Rewriting Indie Cinema

Improvisation, Psychodrama, and the Screenplay

J. J. Murphy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231549592
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Most films rely on a script developed in pre-production. Yet beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the recent mumblecore movement, key independent filmmakers have broken with the traditional screenplay. Instead, they have turned to new approaches to scripting that allow for more complex characterization and shift the emphasis from the page to performance.

In Rewriting Indie Cinema, J. J. Murphy explores these alternative forms of scripting and how they have shaped American film from the 1950s to the present. He traces a strain of indie cinema that used improvisation and psychodrama, a therapeutic form of improvised acting based on a performer's own life experiences. Murphy begins in the 1950s and 1960s with John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Barbara Loden, Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, William Greaves, and other independent directors who sought to create a new type of narrative cinema. In the twenty-first century, filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant, the Safdie brothers, Joe Swanberg, and Sean Baker developed similar strategies, sometimes benefitting from the freedom of digital technology. In reading key films and analyzing their techniques, Rewriting Indie Cinema demonstrates how divergence from the script has blurred the divide between fiction and nonfiction. Showing the ways in which filmmakers have striven to capture the subtleties of everyday behavior, Murphy provides a new history of American indie filmmaking and how it challenges Hollywood industrial practices.

1

AND I HATE ACTORS

The New American Cinema

In conformist postwar America, the newfound emphasis on spontaneity and improvisation represented a radical challenge to tradition. Nowhere was this more evident than in the arts. In painting, the free-form gestural application of paint to canvas, as embodied by the paintings of Jackson Pollock, became the cornerstone of abstract expressionism. Assemblage, which combines disparate materials, became a new way of making sculpture. In music, Charlie Parker revolutionized jazz with bebop. The Beat writers, most notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, altered contemporary literature through their spontaneous prose and poetry. The Living Theatre incorporated audience participation into their plays, while impromptu theatrical events known as happenings also took the spotlight. The Judson Dance Theater performed collaborative pieces with artists from other disciplines that pushed the boundaries of the medium. Robert Frank’s snapshot aesthetic in his photo essay The Americans challenged accepted notions of pictorialism in photography, while a number of independent filmmakers, most notably John Cassavetes, employed improvisation to create an alternative to classical Hollywood cinema.

Daniel Belgrad has argued that spontaneity represented a distinct and alternative cultural movement in postwar America, positioning it as a third strand “opposed to both the mass culture and the established high culture of the postwar period.”¹ According to Belgrad:

Most broadly, spontaneity implied an alternative to the vaunted rational progress of Western civilization, which had succeeded in developing technologies and principles of organization that threatened human life and freedom on an unprecedented scale. In the specific historical context of wartime and postwar America, spontaneity did battle against the culture of corporate liberalism, which was the most recent and local manifestation of these principles.²

Within the various arts, spontaneity provided a weapon for artists to challenge the hegemony of corporate liberalism and manifested itself as an assault on established tradition.

Jonas Mekas became the chief proselytizer for spontaneity in cinema. He cited films by Morris Engel, Lionel Rogosin, Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank, and Cassavetes as signs that a revolution was underfoot. In the films of what he termed the “New American Cinema,” Mekas describes the defining aesthetic characteristics of this new cinema: “Though made by directors of different ages and temperaments, all these films reveal an open ear and an open eye for timely, contemporary reality. They are similar in other respects: in their use of actual locations and direct lighting; their disrespect for plots and written scripts; their use of improvisation.”³ Mekas attacked Hollywood, the most entrenched film industry in the world, as the enemy of a more radical and alternative filmmaking practice. For Mekas, the notion of spontaneity represented not simply an aesthetic process but a moral imperative: “Spontaneity as liberation, as bliss, as a means of freeing one’s self from the moral, social clichés, out-dated mores, the business way of life.”⁴ Mekas ultimately viewed the filmmakers associated with the New American Cinema as artists who approached reality in a modern way.

Mekas reacted against the professionalism and technical polish of what he perceived to be a lifeless Hollywood cinema. He strongly believed that the professionalism of the industry succeeded in inhibiting creative freedom on every level of the production. Spontaneity would have a liberating effect on filmmakers by freeing them to create a radically new type of cinema. As he explains:

The New American film maker seeks to free himself from the over-professionalism and over-technicality that usually handicaps the inspiration and spontaneity of contemporary cinema, guiding himself more by intuition and improvisation than by discipline; he aims desperately, as his colleague action painter, or poet and dancer, at art in its very flight, at a free, a spontaneous inspiration: art as an action and not as a status quo; art as various states of feeling and not as a series of facts, nature-morts [sic], or pastiches.⁵

The use of improvisation became the chief means for filmmakers to create a more spontaneous cinema.

Mekas explicitly blamed screenwriters for keeping cinema so conventional.⁶ Not only did he detest the formulaic nature of traditional screenplays, but Mekas held professional actors in contempt as well. In a diary entry dated July 14, 1960, he writes, “Every day a dozen envelopes with photographs, credits on the other side, etc., come in, from actors, sending their pictures. So they think we are making a movie about actors? They can’t play anything but actors. They look like actors, they speak like actors, they behave like actors, and they are actors. And I hate actors!”⁷ He did not actually hate actors but rather a certain type of actor and controlled style of acting that he considered to be outmoded in which “the director takes an actor, like any other raw piece of material, and begins to build from it a contraption of his own.”⁸

Mekas’s comments highlight the integral connection that exists between preconceived screenplays and performance. Written dialogue on a page has an impact on the performance of actors because it does not usually allow them to deviate from the lines that appear in the script or to utilize techniques such as improvisation. Mekas was wholeheartedly against “preconceived, worked-out ideas,” such as you would find in a written screenplay. In a column in the Village Voice on March 2, 1961, he clarifies his own conception of performance: “The young actor of today doesn’t trust the will of a director any longer. He doesn’t think that the part he is playing is only a part, and he only an actor. He merges with his part entirely, it becomes a moral problem for him, and a problem of existence.”⁹ For Mekas, the actor in cinema is not directed or controlled but rather is her or his own agent who responds intuitively and spontaneously to what is unfolding in the present moment of the situation.

Improvisation is often connected to naturalism or cinematic realism, as is evident in the arguments that Mekas makes in favor of a new cinema. In his influential article “Notes on the New American Cinema,” he charted a revisionist history by citing James Agee, who embraced “works of fiction, played against and into, and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality.”¹⁰ Mekas traced the realist impulse back to such films as Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee’s In the Street (1948, 1952); Sidney Meyers’s The Quiet One (1948); Engel’s films, including Little Fugitive; and Rogosin’s On the Bowery and Come Back, Africa. He writes: “Formally, one of Rogosin’s contributions to the new cinema was an effective dramatization of reality, the use of real life scenes in an organized, planned drama.”¹¹ In discussing Shadows, Mekas cites Siegfried Kracauer’s notion of “ ‘camera reality’—a film free from literary and theatrical ideas.” According to Mekas, the film’s formal strength derives from “the people in it, their faces, their movements, their tone of voice, their stammerings, their pauses—their psychological reality as revealed through the most insignificant daily incidents and situations.”¹²

MORRIS ENGEL, RUTH ORKIN, AND RAY ASHLEY: LITTLE FUGITIVE

The New American Cinema did not blossom all at once but developed in gradual stages. One of the first films to break with the conventions of Hollywood was Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive (1953), made in collaboration with fellow photographer Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley (Raymond Abrashkin), who is credited with writing the screenplay. The groundbreaking film, which is built around a specific location rather than story or character, explores the legendary Brooklyn amusement park Coney Island.

Little Fugitive utilizes a simple story frame. Twelve-year-old Lennie Norton (Richard Brewster) resents having to take care of his seven-year-old brother, Joey (Richie Andrusco). When their single mother has to leave to attend to their sick grandmother, the two boys are left to fend for themselves for a couple of days. Lennie and two friends trick Joey into believing he has shot and killed his older brother. Unaware of the ruse, Joey takes the money his mother has left for them and flees to Coney Island roughly nineteen minutes into the film. The narrative, which employs a conventional ticking clock of the mother’s eventual return, serves as little more than a pretext to explore the visually exciting world of the enticing amusement park—the rides, arcade games, junk food, and crowded beach—all seen through the eyes of an impressionable young child with an obsession with horses.

FIGURE 1.1 Joey explores the boardwalk at Coney Island, Little Fugitive

Although the acting and story do not quite achieve the naturalism for which Engel was striving, he employs a number of innovative strategies. In using nonprofessional actors in the main roles, the filmmakers even went so far as to consult with child psychologists at the Bank Street School of Education in New York City in order to try to obtain more naturalistic performances from the child actors.¹³ They also kept dialogue to a minimum, which no doubt stemmed from the fact that the screenplay from which Engel was shooting consisted of only two pages. As Alain Bergala observes, “The two-page script gave a free hand to Engel, who shot it as a semi-documentary between fiction and reality, part staged, part improvised.”¹⁴

In his review of the film, André Bazin argues that Little Fugitive is assisted “by the spontaneity of life,” and suggests that it would have been impossible to plan out such a film entirely in advance, even using a short outline. Bazin writes:

In short, it is the awareness we have of this margin of indetermination that gives the film its charm. Cesare Zavattini has often spoken of the (unrealizable?) film in which the director wouldn’t know the ending, a film as free as life itself. In this sense, The Little Fugitive [sic] is a case study in neorealism, not so much for its socially documentary aspect, which has never really been essential to neorealism, nor for its on-location setting, but for the way in which it approaches that scriptless film ideal wherein the drama arises exclusively from the evolution of the present.¹⁵

Part of this quality that Bazin so admired had to do with the way the film was shot, which depended on Engel being able to utilize a specially designed camera.

Engel had a friend, Charles Woodruff, make a 35-mm portable movie camera to allow him to shoot Joey unobtrusively as he explored Coney Island, thereby embedding his wide-eyed protagonist in a documentary-like setting where people appear to be unaware of the camera.¹⁶ The sound in the film was postdubbed. Besides the improvised quality that came from not using a traditional script, a big part of the fascination of Little Fugitive derives from its lyrical black and white cinematography: the light and shadow patterns under the boardwalk, the oblivious crowds of sunbathers on the beach, the landmark Parachute Jump in operation, a montage of the heads of carousel horses, and an unexpected rain storm that leaves huge puddles of water in the nearby streets.

LIONEL ROGOSIN: ON THE BOWERY AND COME BACK, AFRICA

Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery (1956), which was made three years after Little Fugitive, shares a number of similarities with that film. Unlike Engel and Orkin, however, Rogosin was not an experienced still photographer but rather a disenchanted businessman who decided that he wanted to make socially concerned movies. On the Bowery was conceived to be a test run or learning experience for a more ambitious project that he envisioned about apartheid, Come Back, Africa.

Rogosin had become fascinated with the Bowery, a former theater and entertainment district in New York City. The construction of the elevated subway known as the Third Avenue El in 1878 had a significant negative impact on the neighborhood, which in the 1890s became a major vice district. According to historian Eric Ferrara, the area continued to decline:

The Golden Age of the Bowery was fading. By the 1920s and ’30s, nearly all of the union halls, theaters and museums were long gone, replaced by manufacturers, warehouses and lodging houses. Population relocation, an economic depression and a concerted local and federal effort to eradicate vice and corruption took their toll on the old entertainment district. All that remained were a few small businesses, greasy spoon diners, shelters and flophouses.¹⁷

It was during the Depression that the Bowery became associated with Skid Row. After ...