Movies: New Styles of Storytelling

MEDIUM COOL directed by Haskell Wexler Paramount

JUSTINE directed by George Cukor Twentieth Century Fox

I am suspicious of the discovery of “new art forms” (especially when announced by the artist himself), as well as of the many “breakthroughs” we are always hearing about in one field or another. Without sounding any such cataclysmic cultural alarm, I would like to call attention to some recent movies that seem to me to represent, in their different ways, new styles of storytelling for commercially produced Hollywood movies.

For several years there has been proud talk of the “New Hollywood” by people in Hollywood, though even the most ardent upholders of the concept find it difficult to pin down, and as far as I was able to translate the disconnected definitions of it, the general idea seems to be that Hollywood need no longer be ashamed of being Hollywood because it is doing such daring new stuff, real artistic and all. just like the Europeans; and Darlings, we shouldn’t feel guilty anymore.

Since the end of World War II there indeed have been innovations and new departures in American moviemaking, but not in the area of what I think of as “storytelling.” There of course have been great advances in color, lighting, wide screens, photography, and many technical aspects of production. There was talk of a “new kind of movie” in the fifties, but that was primarily a different kind of acting style, made popular by James Dean, Marlon Brando, and the many other talented acolytes of Strasberg’s version of Stanislavski’s Method. But the American movies thought of as bold and daring in that era were ones like On The Waterfront, in which, despite all of Brando’s introspective and untraditional (for Hollywood) acting style, the story itself followed the same conventional Hollywood plot form of fast-paced beginning, middle, and inevitably victorious and glorious (happy) end. In the sixties the American commercial movies that were hailed as bold and daring most often have been regarded as such because of the theme, the dealing with controversial subjects such as a white girl marrying a Negro (Guess Who’s . . .), a college girl getting a diaphragm (Goodbye, Columbus, whose theme is really out of the fifties when the story was written and is now outdated by the Pill) , a crackpot SAG general going off his rocker and ordering atomic war (Dr. Strangelove), a teen-age girl getting laid by a wide and wild assortment of older men (Candy), and a nice young housewife getting knocked up by the devil (Rosemary’s Baby).

Despite some taboo-breaking in themes, however, most of these movies pretty faithfully stuck to conventional plotting techniques, the linear progress from beginning to middle to end (though in some cases the end wasn’t happy/victorious), with all elements fitting neatly into place and building with traditional momentum to the wrap-up climax that tied all the threads of the story together.

European film-makers have broken out of these standard conventions and experimented with new storytelling techniques for some time now (with varying degrees of success) in works such as Truffaut’s imaginative love-murder story Shoot the Plano Player, Fellini’s dreamlike, autobiographical 8 ½, and Antonioni’s self-consciously pretentious mod murder fable, Blow-Up.

Most of our own allegedly daring commercial movies have adhered to traditional storytelling conventions (with a few recent exceptions in the loose, somewhat improvisational story of Easy Rider, and the almost nonstory of 2001: A Space Odyssey), but several new ones make definite departures from the norm in imaginative, unpretentious ways that hopefully mean an opening up of new possibilities for American moviemakers.

Alice’s Restaurant, based on the rambling song by Arlo Guthrie, comes fresh from a rich and thriving storytelling form that has gained great popularity in this country among the young, the “stories” set to music of a talented generation of singer-composer-lyricists that began with Bob Dylan and has been joined by Phil Ochs, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Guthrie himself, and perhaps most beautifully of all by Joni Mitchell, one of whose songs is sung in this movie. These songs are most often a kind of poem-story, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes wholly imaginative, often a mixture, funny and sad and personal. In many ways they provide for both the author-singer and the audience the sort of identification and relation of experience that was served for past generations by more conventionally unsung poetry and by short stories and novels. Joni Mitchell’s first album, for instance, is a series of songs about a young girl coming to New York, experiencing first love and disillusionment, and finally leaving, sadder and wiser. The songs have the youthful poignance and the fine observation of a gootl first novel, and in a sense the album is a first novel, except it is on a record instead of in a book, and the author herself sings the story.

Arlo Guthrie’s song of “The Alice’s Restaurant Massacree" is an anecdotal, humorous, artfully exaggerated account of some of his own adventures with his friends, a picaresque story set to music. There isn’t much of a formal plot, things just seem to happen. These friends of his, Alice Brock and her husband, Ray, open a restaurant in Stockbridge, Mass., and Arlo goes up to visit and says that’s something he always wanted—not owning a restaurant, but having a friend who owned a restaurant. More friends come up for a big Thanksgiving dinner and everyone has a good time eating all the good food and smoking all the good grass, and afterward Arlo and a buddy take out the garbage and dump it off the roadside out of town and get arrested for “littering” and are taken to jail. Alice bails them out, but when Arlo goes down to New York to take his Army physical, the “littering” charge on his record puts him into a group of undesirables who have committed a lot of weird crimes, and even though Arlo jumps up and down and tells the recruiting officer he wants to Kill, Kill, Kill, the Army decides he’s a weirdo and doesn’t draft him after all. Then he goes back up to see Alice and Ray, and things just keep happening, and that’s roughly what the song’s all about.

That’s what the movie’s all about, too, and director Arthur Penn had the good sense to try to make it in the anecdotal, rambling style of the song, and had the considerable ability to bring it off. There are more things added to the story told in the song, like Arlo visiting his dying father, Woody, in the hospital in New York, and he and Pete Seeger singing for him. Other people and trips and encounters are added, but everything happens casually and without any forcing for a standard plot.

The last quarter of the movie becomes terribly morose, with Woody dying and a young junkie friend of Alice and Ray’s getting killed, and a colorful but somehow strained and joyless “remarriage” ceremony Alice and Ray hold in their church-house, after which Arlo and most of their friends leave them for other travels and adventures. There is a last long shot of Alice standing at the church door, not looking very happy. I can’t tell whether this last part was added for “significance,” or perhaps because some things like that really happened and Arlo wanted them in the movie, or what. Though the ending makes the whole thing heavier, it doesn’t basically violate the spirit and style of the song or of most of the movie. Arlo is relaxed and charming and funny playing himself, and Pat Quinn is a tough and tender, sharp and impetuous, sadeyed, marvelous Alice. The movie is never dull, and moves along at its own informal, quirky, personal pace. It is as likable as Arlo himself.

When I first heard the general idea of Medium Cool— the mixing of “real” documentary footage of the Chicago riots, the Democratic convention, and other public events of 1968 into a fictional story of the life of a young TV cameraman—I feared that the actors and the story would seem like thinly veiled devices to make an excuse for using the documentary material in a feature movie. To my pleasant surprise, that obvious pitfall was artfully avoided, and the story of the young TV cameraman, played superbly by Robert Forster, is unusually convincing.

Through most of the movie (right up to a tacked-on ending), the only plot is the cameraman’s growing conflict about the uses of his work, its influence on the public, the corruption of the media, and his own responsibilities to his job, his beliefs, and the people whose lives he is influencing by his own life and work. But you are anxious to know what happens next, as deeply as in the most fast-paced thriller, because you have a sense that this is what a particular person’s real life and concerns are actually like.

At least part of the authenticity comes from perfectly realized interiors, like the bachelor-cameraman’s casual, comfortable pad with all the right posters and mementos and modern mix of furniture, its aura of a place where one man lives and brings home his casual women. The cameraman becomes accidentally involved with a young Vietnam War widow from the West Virginia hills and her young son. Her own plain, cramped apartment, where the kitchen is headquarters, is again just right. So is Verna Bloom, who plays the part of the widow with complete charm and naïveté, not glamorous but pretty, not intellectual but smart. There are unhurried, wonderful scenes of these people, talking, touching, eating, wondering.

The authenticity of the whole movie is of course enforced and deepened by the scenes of the actual demonstrations and clubbings of the crowd by the Chicago police, and the inside of the Democratic convention during the proceedings. Directorphotographer Haskell Wexler set his actors into these “live” scenes—at considerable physical risk to them and to him. The mixture of art and life that Wexler comes up with is eerie and powerful, and continually fascinating.

The “storytelling” lesson of both these entertaining movies seems to be that it isn’t necessary to follow the conventional mold of singleminded plot in order to hold an audience. I was further convinced of this by seeing another new movie done in the more conventional story style, which was much less interesting because of its insistence on following the traditional rules of plot. Ironically this was Justine, based on Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which was one of the more successful attempts to break some of the old storytelling molds, to forget the linear structure of this-happened and that-happened next, to move backward and forward in time, not just with conventional flashbacks, but with a continuous flow of past and present that probed deeply into the heads and hearts of the characters.

Certainly a movie couldn’t strictly follow the complex structure of the Quartet, but one might have been attempted with its complexities in mind, its method of turning in on itself and looking backward and forward in the lives of the characters, whose motives and behavior are the real story anyway. Hut (he movie Justine hacked out a simple, linear plot line from the four books, tossed most of the characters in, and set them shuttling obediently from beginning to middle to neatly wrapped end.

When they are just going about their daily lives, reacting to and off one another, the movie is most alive. It is worth seeing for Dirk Bogarde’s magnificent portrayal of the British diplomat Pursewarclen, Anouk Aimee’s sleek, cold sexuality as Justine, and Anna Karina’s touching performance as the muddled, good-hearted, often abused Melissa. But the major “plot” role is an embarrassment—the supposedly fiery but capable Coptic Christian Nam/, who becomes obsessed and mad with his plan to fight the Muslims before they strike at his own people. He seems in the movie not like the driven, dedicated man of the books, but a loud-talking nitwit. Weirdly enough, he is played by Robert Forster, who did such a beautiful job as the TV cameraman in Medium Cool. I would guess that the difference was that in the cameraman role he believed in the reality of the character he was playing, but delivering the lines of Naruz in Justine he must have known he was playacting, and blustered his way through it as best he could.

Some movies, anyway, are getting real-er than ever.