Source: New York Film Festival
Aside from the theoretical problems with auteurism, a simple practical one impedes would-be auteurists today. Films still aren’t always available, even with video and DVD releases making more movies available than ever in people’s own homes. I have an idea of what a Douglas Sirk film means, for example, from the color triumvirate (All that Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life) as well as a few B&W B films (Tarnished Angels, There’s Always Tomorrow, All I Desire), but he made so many films that aren’t currently available. It could be they don’t possess the qualities that we look for and admire in a Sirk film, but how would I know without seeing them?
Nowhere is this problem greater than with the work of Sam Fuller. The ones with major video releases (Underworld USA, Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor) are amazing. I’ve also been lucky enough to see a 16mm print of Crimson Kimono, which has to rank up with my favorite films. For the uninitiated (or the unimpressed), Fuller’s cinema is one of fortuitous contrast. Thematically, he had an equal knack for ratcheting up the toughness or action and crime genres as for exposing the emotional bonds of his characters, particularly the ones between men. Filmically, he worked with B movie assignments and incredibly low budgets, yet was able to produce some of the most beautiful, fluid tracking shots in American cinema. Politically, his works were too cynical and too understanding of base motives to have much in common with the liberal consensus of the social problem films, yet his explorations of race and social ostracism still hit home — insightfully.
Yet I’ve seen little besides the titles I’ve listed. I eagerly await the release — some release — of House of Bamboo, Verboten! and the infamous White Dog. Fortunately, a restored print of The Big Red One, a World War II war epic from 1980, is out now and on its way to DVD. I caught it last night at the Brattle, and am still exhausted by the 3-hour running time — 3 hours of gritty war scenes. Perhaps the first oddity approaching it as a Fuller fan was the striking change in film style: I counted only 4 or 5 tracking shots in the whole film, and only two of those were dollied. Instead, we have a looser style associated with the New American Cinema, favoring static setups, pans, zooms and occasionally handheld camera (this may have had to do with the restoration, which added 40 minutes of lost footage). In fact, the aesthetic effect has more in common with the disorienting spatiality of Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie than it does with the kinetic classicism of Naked Kiss.
Fortunately, the film coheres better than Hopper’s. As a narrative, it’s barely structured; instead, the spectator is thrust into a Bressonian detail of battle after battle, punctuated only by moments of rest and nervous camaraderie between the infantrymen. The effect is cumulative and gripping, a synthesis of surrealism and realism. While I can’t help but wistfully imagine what the film would have been like had it actually been made in 1959 as originally planned, it still a cinematic experience that defies simple explanation.
Writing on the rerelease, A.O.Scott notes, “In those days of The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, it probably also seemed more than a little dated — an old geezer telling war stories that nobody wanted to hear anymore.” Now that the political temperature has changed — when Private Ryan takes up Greatest Generation nostalgia and analogies to World War II abound - perhaps the film’s moment has finally arrived.
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