The Reality

Socio-political Film Studies was one of my favorite things from College. Here is the newest of my regular series.

There were so many Prison Dramas in the 70s that are of a certain similar flavor, it bears noting how and why these similarities were printed and what it suggests about the zeitgeist of the era. Prison films in general boil down to a struggle between men, machines and the mincer.

In “Papillon,” Steve McQueen the one intent on escape, says to his buddy, the crooked guards’ best-friend, the dutifully bribing Dustin Hoffman character:

Papillon: That’s why you should run. Now, Louis. While you’ve got a chance.
Dega: But I have a chance without running.
Papillon: Me, they can kill. You, they own.

That is the key to understanding prison films, and I think, their reflection of the zeitgeist of the era. But first, some excavation of the genre.

There are prison movies where planning and executing the escape is most of the narrative (Escape from Alcatraz, The Shawshank Redemption, Each Dawn I Die, There Was A Crooked Man, Cool Hand Luke, Mrs. Soffel, Papillon, Down by Law, Prison Break (1938), Crashout (1955), Midnight Express (1978).

However, a film about prison does not necessarily have to be set in one. David Hayman’s film Silent Scream (1990) concerns the suffering and mental anguish brought on by incarceration, yet this is not predominantly set in prison. We’re No Angels (1955), Breakout (1975), In The Name Of The Father (1995) and Sleepers (1996) could all be seen as concerned with prison, yet in all of them a significant part of the film takes place outside the prison walls.

Many prison movies place the escape fairly early on and the rest of the flick is about being a fugitive (Runaway Train, A Perfect World, Out of Sight, The Defiant Ones, I Was A Fugitive from a Chain Gang, We’re No Angels).

There have been 300 films made since 1910 which are at least partly about civil incarceration. All of them address the conflict of the machine versus man, conformity versus independence.

The constant battle with authority punctuates most prison films of the sixties and seventies. Often depicted as a battle to survive, inmate defiance has been central to the prison movie. Robert Stroud’s refusal to be institutionalized in Birdman Of Alcatraz (1962) is a prime example of such a battle. There is a constant struggle throughout the film between the Governor and Stroud culminating in Stroud’s tirade against the prison system:

you want your prisoners to dance out the gates like puppets on a string with rubber stamp values impressed by you with your sense of conformity, your sense of behavior even your sense of morality…When they’re outside they’re lost – automatons just going through the motions of living but underneath there’s a deep deep hatred for what you did to them…The result? More than half come back to prison.

The battle with authority is sometimes physical with brutal exchanges between officers and inmates (McVicar (1980), Scum (1983) Lock Up (1989) for example). While at other times it is expressed in mental victories over the system – broadcasting music over the exercise yard PA from the Governor’s office in The Shawshank Redemption (1995); deliberately losing the big race in The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (1962) and getting Alcatraz closed down in Murder In The First (1995). The target for inmate battles is often represented as a huge faceless system of which the guards and the Warden are only part: inmates must fight the machinery of punishment.

The ‘system’ with its impenetrable sets of rules and regulations, grind on relentlessly. The effect of such a mechanistic depiction of punishment is to highlight both the individual fight for survival and the inherent process of dehumanization which comes with incarceration in the system. The monotony and regulation of prison life is most often depicted by the highly structured movement of prisoners.

From prison films of the 1930s and 40s like Numbered Men (1930), The Criminal Code (1931), San Quentin (1937), Men Without Souls (1940) and Brute Force (1947) through to recent movies like Dead Man Walking (1995) and The Shawshank Redemption (1995) shots of inmates trudging along the huge steel landings, up and down stairwells to and from their cells has been used to convey the system within prison:

Rows of cell doors open simultaneously and hundreds of prisoners tramp in unison to the yard. In the cavernous mess hall, they sit down to eat the mass-produced fodder their keepers call food. The camera tracks along a row of prisoners to reveal faces mainly individuated by the manner in which they express their revulsion at the meal. (Action line from “The Big House” screenplay)

This uniformity in movement not only underlines the highly structured routine of the prison but extends the machinery image further. The motion of inmates mirror the workings of a machine – prisoners are the cogs that whir around, driving the huge mechanism of punishment unswervingly onward.

Prison films of the seventies used this to effectively communicate the emotional landscape of the socio-political ethos that permeated the decade. American Political society had fulfilled Eisenhower’s warning from his farewell address. The industrial military complex had an office in the West Wing, multinational corporations and the richest .1% of the elites who ran them were sprinting out of the best reaches of governments to regulate them – even if there had been will to do so. The amount of power an individual could exercise against this vast, corrupt, sinister machinery was extinguishing.

Whereas earlier in the century, in the benchmark prison film, “I Am A Fugitive from A Chain Gang” (1932), James Allen escapes the chain gang only to live in constant fear of being caught. In a powerful final scene, Allen says a last goodbye to the woman he loves – Helen:

ALLEN: But I haven’t escaped, they’re still after me, they’ll always be after me. I’ve had jobs but I can’t keep them – something happens, someone turns up. I hide in the rooms all day and travel by night: no friends, no rest, no peace…keep moving that’s all that’s left for me. Forgive me Helen, I had to take a chance to see you tonight, just to say goodbye.
HELEN: Oh Jim, it was all gonna be so different
ALLEN: It is different, they’ve made me different. (hears a noise and, startled, whispers) I’ve gotta go
HELEN: I can’t let you go like this, can’t you tell me where you’re going (shakes his head) Will you write ? (shakes head again) Did you need any money ? (shakes head, backing away from her and staring wildly) But Jim, how do you live ?
ALLEN: I steal.

In that film, the prison is the machine of society circa 1932 – an American society broken by the Depression. In early prison films, people are broken, desperate and destitute calling out for systemic reform. Films such as Hell’s Highway (1932) and Blackwell’s Island (1939) show prison as ‘the ultimate metaphor of social entrapment’ (Roffman & Purdy 1981, p.26) with the emphasis on the brutality of prisons and chain gangs robbing men of their individuality and freedom:

the evil in the men’s prisons appears to have been transformed into some larger entity. More often than not, that larger entity takes the form of a political or big city “machine”. The effect of this was to encourage the audience to … vent whatever animosity they might be able to muster on … the “system” that seemed, to the thirties audience, to control the very life of every honest, hard working (or unemployed) man in America. (Querry 1976, p.159)

Prison films of the 70s concentrated instead on the conflict of inmates battling with the often faceless prison authorities. Paul Newman as Luke Jackson is determined to do his two years as hard time in Cool Hand Luke. Jackson refuses to submit to authority, facing unmerciful beatings from the guards and inmates alike, and memorably wins a bet to eat fifty hard boiled eggs.

For his non-conformity, Steve McQueen in the title role of Papillon (1973) does two lengthy spells in solitary confinement, forced to consume insects to survive the second spell; while Paul Crew (Burt Reynolds) refuses to throw the cons versus guards football game in The Mean Machine (1974) realizing his sentence will be increased and his life made a misery by the Warden.

Although used primarily to illustrate injustice, the hard and fast prison rules serve to emphasize the unyielding processing of inmates through the penal system. This is expressed through seemingly trivial regulations such as no talking during hard labor in Papillon (1973) and Scum (1983); inmates to refer to each other only by their prison name in Wedlock (1990) and so on. Introductory brutal beatings pepper the prison films of the 70s such as in The Mean Machine (1974) where Paul Crew (Burt Reynolds) is beaten by Head Guard Captain Kennauer for giving him ‘a look.’

The representation of the prison as a machine in cinema is fundamental to the prison movie of the seventies. For it is from this idea that the other themes flow: escape from the machine, riot against the machine, the role of the machine in processing and breaking inmates and, entering the “free” world as a new inmate.

Papillon: Me, they can kill. You, they own.

It is better to be prisoner than property — but it is best to be free of whole machine.

______
-Querry, R. (1973) “Prison Movies: An Annotated Filmography 1921 – present” in Journal Of Popular Film vol 2 Spring pp.181-197.
-Roffman, P. & Purdy, J. (1981) The Hollywood Social Problem Film Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Socio-political Film Studies was one of my favorite things from College. I’m going to touch on this occasionally, it’ll be a regular series.

Yeah, um, did I mention that The New York Times sat on the NSA Wiretapping story until AFTER the most important election in generations – why? Because the criminal exposed in the story was afraid of losing an election if the crimes were revealed. The criminal? George W. Bush.

Did you catch that? As The Times tried to explain it:

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

So this story could have been published earlier. A story about how the President personally broke the law 30 times. If the story does not unduly threaten national security NOW, and it clearly doesn’t, it wouldn’t have a year ago.

I’m curious about how precise the measure of a year is. Slightly more than a year ago, the country was conducting an election of some note. Did the NYT hold the story past the election, thereby depriving the public of information relevant to their choice for President? Why did the NYT hold the story? In what context did administration officials urge the NYT not to publish, and who did the urging?

The story says, not in answer to these questions:

Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

Wait a minute. Is that actually, in fact, the answer to those very questions? Afterall, regarding this very case, President Bush is guilty of breaking the law 30 times. The Democrats, in the minority, lack subpoena power. So why would the NYT help criminals stay out of jail? What’s the word for that? Accessory, I think. I do think that’s a felony too.

Once again, American filmmakers in the 1970s nailed it. Presented for your consideration, Sydney Pollack’s 1975 film “Three Days of The Condor.” In this clip, CIA Analyst Joseph Turner (Robert Redford) tells CIA Coup Member J. Higgins (Cliff Robertson) that he has blown the whistle on a secret cabal within the CIA which is manufacturing evidence and plotting to start a war in Iran in order to seize the oil in the region. Crazy. I know. Yeah, so, in this final scene, the two walk through Times Square so as to make tails and bugging difficult.

[Turner and Higgins stop in front of The New York Times.]
Turner: I told ‘em a story. You play games; I told ‘em a story.
Higgins: Oh, you… you poor, dumb son of a bitch. You’ve done more damage than you know.
Turner: I hope so. [Turns to leave]
Higgins: Hey Turner! How do you know they’ll print it? You can take a walk…but how far if they don’t print it?
Turner: They’ll print it.
Higgins: How do you know?

Now we know. And now we also know how far Turner would get on a walk in the woods.

Socio-political Film Studies was one of my favorite things from College. I’m going to touch on this occasionally, it’ll be a regular series.

Strangely, it wasn’t the recent NSA ruling by a Federal Court smacking down Bush’s illegal spy ring that got me to netflix one of my old favorite Watergate-era films.

What got me going back to my favorite time in Film History, American 1970s, was actually the fade-to-black shot of film-noir masterpiece The Third Man (1949) [view trailer]. You know, that brave long quiet last shot where the loyal and jilted lover of Orson Welles, Valli (Anna Schmidt) walks towards the camera for an aching 65 seconds of heavy zither music only to pass her suitor, the audience surrogate, without a glance.

The mesmerizing hollowness of that last shot, reminded me of the last shot of 1974′s The Conversation. Francis Ford Coppola wrote, produced, directed and released this taut film as part of American Zoetrope in 1974.

The low-budget masterpiece The Conversation was in production before and during the Watergate era (and between Coppola’s two Godfather films) – a time of heightened fear over Nixon’s violations of our civil liberties. Its cinematography illustrates the claustrophobic themes of the destruction of privacy, alienation, guilt, voyeurism, justified paranoia, unprincipled corporate power and personal responsibility. Buoyed by an astounding sound design, this film more effectively responded to the growing, ominous 20th century threats of the loss of personal freedom and privacy than any other film of the Watergate years. [view trailer]

Also, you know when a film is cited by both Gene Hackman and Francis Ford Coppola as their own favorite film, they were at the top of their game. Coppola’s prescient understanding of national audience mood and his ability to speak to it is a skill we blogosphere newshounds and tidewatchers should work to emulate — but more on that later.

More about the film first: The marvelous sound work by Walter Murch and Arthur Rochester was deserving of an Oscar for its stellar sound-mixing of interdependent elements: taped conversations, muffled voices, background and other mechanically-generated noises, musical/piano accompaniment (Hackman learned to play jazz Sax for the film) and other ambient sounds. In keeping with the tacit mission of American Zoetrope which was to teach European Masters’ innovations to America, the film has many thematic similarities to director Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966).

But, damnit all, this last scene (above), the last 20 seconds of the shot, is so perfect for crystallizing all plotlines and themes into one distilled epitomical moment, that I cannot help but wonder if that particular shot was the germ of the entire film — and from there, working backwards, Coppola provided backstory, character arc, and false resolutions. Coppola has said that he put the story together after a conversation with director Irvin Kershner about wiretapping and surveillance – combine that with the fact that the film was originally imagined as a horror flick but as events unfolded in Nixon’s madhouse with a paranoid delusional psychotic President bugging his own aides, the horror flick became a stark reality film.

Those who read the New York Times’ 1971 series of the Pentagon Papers exposing Nixon’s lies about the Vietnam War, and the 1972 Washington Post series uncovering Nixon’s response, the Whitehouse Plumbers, knew that Nixon was spying on his enemies list. But it wasn’t until 1973 when the shit hit the fan with the existence of the Whitehouse Tapes being made public and then the operatic culmination of Nixon’s “my kingdom for a horse” soliloquy AKA the Saturday Night Massacre, that a critical mass of the Nation knew just what kind of clusterfuck the Republicans were running in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The Conversation dropped into theatres in the Spring of 1974, during the Senate Watergate Commission hearings and right before the 1974 Supreme Court ruled 8-0 in United States v. Nixon that the Imperial Presidency (Unitary Executive) theory was bullshit. The film found a sufficiently paranoid fertile audience and reviews hailed Coppola as visionary. The film was immediately added to the Academy’s short list for that upcoming Oscar season. Considering pre-production timeframes, Coppola had to forsee all of these events or at least the sense of our national mood in the wake of them, a year in advance.

Now, with the shit hitting the fan again, as Nixon/Ford alumni Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. sprint into the poetically ironic arms of George Santayana, I predict this film will have a second life soon. Rereleased on DVD in 2000 in a nice set with commentary and extras, this The Conversation is more timely in 2006 than it’s original 70s context where the boogeyman of a malignant hyper-powerful corporation, then verged on tinfoil hattery. Sadly now an evil multinational cororation skulking hand-in-hand with shadowy government agencies is, well, understood.

Here is where the excavation of history comes into play: Coppola was the best American director of the decade because he saw American history as a story which was then taking a siniser turn — his 70s films were each one slighly ahead of the curve. Just as that last scene of The Conversation could very well have been the impetus for the entire film, which itself was a perfect time capsule of a very complex and quickly changing socio-political context, I wonder what the silent pantomime end scene would be which would tie off all the various story lines running in American politics today.

As it stands, it would be those of us who don’t anymore live by the “New York Times” or the “WaPo” stenography for infotainment, but who rely instead the grassroots media and the blogs who would see the arc of current events story line clearly enough to see a year down the road. To be as brilliant as Coppola we would need to see at least a year in advance. So, newshounds and tide watchers, if we come upon the perfect allegorical moment and work backwards, we can know how to play the ’08 primaries, or the impeachment hearings, or the war with Iran, or the housing market recession, or the…

I think Clooney hit the nail on the head for last year’s zeitgeist with Good Night, and Good Luck. For next year, maybe Syriana had it with this:

George Clooney should make All The Shah’s Men.

View the other notable scene from The Third Man when we finally meet… the third man.

The late 1960s was a time of radical change in the world of film. The Hollywood studio system was in decline, while the European art film movement created a new aesthetic standard for filmmaking. This industry transformation, encouraged by the success of a few experimental Hollywood films at the end of the decade, led to the filmmaking renaissance of the 1970s. The monolithic Hollywood studios began to lose their power during the 1960s. Millions of dollars were spent on extravagant blockbusters such as Cleopatra, but with diminishing returns at the box office. At the same time, the traditional, wholesome values represented and reinforced by Hollywood movies were increasingly rejected by the new generation of film audiences, and the studios were unsure what to do.

While the studios were failing to produce work that engaged and attracted audiences, European filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini were creating an alternative cinema that challenged the very art form itself. Young audiences embraced these new movies. Sydney Pollock recalls that “every major college campus, and the area around, on Friday nights was full of kids going to foreign films”. These movies experimented with new ways of telling stories, breaking Hollywood traditions in both form and content. The foreign art films of 1960s offered many differing and even conflicting approaches to filmmaking, but all had one thing in common: each was clearly the product of a single, focused director working behind the camera and bore the signature of its author or auteur. Unlike Hollywood, where films were made with an almost assembly line quality, these movies were personal works of art, and the emerging generation of American directors took note. These new American auteurs of the 1970s idolized figures such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Fassbinder, and Ingmar Bergman, whose influence is readily apparent in the best of American 1970s films.

However, it was not only the artistic advances that led to the auteur phenomenon. Both the Hollywood and the horror proponents of this movement drew upon the political instability of America in the late 1960s and early 1970s as subject matter for their work. Without it, the directors would not have been able to achieve the socially relevant focus that distinguished their movies from US cinema earlier in the 1960s and subsequently in the 1980s. The civil rights and feminist movements in America during the 1960s worked to change the contemporary social hierarchies, while the events surrounding Vietnam and Watergate led to a general distrust of the government. A great deal of social advancement and positive change was taking place, but at the same time America was still a corrupt capitalist society. This remained a period of a great disillusionment in America and out of this upheaval came the subject matter of the new cinema.

The best films of the 1970s cannot be fully understood without understanding that they are products of their age moreso than other periods. These are films with a heightened connection to the heightened anxieties reflected in American socio-political life. Therefore, investigating the civic body si key to understanding these remarkable films. Coppola, Friedkin, Bogdonovich, Scorsese, and Altman are but a few of the great filmmakers from this period. Others such as Hal Ashby, Terrance Mallick, Alan J. Pakula and Woody Allen acknowledged the same filmmaking influences and dealt with the same contemporary issues, successfully within the Hollywood system. But two of these filmmakers–George Lucas and Steven Spielberg– produced films that were more mainstream in the later half of the decade, which effectively ended the filmmaking renaissance of the 1970s.

There have always been and always will be auteurs in American film, if one considers the Hitchcocks and the Paul Thomas Andersons, but never in such abundance as there were in the 1970s. In both Hollywood and the world of independent horror films, directors in the seventies were experimenting with form and producing immensely creative work. And it was not just the talent of individual artists that made this possible, but also the context of the time. The relative failure of Hollywood movies a decade before had caused the young generation to look to foreign films as a source of artistic inspiration, giving the directors a new filmmaking style to emulate. At the same time, America was in the midst of a great deal of political and social change which provided the directors with compelling, pertinent subject matter to which they could apply their new techniques. This combination of individual gifts with historic events and influences led to the auteur movement. But the films came out of such a specific social and cinematic climate that it is improbable that anything similar will happen again. The period represented a filmmaking renaissance in America, one that will be studied and appreciated by future generations, but most likely never equaled.

My favorite 70s pictures.