THE LAST WALTZ and Thanksgiving in Troubled Times

[I wrote this essay three years ago, after that awful day in November, with America on the precipice of the Trump regime. It feels right to publish it here, now.]

I watch THE LAST WALTZ every year around Thanksgiving. It's about capping an era, and it always feels right to cap the year by returning to the Band's big farewell concert/party. However, with a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed president-elect headed for the White House, it seems to me that, here on the 40th anniversary of that Thanksgiving night in 1976 at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom, the film contains a vision of America more badly needed in today's America than ever. After all, one of the Band's best songs was called "Across the Great Divide." 

We might start by noting that, in the Age of Trump, the Band's tough, funky ensemble rock remains a vision of the melting pot, that most American of ideas, and one which Trump's campaign tried to give a bad name. In THE LAST WALTZ, each ingredient is embodied by one of the Band's old friends—the Staples for gospel; the Chicago blues by Paul Butterfield and Muddy Waters (and his great pianist Pinetop Perkins: if only they'd gotten him on film!); country by Emmylou Harris; New Orleans jazz and R&B by Dr. John, as well as a horn section playing Allen Toussaint's charts. Motown is here in the rhythms and songs (Marvin Gaye's "Don't Do It"); the immigrant experience in the bracing "yargh" of Van Morrison. 

In contrast to the homogenous vision of America imagined by Donald Trump, in THE LAST WALTZ what's vital in American culture—rock & roll itself—comes from the sparks that fly when "opposites" rub together: rural and urban, North and South, men and women, black and white, tradition and revolution. As Levon Helm explains, "Memphis is kind of the middle of the country": "bluegrass or country music, if it comes down to that area, and if it mixes there with rhythm, and if it dances, then you've got a combination of all these different kinds of music—country, bluegrass, blues music, show music." "What's it called, then?" asks director Martin Scorsese. Breaking out in a big grin, Levon answers, with a glint in his eye: "rock & roll." 

As Greil Marcus wrote in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, the "secret theme" of the Band's music is obligation: "What do men and women owe to each other? How do they keep faith? How far can that faith be pushed before it breaks? Those are problems communities and friendships share." The answer coming back from the Trump election might be: Nothing. We owe each other nothing. Every man for himself, and God against all. "The Weight," as performed in THE LAST WALTZ by the Band with the Staples, offers an alternate answer, positing a universal American burden, some combination of "love, debt, fear, and guilt," in Marcus' words. It's a version of the social contract: if we all share the weight, that's just another way of saying we get to carry each other. 

On an associative level, the movie resonates with the antiwar and Civil Right Movements, due to the presence of the Staples and Bob Dylan (his fiery electric music with the one-time Hawks—a public scandal a decade earlier—now cheered). It's about the counterculture, but also about traditions the 60s swept away, like Tin Pan Alley, represented by Neil Diamond. The Band plays as if they imagine that if they could just make music powerful enough, they could make whole the divides of the 1860s and the 1960s. We've heard the phrase "there's strength in diversity." This movie shows us what that looks like.

While it feels especially elegiac at the end of the Obama era, Scorsese's fantasia about the changing of the guard would be no ordinary rockumentary in any year, not with seven 35mm cameras, operated by the likes of Michael Chapman, Vilmos Zsigmond, and László Kovács, pulling off Scorsese's elegant compositions, and storied Hollywood production designer Boris Leven lighting the set he borrowed from Verdi’s La Traviata, replete with crystal chandeliers, his lights glinting off Robbie Robertson's gilded guitar. How deep is the red of that backdrop! (As Robertson recalls in his new memoir, when asked by the crew, "is there a movie we should watch to inspire us?” he thought of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES, before naming Jean Cocteau’s THE BLOOD OF A POET.) Robertson's quip that the concert is a celebration of the "beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning" evokes the way Scorsese cut the picture, scrambling up the chronology so the last song they played that night is the first song in the movie. When Scorsese is in personal mode, there are few more exhilarating filmmakers, and he loves this music, feels it in his bones, in his camera moves and the rhythm of his cutting. The interviews are funny. In a playful Brechtian move, he occasionally leaves in bits of the process, revealing how filmmakers tweak reality—flubbed takes, spoken directions to the cameraman, views back on the crew. 

The backdrops to the interviews signify the Band's geographical and emotional landscapes: New York City, the Canadian Maple Leaf, a sign proclaiming "Dixie" (the beer), and...the Confederate battle flag. The fact of the latter in the movie is fascinatingly paradoxical, redolent as it is of the Ku Klux Klan but also an unfortunate icon to this day of the Southern white working class, many of whom voted Trump. The movie dares to listen to their stories, too, to gather them into the fold. Trump voters, too, were asserting some vision of community, albeit a homogeneous one, and, perhaps just as importantly, expressing a sense of loss. It makes me think of the man in "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," a character imagined by a Canadian (Robertson) and brought to life by an Arkansan (Helm). He is, in Marcus' words, "a poor white farmer from the Confederate side of Tennessee": "He wants us to understand that the war has cost him almost everything he has...It is hard for me to comprehend how any Northerner raised on a very different war than Virgil Kane's, could listen to this song without finding himself changed. You can't get out from under the singer's truth—not the whole truth, simply his truth—and the little autobiography closes the gap between us. The performance leaves behind a feeling that for all our oppositions, every American still shares this old event; because to this day none of us has escaped its impact, what we share is an ability to respond to a story like this one." Marcus was speaking of the recorded version, but all of this comes through even more powerfully in the movie, with Robertson punching the air into the song and Helm, fierce and soulful behind the drums, putting you squarely in this character's shoes. We'll need to listen to voices like this, too, and, if necessary, be changed by them.

Finally, the movie is full of the life force and community, in the face of Trump's nihilism and social atomization. How many times have I seen it with friends, singing along communally with gusto? Think of the camaraderie in Neil Young's "Helpless," the glances tossed between Young and the musicians as together they are left utterly disarmed in the face of beauty. Or the way Rick Danko regards Joni Mitchell with such little-boy joy. Or Danko singing "It Makes No Difference" into the dark, and Garth Hudson stepping into the frame with his alto sax to light up the night with magic and warmth. America under Trump might be a mean place, but its other face is the vision of friendship here. It can get us through some cold days to come. As Hudson asserts, refuting the "jazz is evil" or "devil music" theory, the truth is, music is actually a healing force. There is room for all in the America of THE LAST WALTZ, a stage on which a glorious dance of contradictions sets off sparks in which we glimpse, if just for a moment, an America we can be proud of.

Elvis Costello's take on "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" at 40

On his version of Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," my main man faces up to the world, faces it down, ventures out to remake it, to set it to rights, at least in the space of the few minutes of this song. Riding in on wave after wave of slashing guitar, Steve Nieve's keys are grand and stately as they announce the song in the wake of Pete Thomas's machine-gun snare barrage, then garage-y as they swirl around those waves of guitar—oil atop the water. Bruce's muscular, melodic bass and Pete's propulsive drums are a sodden, relentless undertow threatening to pull the singer back under. Yet he beats on, fights his way as the waves crash against him. His voice embodying wounded swagger, he surveys the landscape of the blasted shore, looks for hope and love and peace amidst the ruins, stands his ground as the tide rushes back beneath him, suctioning back around his legs. By the bridge he's surging, and as Pete moves to the ride cymbal the power of the music surges through him (and you): it's the life force, and he's got his second wind, and as the wave builds he's now at its crest; as it breaks he's exulting. Pete's drums are exploding all around him in the sky as he makes it to the beach. Bloodied but unbowed, he emerges gasping on the shore. He's ready for whatever comes next, to greet it defiantly with love and peace and not add to the hatred and violence and ugliness in the world (and so will you be after hearing this). He lunges snapping at that last line of the chorus, bites it off: "WHAT's so funny 'bout peace love and understanding?" Every time I draw this jam while doing the iPod shuffle, I have to replay it over and over.

LOVE ACTUALLY podcast starring Karolyn Steele-Pfeiffer, Michael G. Smith, and yours truly

Karolyn Steele-Pfeiffer makes her podcast debut on Michael G. Smith's revenant White City Cinema Radio Hour. Risking cineaste opprobrium (or at least snickers), Michael and I explain how we learned to stop worrying and love Richard Curtis's LOVE ACTUALLY, that ne plus ultra of modern rom-com. Meanwhile, the wise Karolyn explains why the movie was always great in the first place. 

Head here to give the podcast a listen.

In my 2016 writeup for Cine-File, I tried to convey a bit of this story. To get you warmed up for the podcast, I've reprinted it below.

Richard Curtis' LOVE ACTUALLY 
Of the world of modern romantic comedies, so shaped by Richard Curtis' pen (BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY, NOTTING HILL, FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL), I once knew naught. This, despite my great affection for the rom-coms of the 30s and 40s. It took a connoisseur like my wife to clue me in. Upon first viewing LOVE ACTUALLY, Curtis' maiden attempt at wielding the camera, I was scandalized. "Curtis, you have no shame!" I cried. It took repeated administerings over several holiday seasons. Slowly, my amazement grew to fascination, and pretty soon I was clamoring for it as soon as December rolled around. Today, I believe it to be one of the age's great entertainments, a milestone in the canon of UK-US Christmas pop culture. It dawned on me that it was Curtis' utter lack of shame that constituted his greatness. He is completely sincere; he cannot be embarrassed. He achieves moments of real dramatic and psychological verisimilitude, then happily chucks them in favor of fantasy. I began to see the film as a modern, cheerily explicit, sexy equivalent of my cherished P.G. Wodehouse novels. Like Wodehouse, Curtis breezily choreographs a complex farandole of plot and subplot, stacking and spinning ten storylines at once. Even after umpteen viewings, one spots new connections, marvels at Curtis' conducting of the relationships and destinies of a bevy of Londoners, embodied by pleasing players like Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightly, Laura Linney and Bill Nighy. LOVE ACTUALLY is a film that even the vinegary David Thomson, in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls "a triumph." It will restore your faith in humanity. It's very funny, and it gets you in the mood. My wife reckons that the transcendent detail is the way the "enigmatic" Carl (Rodrigo Santoro) plays with Linney's hair as they dance. In response, I can only muse happily over how much I still have to learn. 

"Saraband" and Ingmar Bergman at 100

[Editor's note—on Wednesday, October 3, 2018, I facilitated the Gene Siskel Center Film's Center's Movie Club screening of Ingmar Bergman's Saraband. The following is a transcript of my opening remarks.] 

 

Well, Ingmar Bergman. There's a lot to say, but I'll just talk a bit about Saraband, and how it fits as a cap, or coda, for his body of work. Then I'll put it out there for discussion. 

 

I should say, I hope you've enjoyed the Siskel's Bergman retrospective. For me, it's been wonderful to see all these films again that I first saw almost 30 years ago (wonderful but intense—I may need to go and watch Love Actually to recover). Ingmar Bergman was my gateway to world cinema, and I think that's been true for a lot of people. And now we've come to the end, with Saraband. I think it's a magnificent work but very sad—full of guilt and despair, but would Bergman fans have it any other way? And yet, I'd argue it also contains a hard kernel that's always there in his work—a broken grace note of hope and optimism, which insists that "love is real in the world of human beings."(1)  

 

Coming four years before the end of his life, Saraband is his final statement about death, as well as his last word on what comes after.

 

It's a very personal work. Bergman writes in his wonderful memoir The Magic Lantern about how his mother (who was also named Karin) had to have her womb and ovaries removed. In Saraband, the same thing has happened to Marianne. Readers of that book may also have recognized the black and white photograph of Johan's house. It's actually a photo of Bergman's grandparents' summer house in Dalarna, which he so loved to visit as a child. 

 

The first key aspect of Saraband I'd like to mention is right there at the top: this is a film, as the dedication says,"for Ingrid." It's a labor of love to the memory of his late wife, Ingrid Von Rosen. Bergman was married five times, but his longest and last marriage was to Ingrid: 24 years, from 1971 to 1995, when she died of cancer. 

 

In Saraband, the late Anna, whom everyone loves and misses so desperately, and who plays such a pivotal role, is represented by a portrait, and it's a portrait, in reality, of Ingrid. 

 

The second key also involves Anna/Ingrid, and it's what Bergman has referred to a perhaps "the core of the text." We know that the major preoccupation of his work was his lifelong terror of death. There was a very important incident in his life, which he spoke about many times, including when he first gathered together the cast and crew for Saraband. 

 

I had an operation once—

—and they accidentally gave me too much anesthesia

They couldn't wake me for eight hours.

This fascinated me because I thought, is this what death is like?

You're a light that's lit. And then one day it's extinguished. Then there's nothing—

no flame left.

So death is nothing to be afraid of.

Up to then I had always had such a terror of death. That what The Seventh Seal was about. So that was a relief. 

And then came...the devastating problem.

When my wife Ingrid died, that became a worry.

Because I thought, "I'll never see her again, if that's all death is."

I explained my dilemma to Erland [Josephson].

And Erland said:

"What do you really want?"

and I said, "I want to see Ingrid."

And then he said, very wisely,

"Then hold on to to that."

That's one of the most valuable pieces of advice I've ever had.

In true death, it might simply be that Ingrid is waiting for me, and that she exists.

And she'll come to me.

Imagine—all of humanity has thought endlessly about death.

Since the beginning of time, not knowing.

Can you imagine that it's so incredibly simple?"

 

Saraband, then, is an expression of this fundamental shift in his ideas about death, which he folded into the scene where Henrik meets Marianne in the church, and he talks about his vision:

 

She's walking towards me—Anna is walking towards me, by the gate.

And then I realize that I'm dead.

And then the strangest thing happens.

I think, "Is it this easy?"

 

I think another key to the movie is the idea that love can both imprison and liberate—and the same for music.(2) Bach's cello suites, and in particular the Sarabands, were great sources of consolation for Bergman his whole life.

  

Also very important is the letter Anna leaves behind. It is "the catalyst of Karin's rebellion."(3) Anna frees Karin, even in death—just as, perhaps Ingrid freed Bergman. As Karin says, "This letter is what love is, isn't it?"  

  

There's one question I always have, when I watch: Why, when Marianne first arrives, do the doors slam shut, as as if by unseen ghostly hands?

 

However, the last aspect I'd like to highlight is Saraband as an expression of Bergman's bond with Liv Ullmann. As I would not be the first to note, it cannot be an accident that she is in the last frame of his last film. Her final words are: "I thought about the enigmatic fact that for the first time in our life together, I realized I felt that I was touching my daughter. My child." So much of Bergman's work seems to me to have been about that profound yearning to touch, to make a real human connection, especially between parent and child.

 

In the documentary Liv & Ingmar, Ullmann tells a story of a fateful day:

 

I was in Norway on the coast

and I woke up that morning

and I knew, something was happening with Ingmar which was different, and which maybe was absolute in his time here on the earth.

and I hired a plane, which I've never done before

because I knew I had to go now, this morning, this day

and I flew to Gotland and I took the ferry boat [to Faro Island]

and I came here in the afternoon, and he was here 

and at this time we couldn't speak with words.

or I spoke, and he was there. 

and then I pretended that he said to me, why did you come?

And I quoted him from the film Saraband, 

"I answered because you called for me."

And then I left 

and I'm happy I was here because that same night, at some time that night—we don't really know when—he continued his voyage, but now in the universe somewhere. 

 

Some see Saraband as a final work of pessimism. But I like to hold in my mind that counter idea: "Anna is walking towards me by the gate. And I think, 'Is it this easy?'" 

 

These words are what I'll hold onto from Bergman's work, which I've so enjoyed reconnecting with, and which I think comes to a grand conclusion with Saraband. 

 

When my aunt heard I was facilitating this discussion, she suggested a format she used in her Education for Ministry group. They used these four questions.

 

A    What amazed you, gave you an “aha” moment?

B    What bothered you?

C    What confused you?

D    What delighted you?

(1)In The Magic Lantern, Bergman writes about Mozart's The Magic Flute, wherein the hero Tamino asks, concerning his beloved: "Does Pamina still live?" "The music translates the text's simple question into the greatest of all questions. 'Does Love live? Is Love real?' The answer comes, quivering but hopeful in a strange division of Pamina's name: 'Pa-mi-na still lives.' Love exists. Love is real in the world of human beings."

(2)I'm indebted here to Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian.

(3)Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian.

Andre Bazin at 100

"So the screen reflects the ebb and flow of our imagination which feeds on a reality for which it plans to substitute."—Andre Bazin, from "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage," Cahiers du Cinema, 1953 and 1957

I've been thinking about Andre Bazin on this, his 100th birthday. I pulled the volumes by or about him down off of my shelf, and gathered up these voices as a birthday offering.

The roll call: Andre Bazin died in 1958, at the age of 40. (So, still quite a young man.) His sensibility was forged during the Occupation and Liberation. In fact, Dudley Andrew, in the preface to the 1990 edition of his biographical study, Andre Bazin, states: "Bazin's private struggles...vividly dramatize deep faults in that public terrain that goes by the names 'The Occupation' or 'The Fourth Republic.'" 

He was the man who extricated Francois Truffaut from, in Truffaut's own words, detention home, military prison, and asylum.

 

Truffaut himself, writing in the foreword to the 1977 edition of Dudley Andrew's study, says: "I was an adolescent in trouble when I met him in 1947; I was fifteen year old, he thirty. And I will die without ever knowing why Bazin and his wife, Janine, became concerned enough about me to extricate me...I assert that Bazin's absolute good faith, his generosity, made him a character who stunned, intrigued, and excited us even to a point where we had to smile to one another to hide our emotions.

He co-founded Cahiers du Cinema in 1951, the "most influential film journal in history" (James Monaco), "intellectual home" to the likes of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette. When the younger critics would get carried away, Bazin, in his essay "La Politique des Auteurs" (1957), went on to debate and critique the very auteurist movement he helped invent, or at least inspire. (This was in the spirit of a "family debate," says Bazin's biographer Dudley Andrew. It's as if Bazin, the "father," was debating his "children," like Truffaut.)

 

He was the "spiritual father of the [French] New Wave." (Michael Temple and Michael Witt)

 

He "laid the groundwork for the semiotic and ethical theories that were to follow." (James Monaco)

 

His two great subjects were Italian Neorealism and the new American cinema.

 

He felt a special affinity for Cocteau, Welles, and Chaplin.

 

Here's critic James Monaco, from How to Read a Film (2000 ed.) on Bazin's theories about the different ways theater and cinema work:

 

"The implications for cinema are that, since there is no irreducible reality of presence [of the actor and the spectator], 'there is nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves in imagination with the moving world before us, which becomes the world.' Identification then becomes a key word in the vocabulary of cinematic esthetics. Moreover, the one irreducible reality is that of space. Therefore, film form is intimately involved with spatial relationships: mise-en-scene, in other words."

 

Monaco again, on Bazin's theories about the moving camera:

 

"...the moving camera has an inherent ethical dimension. It can be used in two essentially different ways (like focus shifts, pans, and tilts): either to follow the subject or to change it. The first alternative strongly emphasizes the centrality of the subject of the film; the second shifts interest from subject to camera, from object to filmmaker. As Andre Bazin has pointed out, these are ethical questions, since they determine the human relationships among artist, subject, and observer."

 

And Monaco on Bazin as existentialist:

 

"Always the existentialist, Andre Bazin was working to develop a theory of film that was deductive—based in practice. Much of this work proceeded through identification and critical examination of genres. 'Cinema's existence precedes its essence,' he wrote in fine existential form. Whatever conclusions Bazin drew were the direct results of the experience of the concrete fact of film."

 

Eric Rohmer: "Without any doubt, the whole body of Bazin's work is based on one central idea, an affirmation of the objectivity of the cinema in the same way as all geometry is centered on the properties of a straight line."

 

He remains relevant. Dudley Andrew again, from 1990: "No better example [of how Bazin's thinking can illuminate our own era] could be cited than the resuscitation in the 1980s of questions concerning the status of photography. Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes invite us to return to Bazin and to the distinctive view of 'the technologies of representation' that he held by virtue not just of his genius but of his openness to such contemporaries as Andre Malraux, Gilbert Cohen-Seat, Edgar Morin, and Jean-Paul Sartre, not to mention 'photographers' like Chris Marker." Presumably, we could trace his ideas, and his ethical concerns, all the way up to today's "virtual reality." 

 

In his introduction to Bazin's posthumously published critical study of Jean Renoir (Jean Renoir, 1971), Francois Truffaut writes, "More than a critic, he was a 'writer of the cinema,' striving to describe films rather than to judge them."

 

Jean Renoir himself, in his foreword to Bazin's collected essays What Is Cinema? Volume 1 (1967 English edition):

 

"Our children and our grandchildren will have an invaluable source of help in sorting through the remains of the past. They will have Bazin alongside them. For that king of our time, the cinema, has likewise its poet. A modest fellow, sickly, slowly and prematurely dying, he it was who gave the patent of royalty to the cinema just as the poets of the past had crowned their kings. That king on whose brow he has placed a crown of glory is all the greater for having been stripped by him of the falsely glittering robes that hampered its progress. It is, thanks to him, a royal personage rendered healthy, cleansed of its parasites, fined down—a king of quality—that our grandchildren will delight to come upon. And in that same moment they will discover its poet. They will discover Andre Bazin, discover too, as I have discovered, that only too often, the singer has once more risen above the object of his song."

 

Happy birthday, Andre Bazin!

Postscript: Yours truly, reading at Andre Bazin's 100th birthday party at Comfort Station in Logan Square on April 18, 2018.