Troublingness: Terry Gilliam's Cursed Films - The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Other Works

Terry Gilliam's (or rather "A Film From Heath Ledger & Friends", as it is officially credited) The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is his most coherent work since 12 Monkeys (1995). This comes as a relief after the complete, unwatchable botches Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), The Brothers Grimm (2005) and Tideland (2005). Does that make it a good film? Probably not, but it was far more enjoyable than I was led to believe.

The DVD, released May 11th, comes with a touching introduction from Gilliam as he outlines his thinking behind the film. He wanted to do a joyous and fun film, along the lines of Fellini's Amarcord (1973) and Bergman's 1982 Fanny and Alexander (his words, not mine on this Bergman film), that was a sort of playful compendium of many of the things he'd done before. He then briefly discusses the tragedy of Ledger's untimely death during the production in January 2008. A plan was hatched to finish the film (outlined below) and filming was completed. Tragedy wasn't finished with the film yet. The film's producer, Canadian William Vince (producer of Capote), died of cancer at the age of 45.

It has always been said that a "troublingness" (I know, it's not a word, but in the whacked world of Gilliam films it seems appropriate) has plagued almost every film Gilliam has made. Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and The Brothers Grimm were all swamped by fights between Gilliam and releasing companies resulting in the pictures almost never being released; The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was not completed due to a combination of storms wiping away all sets, lead actor Jean Roquefort unable to ride a horse because of severe back pain and the collapse of financial support (the whole catastrophe was outlined in the great 2002 documentary Lost In La Mancha). Supposedly he's resurrected this one and will shoot it soon with Ewan MacGregor and Robert Duvall - good luck to him. The less said about the virtually unreleased Tideland the better.

Podcast: Interview with Terry Jones (1987)

Julie Walters (right) in Terry Jones's Personal Services (1987).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with film director, screenwriter, actor and comedian Terry Jones.

At the time of our conversation, Terry Jones was promoting his new film Personal Services, which had recently gained some notoriety by being banned in Ireland. Jones, who, along with Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, and Michael Palin, formed the famous Monty Python comedy troupe on television and film, had previously directed two Monty Python films – Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983) – both of which were also, at the time, "banned in Ireland." Personal Services, which starred Julie Walters in the lead role, was Jones's first non-Python directorial effort.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Terry Jones as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Making the Myth True: The Fisher King on Criterion

Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King.

Around the turn of the millennium, the director Terry Gilliam struggled to bring an updated Don Quixote to the screen; the documentary Lost in La Mancha (2002) chronicles the breakdown of the project after bad weather and the illness of his Quixote, the French actor Jean Rochefort, threw it into financing hell. When he finally released a version of it called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2018, he’d lost the momentum. Really, though, he’d already made his Don Quixote, back in 1991. In his best movie, The Fisher King, written by Richard LaGravenese, two men strangely bonded by a tragedy heal each other through a crackpot mission to locate the Holy Grail, devised by one of them, a schizophrenic (Robin Williams) who used to be a Hunter College English professor named Henry Sagan, and carried through by the other, a one-time radio talk host named Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) whose life has become meaningless. The tragedy is a mass shooting at a popular bar called Babbitt’s perpetrated by a lunatic who has received encouragement for his paranoia by Jack, whose favorite targets is the yuppies who frequent Babbitt’s. Jack’s spleen isn’t real; his diatribes are cynical inventions to entertain his listeners and fuel his career. Until the killer strikes, it never occurs to him that there might be consequences to his habit of revving them up. Afterwards, shattered by what he’s brought into being, Jack goes into retreat, drinking and hiding from the world while his girlfriend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) shelters him and lets him help her manage the video shop below her apartment.

Hot Mess: Jupiter Ascending

Mila Kunis is Jupiter Jones, in Andy and Lana Wachowsk's Jupiter Ascending.

It’s often been said of Andy and Lana Wachowski that even when they fail, they do so in new and interesting ways with each new project. I think such a sentiment speaks more to the audience member than the artists, frankly – it sounds to me like that person thinks the Wachowskis do excellent work that they simply have trouble understanding, and I don’t count that as a fault. The veteran writing-directing duo have been unimpeachably fearless in their drive to create original, engaging film experiences, and for me their acceptance of risk, which often yields spectacular, visually-stunning, emotionally-challenging rewards, outweighs their occasional missteps in quality. One only needs browse their resume: from the gorgeous Lichtenstein-inspired pop cubism of the narratively-stunted Speed Racer to the beautiful but bloated Cloud Atlas, the Wachowskis have been characterized by their inspired (if flawed) work, and moreover, their willingness to dust themselves off, go back to the drawing board, and try something new. They’re persistent, if nothing else.

It was really only a matter of time before this pattern coalesced into something like Jupiter Ascending – after the heavy century-spanning pseudo-philosophy of Cloud Atlas, it makes sense that the Wachowskis would indulge in some simple escapism. “Simple”, though, isn’t the best term to describe the extravagant, wild, convoluted, and gorgeous Jupiter. “Hot mess” might be more accurate.

Time and Again: SyFy's 12 Monkeys

"She is not your mission. She’s just a puzzle piece." – Dr. Jones to Cole, in the pilot episode of SyFy's 12 Monkeys.

Adaptations of movies to television can be hit and miss, and perhaps the strongest television shows to come from the big screen aren't inspired by the most beloved films. Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights (2004) probably had its fans, but the television series (launched by NBC in 2006, also developed by Berg) made no bones that it was taking off in its own direction, unburdened by the film or book. In fact, I confess that I began watching the series without even knowing about the film, and it so confidently built its world in its extraordinary first season that I've never felt remotely inspired to check out its source material. The other great movie-to-TV adaptation is of course Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There, the series quickly outstripped the famously wrongheaded early-90s film and found its voice precisely in the broader continuing storylines so essential to television storytelling.

But adapting films beloved in their own rights, especially arguably classic films like Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (itself inspired by a then-classic film, in that instance, Chris Marker's incomparable La Jetée) are a different story, both literally and figuratively. When it's a movie that you love, that you've seen multiple times, and that you know backwards and forwards, that is a tough new row to hoe for a new television series. SyFy has bravely taken that on with its new time travel thriller 12 Monkeys, which premiered two weeks ago. And the results, so far, are genuinely promising.  
 

Dreams Are Nothing More Than Wishes: Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?

There couldn't be a more apt title for John Scheinfeld’s engaging documentary on the late singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson than Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? Despite the fact that Nilsson was both a prolific pop songwriter and a gifted tenor, perhaps what made Nilsson less than a household name was that he didn't comfortably fit into the niche of a traditional pop crooner. It also took Scheinfeld almost four years to get a distributor for his movie about him. But it’s definitely worth the wait.

Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? examines with both insight and empathy the life of a pop artist whose pining voice cast a larger shadow on a tragic life. While he wrote songs that became hits for The Monkees (“Cuddly Toy”), Three Dog Night (“One”) and Blood, Sweat and Tears (“Without Her”), his only chart successes were other people’s tunes. “Everybody’s Talkin’” (made famous in Midnight Cowboy) was written by Fred Neil, while the Grammy-winning “Without You” was originally a track by the British rock group Badfinger. Nilsson never performed concert tours to promote his albums and his studio work itself became unique in that he did all his own overdubbed harmony vocals. With the help of top-notch players (from Little Feat’s Lowell George to keyboardist Nicky Hopkins), Nilsson became an insulated pop force, someone hidden away in the imagined world of a recording studio. From there, his lovely and quirky ballads and anthems could bring a youthful longing to unrequited wishes.

Excess, Baseball and the Irish: The Rum Diary, Moneyball and The Guard

The late French filmmaker Francois Truffaut once said that you could tell if a film is shit within the first five minutes. I wouldn’t go that far, but with most movies, you can pretty much sense when a film is working or not. The bigger question is why do certain films, with decent ideas and talented stars, fail while other more modest efforts succeed? Two recent American failures demonstrate the former while a certain Irish comedy sails up the middle and blows the two more expensive efforts out of the water.

Neglected Gem #96: Adventures of Don Quixote (1933)

Feodore Chaliapin as Don Quixote in G.W. Pabst's Adventures of Don Quixote (1933).

Adventures of Don Quixote is one of the true curiosities in movie history, and not only because it’s the one adaptation of Cervantes’ book by a major filmmaker that was actually completed. Orson Welles died without finishing his, and Terry Gilliam’s closed down early in the shoot when he hit one insurmountable difficulty after another (all of which are chronicled in the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha). This 1933 film is the work of the great German director G.W. Pabst, best known for his silent films with Louise Brooks, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. He filmed three versions of the novel, one in French, one in English and one in German; all three starred the great Russian opera basso Feodor Chaliapin, who turned out to be both a magnificent camera subject and a mesmerizing actor. He doesn’t get to sing Mussorgsky (Chaliapin was celebrated for his Boris Godunov), but he does sing, and even though the music by Jacques Ibert is mediocre, these abbreviated arias are among the movie’s high points. Chaliapin had appeared in a couple of silent movies, but Don Quixote was his only major movie role, and his last. (He died in 1938.) If his name rings a bell today, it’s probably because his son, who bore his name, played the marvelous old grandfather in Moonstruck who asks his dogs, with magisterial impatience, “Why do you make me wait?” before taking them for their evening constitutional. (Chaliapin Jr. died in 1992.)

Critic's Notes & Frames, Vol. IX

A couple of years ago, I started included a few samplings from my Facebook page, which I've been treating as an ongoing dialogue with various critics, performers, writers and friends about social and cultural matters. (Some have described it as a salon.) Here is even more of the same. As before, it includes borrowings of songs and photos that sometimes others have posted and that I've commented on:

Me In Particular: The Reappearance of Oscar Z. Acosta

Oscar Z. Acosta, as photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

In his roughly 39 years of life, Oscar Zeta Acosta recreated himself more than once. From a typical barrio kid growing up in the working-class Mexican-American community of Riverbank, California, he became a clarinetist in the US Air Force marching band; a Baptist missionary in the jungles of Panama; a creative writing student in San Francisco, mentored by famed baseball novelist Mark Harris; a law-school graduate and member of the California bar; and a Legal Aid Society advocate for the impoverished of East Oakland. And that only takes him up to the beginning of his first book, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), which ends with his transformation into a budding Chicano militant. 

Most of us have known Acosta only as “Dr. Gonzo,” the fire-breathing, drug-scarfing, knife-wielding sidekick created by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), and portrayed by Benicio del Toro in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film of that book. Yet Acosta deserves to be remembered as more than a featured player in the Thompson legend; he left a legacy both historically important and all his own. That legacy is the subject of Phillip Rodriguez’s The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo, an hour-long documentary which debuted last month on PBS as part of the VOCES series on Latino arts and culture. The film is a mishmash, frankly imaginative and affably unpretentious, in which the skimpy visual evidence of Acosta’s life (mostly candid photos and news clips) is fleshed out with scripted reenactments played in period costume against sets that suggest workshop theater. The first-person narration is derived from Acosta’s two books, and aside from the compelling footage of the subject addressing protest rallies or courthouse cameras, the documentary’s chief value is that it inspires – in a way that Thompson’s portraiture never did – a curiosity to read the man’s own words.

The Next Three Days: Paul Haggis’s Botched Remake

Over the years, movie remakes have gained something of a disreputable reputation among filmgoers. But while there are no shortage of remade turkeys (Breathless, Vanilla Sky), many other remakes have been quite good, even great. The makers of The Birdcage (1996) did a nice job of translating La cage aux folles (1978), that funny French farce about a gay couple (one of whom dresses in drag) pretending to be straight to American shores. It deftly substituted political divisions for the class ones in the Gallic movie. Likewise, the folks behind Unfaithful (2002) perfectly captured the darkness and passion lurking behind placid bourgeois exteriors that allowed Claude Chabrol’s French original, La Femme infidèle (1968), to stand out from the pack. Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995), notwithstanding Brad Pitt’s grating, excessive performance, was a terrific extension of Chris Marker’s brilliant apocalyptic, time-travel SF short, La jetée (1962). And, of course, John Huston’s adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) improved on the 1931 movie of the same name (and another made in 1936 called Satan Meets A Lady), so much so that very few people are aware that Huston’s was actually a remake, let alone the third version.

Diane Kruger & Vincent Lindon

By those lights, The Next Three Days, an American adaptation of Fred Cavayé’s fine 2008 debut French thriller Pour elle (For Her) ought to have been a slam dunk since its premise was so striking and plot friendly. The French movie revolved around an ordinary Parisian teacher, Julien Aucler (Vincent Lindon), whose wife Diane (Diane Kruger) has been imprisoned for murder. She’s innocent, but damning circumstantial evidence means she’s going to be locked up for many years to come. Determined to do right by his wife, and their young son Oscar (Lancelot Roch), and utterly convinced of her innocence, he sets out to see if he can find a way to bust her out of prison and escape the country with his family. Great idea, terrific execution; a foolproof template for a remake, you’d think. That is if Hollywood hadn’t made two mistakes in the process: 1) They handed over the reins of the project to Paul Haggis, hack director (Crash) and screenwriter (Million Dollar Baby, Casino Royale); and 2) they decided to deviate from the tight and economical 96 minute French movie and delivered a bloated, excessive 135 minute American version in its place. Big surprise: the remake sucks.

Four Films About Love

Ralph Fiennes and Kristen Scott Thomas in The English Patient. 

"Love means never having to say you're sorry," the dying Ali McGraw told hubby Ryan O'Neal in that popular tear-jerker Love Story (1971). But not only did the movie excuse you from having to apologize, it also saved you from the complexity of love’s transgressions. Love Story said that love could transcend all of life’s tragedies and could cure us all of life’s ills – it might even ennoble us. Lou Rawls once sang that “love can be a hurtin’ thing,” but if you want a hit movie about painful subjects, love best be a healin’ thing. Hence, redemptive dramas like Terms of Endearment (1983) or Ghost (1990) became box office triumphs whereas more ambivalent pictures like James Gray’s Two Lovers (2008) didn’t (in this picture’s case, it was also criminally underrated).

Is Film Criticism Dead? #5

My colleagues [Susan, Kevin, David & Shlomo] have previously and majestically destroyed Andrew O' Hehir's ignorant article "Film Critics: Shut up already!" I support them and their opinions whole heartedly. But I feel as if my position on the subject would be trite, so I'm shifting the looking glass from film criticism to the film industry's impact on it. Here are some disparate observations.

Brain Freeze: Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer

Well, it was bound to happen one day. And today is that day. We try our best to run new reviews daily and we've succeeded for the past four years in doing so. With a growing archive, however, it sometimes gets hard to remember whether we've already reviewed a work - especially if that work has had a problematic release schedule. Of course, we sometimes deliberately run two reviews of the same film, play, or book, when there are contrary opinions at issue. But until today, it was never inadvertent. Justin Cummings had already reviewed Snowpiercer back in June (before it opened theatrically in Canada) and I simply forgot that he had done so for a number of reasons that don't require delving into here. So sit back and enjoy Phil Dyess-Nugent's sharp take on a problematic film. My apologies to Justin. His equally smart review can be found here.

Kevin Courrier,
Editor-in-Chief
Critics at Large.  

Snowpiercer, the first English-language production directed by the Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, blundered into the news last year, when it was reported that its North American distributor, Harvey Weinstein, intended to cut twenty minutes from the director’s version. The resulting explosion of outrage and indignation got Weinstein to back off. The movie has mostly gotten great reviews since it opened in America, and it’s tempting to think that some of that is a show of support for the director and his commitment to his full, 128-minute vision, like the Best Picture award that the Los Angeles Film Critics Association lavished on Terry Gilliam’s Brazil prior to its North American release, when the director was still battling Universal Pictures over which version would make it into theaters in the U.S.

With Memories of Murder (2003) and The Host (2006), Bong established himself as one of the freshest, boldest new filmmakers of recent years, and the ambitious Snowpiercer is his first feature since 2009’s Mother. So it’s easy to pick sides in a fight between him and Harvey Weinstein. I myself remained excited about Snowpiercer even after I saw a trailer for it that, if it had been for a movie that had sprung from the loins of some heavyweight American shlockmeister like Michael Bay, would have set off alarm systems at Indiewire and inspired a dozen editorials about the death of film. Well, I thought to myself when Bong’s name appeared at the climax of a chaotic flood of butt-ugly images and baffling moments, probably whoever cut this together had no idea how to suggest the nuances of the complete work.

Master Acting Classes: The Fisher King (1991)

Few would remember now, but the 1991 summer movie season was dominated by movies about thoughtless, self-absorbed yuppies who find redemption: Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry, William Hurt in The Doctor. The only one of the these pictures that wasn’t fatuous, trite and infuriating was The Fisher King. In it, Jeff Bridges plays Jack Lucas, a smug, cynical New York talk-radio host with a habit of mocking his callers. When he lectures one of his regulars (Christian Clemenson) on the worthlessness of the yuppie scum who frequent a watering hole called Babbitt’s – the name is an allusion to Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel, a satirical portrait of a Yankee bourgeois – proclaiming that they deserve to be wiped out, the caller takes him at his word and unloads a rifle on the crowd at the bar before shooting himself. One of his victims is the wife of a Hunter College humanities prof named Henry Sagan (Robin Williams), who dies in his arms. The tragedy triggers a psychotic break in Sagan: after a year of catatonia, he holes up in a boiler room in his old apartment building, calling himself Parry and identifying himself as a knight in search of the Holy Grail (“Parry” for “Parsifal”). When Jack, whose role in the Babbitt’s slaughter shook him up so badly that he has been hiding out at his girl friend’s and mostly inside a bottle of Jack Daniels, is set upon by violent youths in Central Park on what used to be called a wilding spree, it’s Parry who rescues him. Jack finds out Parry’s history from the super in his building and decides that it can’t be a coincidence – that trying to help Parry is the only way he can get his own life back, “pay the fine and go home,” as he puts it to his girl friend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl). At first he thinks a few bucks will do the trick, but all Parry does with the money he proffers is to hand it off to another homeless man. Then, with Anne’s help, Jack arranges for Parry to have a date with Lydia (Amanda Plummer), a publishing-company employee whom Parry worships from afar. Bizarrely, the evening is a triumph: Parry and Lydia, a peerlessly awkward waif who inhabits her own universe, turn out to be a match made in romantic-comedy heaven. But the thought that he might find love again stirs up Parry’s repressed memories of the night he lost his wife, and his old enemy, the Red Knight, a personification of all his demons of guilt and grief that only he can see, intervenes. Parry winds up in a psychiatric ward, once again imprisoned in a catatonic state – and Jack still hasn’t earned his own redemption. So he does the only thing remaining to him: dressing up in Parry’s ragtag-knight outfit, he carries out the task Parry set him earlier in their acquaintance. He scales the wall of the Medieval castle-like Fifth Avenue residence of a wealthy recluse, swings through the window like a parody of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, and lifts a trophy Parry saw in a photo that he’s convinced is the Holy Grail.

Blues For Mr. Happy: Remembering Robin Williams

Robin Williams as Parry in The Fisher King.

In The Fisher King (1991), which has the distinction of being the movie that Terry Gilliam was put on Earth to direct, Jeff Bridges plays Jack, a rich, successful radio shock and aspiring sitcom actor who, with his sexual magnetism, long-haired, piratical look, and penthouse apartment, is like the Howard Stern of Howard Stern’s dreams. After goading a regular phone-in caller who proceeds to shoot up a Manhattan bar, Jack’s life and career fall apart; he’s too guilt-stricken to continue what he’s been doing but too cynical and bitter to imagine how to change. He stumbles across a chance for redemption when he meets Parry (Robin Williams), a crazy homeless man who used to a professor of classics until he lost his wife in the massacre at the bar. Parry has fallen in love with Lydia (Amanda Plummer), a mousy accountant he’s never met but who he scuttles after as she slogs to and from the publishing house where she works. Jack decides that if he can get the two of them fixed up, he’ll have repented for his sins and can get back to his rightful place at the top of the fame ladder.

It’s Bridges’ job to keep the audience hooked from the first frames to the last, by being convincingly nasty and self-involved at the start so that Jack’s search for redemption seems like enough of a challenge to be dramatic, while also being sufficiently compelling (and attractive) that nobody watching him will simply say, “Fuck this guy.” But it’s the actor playing Parry who has the greatest potential to send the movie hurtling off a cliff at any minute. He has to get his laughs without making it seem as if the movie is holding someone mentally ill up to ridicule; he has to make the fact that Parry is stalking a total stranger seem moonstruck-romantic, and never creepy. Happily, the role is squarely in Williams’ wheelhouse. He’s able to use the fast-talking, free-associational style he developed doing stand-up comedy—the style that the name “Robin Williams” automatically brings to mind—and fold it into the character, using it as the high-speed ranting of a literate crazy person, whose tongue is racing to keep up with the speed of his mind.

Continuum: The New Politics of Time Travel

Rachel Nichols stars in Continuum on Showcase

I’m a sucker for time travel stories. My first favourite film was Terry Gilliam’s wildly surreal Time Bandits: I was taken to see it for my 11th birthday, and can still vividly recall the delight I felt leaving the theatre that afternoon.  And I’m certainly not alone in my enthusiasm. There is something uniquely compelling about the time travel conceit, and there’s a good reason why it remains one of the more popular subjects in science fiction literature, film, and television. Time travel plots are eminently adaptable – they can be ridiculous or grave, simplistic or painfully complex. They can be camp (Time Bandits), philosophical (La Jetée), juvenile (Hot Tub Time Machine), geeky (Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel), or can just plain mess with your head (Primer). From the giddy fun of the Back to the Future trilogy, to the patently movie-of-the-week quality of The Philadelphia Experiment, to the smash and grab Snipes/Stallone vehicle Demolition Man, I have eagerly consumed them all. The Harlan Ellison-authored original Star Trek classic “City on the Edge of Forever” set the standard for me at an early age – somehow covering many of the light and heavy aspects of time travel in one brief hour of television. But when it comes to series television, the results have been more hit and miss. From the Time Bandits-inspired, delightfully cheesy, perhaps rightfully short-lived Voyagers!, to the more human-centred (and often sublime) Quantum Leap almost a decade later,  the too-quickly-cancelled Journeyman on NBC, and the BBC’s magnificent Life on Mars, time travel is a challenging format for a continuing series. And so when Showcase premiered its new science fiction/police drama Continuum in late May 2012, I made sure to tune in.

Show, Don't Tell: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010)

Famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once claimed, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Filmmaking is not without its own magicians, pioneering landscapes for our bewilderment. Georges Méliès took us on a trip to the moon in La Voyage dans la lune (1902), long before Apollo 11 touched down on it in 1969. In Star Wars (1977), George Lucas piloted us on a journey to a galaxy both far away and long ago. Terry Gilliam has traveled with us through the belly of a monstrous fish, to the moon, and explored the depths of a raging volcano and time itself in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989). These are only a handful of the artists who've waved a cinematic wand to make us believe in the impossible. They inspired generations through mystique. We all wanted to know the answer to one question; how was this possible? With DVD bonus features and behind the scenes documentaries we can now answer that question but the true masters have never revealed their secrets upfront. 

Time Folder: Remembering Film Essayist Chris Marker

"Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place"

                    (T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday)

"L'Éloignement des pays répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des temps."

(The distance between countries compensates somewhat for the excessive closeness of time.)

                                                                                                            (Jean Racine, Bajazet)

Since French filmmaker Chris Marker’s death on July 29th at the age of 91, I've been considering his importance in my own development as a writer and critic. As I rewatched his two best known and influential works this past weekend – the short film, La Jetée, and the feature Sans Soleil – I've come to realize even more his major impact on my writing life. I may have only seen two of his dozens of shorts and features, but the ideas he was working through in them – the nature of time, loss and memory – have been a constant in my own work. From my novel, The Empire of Death, to my critical pieces, especially where I use memoir to decipher my understanding and reaction to a work, the ideas of memory and the inexorable passage of time are always present.

The Woman at Orly in La Jetée

I first encountered Marker's work in the Film Studies program at the University of Toronto in 1979 or 1980. U of T's film program was not about learning the craft of filmmaking, but rather to study films as text (just as one would a novel, poem or historical period). In one class, my professor showed us Marker's remarkable 29-minute short, La Jetée. La Jetée is about a man in the future who has a vivid memory from his childhood of a single incident at Orly Airport in Paris. In the memory, he is with his parents on an outing to watch the airplanes land and depart. At the end of a jetty, the man remembers seeing a beautiful young woman. As he studies her face he also witnesses someone being killed. The memory is not complete, it is just a fragment, and he is determined to understand it. Many years later, after a cataclysmic war, a group of scientists develop a technique to push people into the past (or into the future) in order to find a way to save those who still survive in the post-apocalyptic present. The man with the memory, now a prisoner of the scientists in an underground realm, is chosen because his one vivid recollection of that day is very strong. After several failed attempts, he manages to go back to a time just prior to the incident in his memory. He finds the woman and, during several journeys back, he starts a romantic relationship with her. I will leave the rest of this fine film for you to discover.

Chris Marker

What is so compelling about the film, where it becomes the perfect visual metaphor for memory, is that the whole film (except for one very brief moment) is composed of stills with a narrator describing/clarifying what we are seeing. Marker uses these images (many in repetition) as a representation of how our memory works. Most times when we recall the past we remember it only in fragments. These fragments often get mixed in with other memories, too, as our brain zooms through its 'attic' making up its own associations and connections. Many times, these memory fragments do not play like movies, but instead still images; captured moments. (Ironically, film itself is actually a series of still images that are shot at 24-frames a second which, when projected, tricks the mind into thinking it is seeing a moving image. In fact, all we are seeing is a still image followed rapidly by dozens of other still images cut together to tell us a story.)

Marker is also making references to influences on his own work, be they writers (Jules Verne), philosophers (Roland Barthes) or filmmakers (Alfred Hitchcock, especially his film Vertigo). He also takes one brief five-second moment to eschew still images. As we look at the beautiful young woman sleeping on a bed she awakens, looks at the camera and smiles slightly. But these aren't stills, this is actual film. The woman moves. It is deeply erotic sequence, even startling, in a film that, except for this, is made up of stills. It is as Spalding Gray once said in one of his own filmed essay/lectures, "a perfect moment." 

Family Legacies: Jeremiah Zagar's In a Dream

Is it just my imagination or have families that are not crazy become as rare as the northern hairy-nosed wombat? Environmentalists believe only about 113 of these marsupials still exist in Australia. Dysfunctional homo sapiens, on the other hand, now number in the billions worldwide. The word ‘dysfunction’ is relative, of course. But when it comes to my relatives, there’s madness aplenty running through our intermingled bloodlines.

So, somehow it did not surprise me to learn that a distant cousin I’ve never met -- Jeremiah Zagar -- made a documentary titled In a Dream that chronicles the meltdown of his nuclear family. My maternal grandmother was a half-sister of his maternal grandfather, ancestors who both died before we were born. In the 20th century, the entire clan left Poland (just a few steps ahead of the Nazis, who would obliterate their Jewish shtetl) and landed in America. Later, my immediate kin remained in New York while his settled in Pennsylvania.