“All I am is what I’m going after.”

David Liu | 26 May 2012

Vincent Hanna is on to something. I recently viewed Heat for the fourth time after a friend suggested a late night movie to start the weekend, and for the fourth time came away admiring its visual compositions, its gritty yet figurative dialogue, its inherent affinity to literature and art.

Not unlike Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Michael Mann’s best films are brooding contemporary narratives defined by solitude, moral ambiguity and obsessive pursuit of elusive trophies. What continues to strike me about Heat — and similarly wired films like Ford’s The Searchers and Fincher’s Zodiac — is how Mann’s tireless devotion to method and mood results in a worthy analogue to great literature. Is there another American action picture that leaves its audience so wondrously full on a final sequence so tragically empty?

Art & Film: Michelangelo/Mann

David Liu | 26 May 2012

From the canvas (in this case, marble block) to the cinema.

Pietà (Michelangelo, 1498-99; marble)

Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)

Near the beginning of the film, Neil McCauley walks past a replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Near the end, world-weary Vincent Hanna fights to keep his suicidal step-daughter alive.

As I prepare to write my final undergraduate paper on the life and times of Chinese-American Hollywood actress Anna May Wong, I decided to collect some pictures for inspiration. 

Two photos in this set are especially moving.

  • Row two, left: enjoying a light moment with German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and fellow international star Marlene Dietrich; Berlin, 1928.
  • Row two, right: posing with African-American actor-activist Paul Robeson and Chinese opera singer Mei Lanfang in front of Claridge’s Hotel; London, 1935.

And for what it’s worth, a humorous anecdote: In a 1936 visit to China, Wong stopped briefly in Tokyo, where reporters asked about her romantic life. Wong replied, “I am wedded to my art.” Nevertheless, Japanese newspapers reported the next day that Wong was married to a wealthy Cantonese man named Art.

A History of Violence

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation

David Liu | 20 April 2012

On the evening of February 18, 1915, The Birth of a Nation screened at the White House to an enthusiastic Woodrow Wilson, whose evaluation of the film now resonates in 20th century lore. ”It is like writing history with lightning,” the Southern-born, pro-segregation Wilson reportedly remarked, “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” 

At once politically maddening and aesthetically groundbreaking, D.W. Griffith’s epic condenses the ideological disparities of post-Civil War America into a maelstrom of high fantasy masquerading as alternate history. Adapted from Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman, the film operates on the prevailing dichotomy of North and South as personified through two proud families, the Stonemans and the Camerons.

Russian-born critic Alexander Bakshy once wrote: “The development of Griffith is the development of American film.” He may not have been far from the truth. At 197 minutes, Griffith’s controversial race spectacle heralded the birth of an art form.

Notes on Style:

  • Griffith was a pioneer of off-screen space, and in The Birth of a Nation, we see complex cross-cutting that results in innovative compressions of time and space.
  • With his use of the “cut-back” or flashback, Griffith anticipated Soviet montage by nearly a decade.
  • More subtle gestures than earlier entries in silent cinema; in this sense, the film marks a significant departure from the theatrical expressionism of vaudeville, perhaps beginning the shift toward more narrative-driven cinema.
  • Foreground and background: strong visual distinctions between rich and poor, white and black, owners and slaves, Union and Confederate.
  • Intellectual montage: cutting from close-up of tousling pets to medium shot of young Stoneman and Cameron bachelors.
  • Recurrent image of opulence: the staircase in the Cameron mansion.
  • Spectacle within a spectacle: rich whites watching black minstrel dancers, Lincoln at the Ford’s Theatre.
  • Bird’s eye and panning shots: from the Confederate cavalry charge to the raiding of Atlanta.
  • Tracking shot: heroic dash of the Ku Klux Klan, led by renegade Ben Cameron, on a mission to reclaim the “Aryan birthright.”
  • Static shot: Individuals exit frame until only one remains; emphasis on the elusive nature of American progress.

Art & Film: David/Coppola

David Liu | 19 April 2012

From the canvas to the cinema.

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GREAT SCENES
Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) 

As reality sets in on the RMS Titanic, the string orchestra plays “Nearer, My God, to Thee” — at least according to a handful of eyewitnesses and four films based on the disaster. The most recent of these, Cameron’s blockbuster romance, returns in 3D this weekend to mark the 100th anniversary of the ocean liner’s maiden voyage.

Did it really happen? Does it really matter? For a brief moment, anyway, Cameron captures the spirit of cinema’s pioneering populists, D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.