Memory and Imagination in Film

Scorsese, Lynch, Jarmusch, Van Sant

P. Lombardo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780230241718
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319432
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Inspired by Baudelaire's art criticism and contemporary theories of emotions, and developing a new aesthetic approach based on the idea that memory and imagination are strongly connected, Lombardo analyzes films by Scorsese, Lynch, Jarmusch and Van Sant as imaginative uses of the history of cinema as well as of other media.

Part I

The Wonder of Cinema: Scorsese

1

Living in Manhattan in the 19th Century

Monsieur G. brings an instinctive emphasis to his marking of the salient or luminous points of an object (which may be salient or luminous from the dramatic point of view) or of its principal characteristics, sometimes even with a degree of exaggeration which aids the human memory; and thus, under the spur of so forceful a prompting, the spectator’s imagination receives a clear-cut image of the impression produced by the external world upon the mind of Monsieur G. The spectator becomes the translator, so to speak, of a translation which is always clear and thrilling.

Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

Gangs of New York was released in 2002, but it had been conceived a quarter of a century before. It was in the 1970s that Scorsese read Herbert J. Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York (1928), and, being such a passionate lover of the city, he was inspired by the history of the various groups in Manhattan in the 19th century. His friend and collaborator, Jay Cocks, immediately started to write the screenplay. Hollywood magazines spread the news that the producer Alberto Grimaldi had optioned the rights, and Scorsese made several attempts to get the budget, but this film remained just a wish for a long time. Finally, at the end of the 1990s, as Scorsese declared, ‘everything came together’ and ‘Harvey Weinstein at Miramax agreed to do the picture’.¹ This distribution company, founded in 1979 by the two brothers Weinstein, film buffs who after their commercial success in concert production entered the film industry, was bought in 1993 by Walt Disney Studio Entertainment; the two brothers stayed on at the head of Miramax. In the 1980s, an impressive number of Oscars went to several movies produced by the company, as to United Artists in the 1940s: Miramax is a giant. As announced at the Cannes Festival in 2013, Scorsese is now collaborating with the company to develop his 2002 film on the gangs in a TV series.

At the time of the shooting, things did not go smoothly with movie mogul Harvey Weinstein; in the eternal ups and downs between producers and filmmakers, Scorsese probably did not realize his film exactly in the way he wanted. In any event, Gangs of New York came out. Like any aesthetic object it has been exposed to the hazards of its own existence, with compromises among the various people involved in its production, and the more so since it was a huge budget movie. Similarly to architectural works, films result from the tension between two value systems: art and money. Architects and their sponsors, filmmakers and producers struggle with each other; the most prosaic concerns and the flight of artistic imagination compete. In recent decades, films have often been reconstituted in the way filmmakers conceived them before the interventions of their colossal producers. We can now see the authors’ versions of Touch of Evil, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now and so on. Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Coppola, all had to come to terms with Universal Studios or Metro Goldwyn Mayer. But the chain of reification is endless in the capitalist cycle: today the market launches what was rejected yesterday and tomorrow it will release what is rejected today.

The history of cinema is rich with anecdotes about the confrontation between producers and directors: cuts here and there; choice of actors; sequences to be eliminated or to be added in order to seduce the audience; collisions and crashes; breaking off of contracts; delays; strenuous efforts and cruel restrictions. Since the 1950s, innumerable films have dealt with the theme of the filmmaking process with producers, directors, screenplayers and actors – from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1953) through Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963) to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and INLAND EMPIRE (2006).

Indeed, it is in the film industry’s wild world that cinema goes on existing, in spite of the regrets of the purists. Aesthetically ambitious filmmakers should get credit if they succeed in retaining as much as they can of their artistic ideals in spite of producers’ pressure. Great artists challenged Hollywood, as did Orson Welles: he could do a lot of what he aimed to, and, facing the monster of Hollywood, he realized his movies while struggling with the intimidations of the studio companies. Paradoxically, the freedom of invention can result from constraints – hasn’t the form of the sonnet found its glory within the limits posed by metre and rhymes?

Production theory has paid attention to the economic aspects of filming, often opposing auteurism or, to use the term launched by the Nouvelle Vague, la politique de l’auteur, indicating that good filmmakers are artists whose style is recognizable in all their works. The notion of the author has been fiercely opposed since the 1970s: of course any film is the outcome of collective work and, as has been shown by David Bordwell, corresponds to certain historical conditions of filmmaking and film thinking. But in the 20th century, for postmodern theorists, it seemed necessary to pronounce the death of the author. Nevertheless, one could now dispense with the rigid faithfulness to the well known definitions of Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, based in part on an interpretation – or misinterpretation – of Stéphane Mallarmé and his famous formula in his essay ‘Crise de vers’: ‘disappearance of the poet as speaker’.² The context of the theoretical radicalism of the 1960s was determined by the Marxist intellectual atmosphere and by the rejection of the tyranny of literary history based on the authors’ biography. But the author is not dead since authorship is still a circulating notion, both in terms of rights and in terms of common sense communication, even if the Internet is changing the world and therefore our conceptions. Filmmakers do exist with their numerous collaborators and, I believe, are an important part of the imagination of a film.³

At any rate, whatever the actual tribulations at the time of the making of Gangs of New York, in spite of the journalistic gossips or the academic research in production theory, while watching the movie we are not worried about the relationship between Scorsese and Weinstein, the sacrifices of the one and the demands of the other. The film mesmerizes all those who are not devotees of the most radical artistic avant-gardes, all those who do not refuse the narrative form in the name of postmodern aesthetics. Those who are fond of great epics mixing history and fiction, and are not ashamed of liking Verdi’s operas and Hollywood movies, cannot but applaud this work. Scorsese’s films are narrative, as he himself declares. He has always been fascinated by American cinema; his A Personal Journey through American Movies (first released in the United Kingdom in1995) is an important documentary illustrating the work of some pioneers of film and promoting the memory of Hollywood, both huge productions and small-budget movies whose value has not been recognized, for instance, the films produced or made by Ida Lupino and André de Toth. In an interview with Les Cahiers du Cinema, Scorsese explains:

I grew up going to the movies for entertainment, cinema was a show. To say a show is to say: a story. And a story needs a narrative. I make narrative movies. This does not mean that I cannot appreciate movies of other countries and cultures, and avant-garde. [ . . . ] What strikes me about those filmmakers from the past [presented in A Personal Journey through American Movies] is the way in which they managed to shoot very personal films without denying the genre to which they belonged.⁴

It is time to demythologize some poststructuralist and postmodern convictions: their horror of the notion of representation and the idea that so-called traditional narratives are linear. Stories represent events that can be external and internal – actions or thoughts and emotions. From the oldest narrations in verse or in prose, stories can be interrupted by other stories, characters multiply and the flow of time is broken by flashbacks and anticipations. Making narrative films does not mean that the time they represent is linear or that they adopt the classical Hollywood narrative; and in historical terms, as remarked by David Bordwell, ‘postwar European cinema can be characterized by its effort to structure a film around highly self-conscious narration’.⁵ In any event, as in literature, narration in film can be fragmented, suspended, slowed down or accelerated and yet narrate a story or more than just one. Modernity produced works that are not narrative, but this certainly does not discredit narration. Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and André Malraux, for example, scorned narratives. In Les Voix du silence Malraux accused the ‘official poetry of the 19th century’ of being immersed ‘in dramas and stories’; ⁶he was equally mistrustful of any film that resembles a novel. To the narrative mode he opposed the scene; according to him Baudelaire’s poetry is based on scenes and not on dramas and stories. But, besides the fact that Baudelaire narrated several short stories in his Spleen of Paris and that many of his poems are condensed dramas where the lyrical voice often addresses another person or the reader, a scene – in words or in a moving image – can be a short narrative or a narrative embryo. Actually, as early as the 19th century, one of those authors who is considered traditional, Stendhal, said that the plot was not so important since human emotions were all that matter in literature, as he wrote in his journal in February 1835: ‘What can a novel be without emotions?’⁷

Between the hypothetical unity of a story and the destruction of narrative, there are many ways of adjusting the plot to the most important questions raised by storytelling and narration in the movies – therefore in the emotions represented or suggested by them. Not unlike Stendhal, Scorsese can break off the continuity of events and daringly play with temporal elements: one has only to think of the chronological discrepancies in Goodfellas where the important dates unfolding from the 1950s to the 1980s are written on a black screen, as in ‘traditional’ old Hollywood movies. Nevertheless, in Goodfellas’ first frames, we see Jimmy (Robert De Niro), Tom (Joe Pesci) and Henry (Ray Liotta) brutally beating to death the mobster Billy Batts of the Gambino Mafia family, who is hidden in the trunk of their car. Actually this episode takes place in the middle of the movie, in June 1970. It is only after a few minutes of this start in medias res that the chronological sequence begins in the 1950s. Henry’s voice-over narrates (in the past tense), and the screen shows him as a boy looking from a window at the Italian Mafiosi in the street. He dreams of a life like them, and he pronounces this unforgettable line: ‘I always wanted to be a gangster.’

Later in the film, the killing of Billy Batts comes a second time: we see again the three thugs opening the trunk, pulling out the dying Billy and finishing him off. But shortly after, another type of chronological discrepancy occurs in the juxtaposition of the frames and Henry’s voice-over. Obviously the choice of a voice-over is already a narrative tool but this doesn’t imply that the narrative is ‘traditional’. In fact in the second part of the film, Henry describes a joyful and eagerly awaited event: Tom receives a great honour; he ‘is made’, which is to say that he becomes a ‘family’ member, but we see more than what we hear: Tommy, dressed up for the ceremony, is executed by Gambino’s killers to avenge the murder of Billy Batts. The narrator (Henry) describes the happy event and the frame shows Tommy’s death. This temporal divergence adds to the horror of the scene and for a couple of minutes viewers are put in the situation of knowing more than the narrator – again an awkward situation since Henry is telling the whole story and therefore is aware of the order of events. In this narrative strategy, there is something more than the equivocal narration David Bordwell identifies, for instance, in his analysis of The Spider’s Stratagem by Bertolucci. He shows that no clear boundaries are marked among characters’ subjectivity, objective events and the voice-over’s commentary.⁸ Scorsese increases the impact of conflicting emotions in the very short time when the viewer realizes the gap between words and images, simultaneously witnessing the time of hope and the time of the catastrophe. Then this same sequence comes back later when Henry’s voice tells us about Jimmy’s desperate reaction when Tommy’s death is announced to him in a phone booth. The shot is slowed down at the moment Tommy’s blood spatters on the walls of the shabby house he has just entered. It is almost a freeze, heightening the dreadful scorn and violence of the episode. For a few minutes, Henry’s neutral voice accompanies the cross-editing of Jimmy happily eating in a diner with him, of Tommy being killed in the empty house and of Jimmy crying and hitting the phone booth as soon as he learns about Tommy’s death, and of Tommy again falling on the floor.

This sequence as it appears the first time and is then reiterated the second time is a good illustration of how deeply Scorsese investigates the problem of narration in film, using repetitions, parallel editing and audio-visual stratagems.

Viewer participation

Goodfellas, which is based on Nicolas Pileggi’s book about the real mobster Henry Hill (who died in June 2012),⁹ is included in the Mafia genre: its reviews never question its historical truth, unlike some articles on Gangs of New York where the issue of fidelity to historical facts has often been raised. Biographies and historical movies are in a peculiar situation, since their narratives are often constructed with some true facts, but composed fictionally. The temptation is then great to take them as documentaries and therefore to be disturbed by facts that do not correspond to historical truth. But this denies the freedom to imagine history; the point of a movie is to present, not an academic history book with the most precise reconstruction of the past, which in any event would be impossible, but the ambience and the characters’ emotions.

Let us look at the example of the 2013 Academy Award-winning movie Argo by Ben Affleck: it is based on the Canadian Caper of 1979 during the Iran hostage crisis and the operation conducted by CIA officer Tony Mendez to ‘exfiltrate’ the six American officials who managed to escape from the attack on the US Embassy in Teheran and were sheltered for two months by the Canadian ambassador. The British journalist Robert Fisk, who was a reporter in Teheran in 1979, corrects the many errors in factual truth, but he comments: ‘While Argo deviates from the facts of the diplomats’ escape, it does – chillingly and with enormous veracity – capture the mood of suspicion and savage vengeance in post-revolutionary Tehran.’¹⁰ Similarly Scorsese aims to achieve the type of veracity that can capture the mood in a given event and historical period. Is not history often presented in a mixture of factual truth and romance? Was this not a typical feature of 19th-century historical dramas?

Some critics have detected serious imperfections in Gangs of New York: a reviewer complained that the film never explains how Amsterdam Vallon manages to regroup the Dead Rabbits after his failed attempt to kill Bill the Butcher.¹¹ The journalist William Stern, in his 2003 article in City Journal, pinpointed Scorsese’s historical inaccuracy.¹² But why should one expect from a film the factual exactness of a history book? As Robert Fisk wrote about Argo, we go to see a movie, not history. If there are faults in Gangs of New York, or rather some incongruities both in historical facts and in the proportions of the narrative, this is part of the epic genre. The great poems of antiquity and the great novels of the 19th century are not even and perfect in all their components, as suggested by the critic Albert Thibaudet about the works of Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Balzac or Stendhal. For the critic, the novel is not a dissertation but a symphony, and what is required is the mastering of the unity of each single episode or section.¹³ As we know from our experience as readers and viewers, ellipses are normal in any narration – novel or film – the more so when its aim is to offer a synthetic vision of the values and the passions at stake in an epoch.

The journalist William Stern wrote that Gangs of New York is fine as ‘entertainment’ but not as historical account. I would contest the stark opposition between historical account and entertainment: entertainments can be empty or intelligent, and this movie, which is entertainment, does not exclude depth. Gangs of New York is not a didactic reconstitution of historical facts, but a breakthrough in the past in order to reflect about human life, hinting at our present as well. In the guise of a historical movie, this film has to do more with the philosophy of history than with historical facts. It is a negative philosophy, almost a weird synthesis of Thomas Hobbes’ and Walter Benjamin’s visions. On one hand, as in Hobbes’ De Cive, mutual violence is considered to reign among human beings in a sort of state of nature; but on the other, violence is institutionalized as state power in a society based on the oppression of the poor, as it is observed by Benjamin in his theses on history: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’¹⁴ Scorsese depicts the barbarism of the law in the United States. What matters in Gangs of New York is not the narrow precision about the history of the country or of the city, but the existential precision alluding to the presence of corruption; the corruption of all societies; the role of religion; and personal motivations as the motors of actions and events.

Gangs of New York reiterates the reach of some great films from the past. It can be said of Scorsese what he says about two old masters in A Personal Journey through American Movies: ‘Like Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille liked to paint on a big canvas.’ And like DeMille’s, his ambition is ‘to tell an absorbing personal story against the background of great historical events’; and also the other way round, to recount great historical events and their motivations against the background of an absorbing personal story. Gangs of New York shows the resistance to Irish immigrants and the political and cultural tensions arou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Wonder of Cinema: Scorsese
• Part II: Experimenting with Time and Space: Van Sant and Lynch
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index