20May05
When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read a first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I will make Jules and Jim.” Six years later—after constantly rereading and even partly memorizing Roché’s novel—he more than redeemed that promise. Sixties audiences didn’t merely see his movie; they wanted to live it.
Jules and Jim begins in Paris before World War I and introduces us to two aspiring writers. Jules is a shy, diminutive Austrian (Oskar Werner is all pained charm), a born onlooker who masks his aggressiveness as passivity. He can’t get the girls, but his friend Jim can. A lanky, not-quite-dashing Frenchman (played with melting standoffishness by Henri Serre), Jim is a Left Bank Don Quixote to Jules’s Sancho Panza. When we first meet them, they are living out a genial but somewhat lackluster Bohemianism, brimming with talk about writing and women. But for all their love of books, these pals only come alive when they meet the magnificently desirable and dangerous Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). She marries stolid Jules, who’s too low-key and dull to keep her, and becomes the lover of Jim, who refuses to subject himself to her will.
9May05
The familiarity and sadness of certain scenes (William Gates missing a crucial foul shot, Arthur Agee’s parents paying a humiliating visit to St. Joseph’s, a suburban Chicago prep school, where they must bow and scrape and beg for a transcript of their son’s grades) almost broke my heart the first time I watched Hoop Dreams. You might think I’m exaggerating my reaction, and I admit I’ve played hoop from grade school through college, then internationally, semipro, and, until just yesterday, on playgrounds across the U.S. of A. So, yes, I might be a sucker for Hoop Dreams. But Hoop Dreams evoked more than basketball fantasies and frustrations. It reminded me of the scariness, the loneliness, the utter devastation of being a fifteen year old with the world on a string and suddenly, somehow, the string gets snipped. The bottom falls out, you with it.
Serious players experience the power of desire, how high desire elevates the body, how low you go if desire is defeated. To lose an important game, or worse, be the one who clunks a shot that could have won it, teaches a player the heartbreaking reality of the games people play, how unforgiving, implacable, and unforgettable they can be, how some vast reservoir of emotion located inside the chest—since naming things is claiming things, why not call the emotion heart—ices over and begins to crack in a split-second, when with overwhelming clarity and certainty, a wish, a possibility nurtured perhaps for as long as you can remember, gets snatched away.
9May05
A shot of a street sign near the beginning of Always for Pleasure, Les Blank’s 1978 paean to New Orleans music, cooking, and dance, offers a telling contrast with the mood of Burden of Dreams, a project instigated the following year by Werner Herzog: “Joy St.” Metaphorically, this is the desired address for Blank’s body of nonfiction studies that show, as he puts it, “people full of passion for what they do.” Herzog, on the other hand, has consistently mined a territory on the far side of Sturm und Drang. “Joy St.” is not simply a foreign country on Herzog’s cinematic map; it is anathema to his goal of bleak existential adventure. Indeed, aside from their shared belief in passionate human endeavor—and a mutual affinity for marginalized folk cultures—the creative realms in which these two filmmakers operate could scarcely be more distant.
In 1980, Blank made a casually straightforward short with the self-explanatory title Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, the upshot of a silly bet Herzog made with Errol Morris. The German director’s invitation to document his South American production of Fitzcarraldo required a rather different, less transparent filmic approach, one that, perhaps inevitably, ended up registering the disparities in the directors’ aesthetic temperaments. Alongside its overt agenda, then, Burden of Dreams inscribes a fascinating double portrait in which Blank remains offscreen while still making his presence felt at every juncture. Adopting an ostensibly neutral recording style that cedes center stage to Herzog’s wildly excessive ego, Blank constructs a separate, reflective discourse able to comment on, reframe, and occasionally even subvert the proceedings he was assigned to record.
