Mean Streets

"You don't make up your sins in a church. You do it in the streets..."

Mean Streets follows antihero Charlie as he wrestles with small-time mob life against his commitment to Catholicism. Charlie sees his redemption as his support for Johnny Boy, who is in deep shit with local loan sharks, particularly Charlie's buddy, Michael. But Johnny Boy is a reckless, hedonistic mook who don't give two shits about no-one but himself. Charlie's faith in Johnny Boy leads him down a perilous street, eventually exploding in bloodshed.

The film marks Scorsese's birth into mob cinema: directing and co-writing a personal work dealing with characters he observed while growing up. Scorsese shoots the film grittily to reflect the reality of the anti-yuppies coming-of-age in a unforgiving, bleak setting of the Bronx.

Mean Streets uses music to heighten the atmospheric tension in the picture. There are two particular tracks that profoundly accentuate the image. First, The Rolling Stones "Jumpin' Jack Black", an upbeat rock 'n roll number, emphasizes the importance of reputation and respect as Charlie sizes up the bar and Johnny Boy swaggers with two girls on his arms. Second, the ironic use of "Please Mr. Postman" in the pool room rumble creates a playful feel of a boys-will-be-boys attitude.

Throughout the picture Scorsese shows flashes of his trademark cinematographic innovation. Particularly, Charlie's drunkenness is captured by the attachment of a reverse steadicam to Harvey Keitel. This creates a great effect as the audience bobs up and down with Charlie and distorts the viewers perception of movement. Scorsese creates a tight knit world that tugs the viewer until he's absorbed into the Mean Streets.

"We're not paying because this guy... this guy's a fuckin' mook."

"But I didn't say nothing."

"And we don't pay mooks."

"Mook? I'm a mook?"

"Yeah."

"What's a mook?"

"A mook. What's a mook?"

"I don't know."

"What's a mook?"

"You can't call me a mook."

"I can't?"

"Nah."

Taxi Driver

One afternoon Paul Schrader delivered a lecture to film students and presented his technique for writing screenplays. Schrader opened with describing the connection between the writer's life and work: a screenplay is inherently influenced by the writer's mood and experiences at the time of the writing. Schrader encouraged the students to pick something that they struggled with -- then create a metaphor for it. A tangible metaphor. Similarly, Vsevolod Pudovkin's seminal thirties work, Film Technique, prescribes that the scenarist must write an idea that can become plastic. Conveying the moving visual experience of film is what makes cinema unique from other art forms.

Schrader writes on the theme of loneliness in his screenplay Taxi Driver. His plastic metaphor for loneliness is a taxi cab. Travis Bickle, the mentally unstable 'Nam vet, drives his cab around the dark, sordid streets of New York City at its most godawful hours and fumes over "all the aminals that come out at night -- whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, nenal." Foreshadowing his cleansing of New York's gutters, Travis muses that "someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."

Martin Scorsese faithfully adapts Schrader's script to the screen. Scorsese says that "visually, everything is shown from Travis' point of view." Scorsese not only creates sympathy for the anti-hero but places the audience in his shoes, in his mohawk, in his room pulling every muscle tight. A dense atmosphere of an individual estranged from society is embodied by the camera with tight shots in the cab, close-ups on his eyes, a red filter as the reflection of traffic lights, low key lighting, and whatnot. De Niro buzzes with energy as Travis slowly descends deeper into insanity. Travis' contradictory actions propel him deeper into isolation and ill health, drinking cases of Coke and downing fast food after immense workouts. .

The film solidifies its longevity and resonance with its universal theme. Travis' cabbing embodies loneliness, floating through the Eastern night with an ironic soft jazz soundtrack. What Travis feels is a reflection of one of humanity's oldest and strongest emotion. The queer-Jew Allen Ginsberg optimistically spurts: "Everybody's lonely. That's the beauty of life. The sense of lonely solitariness.... I'm proud to be lonely!" The taxi driver might not agree.

The Auteur of Wes Anderson

"I saved American cinema. What did you ever do?"

Wes Anderson films are a good fitness regimen for the cinema -- "good cardiovascular" -- keeping the spirits high for the patient with celluloid cancer. The Anderson canon is evidence of auteurism, in that he is a writer-director who is involved in every area of the filmmaking process and makes a series of films that have distinct and consistent themes and styles. Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums represent Anderson's birth into the cinema and possibly his early apex.

From a thematic perspective, Anderson's films melt together into a cohesive world, "a degree of two above reality", the auteur says, with consistently similar characters and situations. Scorsese on Anderson: "He knows how to convey the simple joys and interactions between people so well and with such richness." Like Jean Renoir films, one "immediately feels connected to the characters through [Anderson's] love for them." Antiheros like Dignan, Max Fischer, Royal Tenenbaum and his kids, all experience isolation and failure. They are outsiders of society, very childish, and almost cartoonish (the costumes advance to unchanging uniforms in The Royal Tenenbaums). Anderson has an unlikely affinity for the loser, raising him up by showing him sympathetically with montage and redemption -- the characters always come full circle having some sort of epiphany or coming-to-age. Each character has respective quirks that enhances the subtle wit that permeates through each film.

From a stylistic perspective, "Anderson has a fine sense of how music works against an image." Anderson says that "a lot of times, music helps inspire an idea. I may not even have the script yet; I just know I want to use a song, and I'll write a scene around the song." In Bottle Rocket, Anderson learned how "a story and characters can be supported through music." Anderson had The Rolling Stones' "2000 Man" in his mind for years, and the scene where Dignan runs back into the warehouse to save Applejack was written with this song in mind. "They'll never catch me man, 'cause I'm fuckin' innocent." And you believe him.

Anderson masterly uses music to slow motion. The most memorable scenes in Rushmore are as Max bows with a bloody nose while that endearing and melodic piano is played; the absurd and gleefully happy montage as Herman and Max prepare the aquarium for Miss Cross to Oh Yoko; and the slow motion dance with Miss Cross to "Oh La La". The music is intricately connected to the image, the image is unimaginable without it, and greatly enhances the feeling in the film. The cinema is, after all, in one word: emotion.

In The Royal Tenenbaums, Margot's slow motion introduction to Nico's These Days, helps express how each Margot and Richie have lost their way, have a nostalgia for their youth, and shows their secret desires for each other. Or Richie's suicide attempt to I-stab-myself-in-the-chest Elliot Smith's Needle in the Hay. Anderson just knows how to support the story and characters through music.

Anderson's use of the wide angel lens with a deep focus shows off the finely detailed world that each of his characters inhabit. Because Anderson is intimately involved in every process, including meticulously planning the mise-en-scene with the art designer, every detail further concretes the somewhat fantastical cinematic world of his films.

While Max never really saves Latin, Anderson never really saves American cinema. But, damn it, we believe he does.

une femme est une femme

[Anna Karina]: Lights! Cam-ra! Action!

Chaplin once said that tragedy is life close-up; and that comedy is life shown as long shot. Here, Godard films a comedy in close-up, and so begins the tragi-comedy Une Femme est Une Femme.

Open on: colour, vibrant. Angela, a striptease artist slash antiheroine, tries to bargain with her boyfriend, Emile, "I will fry you an egg on one condition: we have a baby." The lovers perpetual banter with postmodern winks and bows to the camera takes a serious turn here and Angela threatens to have a baby with Emile's friend, Alfred (Belmondo as charming asshole).

Godard's homage/expression of nostalgia for the (American) musical, the film's score is ever noticeable as it abruptly cuts in and out, splashing the vitality and chaos that embodies Angela and her life -- but the film is not a musical -- it is "the idea of the musical". It emerges from the subject, Angela. Atonioni says in a preface to one of his books, paraphrased by Godard: "the subject will emerge which will be the person [herself], [her] idea of the world, and the world created by this idea of it, the overall idea which this conjures." Consequently the film conforms to Angela's vision. Godard, the painter, shows this through rich primary colours in cinemascope, enhancing the atmosphere of Angela's imagination of dancing in a Gene Kelly film. The same visual effect is seen in Amelie.

But, as the film is a neorealist musical, the constrains of society tug on Angela's dream and she is limited to singing while undressing to men in a cabaret. The contradiction of the neorealist musical is connected to the commonly used the Godardian theme of "how somebody extricates [herself] from a certain situation." Here, a womanly urge for a baby and:

Angela: Je veux etre dans une comedie musicale!

Eccentricities of Angela and Emilie as motif: the silent communication through book titles, the cleansing of bare feet before bed, the tap of the shower pipe with a hammer, oh! Their youthful spirits and Angela's adorable costume -- those red pantyhose! -- contrasted by the seriousness of infidelity. Paradoxes abound, Angela sleeping with Alfred is an childish solution to an adult problem that leads to a morally broken yet loving couple.