how Mann frames Stewart at a set distance when he first sees Crisp and then has Stewart gradually increase in size as he walks closer to the camera, similar to how Mann filmed Crisp and his riders in the previous encounter. It is Stewart, not Crisp, who is now the act of destruction, suggesting a perpetual shifting of power roles that recurs throughout the film. Stewart’s wrestling with Kennedy, the man who saved Stewart from Crisp’s wrath in the salt field and who here intervenes Stewart’s fight with Crisp, seems even more unprovoked and purposeless; what these men have against each other, at least at this point, is unclear, and Mann’s mise en scène accordingly reflects this ambivalence by blurring the two men in clouds of dust and even losing them for brief seconds when they fall into a cow pen, where cows fill up the foreground and occasionally block the frame. A scene that in a more traditional Western would stand as a key battle between hero and villain becomes, through Mann’s aesthetic, just the tossing and tumbling of two violent figures, indistinguishable from the rest of the physical landscape.

Mann’s deconstruction of the Western genre is perhaps most clear in the complex performance he draws out of Arthur Kennedy. Although Kennedy becomes the archetypal villain in the film when he is eventually revealed to be the man indirectly responsible for the death of Stewart’s brother, he emerges, as Richard Combs notes in his article on Film Comment, “as the greatest victim and the only sympathetic male character in the film” (44). Indeed, when Kennedy is later forced to kill Crisp, the viewers’ sympathies are entirely in Kennedy’s favor; the scene, after all, directly follows Crisp’s brutal close-range shooting of Stewart’s hand (one of the most violent scenes in Mann’s entire oeuvre), which makes Kennedy’s act seem ultimately justifiable while also satisfying the viewers’ desire to see the malicious Crisp dead. Kennedy’s acting in the scene also evokes sympathy: immediately after shooting Crisp, his facial expression indicates a mix of sorrow and disgust, perhaps conveying Kennedy’s frustration for the demands of a genre that must reduce his multilayered character to mere villain. This facial expression, however, ultimately keeps Kennedy from completely inhabiting that archetypal role; even when he nearly kills his surrogate father (Nicol) and faces Stewart in the film’s finale, Kennedy’s look of sorrow-cum-disgust never ceases and thus neither does the audience’s sympathy for him. His death, wherein he is shot by Indians using his own rifles, veers toward Greek tragedy—a man, not unlike anyone else, destroyed by his own hubris.

In light of Mann’s ambivalent handling of the hero (Stewart) and villain (Kennedy) in The Man from Laramie, the traditional ballad that begins and ends the film seems quite ironic:

The Man from Laramie
He was friendly to everyone he met
Everyone admired the fearless stranger

Who is this “fearless stranger” that “was friendly to everyone he met”? It certainly isn’t Stewart, who spends the majority of the film sparking conflict with just about every character in town (even the local sheriff doesn’t trust him). Considering that Stewart also brings to ruin the family unit that is Kennedy, Crisp, and Nicol, these lyrics seem even more incongruous to his actual character. Yet the ballad, a traditional Western staple, makes Mann’s subversion against the genre all the more clear; its lyrics are a reminder of characteristics usually associated with the archetypal Western hero and how much Mann has subsequently deconstructed these norms. Much of this demythologization must be credited to Stewart, an actor who did some persona deconstructing of his own in his Westerns with Mann (anticipating the dark undertones he would further explore with Alfred Hitchcock). In his study of Stewart and gender identity in Mann’s films, Dennis Bingham emphasizes how Stewart’s restraint in the Westerns only “serves as a contrast to the moments when the character ‘cracks,’ revealing the toughness as a construction” (55). Stewart’s performances in Mann’s films—particularly in The Man from Laramie, his last film with the director—thus complement the similar revealing Mann is making of the Western genre itself: a cinematic construction, forged, if not by gender, then by tradition.

The Last Frontier

Like The Man from Laramie, Mann’s The Last Frontier also begins and ends with a ballad. A portion of its problematic lyrics read:

The last frontier, the last frontier
Back when the law was the law of the open spaces
The folks out there were fair and square
They paid every debt by the sweat of their honest faces

The “open spaces” metaphor may prove an apt description of Mann’s handling of space, but that’s just about where the lyrics’ fidelity to the actual film ends. As will be demonstrated, the film’s sense of civilized law is not always “fair and square” nor governed by those with “honest faces.” In truth, The Last Frontier stands as one of Mann’s most critical indictments of the security and comfort that is supposedly found in civilization (i.e., community and the family unit). By the film’s end, it remains difficult to decide if civilization is any safer than the wilderness.

Mann’s critique of the Western norms associated with community and family is mainly fostered in his use of actor Victor Mature. In the film Mature plays a frontiersman more at home in the wilderness than in the walls of the film’s central fort, the latter of which is governed by an irrational colonel (Robert Preston) and a more humane captain (Guy Madison). After having their supplies stolen by an Indian tribe that is at war with the colonel, Mature and his companions—an old trapper and Indian scout (James Whitmore and Pat Hogan)—seek shelter at the fort, where they are promptly hired as scouts. Within the fort’s walls, Mature develops a romantic entanglement with the colonel’s wife (a young and nearly unrecognizable Anne Bancroft) and becomes increasingly antagonistic with the colonel. Despite his initial reservations, Mature manages to settle down by the film’s end; as will be addressed, however, these final scenes do not reconcile comfortably with the conflicts Mann introduces throughout the film, much less with Mature’s unstable character.

Mature is certainly one of Mann’s wildest, complex protagonists, a man who considerably darkens the traditional notion of a Western “hero” while also allowing Mann to question the value of civilization. Through Mature, writes Lenihan, “Mann took aim at some of the hypocrisies and irrational behavior associated with ‘civilized’ values” (69). This critique is evident in the occasional exchanges between Mature and Madison. When Mature asks how one becomes “civilized,” Madison replies that he “has to belong.” Mature is skeptical. “Belong to what?” he asks. “Other people,” Madison returns, indicating the community and family. Mature then jokingly declares, “I’m gonna find me a woman, make some children, get married, and become civilized!” (Whether Mature means to follow this particular order or not seems wholly irrelevant.) In these scenes, Mann uses Mature as a devil’s advocate to question the accepted notion that having a family is the answer to all one’s problems. This critique further develops later in the film, when Mature and Madison discuss the sadistic nature of the colonel (Preston). Mature wonders how the colonel can have everything that makes a man “civilized”—a high ranking, a wife, etc.—and yet still remain “an animal.” “What the good of being civilized?” he asks Madison. It’s telling that Madison never answers Mature’s question—such a question, Mann implies, has no obvious answer.

With the possible exception of Mature, the strongest character in the film is not an actor but the fort itself. As a mythological symbol for civilization and all that it stands for, the fort becomes Mann’s primary visual metaphor for the inherent, self-conflicting nature of the family/community. Mann evokes the fort’s ambivalent nature through his constantly changing camera angles and various depths of field within its walls; the place becomes “a maze of stairs, posts, walkways, porches, levels, interiors, catwalks, corners, windows, and pits,” such that the “viewer is never clear what the topographical layout really is” (Basinger 107). Unlike Howard Hawks’s distinct handling of space in his more traditional Western Rio Bravo (1959), where the viewer grows accustomed to the exact locations of the town’s living arrangements, the environment of the fort in The Last Frontier is continuously defamiliarized. The fort thus reflects Mature’s psychological difficulty in understanding the family and community in general; like the viewers’ inability to grasp a precise handling on the design of the fort, Mature cannot understand how to behave as a family man and community member. Mature’s misunderstanding is evident in his treatment of the colonel’s wife (Bancroft), whom he first attempts to make love with in spite of her being married (a bold departure from what is normally associated with the archetypal Western hero) and then slaps violently when she won’t run away with him after he has disposed of her husband. Through these actions Mature is attempting to become a settled, “civilized” man, but he doesn’t have a clear sense of how one is supposed to go about accomplishing this goal and remains as lost and confused as the abstract, shifting interiors of the fort itself.

With all that Mann does to present Mature and the community as irreconcilable entities, the film’s happy ending—with Mature in uniform, grinning profusely, now able to pursue the woman of his dreams—cannot be believed without some willful ignorance. This final scene was, in fact, imposed on Mann (Basinger 111), which demonstrates that he was not always in complete control of his material. (He would later deal with studio interference in the finale of Man of the West as well.) Yet like the use of the traditional ballad in this film and The Man from Laramie, the forced ending actually strengthens Mann’s vision—its stark contrast to the rest of the film clarifies the deviations Mann makes from the typical Western genre and actually makes the viewer yearn for an ending that stays faithful to Mann’s vision, no matter how dark this ending may be. In spite of its compromised finale, The Last Frontier stands as one of Mann’s bitterest and most rebellious films, one that perpetually questions the archetypal Western hero and his relation to the community.

Man of the West

Man of the West, one of Mann’s final Westerns, exposes and lays fully bare the subversive themes only implied in his previous films. The destruction of the family unit is, for once, conveyed quite literally, with the film’s hero (Gary Cooper) driven to kill every member of his murderous family of misfits, despite his past connection to them. In his book Westerns, Philip French asserts that in Man of the West “the dialectic of the Western is at work, forming a bond within a society or destroying it, and both themes have their validity (117). Cooper, a man once as ruthless as his adopted family but who now desires to live straight, is suddenly thrust back into the unit’s mold, where he is visibly torn between whether he should again become a part of the family’s communal bond or exterminate it. This struggle essentially becomes a type of psychological purging for the hero. “As if he were the hero of a Greek myth,” writes Basinger, “Cooper makes a symbolic journey into self. He leaves the real world he inhabits and enters the evil underworld to confront the forces which would destroy him, forces which are clearly of and within him” (119). Mann’s film thus blurs the traditional lines between hero and villain, between the security of the family unit and the dangers of the wilderness—neither dichotomy, as Man of the West makes clear, can be easily partitioned.

Unlike The Man from Laramie and The Last Frontier, Man of the West does not begin with an ironic ballad, although its introduction is no less deceptive. The opening credits are accompanied by the archetypal image of the hero (Cooper) on his horse, suggesting the film’s allegiance to a more traditional Western mold. This deceptive quality is maintained in the film’s first scenes, which follows an awkward, silent Cooper as he struts into town and boards a train. Basinger notes that these scenes almost act as a comedy in their lighthearted nature, thus making the film’s later sequences all the more grim and troubling (120). Mann does, however, slip in a few subversive touches in this first section, particularly in his use of the train. As Combs observes, the cinematic image of the train moving towards the screen—reproduced masterfully by Mann here—is not only a traditional Western motif but harkens back to the birth of film itself with the premiere of the Lumière brothers’ L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895). In Man of the West, however, Mann counterpoints the train’s mythological signification with more modern touches: the way its steam nearly engulfs Cooper on arrival, the bumpy nature of its seats when traveling, the way its passengers are required to help load wood at occasional stops. These subtle details defamiliarize the viewers’ archetypical perceptions of train travel in the Western film, revealing its more realistic aspects and thus foreshadowing the harsher world to come.

When Cooper and two other passengers (Julie London and Arthur O’Connell) are left behind after experiencing a botched train robbery, they are forced to take shelter with Cooper’s old “father” Dock (Lee J. Cobb) and his vicious family. Their meeting of the gang consequently changes the mood of the film entirely, transforming its initial pose as a traditional Western film to an intense, psychological journey that recalls Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with Mann increasingly utilizing his mise en scène to convey his protagonists’ psychological states. As Cooper approaches the gang’s shelter, for instance, Mann cuts from a close-up of Cooper to an extreme long shot, tracking him at a far distance as he walks toward his old home. This sudden cut has a double effect: it isolates Cooper in the surrounding barren environment, thus conveying his feelings of alienation and danger, while simultaneously distancing the viewer from Cooper’s character. It is at this point, after all, that his past life begins to become revealed and his character considerably darkens. Mann plays with this darkness further within the cramped, claustrophobic interiors of the house, where Dock’s lighting of a lamp merely draws the viewers’ attention to the shadowy, indistinguishable figures that surround Cooper. Yet as uncomfortable as these closed-in interiors are, Mann’s later exterior shots are just as unsettling. The landscape, writes Combs, becomes “almost entirely symbolic, in the progression from lush green valley to a dried-out promised land,” ending at a mountainside with “rock formations so bleached they resemble the bones of a vast skeleton” (42). Indeed, Mann’s evocative use of a ghost town near the film’s finale suggests a post-apocalyptic environment; within the context of such a lifeless landscape, Cooper’s killing of his entire family unit seems wholly appropriate.

Just as iconoclastic as Mann’s deconstruction of the physical environment is his treatment of the archetypal female character in Man of the West, as portrayed by London. Although women in Mann’s films had always been one of the few elements to stay in the Western tradition, oftentimes signifying the hero’s moral conscious and stability, in Man of the West this archetype begins to, quite literally, strip away. The scene where London is forced to remove her clothes for the gang is disturbing, as Basinger puts it, because of the way “sex and violence are clearly linked with a solemn, almost polite and respectful pace which makes the action all the more horrible to watch” (123). The ‘polite and respectful pace’ of Mann’s direction here—a pace that could be associated with the traditional Western film—subverts itself by the appalling content within its calm borders, like a painting attempting to crack through its own constricting frame. Additionally unnerving is the fact that the imminent threat of rape towards London’s heroine actually becomes fulfilled at the film’s end; in Mann’s world, the hero is powerless to save his woman from harm, perhaps because the traditional notion of “hero” does not really exist at all. Nothing is secure, Mann implies, not the family unit nor certainly the desires of a filmgoing audience that expects its Westerns to follow a traditional, safe pattern as linear as the film’s opening train.

In what might have been one of Mann’s most subversive acts against the values of family stability and the Western ideal, the director originally wanted Cooper to run off with London at the film’s end, despite his character’s being married to another woman. The studio objected, however, primarily because of the idea of Cooper being “rewarded with blatantly ‘soiled’ [i.e., raped] merchandise” (Tuska 92)—an indication of the sexism in Hollywood at the time that is, in its own way, just as disturbing as anything in Mann’s film. Still, even if Mann’s wishes for the film’s narrative finale were not explicitly met, the sense of familial disintegration remains and lingers as the film comes to a close. With all its acts of violence, stark imagery, and psychological intensity, Man of the West is an exemplary model of Mann’s vision of the Western genre.

The 1950s, with its growing sense that the traditional family unit was crumbling apart, proved to be a suitable decade for Mann’s Westerns. As demonstrated in The Man from Laramie, The Last Frontier, and Man of the West, Mann’s films exhibited the family structure, as well as the community in general, as capable of internal disintegration, thus questioning the family unit’s solidarity in the face of a complex reality. With the destruction of the family in Mann’s Westerns also came the destruction, or deconstruction, of the Western genre, with the deceptive façade of the family/community becoming a metaphor for the equally misleading ingredients of the archetypal Western formula. By introducing modern elements into these traditional ingredients through his mise en scene and use of actors, Mann triggered a kind of atomic explosion within the Western genre, clearing a path for future iconoclastic filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood. In this sense Mann was truly his own “Man of the West,” forging a cinematic frontier for others to follow.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. 93-149.

Basinger, Jeanine. Anthony Mann. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Boxwell, David. “Anthony Mann.” Senses of Cinema. 2003. 25 October 2008.
<http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/mann_anthony.html>.

Casper, Drew. Postwar Hollywood: 1946-1962. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

Combs, Richard. ”Worlds (Within Worlds): How Anthony Mann Negotiated the Rugged Terrain of Moviemaking in the Twilight of the Studio System.” Film Comment 43.3 (2007): 40-44.

Farber, Manny. Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. New York: De Capo Press, Inc., 1998.

French, Philip. Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Horton, Robert. “Mann & Stewart: Two Rode Together.” Film Comment 26.2 (1990): 40-46.

Kitses, Jim. Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood. London: British Film Institute, 2004.

Lenihan, John H. Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1988.

Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1992.

Tuska, Jon. The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

The Green Ray (1986)

For all the praise given to Howard Hawks by the Nouvelle Vague critics-turned-filmmakers of Cahiers du cinéma, arguably only Eric Rohmer has successfully transposed Hawks’s trademark nonstyle to a consistent, personal vision of his own. Like Hawks at his best (Rio Bravo, Only Angels Have Wings), Rohmer eschews rigid formalism for the sake of creating a naturalistic environment driven almost solely by his characters’ social interactions, and this delicate wonder may be the French director’s very best fulfillment of his particular goals. In depicting the efforts of a thirty-something woman (Marie Rivière) to find love while on vacation with various friends and acquaintances, Rohmer takes a deceptively simple premise and accentuates it with his improvisatory editing rhythms and seemingly random scattering of hand-written date markers. What results is empathetic filmmaking of a very high order: by making his formal techniques practically invisible, Rohmer forges such an intimacy with Rivière’s character that her occasional tearful breakdowns are devastating—they emphasize the actual distance between the viewer and her helpless character that permeates Rohmer’s masterful illusion of close proximity. By ending on a note of suspended disbelief via optical phenomena (the “green ray” of the film’s title, taken from a Jules Verne novel of the same name), the film poignantly calls attention to the underlying fate that has been guiding Rivière through Rohmer’s premeditated narrative strand all along, thus providing for the character a type of hopeful compassion that we, as viewers outside the action, cannot bestow ourselves.

Summer Hours (2009)

Olivier Assayas's latest film, which charts the relinquishing of a family estate by three siblings (Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, and Jérémie Renier) following the death of their mother (Edith Scob), synthesizes beautifully many of the themes he's been exploring in previous features: how people respond to the death of a loved one (Late August, Early September), the personal value attached to material objects (Les destinées sentimentales), and, perhaps most significantly, the effects of globalization on human relationships (Irma Vep, Boarding Gate). In presenting the Binoche and Renier characters as too preoccupied with their respective careers in the United States and China to care about preserving their ancestors' possessions, Assayas pinpoints how the blurring of national borders caused by technology (particularly through cell phones and the internet, as often referenced here) makes problematic the notion of "cultural identity," thereby forcing one to reevaluate what national heritage means at a time when expatriation is increasingly commonplace. In this sense Assayas seems to be taking cues from one of his mentors, Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, examining what relevance the history of his own native homeland of France has on contemporary life. What the film has to say about this matter is simultaneously tragic and hopeful (bittersweet strikes me as too simple a word for Assayas's complex sensibility); as demonstrated in the film's sublime final scene, Assayas implies that genealogical memory may be able to live on through the relationships we form with others, even as it fades away through the deterioration of physical objects. Much of the film's humanism (and thus optimism) stems from Assayas's refusal to judge any of his characters, which is explicated in a masterful narrative structure that subtly shifts its identifiable viewpoint between three generations, beginning with Scob's 75-year-old senior and working its way down to her Plasticines-listening granddaughter (played by Alice de Lencquesaing). Like Arnaud Desplechin's Un conte de Noël (2008), Assayas utilizes the cinematic medium itself to set a unifying frame around his family unit, structuring the family members' disparate lives within Assayas's seemingly weightless yet completely controlled camera movements. In short, while this might not reach the stylistic, improvisatory heights of Assayas's best film, Irma Vep (1996), it's conceivably his most personal work and one that, like Irma Vep in the '90s, is unequivocally about the world we live in today.

Merci beaucoup to my friend L., whose openness in discussing with me her own "expatriation" from France helped me to appreciate Assayas's film all the more.

La Cheval d'orgueil

(The Horse of Pride) (1980)

Based on Pierre-Jakez Hélias’s 1975 autobiographical novel of peasant life in early 20th-century Brittany, Claude Chabrol’s very uncharacteristic feature forgoes his usual preoccupation with the contemporary French bourgeoisie for a calm, serene portraiture of a culture now faded in the nation’s memory. Possessing no plot in the traditional sense, the film primarily centers on the childhood of a son (played at different ages by Ronan and Armel Hubert) born to a poor couple (Bernadette Le Saché and a young François Cluzet), occasionally diverging from its casual depiction of Breton communal life into folkloric interludes and tall tales. Chabrol’s controlled and distant aesthetic, previously and subsequently utilized to provide sharp commentary on characters’ relationships in films like La femme infidèle (1969) and La cérémonie (1995), here functions more as a respectful reverence for Breton customs, as if Chabrol is cautious to not contaminate the culture’s singular traditions with his own commentary. In this sense Chabrol’s remoteness differs from that of a period film like Barry Lyndon (1975), where Kubrick’s detached sensibility turns all of his characters into bizarre curiosities rather than the human, if still slightly eccentric, populace observed in Chabrol’s film (Jacques Dufilho, playing the protagonist’s grandfather, is especially memorable).


Of course, the irony is that by shooting the entire film in French language rather than Hélias’s original Breton, Chabrol automatically contaminates the production with his own culture anyway. Perhaps due to this linguistic anachronism, Chabrol understandably skips over the majority of Hélias’s extensive and fascinating discussion of learning French in his novel—an omission that perhaps is for the best anyway, given the topic’s relation to the literary form over the cinematic. Indeed, Chabrol’s use of French language in his adaptation adds a significant thematic layer to the film, anticipating the manner in which French laws and the economy would eventually force Brittany to discontinue its national language. Chabrol explicitly illustrates the country’s cultural assimilation, both into France and into the world as a whole, near the end of his film, when cinema is introduced to the Breton community in the form a silent gangster serial (causing one woman to pull down the projection blanket out of fright). On a more formal level, Chabrol at one instance evokes Brittany’s gradual global awareness by cutting to black-and-white stock footage of World War I—a startling, interruptive explication of modern technology that contrasts to the antiquary age referenced by Chabrol’s cutaway to Georges de La Tour’s Le Nouveau-né at a much earlier point in the film. Anticipating Jia Zhangke’s similar documentation of cultural shift in Platform (2000), Chabrol’s film humbly admits France’s gradual absorption of Brittany, an act essentially compounded in Chabrol’s literal attempt to capture the reality of a bypassed period through the artificially modern process of filmmaking.

In spite of the national tensions that Le Cheval d’orgueil inevitably alludes to and even intentionally references (catalyzing in an encounter between the protagonist’s grandfather and his employer, which is one of the few scenes that is recognizably Chabrolian in its absurd actorly mannerisms, sparse interior location, and biting critique of class), one shouldn’t dismiss the tranquil, pastoral beauty that Chabrol achieves for the majority of the film. Heightened by Jean Rabier’s lush photography, the film’s painterly mise en scène often resembles the landscape works of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. More than a series of pretty pictures, however, Chabrol also does wonderful things with movement, both within the frame (such as the complementary rhythms of washing and hoeing, not to mention the effects of the wind on fields and strung wooden shoes) as well as through the frame (some of the tracking shots, particularly in the film’s opening wedding ceremony, are marvelously composed). Perhaps most significant of all is Chabrol’s ability to depict the Breton people in a way that does not sentimentalize (and thus condescends) them, thereby steering clear from the bourgeois tendency, as commented on by Hélias in his novel, to view the lives of the lower class as “bad melodrama.” This may not only be Chabrol’s greatest film in terms of visual and aural composition, but it’s also one that reveals, in its deference for an older culture and its Truffaut-like playfulness, a compassionate and tender sensibility beneath the director’s normally cold exterior.

This short piece was written for Flickhead's ongoing Claude Chabrol Blogathon.

L'enfer (1994)

Working with an undirected script by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Nouvelle Vague auteur Claude Chabrol offers one of his typically offbeat character studies, this time exploring how jealousy can drive men (particularly rich, shallow men) literally insane. Whereas Chabrol’s initial foray into this type of material with La femme infidèle (1969) demonstrated how confirmed infidelity can ironically help heal a lifeless marriage, Clouzot’s script inverts this idea, depicting how unrealized suspicion of infidelity can drive a good marriage to complete shambles. As the disturbed hotel owner who gradually begins to suspect that his wife is sleeping with every guest in their inn, François Cluzet provides an effective, believable performance, even as his character’s erratic behavior grows increasingly comedic in its deluded outbursts of emotion; Emmanuelle Béart, on the other hand, is not asked to do much more than look beautiful and unapproachable, which might be just as well considering her function in the film as a continuous object of jealousy (although, in all fairness, she does exhibit some human dimensions in the film’s final third, right when Cluzet’s character loses all sense of rationality). As always with Chabrol, what the director does with location, mood, and his mise en scène in general is just as provocative as anything he does with his characters—here making wonderful use of Lake Saint-Ferreol in Lauraguais, France, and particularly the central hotel, which Chabrol transforms into an interior, psychological universe as intense and full of suggestive nuances as anything in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Most intriguing of all, however, is Chabrol’s mathematical expression of time as a variable inversely proportional to jealousy: the more Cluzet’s character suspects his wife of cheating on him, the slower Chabrol paces his film’s sequence of events, until, in the bravura finale, time seems to stop altogether, with Cluzet’s character stuck in an eternal nightmare of looping suspicion.

Ten (2002)

Without a Bo Derek in sight (sorry, I couldn’t resist), Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami pushes to new extremes the minimalism he has been experimenting with for his entire career in this series of ten sketches, all centered on a female driver (Mania Akbari) and her various passengers. By confining his entire film inside a car’s interior through the use of two digital video cameras mounted on its dashboard, Kiarostami removes much of the unnecessary distractions of equipment and crew that normally accompany such film productions (something he’s increasingly been trying to do with every feature, as he shares in his accompanying documentary 10 on Ten) and consequently induces a heightened sense of naturalism from his performers—Amin Maher, who plays Akbari’s tyrannical young son and is the only male member of the cast, is particularly outstanding. Those accustomed to Kiarostami’s masterful handling of landscapes in past films—completely absent here—will be forced to reexamine his mise en scène and his role as an auteur in general. Yet what’s astonishing in Ten is how Kiarostami manages to make his mark even within this most constrained of formal environments, using jump cuts and cutaways just as strategically as he’s used long shots and tracking shots in masterpieces like Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), even developing the latter film’s expressive utilization of absence to provocative political ends here. It’s telling, for example, how in Ten’s very first scene Kiarostami complements the Maher character’s developing patriarchal tendencies with a refusal to cut to Akbari’s reactions, thus implying in a visual sense the Iranian female’s nonexistence in the presence of men; it is only after Maher leaves that we are given our first shot of Akbari. (Although, perhaps even more significantly, when Akbari inadvertently picks up a prostitute in a later scene, we never see the latter character’s face at all.) When one of the characters removes her chador to reveal her shaved head near the end of the film, the very act of revealing becomes just as politically charged with meaning as what is revealed—a fitting illustration of how Kiarostami’s minimalistic formalism often subversively undermines one’s perception of what is depicted both on- and off-screen. In its unapologetic attentiveness to the female experience in Iran, this joins Jafar Panahi’s powerful The Circle (2000) as one of the most socially transgressive films to come from the country. Indeed, given the current air of revolution among the nation’s citizens following Ahmadinejad’s reputed reelection, the film’s Mousavian brand of liberalism could not be more relevant.

Boy Meets Girl (1984)

The first full-length film by Leos Carax (who would later go on to direct Les amants du Pont-Neuf and Pola X) is a virtually plotless exercise in mood, following the meandering lives of two antisocial misfits (Mireille Perrier and former acrobat Denis Lavant) and their attempts to connect with one another, if not with the world in general. As far as debut features go, this is typically overloaded with too many ideas, both formal and thematic, but such a complaint seems rather innocuous when ideas of any kind are scarce in mainstream cinema. Basked in beautiful black-and-white photography by cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, Carax's film suggests a provocative blend of Jean Eustache (Lavant has a monologue on life and love that recalls Jean-Pierre Léaud's rants in The Mother and the Whore), Jean-Luc Godard (Carax trades traditional narrative for a series of playful sketches), and Alain Resnais (mainly by way of Last Year at Marienbad when Lavant visits a party of ghostlike has-beens) while also anticipating the offbeat characterizations of Jim Jarmusch. Yet Carax is certainly forging a vision of his own here, particularly in his stunning handle of light and sound: the way he steadily zooms toward the flickering innerworkings of a pinball machine, for example, or his wonderful fusion of Perrier's tap dancing with David Bowie's "When I Live My Dream." Carax can be slightly too narcissistic for my taste, yet I suppose this is like complaining that fine wine isn't sweet enough—the film's self-indulgent sensibility is in many ways part of its savor, without which we wouldn't have much of Carax's reckless splendor.

Mandingo (1975)

Richard Fleischer’s problematic but commanding film, based on Kyle Onstott’s reputedly lurid novel about the corruption of a slave-owning Southern family in the antebellum United States, seems a fitting illustration of Frederick Douglass’s assertion that slavery, like a contagious disease, damaged all who partook in it—by the end of the film even the viewers themselves are bound to feel rather depraved from Norman Wexler’s exploitative script, which more often than not revels in sexual degradation (of blacks and whites alike) and excessive violence (climaxing with a slave being simultaneously stabbed with a pitchfork and burned alive in boiling water). Still, I wonder if a repulsed response is more suitable than the “feel-good” emotions Spielberg has attempted to induce from national tragedies in manipulative heartwarmers like Amistad and Schindler’s List. Say what you like about matters of taste and propriety, Mandingo’s exploitative inclinations at least serve as an accurate reflection of the inherently exploitative nature of slavery itself, and personally I’d rather have this film’s overindulgence than Gone with the Wind’s (or, for that matter, Cold Mountain’s) silence on the subject. To his credit, Fleischer remains assured and even empathetic in his direction (his tracking shots of slaves in chains are unforgettable), and he manages to draw out from his cast some affecting performances that ultimately transcend the script’s limitations—especially good are Brenda Sykes, Perry King, and Susan George. (James Mason’s unhinged, one-note portrayal of a garbling slaveholder, on the other hand, is best left forgotten in the actor’s resume.) I’m not sure I’d watch this again, but perhaps that only testifies to Fleischer’s accomplishment: he’s furnished a film about slavery which, in spite of the script’s occasional outrageousness, doesn’t flatter our moral sense of superiority but rather plays with the less-flattering human impulses that ultimately allowed such a mortifying system to exist in the first place.

Un coeur en hiver (1992)

In this delicately crafted character study by Claude Sautet (Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud), Daniel Auteuil plays an antisocial violinmaker who begins to develop romantic feelings for the violin-playing girlfriend (Emmanuelle Béart) of his business partner (Alain Resnais regular André Dussollier) but then withdraws as the relationship shows signs of intimacy. Sautet’s control of the material is masterful and at times surprising in its developments—what initially seems to be a discreet exploration of ménage à trois and secret desire gradually becomes a haunting analysis of loneliness. Jean-Luc Godard once fingered out Sautet as the kind of bourgeois director he was attempting to rebel against, yet in many ways Clautet displays a healthy ambivalence towards the upper-class lifestyles of his characters, revealing how the ease of habit and routine provided by wealth discourages the kind of emotional risk-taking needed to openly profess one’s love to others. The talented cast remains more than adept at conveying Sautet’s themes, especially Béart, who really comes alive during her violin sessions—it’s refreshing to see a film that for once actually shows its actors playing instruments rather than obstructing their fingerings off-camera, and it’s testament to Béart’s fearlessness and ability as a performer that she takes up the challenge and marvelously succeeds. Yet it is Auteuil's low-key performance as a man quietly coming to grips with his own social inadequacy that lingers long after the film's ambiguous closure.