April 8-14, 2004

cover story

Rebel Yell

The stories behind three festival rule breakers.

by Sam Adams

From Hunter S. Thompson to the Dalai Lama, the films in the 2004 Philadelphia Film Festival pay tribute to people who followed the dictates of their conscience more closely than the law of the land. In a time where pressure to conform, to quietly obey, is at its height, we've profiled three artists -- a director, an actress and a film programmer -- who dared to pose impertinent questions and demand uncomfortable answers. Their achievements, and the costs of them, are well worth heeding.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Tobe Hooper:

Leatherface, C'est Moi

The people in Tobe Hooper's movies don't die, they get killed. It's the difference between an actor falling over sideways and a scene where you feel the knife strike bone, see the terror in the character's eyes. It's what differentiates The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from virtually every imitation that followed.

"I got started making documentaries, cinema verite," Hooper recalls from Los Angeles. "I got caught in a riot in Memphis on the first anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. I've been in a lot of situations where I've seen a kind of reality in segments, wedges of reality. It always bothered me in movies that when a character gets stuck with a knife, he's instantly dead."

If this sounds morbid, it's no more so than the fact that most people, consciously or unconsciously, confront the specter of their own death on a daily basis. Chainsaw merely strips the veneer away. The characters, five feckless young Americans making their way through a particularly empty stretch of the Lone Star State, don't do anything to earn their deaths, though they're not "likable" in any reductive Hollywood way. They don't crack wise, or come up with clever plans to triumph over evil. You run or you're dead. End of story.

Watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 30 years after its birth, it's not Leatherface, the chainsaw-wielding bogeyman, that's most terrifying, or even his clan of snaggletoothed ex-cattle slaughterers. It's the barren landscape, brilliantly captured by cinematographer Daniel Pearl (whose similar photography was the only worthwhile aspect of last year's slick, soulless remake). The vast empty spaces that once evoked the promise of the open frontier have become a moral wasteland, devoid of sense. With the hot breath of hell on her neck, Marilyn Burns runs ever so slowly for help, advancing on a house in the distance, lit up as if to welcome visitors. But though the lights are on, there's nobody home. In Texas, no one can hear you scream.

If Hooper won't exactly admit to identifying with Leatherface, it's worth noting that Hooper's most famous creation was inspired by his antisocial urge to escape from a hardware-store crowd -- although Hooper swears he only fantasized about using the noise of a chainsaw to send shoppers running. At the same time, the DVD's unedited outtakes reveal a startling similarity between the movies' victims and its crew; when a take ends, it's as if another character has stepped into the scene, one who just happens to be carrying a black-and-white slate board. Perhaps what makes the movie still so trenchant after so many years is that the audience, like the movie's creator, secretly identifies with both victim and killer. If there's no higher power, humanity's horrors can only be our own fault.

That and many more high-flown interpretations have been attached to Chainsaw since its opening. Few recall that the movie was not only a box-office hit, but a critical sensation, particularly in Europe, where it was included in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes. Hooper says that while the movie was never intended as an allegory, of the Watergate-era breakdown of authority or anything else, the atmosphere of the time definitely influenced the film. Austin, Texas, where Hooper and co-screenwriter Kim Henkel lived, was "kind of a focal point for political activity," and the two discussed politics often. "It was in the fabric of our mind at the time, and everything came up, through those filters," Hooper says.

At the same time, the movie's endless pursuits have an almost dreamlike quality, like the early silent films where a character runs off the screen and instantly reappears on the other side. Purely intentional, Hooper says. "In a way the plot kept folding back on itself," Hooper recalls. "Every light that could be safety was a nest of danger. That part of the plot fell into place in a matter of seconds, right after the Montgomery Ward chainsaw thought."

Hooper is obviously proud of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and seems more philosophical than bitter about the fact that its overwhelming success forever typecast its director. (Even Hooper's work on Poltergeist was widely, and unfairly, attributed to Steven Spielberg, whose filmography is not exactly replete with moments of genuine horror.) The new Toolbox Murders is something of an attempt to make peace with Hooper's gory reputation. Chainsaw "is my brand," Hooper allows. "I've had to get used to it. Toolbox is an after-embrace of that reality. I'll make what's expected and do it up proper, and make a hell of a scary movie."

Toolbox Murders screens Sat., April 10, 10:15 p.m. at the Prince Music Theater and Sun., April 11, 2 p.m. at the Bridge. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre screens Sun., April 11, 9:45 p.m. at the Ritz East. Hooper is scheduled to attend both Toolbox screenings; he will receive the PFF’s Phantasmagoria Award before the Saturday show.

Anna May Wong:

Maligned Pioneer

It could, appropriately enough, be a scene from a silent movie: American author, on vacation in a strange city, spies a photo in an antique-shop window and is instantly transfixed, touching off an instant obsession. Thankfully for Graham Russell Gao Hodges, life does not always imitate silent film. Instead of ending up ruined and destitute like Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, Hodges channeled his infatuation into a fascinating work of film history: Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend (Palgrave/Macmillan).

When he saw Wong's picture on London's Charing Cross Road, Hodges knew, by his own account, "almost nothing" about her -- perhaps a vague memory of Douglas Fairbanks' sword jammed into her back in The Thief of Baghdad, or the way she out-vamped Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, but no idea that Wong had been the first Chinese-American movie star, with a career spanning over 40 years and 50 films. "What I did sense," Hodges recalls, "was there was something very special about her. It really deeply intrigued me, and I wanted to find out more, and as I learned more, it just snowballed." As Hodges delved into research, snapping up Wong photos and memorabilia, he writes, "interest turned into fixation."

A similar fate befalls Valentine (Jameson Thomas), the Jazz Age club owner who falls under Wong's spell in Piccadilly (1929). The British silent brought Wong her greatest success, and its restoration last year by the British Film Institute has become part of a new wave of Wong-mania, including two other biographies, two documentaries scheduled for completion in 2005, the 100th anniversary of Wong's birth, and even a couture collection inspired by her distinctive style.

It was not always so. Even at the height of her fame, Wong was accused of embodying Orientalist caricatures on screen, even as she struggled to bring a measure of authenticity to her characters and regularly lost parts to white actors in "yellowface" -- most crushingly the role of O-lan in the 1937 adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, for which Austrian Luise Rainer won an Oscar. No less than Madame Chiang Kai-shek is reputed to have campaigned against Wong's getting such a prestigious role, feeling that Wong set a bad example for a generation of Chinese women who were meant to be discarding the past and modernizing China.

The second generation of her family born on American soil, Wong struggled to balance her independence with a respect for Chinese tradition. Her romantic relationships were invariably short-lived, usually with older white men, including director Tod Browning (Dracula), a pattern Hodges attributes less to sexual opportunism than to Wong's difficulty in finding Chinese-American men who would accept her devotion to her career. Wong and her father had their disputes, but she moved back home after her lead role in the Madame Butterfly pastiche The Toll of the Sea (1922) made her a star, meeting reporters in a bungalow behind the house. Years later, she made a voyage to China, where she met with a mixed and sometimes hostile reaction, greeted by headlines that claimed, "Anna May Wong loses face for China."

Wong made Piccadilly during a two-year sojourn in Europe, seeking respite from the overt racism of the American movie industry, where, to add insult to injury, she ended up teaching stars like Myrna Loy and Constance Talmdage how to use chopsticks properly, the better to play "Chinese." But if Piccadilly, shot in England by the German director E.A. Dupont, gave Wong one of her strongest roles -- not to mention the rare chance to play opposite other actors of Chinese descent -- the movie was, according to Hodges, something of a heartbreaker for her as well.

As Shosho, the scullery maid who becomes the new dancing sensation of London's Piccadilly nightclub, Wong is as forthright and demanding on screen as she was off. Valentine, the club's owner, storms into the kitchen after a belligerent customer (Charles Laughton in an early role) complains loudly about a dirty plate. He finds the dishwashers neglecting their duties -- understandably, since Shosho is in the midst of entertaining them with a playful, sultry dance. Shosho gets the sack, but after a private dance in Valentine's office, he's persuaded to displace his own sweetheart, Mabel (Gilda Gray) and give Shosho a shot at wowing the Piccadilly's audience. She quickly becomes the talk of the town, but her newfound success makes her arrogant, and her cruel disregard for those around her leads to a tragic end.

It wasn't her onscreen death that troubled Wong; as she once said with bitter humor, "pathetic dying seemed to be the best thing I did." What devastated Wong was the censors' removal of a kiss between Shosho and Valentine, on the grounds that interracial lip-locking was strictly taboo. (The new version restores more than 10 minutes of footage, but the kiss remains lost.) Even a tame handclasp between the two is undermined by the fact that the camera never shows the linked hands and the actors' faces in the same shot.

Still, the movie contains extraordinary moments that reinforce Hodges' conviction that, however caricatured her roles, Wong found ways to bring her personality and culture to the screen. She wore authentic Chinese costumes and hairstyles, and when the world heard her voice in Shanghai Express, she spoke real Chinese, not the "gibberish" Paul Leni babbled in The Good Earth. In Piccadilly, Shosho takes Valentine to London's Limehouse district to buy a Chinese costume for her act. Valentine asks to see her in the costume, but she refuses, forcing Jim (King Ho-chang) to try it on instead. Valentine balks at the price, but Shosho insists: She will only dance in this costume. That Jim, unbeknownst to Valentine, is Shosho's lover only increases the tension.

Hodges points out that Wong places her fingers over her face, "a Chinese man's mark of negotiation," and that the costume is that of a warrior, signifying that Shosho is the one truly in power in the scene. To Wong's critics, Shosho's forcing Jim to try on a woman's costume represents an emasculation of the Chinese man, but in fact the gesture has more to do with subverting Valentine's voyeuristic expectations. (After all, she procures Jim the job of her accompanist, though his new position also gives Jim a front-row seat to her seduction of Valentine.) Shosho's dance is, Hodges says, "a mixture of traditional Chinese and a mixture of Anna May's own ultra-modernism." As with her costume, Shosho controls her heritage; neither it, nor anything else, controls her.

Hodges' book subtly but insistently positions Wong as a pivotal figure in the development of a unique Chinese-American identity, neither discarding her culture nor being bound by it. Her constant flight from and return to the U.S. is a poignant metaphor for her existence, alternately seeking acceptance and defiantly rejecting it. If, as Hodges writes, her "descent into oblivion" was once "necessary to a people anxious to forget how American cinema denigrated their culture," her re-emergence might signify an attempt to come to terms with the country's unpleasant past. The book's reference to such legislative horrors as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is an indicator of how far American society has progressed; the fact that Wong still, a half-century after her death, "remains the premier Asian-American actress" is a blunt reminder of how little has changed.

Piccadilly screens Sat., April 17, 5:30 at the Prince Music Theater. Hodges will attend the screening.

Amos and Marcia Vogel

Amos Vogel:

Programming as a Subversive Art

A good programmer is as important as a great filmmaker: what good is a masterpiece no one can see? More importantly, programmers, whether those who program festivals or those who curate year-round, forge connections between films, and they encourage audiences to forge their own.

Few programmers have encouraged -- and confronted, and sometimes confounded -- their audience the way Amos Vogel has. The subject of Paul Cronin's loving documentary Film as a Subversive Art, Vogel fled Nazi Austria for Israel, intending New York as a pit stop on the way. But Vogel, an avowed socialist, became disillusioned with Zionism and elected to stay in Manhattan.

A voracious polymath, Vogel became aware of a wave of postwar cinema seeking to grapple with the world's new uncertainties, filmmakers who rejected narrative and simple cause and effect for a more personal, idiosyncratic method that defied category altogether. He also knew that New York, and the U.S. as a whole, lacked a regular venue where such films could be seen. So in 1947, Vogel, emulating the Vienna film societies of his youth, founded Cinema 16, devoted to "films you cannot see elsewhere." Vogel chose the 200-seat Provincetown Playhouse for his venue, inspired by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's successful screenings of their own experimental work. Their films became early staples of Cinema 16's programming.

"We were sold out instantly for two performances," the now 84-year-old Vogel recalls from Manhattan, where he still lives. "That encouraged me a great deal."

Less encouraging was the response of the city film censors, who promptly tried to shut Vogel down. At the time, public screenings required the censor's seal of approval, which Vogel points out was a relatively easy matter for Hollywood films to obtain. Cinema 16's movies, however, were a different matter: Not only was Vogel often screening the only print in the U.S., which was not always available before the screening, but the censorship office required a transcript of the film's soundtrack as well as a copy of the film. Vogel did his best to comply, even when the film in question was a children's short from Bulgaria. The stenotypist dutifully noted the dialogue, which Vogel recalls as something on the order of "ba ba, ga ga, poo poo."

Not all of Cinema 16's fare would have made it past the censors; one wonders how they would have reacted to Georges Franju's slaughterhouse documentary Le sang des bêtes. Luckily, Vogel discovered that he could circumvent censorship regulations by making Cinema 16 a membership society. No less a luminary than Robert Flaherty signed on as the head of "a board yet to be named"; with the director of Nanook of the North's name on the letterhead, "a very excellent list of intellectuals" signed on as sponsors.

Many of the films Vogel programmed have become part of the film studies canon -- a canon that, as Scott MacDonald points out in his authoritative book Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Temple University Press), exists in part as a reflection of Cinema 16's regular programming. But just as important as the films Cinema 16 showed was the way Vogel showed them. Rather than programming avant-garde films with avant-garde films, documentaries with documentaries and so on, Vogel mixed it up: some Stan Brakhage here, a film about ants in equatorial South America there. Not surprisingly, the approach infuriated some viewers. Fans of Cinema 16's political films dismissed the experimental filmmakers as "frauds," while avant-gardists were bored to tears by science documentaries. Too bad for them. As Vogel says in the film, his attitude was, "You don't like it? We'll show it again." Vogel's wife, Marcia, was Cinema 16's membership secretary; from her perch outside the auditorium door, she made a perfect target for disgruntled audience members as they stormed out midprogram.

It wasn't just Vogel's contrarian streak that dictated Cinema 16's eclectic programming; Vogel was inspired by the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, whose montage theory pitted opposing images against each other, a collision that produced a "third thing" in the manner of Marx's dialectic. What "third thing" did Cinema 16 seek to produce? Vogel answers simply, and without hesitation: "Film culture."

Cinema 16 closed its doors in 1963, a victim, in some sense, of its own success. Having long since outgrown its Provincetown Playhouse digs, Cinema 16's audience was filling an auditorium of 1,600 seats, which inevitably meant rising costs as well as rising admissions. In the end, Vogel chose to shut Cinema 16 down rather than raise membership fees to what he considered unacceptable levels. The story doesn't end there, though. Vogel went on to be the founding director of the New York Film Festival, and the films Cinema 16 showed influenced a generation of filmgoers and filmmakers -- and not just in New York, as Cinema 16 eventually branched out into distribution. In the 1970s and '80s, Vogel headed the film department at the Annenberg Center, a period he remembers with complete happiness.

Few programmers have emulated Cinema 16's breadth, but Vogel's philosophy is enshrined in Film as a Subversive Art, both Cronin's film and Vogel's book of the same name, published in 1974. The book, which is long out of print and fetches hefty prices online, reveals the philosophy underlying Vogel's programming. Fusing film study with science, philosophy and social criticism, it's a film buff's dream read, lavishly illustrated and full of enticing, evocative descriptions of films -- some of which have, unfortunately, become as hard to find as the book itself. Throughout, Vogel focuses on film's potential to undermine the staid certainties of 19th-century art, and calls filmmaking "potentially the most important art of the [20th] century," uniquely suited to adapting the fragmented, uncertain nature of modern human existence.

Thirty years later, Vogel is less sanguine about the evolution of film culture -- not surprisingly, as even art house cinemas rarely provide the contemplative atmosphere that Vogel evokes in his book. But he remains firm in his conviction that film can change the way people think, if not optimistic that either such films or such audiences exist. "It could be that a film changes one building block of an entire wall, which makes up what the person thinks. You don't realize to what extent you can be effected by a film."

Film as a Subversive Art screens Sun., April 11, 4 p.m. at International House and Mon., April 12, 9:30 at the Prince Music Theater. Amos Vogel, Marcia Vogel and Paul Cronin are scheduled to attend both screenings, each of which will be followed by a different program of Cinema 16 shorts.