A Rare Bird Indeed

Here I depart from my usual subject matter to plug a new book that has nothing to do with the movies. (Actually, there is a film connection of sorts, but I'll get to that in a moment.)

Titled Ghost Birds, the book describes how, during the late 1930s, a young Cornell graduate student named James T. Tanner undertook an ornithological expedition that led to what probably remains the most remarkable field research ever conducted on one of America's rarest birds, the ivory-billed woodpecker. It's a great story that takes the reader on a twisty tour of remote wetlands in eight southern states. While Tanner had disappointments along the way—his extensive searches in Florida, stretching from the panhandle to the Everglades, led to not a single sighting—he also experienced an extraordinary triumph: in a remote swamp in northeastern Louisiana, he was able to study several ivory-bills, including a young nestling that he handled, banded, and photographed at close range.

Full disclosure: This book is published by my employer, the University of Tennessee Press, and I had the privilege of copyediting the manuscript, a process in which I worked closely with the book's genial and gifted author, Stephen Lyn Bales, a naturalist at Knoxville's Ijams Nature Center. So I'm biased, but no matter: it's still an immensely enjoyable read, and I highly recommend it. For more about the book, here's a link to the UTP Web site. Also, this month's Smithsonian Magazine carries an article that Lyn wrote about how Tanner came to photograph the ivory-bill nestling. That story is an amazing mini-drama in itself.

Now for the movie connection. Coincidentally, a documentary called Ghost Bird (singular in this case) was released earlier this year. It focuses on a much more recent hunt for the ivory-bill, the one that followed reported sightings in Arkansas in 2005. Those sightings made national headlines because the bird was thought to have gone extinct in the decades that followed Tanner's groundbreaking research. Unfortunately, a lengthy Cornell investigation (eventually suspended) was unable to produce definitive confirmation. Birders remain hopeful, however, that the ivory-bill is still out there.

I haven't seen the documentary yet, but that will soon change. On October 21, UT Press (in cooperation with the Tennessee Clean Water Network) will host a screening of the film at the Knoxville Museum of Art. Lyn Bales will be there to sign copies of Ghost Birds, along with Nancy Tanner, Jim Tanner's widow, who played a big role in the writing of the book. (Mrs. Tanner was also interviewed for the film.) If you live in the area and are interested, click here for more information.

Accidental Ambiguity

This is a story about how a tiny technical mishap led me to think a little more deeply about a movie than I might otherwise have. But first, a warning: If you've not yet seen Brothers in either of its forms—Susanne Bier's Danish original, a.k.a. Brødre (2004), or Jim Sheridan's American remake (2009)—you may wish to read no further. Spoilers follow.

I already had Brødre in my Netflix queue when the remake came along. Wanting to see the original first, I avoided Sheridan's movie during its theatrical run, though I did read reviews that supplied a few plot basics about both films.

In Bier's version, the brothers of the title are called Michael and Jannick. The former is a straight-arrow U.N. military officer, the latter a seemingly hopeless ne'er-do-well. Early on, Michael ships off to Afghanistan, where he's captured by Taliban insurgents and presumed dead. Back home, Jannick, having just finished a prison term for a botched bank robbery, starts putting his life in order and strikes up a warm, protective relationship with Michael's wife, Sarah, and her two preadolescent daughters. Sarah and Jannick briefly consider sleeping together but think better of it. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Michael is rescued. He returns home, severely traumatized, and soon, amid mounting jealousies and misunderstandings, he seems headed toward an emotional meltdown.

What the reviews didn't reveal was the central plot twist that drives the action during the film's second half. And, thanks to a smudged DVD, I missed that twist completely as I was watching Bier's film for the first time. The movie's midsection focuses mostly on Michael's imprisonment and his relationship with a fellow Danish captive, Niels Peter, a young radio technician. In one scene, the insurgents order Niels Peter to demonstrate the use of a captured rocket launcher, but having no advanced weapons training, he can't help them; Michael, the more experienced soldier, has to do it. It was around this point as I was watching the DVD that the image began to stutter and stall. But before I could retrieve the disc and clean it, the problem resolved itself, or so I thought. The film continued as Michael is being rescued. But now Niels Peter is nowhere to be seen. What's happened to him? Subsequent scenes—a questioning by Michael's superiors about the young man's whereabouts, an awkward visit with Niels Peter's wife, and finally a climax in which Michael, brandishing a pistol, threatens to kill his family and then himself (Jannick, now the stabilizing force his brother once was, intervenes)—all suggest that something terrible befell Niels Peter and caused Michael's trauma. Exactly what it was, however, is never clear. In the final scene, Michael is in a military prison, with Sarah telling him that unless he confides in her, she'll leave him for good. "He had a little boy," Michael sobs, referring to Niels Peter. End of movie.

Now that was interesting, I thought, immediately assuming that Bier meant to leave Niels Peter's fate an open question. After all, I reasoned, this was a European film, and in European films (especially if the director's name happens to be, say, Michelangelo Antonioni or, to use a living example, Michael Haneke) things often aren't spelled out with Hollywood-style explicitness. My guess was that Michael had had to witness his countryman's execution, doubtless a brutal one (a beheading perhaps?). But for whatever reason, Bier had chosen to leave us in the dark about the specifics. I sealed up the disc in the Netflix envelope, planning to mail it off the next day.

The irresolution nagged at me, however, and soon a bit of Web research revealed that, indeed, I had missed something vital: Michael had not simply witnessed Niels Peter's execution; he had been forced to carry it out himself at gunpoint. I unsealed the Netflix envelope, cleaned the DVD, and returned it to the player. Sure enough, there it was: the insurgents, having decided that Niels Peter is of no use to them, hand Michael a steel pipe and order him to bludgeon his comrade to death; otherwise, they'll just shoot them both. Later, back in Denmark, as Michael's guilt and rage boil over, he screams at Sarah, "Do you know what I did to get back to you?" The irony, of course, is that Michael now appears poised to destroy the very thing—his family—that had determined the dreadful choice forced upon him.

The accidental ambiguity that came with my first experience of Brødre spurred some intriguing thoughts. In some ways the truncated version of the film seemed, however unintentionally, more interesting, more provocative, more artful, than the movie Bier had actually made. Smugly basking in a sense of my "superior taste," I attributed my response to an aversion for works whose moral geometry seems a little too tidily delineated, a little too obvious. But if I had seen the film with the critical scene intact, would I have judged it differently? It's hard to say because my first impressions, based on an incomplete viewing, were so vivid. Any subsequent viewings would inevitably be colored by those impressions.

And then I had another thought: What really happened between Michael and Niels Peter turned out to be worse than the scenario I had imagined. Why did I assume a less awful alternative? Did I have such conventional notions about the qualities befitting a film protagonist that I wasn't prepared to admit that an ordinary, decent man like Michael was capable of so terrible an act? And even if what Michael did was somehow understandable—the alternative would have been his own death as well as Niels Peter's—his subsequent actions, as he slides into denial, are troubling to say the least. He lies to his superiors; he lies to Niels Peter's wife. He can't open up to Sarah. He almost annihilates his family. Bier's film, in its concrete conclusiveness, is actually darker than the reading I gave to the "ambiguous" version. Maybe my taste isn't so superior after all.

This brings me to a truism I too often forget. Like many of us who aren't film professors or professional critics, I'll frequently watch a film, register whether I liked it or disliked it, assimilate it in some way, and move on. Yet, if one claims to take movies seriously—those worth taking seriously, anyway—thinking about them seriously is an imperative. I'm grateful that a thumbprint on a DVD reminded me of that.

A postscript: I've now seen Sheridan's remake, which closely follows the original. Interestingly, on the commentary track, Sheridan says he toyed with the idea of not showing the execution scene until late in the film, when it would have been revealed in flashback (which is what I kept expecting to see, first time around, in Bier's version). But ultimately Sheridan opted for the same structure Bier had used. What difference would it have made if either director had gone this alternate route? Hmm, I guess I'll have to think about that some more.

Commentary Track Gush

Early in the commentary track on the Duplicity DVD, writer-director Tony Gilroy says he hates those commentary tracks in which the filmmaker just starts "gushing" about everyone he or she worked with on the movie. So then what does Gilroy proceed to do? He gushes about the actors. And the crew. And (with a few feints toward modesty) himself. Gilroy's commentary turns out to be indistinguishable from dozens of others that often sound like long versions of Oscar-acceptance speeches.

It's not that I advocate a ban on DVD directorial commentary. If you accept that a certain amount of congratulatory blather is inevitable, there are almost always intriguing things to be learned from even the most self-serving commentary track. Regarding Duplicity, for instance, it's not uninteresting (if hardly earthshaking) to find out that the Bahamas stood in for both Miami and Dubai, or that the cafeteria of a Manhattan girls' school was dressed to look like a posh hotel suite in Rome, or that Gilroy used a handheld camera in one scene because he wanted to suggest that at this point in a story otherwise brimming with misdirection and con games, the "real reality" was being shown for once. For me at least, understanding how cinematic illusions are created, or how specific techniques express meaning, has always been part of the movies' appeal.

That said, I certainly prefer the commentary tracks one typically finds, say, on a Criterion Collection DVD. Usually, Criterion enlists a well-credentialed film scholar to talk about style, theme, historical context, and so on. Sound a little dry? It can be, but at least you don't have to hear that this or that actor was "such an amazing pro" or how a "brilliant" DP, editor, or production designer—and they're never anything less than brilliant—helped save the director's butt.

Happy Birthday, Psycho!

I couldn't let this week pass without noting a special anniversary. Yesterday, Psycho turned fifty. On June 16, 1960, driven by an offbeat marketing campaign ("No one will be allowed in the theater after the movie begins"), Alfred Hitchcock's terrifying (and deeply ironic) masterpiece opened to eager crowds.

The film seemed like quite a departure for Hitch. He had reigned as the cinema's Master of Suspense since the 1930s, but none of his earlier pictures could properly be called a horror film. They were terrific thrillers, mind you, mixing wit, glamorous stars, glossy production values, stunning formal mastery, and, yes, suspense in equal proportions; but the shocks of Psycho— that notorious stabbing in the shower, the subsequent staircase murder, and the final unmasking of the killer—caught his fans by surprise.

Only a year before Psycho, Hitchcock had made something more typical of his oeuvre: the spy-chase epic North by Northwest. It was produced for what was then Hollywood's biggest studio, M-G-M, on what was then a lavish budget, $4.3 million. Its screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, called it "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures," and indeed the movie proved to be one of the director's most popular to date.

But then Psycho came along. Determined to scare the hell out of the audience, Hitchcock would push screen violence to the very limits imposed by industry censors, "good taste" be damned. Working from a pulp novel by Robert Bloch and a script by former songwriter Joseph Stefano, he shot the movie in black and white on cheap sets with $800,000 of his own money: Paramount Pictures, his primary employer at the time, was wary of the lurid subject matter and had balked at financing it. The cast, which included Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, and Vera Miles, was quite capable but not exactly in the Cary Grant–Grace Kelly–James Stewart league, at least in terms of star power. Hitchcock cut all sorts of other corners and went without salary in exchange for 60-percent ownership of the film. Responsible only for marketing and distribution, the Paramount executives figured they had little to lose.

Of course, Hitch made out like a bandit. Psycho quickly raked in millions and, more important, became a milestone in movie history. It's now a staple of film-school classrooms. Critics and scholars have written about it, and written about it, and written about it—and keep writing about it. The late Robin Wood, in a famous mid-sixties essay, compared it to Shakespeare's Macbeth and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, dubbing it "one of the key works of our age." Wood toned down his enthusiasm for Psycho a bit in later writings, but for my money he got it right the first time.

An Art House in the Hinterlands

When I wrote in my last post that I put a new French documentary in my Netflix queue after reading about it in the New York Times, I implied that French documentaries aren't typically the sorts of things that find their way into movie theaters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Actually, that was more than a little unfair. Some years ago the Regal Cinemas chain, headquartered right here in K-Town, converted one of its older multiplexes, Downtown West, into an art house showing mainly indies and foreign films. It's got eight—yes, count 'em, eight—screens, and I think that's pretty impressive for a southern city of this size. (Before the Downtown West conversion, we had an independent art house with just two screens, and my wife and I were enormously grateful for that.)

Because of Downtown West, there actually is a chance that Two in the Wave (that French documentary I was blogging about) will make it to Knoxville. Of course, even eight screens don't guarantee that every offbeat or subtitled film in current release will arrive here—far from it. For example, I kept waiting and waiting for Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles to show up, but no luck, so now that one is in my Netflix queue.

Yet, even if we don't get everything of outside-the-mainstream interest, I did want to set the record straight about my current city of  residence. This very afternoon I saw the Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at Downtown West, and in the neighboring auditoriums such films as The Ghost Writer, The Mother, and The Square were playing—none of them exactly standard fare for the "hinterlands." I don't usually tip my hat to large corporations, but in this case, I'll say, "Thanks, Regal."

A Tale of Two Directors

Appearing in Wednesday's New York Times, A. O. Scott's review of a new documentary from France sent me immediately to the "save" button on the Netflix site. Two in the Wave, directed by Emmanuel Laurent and written by Antoine de Baecque, focuses on the early, intertwined careers of the two directors, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who best exemplified what came to be called La Nouvelle Vague, or the "New Wave," of French filmmaking. I can't wait to see it.

Truffaut, Godard, and several of their friends (notably Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol) were devout movie lovers who started out as critics for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Their readiness to champion such Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks transformed film criticism on these shores as well as in Europe, and the group had an even more profound effect on film production when they became directors themselves. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard's Breathless (1960) were landmark works that inspired filmmakers around the world. America produced its own generation of "movie brats"—Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, et al—a decade later, and it's impossible to imagine that phenomenon occurring  in quite the way it did without the French New Wave that preceded it.

According to Scott's review, Two in the Wave follows Truffaut and Godard up to their infamous falling-out in 1973. "As Mr. Godard’s work became increasingly politicized, and as his always uncompromising and prickly personality grew even more so," writes Scott, "a schism emerged that would become irreparable." Apparently that's where Laurent's documentary ends. I'm not sure whether it includes this postscript: Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984—he was just fifty-two—and Godard publicly lamented their stormy split, and his own role in it, in an introduction he wrote for a collection of Truffaut's letters that was published some years later. It was a rather sad turn in one of film history's most remarkable chapters.

Truffaut's grave in Montmartre Cemetery, Paris.