Issue 8: Winter 2011
Sidney Lumet: Experimental Filmmaker?
Fergus Daly
It is in the preparation. Do mountains of preparation kill spontaneity? Absolutely not. I've found that it's just the opposite. When you know what you're doing, you feel much freer to improvise.
-Sidney Lumet
2011, what a heartbreaking year for cinephiles; we've lost John Barry, Maria Schneider, Susannah York, Jane Russell, Elizabeth Taylor, Farley Granger, Jorge Semprún, Peter Falk, Cliff Robertson and Maurice Garrel. You'd think it couldn't get any worse. But this year we also lost two of the world's greatest filmmakers: Raul Ruiz and Sidney Lumet.
The Deadly Affair
The Appointment
When Lumet died and tributes started to flood in from luminaries such as Scorsese, Allen and Pacino, it was easy to forget the disdain with which Lumet was often met with throughout his career, most notably the appalling attacks on him by the likes of celebrity reviewer Pauline Kael, an unaccountably influential figure in American film criticism who assassinated Lumet time and again, personally and professionally, accusing him of incompetence and of being bereft of ideas (she reported from the set of The Group [1966]). Her attacks were written with the kind of shocking mixture of bitterness and incomprehension that usually points to defensiveness and a frustrating inability to account for novelty. Nonetheless, her campaign did serious harm to the filmmaker's reputation.
In his very welcome Lumet obituary, David Bordwell has written insightfully about the Kael/Lumet case and notes both the paradoxes inherent in her attacks and the lack of research supporting her approach, for example, her "appeal to Renoir as the prototype of the spontaneous film creator. Ironically, for at least some projects we have evidence that Renoir rehearsed his actors quite a bit and retook scenes until he was satisfied. Double irony: Somewhat before Kael was celebrating the careless grace of Renoirian spontaneity, he had in Testament of Dr. Cordelier (1959) turned to a multicamera technique for his own television project. Renoir and Lumet intersect in unexpected ways!" In the final analysis, Kael's type of neurotic and unconsidered attack may be entertaining for celebrity culture devotees but in the end it has nothing to do with the cinema.
The Pawnbroker
Prince of the City
Lumet, an experimental filmmaker? Yes, in the sense in which experimentation is understood in the long tradition of American Pragmatist philosophy.
Throughout the 60s and into the 70s Lumet developed a very subtle analysis of the political life of the individual, in the broadest sense of the individual's ability to inhabit a community. Whilst seeming merely to parallel and broadly chime with the humanist left values driving the Counterculture (civil rights, the anti-war movement etc.), he seems to me to have gone well beyond these movements in terms of the subtlety and philosophical sophistication of his analysis of the ways society functions.
This had to do with the filmmaker's unwillingness to accept the simple repression/liberation, truth/ideology dualisms that drove both the Counterculture movement and the much lauded political cinemas coming from the Eastern block. Critics often interpret Lumet as feeding off these in depicting the all-powerful, all-deceiving State with its corrupt police force and cities under siege from widespread surveillance. Looking again at the films you often find very subtle explorations of how power and desire are not in opposition to one another but wrapped up together, inseparable: Lumet's vision seems like a kind of microphysics of power or micro-politics of desire avant la lettre. Lumet was a pragmatist who never sold his soul to any particular political ideology just as through the course of his career he continued to experiment with different cinematic styles, exploring all the possibilities the commercial cinema could offer him (as well as importing Modernist techniques that had developed in Europe).
Two stills from The Appoinment
The accusations against him of opportunism, eclecticism and a taste for hybrid styles were in fact precisely his values and a testament to his pragmatist philosophy of filmmaking. Pragmatism has long been the great American philosophy, figures like Dewey, Peirce and William James arguing that the experimentalist imagination should take the place of all philosophical givens and a priori certainties, and that thinkers should focus on the problems facing them on a daily basis, here, now, on things in the making. They favoured chance associations and arrangements in the process of construction over fixed programs and the belief in permanent functions and set goals. Lumet's astonishing New York films are in line with the New Pragmatism that has developed in architectural theory in the USA since the 60s, his films too "don't start from an ideal [humanist or otherwise] vision of the city as a constant territory with permanent functions and a predictable progressive act, but diagnose the city, taking as its starting point in the actual conditions of the city...revealing new possibilities latent in a given field simply by framing the issues differently" (The Landscape Urbanism Appendix). Their characters' alliances and filiations are usually based on desperation or misguided loyalty (even families aren't safe havens, "the right to do irreparable harm is a blood right" says a character in Daniel [1983]). Rather than the naive Humanist he is so often portrayed as, Lumet's films belie a belief in the human being and in human values as constantly changing, open to forces beyond human society. There is no Common Humanity and, in these terms, what we have in common wouldn't be a fixed essence but, on the contrary, an openness to novelty, to change and to new filliations wherever we find ourselves in space and time. Our Humanity is a process, always in the making. Lumet's belief in process is most obvious in his police procedural films, but the interest of the non-police films is also often related to this problem of an open future the conditions of which have to be discovered.
Lumet's pioneering attitude led to his admirable aversion to Hollywood and his taking to the streets of New York. Many of his films were self produced, only one (The Morning After [1986]) shot in Hollywood. Several favourable critics place him with Cassavetes and others in what the French like to call The New York School. Deleuze was very fond of Lumet, the filmmaker features even more in the philosopher's lectures than in his two books on Cinema. Deleuze loved Lumet's idea of New York as a challenge to the Company-City that Hollywood had become and quoted the director's belief that "cinema can only be made in a city not made for the cinema." Deleuze was particularly passionate about Bye Bye Braverman (1968) even though he'd never seen it; he was intrigued by accounts he'd read of it in the French film magazines.
Two stills from Bye Bye Braverman
Deleuze famously isolated in Lumet's work the concept of the Any-Space-Whatever, the unspecified spaces of a fragmented city now unified only by surveillance technologies and media clichés.
Prince of the City
Night Falls On Manhattan
But (as we can see below) Lumet also has a penchant for specifying locations, to the point of often including street signs clearly visible in the image.
Q & A
A Stranger Among Us
One is struck time and time again by Lumet's judiciousness. This stems from his love for his characters, his primary concern is always to keep the camera the requisite distance from the characters, to the point of rendering them unidentifiable and bewildering the spectator, rather than expose them to the kind of immoral violence that the eradication of that distance can involve.
Prince of the City
Daniel
The Seagull
Serge Daney's searing question vis-a-vis the infamous 'tracking shot of Kapo' (in which Pontecorvo shamefully re-framed a shot of a woman dying on the wire fence of a concentration camp so that the audience could see better and feel more) could apply to Lumet: "What was the meaning of Godard's formula, ‘The tracking shot is a moral affair,' if not that one should never put oneself where one isn't?" Perhaps Lumet felt he'd succumbed to the temptation to ‘go close' early on, for example in The Pawnbroker (1964) which then may have been the catalyst for a lifetime of sensitivity to the problem. As Bordwell notes: "In Daniel, he lets the angry young man whose sister has wasted away into madness confront the poster agitating for their dead parents. No tracking in, no circumnambulating camera, no heightened cuts or nudging score. And no need to see Daniel's face. Susan merely lifts her head."
This concern for distance is often interpreted as an inability to shake off his theatrical origins whereas in fact he's pushing the bounds of cinema with a ‘theatre effect' which can't be found in any existing theatre but is a result of an experimentation, re-employing theatrical possibilities in a different medium.
It was gratifying to read Scorsese's obituary and its praise for Lumet's Williams, Miller, Chekhov and O'Neill adaptations, The entire half dozen films are superb but the standout has to be The Iceman Cometh. It seems to me that his version of O'Neill's play broadcast on American television in 1960 is pivotal in Lumet's career. It's an extraordinary version of one of the truly great plays in the repertoire: as great a theatrical example of degradation à l'américaine as Fitzgerald's story The Crack-Up is a prose account. In this three-and-a-half-hour-long forensic dissection of the life-stories and lost dreams of a group of alcoholics who frequent Harry Hope's misbegotten Saloon House in Greenwich Village, there are characters, themes and lines of dialogue that will return time and again in transmuted form in all of Lumet's later films. "Men don't want to be saved from themselves because they'd have to give up greed"; "If I don't believe in the Movement, I don't believe in anything else either"; "They [the other drunks] manage to get drunk, by hook or crook, and keep their pipe dreams, and that's all they ask of life. I've never known more contented men. It isn't often that men attain the true goal of their heart's desire"; "You can't hide from yourself, not even here at the bottom of the sea". One automatically thinks of Nazerman in The Pawnbroker who 'believes in nothing, only money'. But so many of Lumet's characters will develop out of the dark souls inhabiting O'Neill's universe.
The Iceman Cometh
Particularly notable for Lumet's future career are the following words of the disillusioned anarchist Larry (beautifully played by Myron McCormick): "I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you're damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer." The greatness of Lumet's films is to privilege questions over answers, and avoiding the ignominy of passing Judgment on his characters becomes a lifelong creative passion. Larry's words in The Iceman "who am I to judge? I'm done with judging" sum up Lumet's philosophy. In later years a variation on the theme becomes progressively more important for Lumet: the desire to be judged that seems to drive certain characters (Ciello in Prince of the City (1981), Don Johnson in Guilty as Sin (1993),Vin Diesel in Find Me Guilty [2006]).
More broadly, the way this feeds into the worlds of his films is in the theme of the inseparability of power and desire: desiring our own degradation or condemnation, relinquishing any possibility of redemption (as Iceman put it), betraying our family or partners, are symptomatic of the desire-power tandem.
"Power should not be understood as an oppressive system bearing down on individuals from above, smiting them with prohibitions of this or that. Power is a set of relations...It's clear that power should not be defined as a constraining act of violence that represses individuals, forcing them to do something or preventing them from doing some other thing. But it takes place when there is a relation between two free subjects, and this relation is unbalanced, so that one can act upon the other, and the other is acted upon, or allows himself to be acted upon. Therefore, power is not always repressive. It can take a certain number of forms. And it is possible to have relations of power that are open." (Michel Foucault)
Because of this openness, power relations are reversible, constantly modifying and open to change, the one who is now the victim in the next breath becomes the torturer. Who can tell the cops from the criminals in a Lumet film (contrast this with another great New York film that may have given new impetus to Lumet's 70s work in the city, Schatzberg's Panic in Needle Park which retains a clear divide between the marginals and the Law)?
The Pawnbroker
Stage Struck
That Kind of Woman
Don Johnson in Guilty as Sin, Faye Dunaway in Network (1976) and Richard Gere in Power (1986) are exemplary in this respect, the ones who manipulate everyone around them like pawns on a chessboard: "all my life I've been getting women to do what I want them to do" says Johnson. As far back as That Kind of Woman (1959) roles were being reversed: "The man takes care of you?" asks Tab Hunter, "I take care of him" replies Sophia Loren. To view a film like Prince of the City with Foucault's vision of social relationships in mind is exhilarating. The dominant tone is one of ambivalence in every area; there is no hint of authorial judgment on Lumet's part and this is echoed formally in the 'lens plot' of the film. Visually, Lumet restricted himself to a mix of wide angle and very long lenses in order to avoid the standardized Hollywood camera distance, the one that intrinsically judges on the spectator's behalf.
As Deleuze said: we are made up of 3 types of lines, lines of rigid segmentarity (family/school/profession), lines of a more supple segmentarity (the molecular displacements that take place on these rigid lines) and lines of flight (the lines of escape, of velocity and of the steepest slope that can succeed in becoming detached from the other two). Pragmatism is the study of these lines as they are entangled in individuals or groups. Sidney Lumet belongs to a whole line of thinkers in the pragmatic tradition and of great American artists tracing lines of flight from the rigidities of domesticity, profession, the American Dream ie the pressures of trying to succeed, the guilt that follows when dues aren't adequately paid, and the eventual plunge into degradation. Following the model of Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up Lumet's are characters who realize their efforts to attain the American Dream can't succeed - having worked too hard and now exhausted, they crack, America has demanded too much of them. "Then they say: leave me in peace with a little whiskey..." (Deleuze) or they try to rise up one last time: Magnani's "I won't be defeated again" in The Fugitive Kind (1960) could also be said by Sharon Stone's Gloria (1999). Lumet is the great filmmaker of the micro-cracks that take place on the segmented lines of family, profession, and inside the individual. Change comes suddenly in Lumet's films until the character asks: What Happened? What happened? screams alcoholic Jane Fonda, referring not only to the dead body in the bed next to her, in The Morning After; or take the magnificent first line of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) "I wonder how that happened...what was that?" Philip Seymour Hoffman asks after sex with wife Marisa Tomei, or take the abstruse flash-back image in Equus (1977) that has something to do with the genesis of Peter Firth's psychosis - what happened? In Lumet the forces producing reality are beyond our perception, outside human control.
Equus
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
This also affects the filmmakers vision of History: there's the persecuted pair the Isaacsons in Daniel and the Pope/Manfield's in Running on Empty [1988] (a family on the run who echo the ex-Anarchists in The Iceman), are they criminals or not?: "nobody knows what happened...even the government" is the conclusion. In The Anderson Tapes (1971) the eponymous character played by Sean Connery finds out too late that everything's changed while he's been in prison.
Individual interiority is inviolable, remains forever impenetrable ("I know what's in his mind" threatens Raf Vallone in A View from the Bridge (1962) but later discovers that the real darkness may lie in his own body.) Again judgment is the issue: "burn me, make me barren but never pity me, never tell me you understand my feelings" is Simone Signoret's great speech in The Deadly Affair (1966). "I do not know and nor does anybody else" is the conclusion offered by Richard Burton, the psychiatrist, at the end of Equus.
The Deadly Affair
Fail Safe
Lumet is interested in the problem of authenticity in contemporary life and those who feel they must play a role. One thinks of the character played by Irish actor Brian F O'Byrne 'getting into character' before the robbery in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead or in The Fugitive Kind, Magnani admonishing Brando "why do you move that way? Everything you do is fake!"
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Guilty As Sin
"You want me to write you an exit speech" says Christopher Plummer to Susan Strasberg in Stage Struck (1958). Likewise there's Jack Warden ‘playing the soldier' in That Kind of Woman and in Guilty as Sin Rebecca De Mornay's words to Don Johnson "you wrote this entire scenario and played out the parts". One also thinks of Deathtrap [1982]) or in The Deadly Affair Signoret's berating of James Mason and his colleagues: "Go kill someone, keep the game alive, in a battlefield for your toy soldiers." This question of inauthenticity feeds into the issue of celebrity, most notably in Network but already present in The Seagull (1968), where the mediocre but celebrated novelist James Mason prompts the destruction of the truly creative characters. One also recalls these powerful words of Sonny (Pacino) in Dog Day Afternoon (1975): "if someone kills me I hope its because they hate me and not because it's their job."
It's like Lumet's entire career was an attempt to give birth to an aesthetic or ethico-aesthetic that by its very nature could never have filmed a Kapo-type shot. Time and again, when a lesser filmmaker would've traveled, dollied or zoomed in to re-frame an emotional moment on the audience's behalf Lumet keeps his distance. Recall the crucial dinner scene in A View from the Bridge where Raf Vallone's back is to camera, his face not visible, almost a silhouette. In short, it's a question of limits and thresholds, most notably for cops testing the limits of the Law or lawyers the Judiciary: In Q & A (1990) Brennan (Nick Nolte) rants "There was a line criminals had to cross---I AM THAT LINE!"
There's also the borderline between individuals, between institutions (a theme of his complex and magnificent cold war film The Deadly Affair), between individuals and institutions (which gave rise to the singular beauty of The Verdict [1982]), the old world that is dying and the new that is being born (which often attracts him to narrative structures that interweave past and present and to re-visit previously trodden territory - for example the stolen shots of the Jewish quarter captured from the car in Bye Bye Braverman return in A Stranger Among Us [1992]).
Bye Bye Braverman
A Stranger Among Us
Lumet probes those Events that bring about change but seem unprecedented ("Why those particular moments of experience and no other?" worries the psychiatrist in Equus). Again Prince of the City is the limit-case: Ciello unaccountably turns against his beloved partners (early in Lumet's output we had the similar but less-complex case of the Robert Redford character in The Iceman Cometh). Lumet gives birth to a new character, one for whom, as Deleuze says, the events that befall him no longer belong to him, the character is only half concerned by what he's doing, something else is pressing on him, something that's never articulated - we can see the progression from The Pawnbroker, whose indifference was clearly justified by his personal history, to the later films (although Brando's character in The Fugitive Kind had already set a precedent) where the motivation is often nebulous or inexplicable (Dyan Cannon in The Anderson Tapes, Matthew Broderick in Family Business [1989], Timothy Hutton in Daniel, those who belong 'no place'). This is a character for whom classical Method acting no longer suffices (Jack Warden, Paul Newman, Pacino could never have played him). Instead, Lumet uses Treat Williams, who brings to cinema a different acting style, a new type of body, new gestures. Lumet had always been drawn to actors with peculiar gaits and awkward postures, from Henry Fonda to Anthony Perkins (especially in the wonderful Lovin' Molly), from David Warner to Lynn Redgrave (Last of the Mobile Hot Shots [1970]). Even Pacino!
Henry Fonda in Stage Struck
David Warner in The Seagull
Anthony Perkins and Blythe Danner in Lovin' Molly
Lumet waged a battle against thinking in terms of 'types' or 'kinds' (thinking which involves an a priori social, often racist, judgment): examples include the incredible scene in Fail-Safe (1964) when Walter Matthau hits the woman who would seduce him sneering at her "I'm not your kind" or in The Fugitive Kind the fugitive ‘kind' are precisely the ones condemned to always feeling they are in a place apart, just like Serpico (1973) will or even Fonda is in Twelve Angry Men (1957). Tab Hunter tells Sophia Loren in That Kind of Woman "I don't care what kind you are."
Lovin' Molly's line "Everyone's some kind of crazy" is like Lumet's definitive answer to judgments of ‘kind'. His celebration of difference is part of his concern with ethnicity and throughout his career he took the decision to set films in Black, Irish, Hispanic, Jewish and Italian milieux.
Lumet often toys with the ultimate cinematic threshold, the threshold of disappearance, the auteur letting go of his creatures only to reel them back in at the last moment. Sometimes the leading characters are so far from the screen as to be barely visible (think of the end of Long Days Journey into Night [1962]) or Newman's summing-up speech late in The Verdict - as if Lumet is saying ‘you're on your own now!'). The limit-case examples of this phenomenon are the incredible single shot in The Appointment (1969) which begins in a close-up of Omar Sharif and Anouk Aimée making love in the grass somewhere on an island, and ends with the entire island in the frame, the couple have disappeared.
And in Bye Bye Braverman, the magnificent journey through Brooklyn of the Red VW Beetle (echoing Lamorisse's Le Ballon Rouge [1956]), the helicopter camera often losing sight of the car and visibly having difficulty in locating it.
The Red Beetle in Bye Bye Braverman
For the same reasons, Lumet loves to put film stars out on the busy streets and lose them there, for example Dustin Hoffman outside Doheny's Bar in Family Business and Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Diamond District of Manhattan in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. He also plays with this idea by sending his Garbo stand-in to wander around the busy 6th Avenue market in Garbo Talks (1984).
Jane Fonda in The Morning After
Garbo Talks
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Dustin Hoffman in Family Business
The struggle between old and new also crops up (in reflexive form) in his version of Chekhov's The Seagull as a debate about the respective virtues of classical and experimental approaches to creativity. In many ways it's Lumet's most autobiographical piece but, again, he doesn't need to judge or to choose. His cinema is both classical and experimental.
Fergus Daly is the director of Experimental Conversations (2006).