Two lakes, a rock, some gravestones and many ghosts …

Martin O'Shaughnessy reports back from a colloquium on film at Dartmouth College.

I was recently lucky enough to attend a colloquium on the topic of committed (French) film, hosted by Dartmouth College and held in Dartmouth's lake house on Squam lake, famous, among other things for having been the location of On Golden Pond, a film that brought together Henry and Jane Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. It was to be Henry Fonda's last big-screen appearance. Although the schedule of the colloquium was demanding (if highly stimulating and enjoyable), time was found for a boat trip during which our guide showed us locations associated with the film. We learned that shooting was moved from the original 'Golden Pond' to Squam lake because the former was too inaccessible. We saw the famous wooden house at the centre of the action: an extra floor had to be added to it for the shooting and was retained by the owner as a free and attractive extension, Hollywood thus accidentally initiating the make-over culture. We also saw the little wooden dressing room built for Hepburn so that the aged star would not have to muck in with the rest of the cast. The owner has also kept this, perhaps to commune with the ghost of the Diva, perhaps to store his gardening tools. We saw too the rock that Jane Fonda back-flipped off and discovered that a pool had had to be dug behind it so that the actress would not crack her head on the bottom. Since the film, the rock has had to be moved into the shore! The pool has been filled in by the movement of the water and people seeking to imitate Fonda's dive risked breaking their neck, it always being dangerous to imitate Hollywood stunts. We found out that the sequence when the boat ran aground on a rock had to be filmed several times because the bottom of the over-sturdy boat had refused to split: eventually a charge had to be used. This was blown a fraction early so that a hole appears in the boat’s bottom just before it hits the rock. Not perceptible in the film when it was released, this premature detonation may be visible on the DVD. You can’t always believe what you see and hear.

Time was also found in the packed schedule to meet committed film-maker John Gianvito who showed us his lovely film Profit motive and the whispering wind, a tribute to Howard Zinn's celebrated People's History of the United States, a legendary oppositional text. The film provides a series of shots of graves of union organisers, native Americans, civil rights activists and so on which together constitute a low key but very moving counter history of the United States. Many of the figures remembered were, of course, murdered. An eclectic document, Gianvito's film also uses inscriptions on head-stones, monuments and signs, alongside some animation and a song (‘The ballad of Joe Hill’), to narrate its counter history. Interspersed with shots of trees and landscapes through which the wind is blowing, the film is deliberately slow-paced. Its fixed shots of monuments and graveyards invite a contemplative engagement with past struggles while the wind embodies the spirit of resistance and opposition that still haunts America. But the film is not simply peopled by ghosts. Refusing to consign opposition to the past, it ends with a montage of contemporary mobilisations that suggests a people still able to arouse themselves, not necessarily the America that we see from this side of the ‘pond’.

Gianvito also showed us another work, An Injury to One by Travis Wilkerson, a powerful film-essay centred on the story of Frank Little, an inspirational organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the ‘Wobblies’. Having come to the mining town of Butte, Montana to help lead striking miners, Little was dragged from his lodging by masked men, beaten and lynched. Many other activists were rounded up and arrested as a prelude to a nationwide assault on the Wobblies designed to arrest their attempt at mass unionisation. Wishing like Gianvito to restore a hidden and violent history to visibility, Wilkerson asks us to read between the lines of official accounts of Little’s murder. His film includes shots of Butte today and shows images of ‘Lake’ Berkeley, the massive man-made hole left by the mining that has filled with polluted water to create the largest body of toxic water in the United States today. Wilkerson tells us how a flock of geese that landed on the water were all found dead day a day or two later, the town still producing corpses even after the mining company has moved on. Hollywood’s ‘Golden Pond’ and ‘Lake’ Berkeley are both haunted, but by very different ghosts. Another illustrious phantom, the great ‘noir’ novelist Dashiell Hammett also traverses Wilkerson’s film. He had apparently told Lillian Hellman that, while working for the Pinkerton detective agency at the time of the Great War, he had been offered money to kill Little, something that had helped him see how corrupt his country was and which had in turn fed into his writing. His novel Red Harvest is set in ‘Poisonville’, a fictional version of Butte.

The question that structured our colloquium was ‘what can cinema do?’ My own provisional response to this question is inspired by the writings of French political philosopher, Jacques Rancière. Rancière argues that cinema and politics are fundamentally different activities that nonetheless overlap in that both struggle over the ‘sensorium’, over what is visible and audible in the world and the place and meaning we give to bodies and things. Not a substitute for, or an equivalent of, political action (if we ask cinema to ‘do’ politics directly, we’ll always be disappointed), film is nonetheless political insofar as it changes what and how we see and hear. Trying to make us see and hear American history and landscape very differently, Gianvito and Wilkerson make their own kind of political intervention in the ‘sensorium.’
(Photo credit: MertzFerdler: Permissions)

La Grande Illusion, Ambiguity and Anti-Semitism

Martin O'Shaughnessy revisits Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion in a contribution based on his recent paper at the Leo Baeck Institute, London as part of their series of talks, Jews: Heroes and Stars.

For a film that is now seen as one of the unquestioned pinnacles of French and European film-making, catching a great director at the height of his powers and pulling together a fantastic cast, La Grande Illusion has had a surprising and chequered reception history. Part of the reason for this lies in the necessarily implicit nature of its politics and the need to talk about the concerns of the 1930s in a coded manner in a film set in the First World War. Part of the reason also lies in the way the film explores the seduction of what it opposes (anti-Semitism, militarism, social hierarchy) rather than simply denouncing it, as less subtle films might have done. This is why some of those who loved it in 1937 (the film was a great success at home and abroad), did so for the ‘wrong’ reasons, finding nationalism in a film that was deeply internationalist in its spirit.

The Second World War complicated matters still further. Seen through the lens of the later conflict, the film’s sympathetic picture of Germans, its internationalism, its romance between a French proletarian and a German peasant woman, its exploration of anti-Semitism, all seemed difficult to swallow, with the memory of occupation, collaboration and Nazi atrocities so fresh.

The film had deliberately shown a stereotypical Jew (he’s in the fashion trade and part of a banking family that has bought up châteaux and land), but made him an overwhelmingly positive character and given him a core role in the narrative. But retrospectively, this strategic recourse to stereotyping could be made to look deeply problematic and accusations of anti-Semitism would haunt the film over a long period. The film shows a French aristocrat who sacrifices himself so that a proletarian Frenchman and bourgeois French Jew may escape from a prisoner-of-war camp, a story that encapsulates both the film’s refusal of anti-Semitism and the sense that the old, undemocratic order must give way to a new egalitarian one. The fact that people have often interpreted it in ways diametrically opposed to this ‘preferred’ reading underlines the inability of films to control their interpretation, especially when they work at the level of the implicit.
(Photo credit: p373. Permissions)

Laurent Cantet's The Class

Martin O'Shaughnessy discusses French director Laurent Cantet's 2008 The Class (Entre les Murs).

This film is really worth taking in. Its Cannes golden palm and Oscar nomination were fully deserved. One of the most interesting things about it is how it was made: inspired by a hit novel by an ex-school teacher, François Bégaudeau, its script was honed through workshops with its amateur cast of teachers, students and parents, each playing their own role. There was thus something profoundly democratic about how it was put together, a quality reinforced by the filming which typically used three high-definition digital cameras running simultaneously to record the classroom interaction through extreme long-takes. This allowed the dialogue to flow organically and signalled a desire on the part of the director to let go off the kind of control that the ‘well-made shot’ would normally require.

As always with Cantet, the film is profoundly interested in questions of power, as evidenced by the teacher’s ability to define legitimate and illegitimate language use and to set classroom norms. Beyond this, the film might be seen as a questioning of the neutrality associated with French republican citizenship and the school’s role in producing such a thing. While Brits and Americans are typically invited to bring their particularity into the public sphere, citizenship in France is based on a leaving behind of the particular. Helping young French people to rise above their religion, ethnic origin or social class, the school has a key role in forming republican citizens. Critics of this model say that one has only to scratch its surface to find the white, middle-class male lurking behind apparent neutrality and universality.

By allowing its protagonists to point to the class and ethnic biases in their teacher’s apparently neutral language use, Cantet’s film shows its awareness of these criticisms of republican citizenship. But despite this, it holds onto a sense of the school as a place where different groups can come together by transcending rather than erasing their differences.

A few years ago, in 2005, after rioting in the French suburbs, Nicolas Sarkozy called the rioters ‘la racaille’, the rabble. Providing an implicit answer to Sarkozy’s disqualification of protesting youth, this film gives its young people an equal right to be heard, recognising them as speaking subjects not as social objects. If the film seems to avoid any direct political intervention, the commitment it shows to equality before the word (both in its content and in the way it was written) underscores a political intent already brought out through its examination of power relations in the classroom.
(Picture of College Francoise Dolto by Gabyu. Permissions.)

On (at the) Broadway: Martin O'Shaughnessy

Martin O'Shaughnessy will be introducing Laurent Cantet's latest film The Class (2008) at the Broadway Cinema, Nottingham on Thursday 5th March at 8.15. He contextualizes the movie within the director's other films and explores it's impact in debates about integration and the role of education in France.
(photo credit: vickibrown; permissions)