In Order to Live
Imitation of LifeOnce asked why he made movies, French director Robert Bresson is said to have replied: "In order to live." If asked why he agitated so passionately on behalf of the art of the cinema, film critic and Austin Film Society "patron saint" George Morris might have replied the same: "In order to live." Ironically, though it is now nearly 10 years to the day of his death in June 1989, it is George Morris' passion for movies that has kept him alive. George's writing, his teaching, his proselytizing and inveigling, all remain vital and urgent -- and very much a part of the Austin film culture -- years after his body has left our circle.
The Austin Film Society has dedicated its new summer Free-for-All series to George Morris, who was a guiding influence on the organization's early development. A hint of his enduring influence on Austin film culture is that Richard Linklater dedicated Slacker to George, who never lived to see the movie's release and success. George was also a prolific writer, who in addition to his books and the other publications for which he wrote found time to contribute film criticism and essays to The Austin Chronicle. We've gathered below some samples of his work from the mid-Eighties that pertain to some of the movies in the upcoming AFS program. Leading off the reviews is some personal background on George written by Louis Black for the Slacker book, published in 1992.
Opinionated and argumentative soul that he was, I can already hear George taking exception with this film series. "But Marge," he calls out, "there's no Godard, no Fassbinder, no Bertolucci, no -- gasp! -- Jerry Lewis." You readers must realize, of course, that this was a man who felt his passions so strongly as to have quit the paper (more than once, I might add) over issues as weighty as misplaced commas and typos. He always returned. There was too much too say. All the films in this series are ones that George surely would have been thrilled to present before the public. Testament to that is the amount of reviews for these films he had already published in the Chronicle. George was one to cherish what he had but always argue for more. The Chronicle and the Film Society's feelings for George Morris echo these sentiments.
George Morris-- Marjorie Baumgarten
In September 1991, as part of The Austin Chronicle's 10th-anniversary celebration, there was a special screening of Slacker with a panel afterward, which I moderated, featuring Rick Linklater and members of the cast and crew. To a surprisingly full house, we talked about the film, feeling a bit silly, I think, sitting on folding chairs in front of the crowd, passing the microphone back and forth. Toward the end, we began to talk about George Morris. It would have made sense anyway, because his influence on the film and its makers as a critic, a teacher, and a friend over the years was profound because he had been a longtime Chronicle contributor, helping the film section cement its enviable reputation. Slacker, however, is so full of George, the way he spoke, walked, talked, and the way he thought and thought ferociously about film, that after watching the film, it was impossible not to think of George.
The first time I saw George Morris, he made me nervous. During the late 1970s, CinemaTexas, a graduate student-run UT film society where many early Chronicle staffers spent time, ran a summer film series (usually we ran series only during the fall and spring semesters). Rumor had it that one of our attendees was going to be George Morris, a New York film writer whose work in Film Comment (particularly on the director John Stahl) and book on the grievously underrated Doris Day had attracted our attention. It was a summer of crazies -- a lunatic lumberjack, a near bag lady, an older woman who always arrived after the film started, and more. Marge Baumgarten, Pamela Peters, and I, while working the door, came to know and cherish all of them. Except one: a full-steam-ahead guy with a closely shaved head and a scary intensity who seemed a little too intense, more dangerous than intelligent. How wrong that impression was.
Rather than dangerous, this maniac turned out to be sweet and intelligent George Morris; a maniac, yes, but one who was absolutely crazy in love with movies.
We all became friends, talked, argued, and watched film. He wrote for the Chronicle passionate statements about life and about art. George taught classes at Austin Community College and helped found the Austin Film Society (from whence, more or less, Slacker came). George threw terrific parties where his one-bedroom apartment would be filled with students, writers, rockers, and filmmakers arguing about film and life. There were teasing phone calls where I would bait him about his affection for Blake Edwards or some misshapen auteurist anti-classic like John Ford's Seven Women and rambling hallway conversations about the peculiarities of Jerry Lewis and the gifts of the master, Ford.
The easy lie here would be that George was always an easy person, but he wasn't. Opinionated, inspired, and brilliant, he was passionate to a fault, and where as a writer this gave him a rare gift, it sometimes filled his life with pain and needless conflicts. I write this because that part of George fills Slacker as well, the edge that haunts all our lives, the passion that is at its center. George ultimately was more a teacher than a peer. His ravenous cinematic appetite and encyclopedic knowledge meant that he always knew more than you did. This was never an attitude but an opportunity; if you were excited about this film, after sharing the excitement, George would suggest a dozen others.
George Morris died because of AIDS.
And did I say that Slacker is full of George? His delirious verbal pace, his emotional delivery, his argumentative style, and his tremendous affection for purely cinematic aesthetics? George would have loved the film, but he never got to see it. Slacker is dedicated to George Morris. He would have loved that as well.
-- Louis Black (excerpt from the book Slacker, St. Martin's Press, 1992)
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951)D: Vincente Minnelli; with Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Nina Foch, Georges Guetary, Madge Blake, Mary Young, Ann Codee, Hayden Rorke.
This has always been one of Minnelli's most popular movies, but even if you think you've watched it to death on TV and videotape, you have never really seen this most tragic of all the director's tragic musicals if you haven't viewed it on a big screen with its shimmering color photography by John Alton, the great noir artist, and Alfred Gilks, who shot the extraordinary 20-minute ballet that "closes" the film. Alan Jay Lerner's plot is wafer-thin, even for a musical. An ex-G.I. (Kelly) remains in Paris after the war to pursue a career as a painter. His canvases aren't so hot, though, so when an aggressive patroness (Foch) pleads to "sponsor" him, the opportunistic Kelly flashes that Irish grin and goes along for the ride. ... It may sound like a conventional quintet on which to hang what seems like almost every marvelous George and Ira Gershwin song ever written ... An American in Paris, however, is a brooding, somber work. Like all of Minnelli's protagonists, Kelly refuses to face the truth, namely that his desire to paint is hampered by his mediocre talent. To justify his dreams of being a great artist, he imagines and bounces through a world of fantasy, a world so real to him -- and to us -- that his frequent outbursts of song and dance become as natural as they are imperative for emotional liberation. This vaporous paradise completely dispenses with the narrative's indications toward illusionism in the climactic ballet, a cathartic set-piece (cf. the finales of Some Came Running and Two Weeks in Another Town) that deliriously, continually re-creates and releases through movement, dance, color, and decor the tensions between Kelly and Caron that have been building throughout the film. Designed after the paintings of Dufy, Utrillo, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousseau, and other artists that Kelly has unsuccessfully emulated in his work, this sequence is quintessential Minnelli: a heightened, swirling exploration of time and space, bustle and repose, grief and loss. The camera tracks, cranes, and dollies through the dance space, anticipating with the boldness of the greatest director working at MGM in 1951, that the New Wave is, indeed, not so very far away. Finally, like all of Minnelli's collaborations with Lerner (Brigadoon, Gigi, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), An American in Paris is a paradox -- a musical that embraces solitude and romantic despair. It is a resplendent motion picture. (10/24/86)
An American in Paris
THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON (1941)D: Raoul Walsh; with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Arthur Kennedy, Charley Grapewin, Gene Lockhart, Anthony Quinn, Sydney Greenstreet.
They Died With Their Boots OnRaoul Walsh's masterpiece is one of four movies programmed by CinemaTexas this semester that explore the myth of General George Armstrong Custer (the other three are Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, John Ford's Fort Apache, and Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee). Walsh's film is superficially the most romantic treatment of the four, but it's neither the whitewashed presentation of Custer nor the simplistic view of historical events surrounding his colorful figure that it may appear on a casual viewing. In the first of seven films he made under Walsh's direction, Errol Flynn gives one of his finest performances as the brash young West Point cadet who forges a legend out of his experiences in the Civil War and later, against the Sioux and the Cheyenne. The director reveals the dark side of Flynn's devil-may-care persona by having his ego subverted throughout the pell-mell narrative by other characters, especially by his wife (de Havilland, in her eighth, last, and best role opposite the actor). Like Bogart, Cagney, and Gable, Flynn is a definitive Walsh adventurer. He hurls himself against the authoritarianism of the military establishment with the same abandon with which he plunges into battle and ignores social niceties, exhilarating in action for the pure hell of it the way that Walsh does with his breathtaking pans, tracking shots, and a narrative compression that distinguishes the director's experiments with the epic form. In both the action and more intimate sequences of They Died With their Boots On, Walsh embodies Flynn's energy and individualism with a small boy's vulnerability, adding a tragic dimension to his character as he is swept inexorably toward the Little Big Horn. The farewell scene between Custer and his wife as he prepares to embark on that fatal mission is charged with emotional resonance. Flynn says to her that "walking through life with you, ma'am, has been a very gracious thing, indeed," kisses her passionately on the lips, and strides out of the room. Walsh pulls the camera away from his departing figure, seeming to will him to stay with her. The next shot is a dizzying track into de Havilland isolated in the frame, her faint providing the period to one of the loveliest passages in Walsh's cinema. (1/11/85)
THE SPIRIT & THE FLESH: THE FILMS OF DREYER AND BRESSONCarl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson are hardly the most commercial choices for a film series, but [we] are bringing these rarely seen movies to Austin because we love them and want to see them. We also feel that there are a lot of adventurous, inquiring filmgoers around town who will welcome a chance to see some of the most challenging, intensely personal masterworks of cinema.
The Danish Dreyer and the French Bresson share a number of thematic and formal patterns. Both have superficial reputations as religious artists. While religious philosophy and the dilemmas of faith are vital parts of both men's oeuvres, the visions here are light years removed from those postulated by organized religion as it has been defined by Judeo-Christian culture. In his book, Transcendental Style in Film, critic-turned-filmmaker Paul Schrader identifies Dreyer and Bresson as transcendental artists whose movies are interior journeys of the soul through a chaotic, hostile world toward liberation and grace.
... In Dreyer's movies, which range from The President in 1920 to Gertrud in 1965, meditations on the conflict between free will and society are inextricably linked to the Nordic landscape of Denmark. The chill air and gray skies of the heaths, villages, and cities extend to and shape the austere routines of daily living in Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud. The effort to assert one's identity in this world is made at great cost, especially for women. Witchcraft is the generating impulse in Day of Wrath, and the women who are so condemned are inevitably those who instinctively act out their desires despite religious, legal, and social pressures.
... Like Dreyer, Bresson has created his unique dialectics of faith and doubt, guilt, and confession on the cutting edges of the commercial cinema. And also like Dreyer, Bresson has developed a bold, elliptical style that pares the narratives down to the minimum details necessary to illuminate interiority. In Diary of a Country Priest, for example, death is announced by a tilt from a clock down to an entry in the young priest's (Claude Laydu) journal or by a doctor's office door opening and closing.
... Bresson's protagonists work to declare their individuality, but [they] partake of the modernist complicity in their victimization. They seek to expunge the physical through a cultivation of the imaginative self, finding liberation in either escape, imprisonment, or death. The agonies they endure are transmuted into things of joy, and it is in this serene acceptance of the abyss that Bresson leaps securely into the pantheon as one of the most inspired givers of form in the medium. (3/28/86)
CARMEN JONES (1954)D: Otto Preminger; with Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Roy Glenn, Diahann Carroll, Brock Peters.
Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones is one of the most uncompromising portrayals of black America in the cinema ... Transposing Georges Bizet's opéra comique, Carmen, to an all-black, World War II setting had been a pet project of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II for many years ... His lyrics for Carmen Jones are eloquent fusions of dialect and poetry ... The supporting cast reads like a who's who of Fifties black entertainers.
Preminger strips the musical of all excess and frills. He creates an austere, depoeticized, anti-lyrical world in which nothing obstructs his camera's detached recording of the action. The great themes of Preminger's oeuvre are obsession and the conflict between freedom and repression, themes which are central to Carmen Jones. ...
Tobacco RoadDorothy Dandridge's Carmen is sister to those Preminger "heroines," like Gene Tierney in Whirlpool and Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse, whose irrational behavior defies psychological interpretations or motivational speculations. Slithering through Preminger's mise-en-scene in her slit skirts and tight blouses, Dandridge is a savage force of nature, and when she begins to taunt Joe in the factory cafeteria with the hottest red rose in movie history, or huddles between his legs to shine his shoes while he suckson a peach, the sexual energy ignites the wide screen.
And the wide screen is very wide indeed in Carmen Jones. It was Preminger's second CinemaScope feature (River of No Return?Carmen Jones, made the same year, was his first), and he displays a mastery of the elongated, horizontal shape that would be matched only by Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, and a handful of others. Many of the musical and dramatic sequences are constructed in majestic long takes accompanied by complex camera movements, an observance of spatial and temporal unities that encourages us to view the volatile melodrama without judging the characters or their actions. The tension Preminger creates in these frequently electrifying CinemaScope compositions between the impassive gaze of his camera and the fury storming across the screen is the source of much of the power and depth of Carmen Jones. (9/26/86)
DOUGLAS SIRK"There is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art." -- Douglas Sirk
... The use of objects and decor to block movement, to obscure truth, recurs in the greatest Sirk movies, among which I would include There's Always Tomorrow (1956), All That Heaven Allows (1956), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), and Imitation of Life (1959). For Sirk, and later for Fassbinder, these claustrophobic arrangements of interiors relay the feeling that people are incapable of direct confrontation because they cannot move freely. Moreover, they cannot think freely and objectively because these clustered frames keep pushing in on them, highly symbolic reminders of the social, political, and economic barriers that inhibit liberation.
Sirk's movies are also about images. The expressionistic deployment of mirrors, glass, and shadows reflects the souls, the doppelgangers of his tormented characters ... Sirk's actors also become images through his complex manipulation of their personae. Rock Hudson starred in eight films for Sirk, and the best of them ... are astonishing records of the evolution of a hunk into a star/actor.
... At Universal, Sirk was repeatedly given schlock scripts and pulp novels, with the exceptions of The Tarnished Angels, based on Faulkner's Pylon, and Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and a Time to Die. Sirk brought to the most intractable material, however, an ironic wit and a glittering style that bathe the stories in symbolic lighting, angling, colors, and mise-en-scene that continually give the lie to the "happy endings" the studio demanded .... -- excerpted from Douglas Sirk obituary, 2/13/87
BLAKE EDWARDSWhy is Blake Edwards so controversial? At times it seems that I spend half my life defending Edwards with friends and critics whose tastes I ordinarily respect, arguing the density of 10 or Victor/Victoria, the comic brilliance of The Great Race or The Party, the sublime ambiguities of Gunn, S.O.B., or the director's greatest, most personal work, Darling Lili. Perhaps the imminent opening of That's Life! will bring a few more people around to the view that I hold, namely, that Blake Edwards is the one surviving, actively creating, transition artist in the American cinema. His tragic farces and comic tragedies audaciously bridge the halcyon days of Hollywood classical filmmaking and the arrival of modernist forms of distanciation and alienation.
... Edwards is best known for his comic expertise, and movies like The Great Race, The Party, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and S.O.B. are among the most hilarious farces to lurch across the wide screen ... pain, humiliation, and sexual impotence recur throughout Edwards' comedies, and like Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis, he will exhaust a joke until it's no longer funny, forcing us to analyze comic modes even while we watch them.
As great a satirist as he is, though, Edwards affects me most deeply because of the intensity and honesty with which he probes his characters' sexual confusion. In Gunn, Darling Lili, Wild Rovers, The Tamarind Seed, 10, and Victor/Victoria, he systematically eradicates male and female differences, blurring genders into a celebration of ambisexuality. Again, this mirrors the characters' drive to adjust to new, confounding situations. In 10 and Victor/Victoria, especially, Edwards seems to be suggesting that a failure to change, to grow, is the true tragedy in life. Nothing, especially our sexuality, is absolute. That Edwards has navigated this tricky region in seven films with his wife (Julie Andrews) representing the Eternal Feminine testifies to his rank as one of the most consistently invigorating filmmakers in movies today. (10/10/86)
