53. Immersion: Film Noir and Ballet Video, reviewed by Master Raro
“Time and tide wait for no man” is a truism perfectly descriptive of my challenge at Ebersdorf Tower under the pandemic. Just when I think I have caught up on my set duties, new labors appear to complicate life in unforeseen ways. I’ve been making sure my employer’s prize cat, Murr, is nourished and pampered in Pippa’s apartment. I’ve regularly checked security on the residential floors of Louise and her guests. I’ve rehearsed the Nekomata pas de deux and my Oestrus solo with Cheryl and Sandy over Zoom. And now Louise wants the 33rd Floor playrooms (my own recent discovery) to be converted into a theater for in-house ballet performances. All this work is waiting for me every day for the foreseeable future. I am now busy carting all the mounted deer trophies from Floor 33 to the basement for disposal. I have to box Mr. Ebersdorf’s residual “high fidelity” LP collection. And I must order a stage floor to cover the abandoned swimming pool. Plus, lighting equipment must be ordered and chairs installed six feet apart as a safety precaution. We’ll have to have a Fire Department inspection. That’s for starters.
But at least I’ve made Albertine and Paco happy because they can reclaim their 35th Floor Cat Lab and dance studio for dedicated use. Albertine can now have rehearsals of her animal acts all day as well as night. And Sandy and Cheryl will be able to use our new indoor theater for classes and rehearsals as well as performances. With luck, all my work will pay off, eventually.
I’ve also been watching movies with Pippa, of course, since she regards me as a household expert, especially on foreign films, which I’ve always followed as a reminder that there is a great big world out there so different from here and now, and more than ever under current lockdowns.
Film noir smuggled foreign film aesthetics into Hollywood long before Rashomon or Open City. Americans learned to watch movies (film noir and horror films) to see cinema stylistics stretched in new directions. Baroque movies (like Citizen Kane) may have been a means of cinematic education for many moviegoers. Film noir especially made use of ostentatious cinematographic values, especially in imitation of German Expressionism’s shadows and fogs. Noir may have been many a cinéaste’s gateway into enlightened considerations of film form, even more than obvious classics, like Battleship Potemkin and Menilmontant.
There may have been an ethics lesson in the genre as well. After all, its depictions of the breakdown of trust between men and women, civilians and soldiers, political leaders and populace could all be allegorized in the crime stories of noir movies. This latter element (the drama of societal adhesives and solvents) was particularly featured in the Hollywood movies of the great Austrian-German master Fritz Lang. A number of the European directors who arrived in the States escaping oppression were experts in a particular area of filmmaking: movie ensemble, in the sense of the spectacle of social groups and the relation of individuals to the community they make up. For example, the Austrian-Hungarian Otto Preminger had a genius for putting his camera in the perfect vantage to observe group activity. You can see this skill in his roving lens in the Catfish Row of his Porgy and Bess and in the louche milieu of Bunny Lake Is Missing. Another extraordinary ensemble director was the Russian-born Rouben Mamoulian. His boxing scenes in Golden Boy are Argus-eyed; they reveal the sport as raw, aestheticized showmanship. Look also at that film’s homecoming scene, which includes a living room chase and a violin concert – a complicated example of ensemble achieved through the controlled movement of the actors and the exact panning of the camera. And for a non-Baroque version of noir, you must see Hungarian André de Toth’s Pitfall, where one man’s descent into adultery and murder is described through the director’s calm, taut lines drawn between characters on precisely defined social levels. Moral collapse is revealed as all too naturally seductive and logical.
On the Internet you can catch (without charge), German-born Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949). Here is immersive film noir that makes us examine details within the photographed image with full attention. The eye must navigate from one visual stroke to another, and then another and another, often within one held static shot, so inclusive and coordinated is Siodmak’s ensemble. The achievement reminds me of a passage in a recent essay by T. J. Clark on the painterly technique of Pissarro: “The human sensorium is plastic: it is changed by use – changed for the better. And what is true of the senses may be true of the instincts, and of our established patterns of knowing and being. We can but hope.”
The first twenty minutes of The Killers is a particularly faithful version of the classic short story “The Killers” by Ernest Hemingway. It deals with all the film noir themes: distrust, threats of violence, physical helplessness, and a grueling ambiguity of motive. Once the movie’s action arrives at the counter of a small-town diner, where two urban killers are awaiting the arrival of The Swede in order to carry out a gangland execution, we are allowed to watch the interaction of the two hoods upon a lone waiter behind the counter, the diner’s cook, and Hemingway’s observant youngster, Nick Adams. When the latter asks “What’s the idea?” one of the hoods replies, “There isn’t any idea.” (Harold Pinter was listening.)
But in place of immediate rationale, there are images. Long before the advent of the wide screen, Siodmak and his cinematographer Elwood Bredell forced our eyes to move from one pinpoint site within the frame to another, from ambiguity to “explanation”, from gothic absence to moral trapdoor. At one moment, the barrel of a revolver hangs isolated between the closed window panels of the kitchen’s delivery port. That small, surreal detail is hard to forget. You cannot help becoming immersed while decoding the situation amid the shifting points of view of a fluid mise-en-scène. And all the while, the film’s camera sits and watches, allowing us to scan the screen for further data. Until the youngster and the cook are taken into the kitchen to be tied up and gagged, you could think the p.o.v. is principally Nick’s, but, no, Siodmak has found a way to shift it from hood to hood, to waiter, to Nick, and to the cook. We are all in this together, utterly individual witnesses and part of the dread ensemble. In the postmodern sense, group identity is fluid.
What I am describing is one way a film can evoke intense paranoia, even to the point of slow-motion hysteria. The Hemingway irony is that The Swede will eventually be found to be beyond any emotion. He welcomes his killers. In the movie, dread takes the form not only of the viewer’s search for clues as to what is going on but also the accumulated evidence from a subsequent investigation of the Swede’s execution throughout the remainder of the film. The Swede will be searched for not only by the two killers but through the memories of the various testifying witnesses of his life. The prizefighter protagonist (played by Burt Lancaster) has allowed himself to become a victim in various careers, not the least of which is his encounter with a gorgeous femme fatale (played by Ava Gardner). Siodmak signals his directorial awareness of individual pathos by including a brief visual reference to a sculpture of Ganymede about to be spirited away by vast wings. And the Swede’s prison cellmate refers to the planet Jupiter. The Hemingway anecdote is given mythic ramifications. The script was credited to Anthony Veiller, but it was also worked on by John Huston and Richard Brooks.
Siodmak’s Criss Cross is much less synthetic in its development than The Killing. There is a dance hall sequence at the beginning that suggests Yvonne de Carlo is in competition with Rita Hayworth for the Hollywood Seduction Sweepstakes, and de Carlo makes the ethnic background of her character a convincing explanation for her flip into femme-fatale betrayal at the narrative’s climax. (Her chump is, once more, Burt Lancaster.) Siodmak provides a dramatic smoke-bomb effect to cover an armored car robbery. It reminded me of Antonioni’s use of thick fog in Identification of a Woman. Once again, the director asks us to wonder at what we see and what it foretells. Siodmak’s artistic influence continues into our new century. The current German director Christian Petzold has acknowledged a deep indebtedness.
What would be the balletic equivalent of the justly famous diner scene in The Killers? In other words, what signs of true ensemble can we encounter in today’s new works that feature a corps de ballet? When we think of classical dance, we think of Petipa’s arrangement of his dancers in rank and file and their continuous dance passages which allow a display of unison movement, as well as the opportunity to inspect individual dancers within the large group. The eye can scan the ensemble and pick up on those performers who produce a unique spark while maintaining the company’s, and the individual ballet’s, style. Petipa is thereby the Siodmak of ballet, sans noir paranoia. This would mean the movements of the dancers must be composed of phrases long enough to allow us time to scan the spectacle and to pick out individuals. It means that the dancers may sometimes remain en place as they show off their footwork. And it means that what they are performing must have dance content that is rhythmically precise and yet allows room for the most fugitive personal accent to declare itself from within the unison. Every dancer in the corps is thus honored. Not every choreographer has a talent for ensemble composition that permits such paradoxical effects of the submerged and the released. And the wit to allow the viewer to sense their presence. When a veteran audience is denied such a powerful source of pleasure, especially in its newest forms, the true ballet lover may look elsewhere.
As a test case, I watched excerpts of recent ballets of “21st Century Voices” presented by the New York City Ballet Digital Season on the Internet. The three choreographers represented were Justin Peck, Alexi Ratmansky, and Christopher Wheeldon. I was interested to observe whether any of the signs of classical ensemble survive into the present century. Do such things as traditional style, phrasing, legibility, and dance detail remain available to new audiences for the art?
What I generally found missing from the works on the program was any sign of a classical dance impulse. (Sometimes the dance seemed as diffuse as that in a new work by Mark Morris.) During a lengthy pas de deux from Wheeldon’s Mercurial Manoeuvers (weak title), it became obvious that we were watching a dance about a relationship just this side of the pugilistic. Such defensive resistance in dance partnering we usually find portrayed in modern dance rather than at the ballet. Ultimately, you imagined Wheeldon aiming toward the aesthetic of a choreographer-led modern dance company rather than opera-house spectacle.
Everyone has noticed that the upper reaches of the David Koch theater are now thinly sold -- when they are opened for ticket sales at all. Perhaps one of the reasons is that no current house choreographer is capable of making ballets that communicate a classical impulse through ballet ensemble to the children of paradise. It is as though this basic talent has been lost. Instead, we get video-game patterning in group design, corny emotionalizing, and those relational tensions in male-female partnering. Notice how often Justin Peck’s dancers must huddle with, confront, and comfort one another. (There is enough of this sort of thing in Jerome Robbins’ ballets. No more is needed in the NYCB rep.) And Alexi Ratmansky’s modern works regularly address political and communal issues from what feels like a hastily improvised Soviet-era soapbox. These approaches are not at all what draws an audience to the ballet stage today. Their equivalents are found on television and Internet news reports every night without charge. Christopher Wheeldon’s idea of “modern” suggests a failure of fresh imagination or a weak grasp of issues involving historical Modern Art. His movement inventions have become sight-bites. Perhaps Wheeldon and Peck should make Broadway their home base in the future. Ratmansky, alas, is sponsored for the time being at American Ballet Theatre.
The niche area of the NYCB repertory that is now occupied by the works of founder George Balanchine continues to offer a variety of dance impulse to the company’s dancers, and Mr. B’s compositional abilities for the corps de ballet allow such motive to reach the Fourth Ring. But large areas of the company’s extensive post-Peter Martins repertory deliver a weak signal upstairs or none at all. There is at least one precedent for this situation. I am thinking of the way André Levinson distinguished between modern ballet and the art’s Petipa tradition. He saw the encroaching influence of mimetic elements in new works as diluting established dance values in the early twentieth-century. I note the relevance of the following quote from one of his 1923 essays (tr. John Goodman): “Saltatory movement excludes all expressive impulse; if it allows psychological emotion to prevail, it is inevitably deformed, its line deviates, its rhythm splinters, it sinks into the material.”
I’m afraid there is an over-reliance on naked deformation, coarse deviation, thoughtless fragmentation, and failed stylistic assimilation on the stage of Koch Theater in 2020. The house choreographic tradition, established by Balanchine and classically based, is largely ignored in new work. The chance for any new company statement with a relation to ballet classicism abandoned the institution some time back under the artistic direction of Peter Martins. In other words, the problem is not that the new material is too “modern”. It shows little plastic interest in the extension of inherited classical values. Merely having new works danced by classically trained dancers does not do the job. The spirit must reside first in the dance material itself. As a result, most new work at NYCB now constitutes an ostentatious break with the company’s tradition.
You would think that the Balanchine repertory would have instilled not only a taste for its tradition, but a passionate desire to superintend it. A corps de ballet dancer at NYCB in what currently represents itself as a “contemporary ballet” could find herself or himself ignored because never really seen except in flash acts. There are no substantive leading or choral roles in these new works. You will find a great many over-partnered pas de deux and ballets featuring the ensemble. I much prefer watching Daniel LaBelle’s witty silent videos on Facebook. LaBelle turns short movement essays into memorable imageries with a confidence and immediacy missing at Koch Theater these days. And he is his own lead performer.
I can identify a number of handy techniques used by the three Digital Season choreographers to deflect attention from their ensemble constituents. There is too much reliance on canonic figures in group work. (Someone is afraid of boring his audience.) There is regularly the threat that a finale will turn into an olio, a last-minute display of solos, duets, trios, etc. to show off technical strengths. (Someone doesn’t have an ending.) And choreographic passages which expose individual performers tend to be brief, with the implication that audiences really prefer group activity: so much more to look at! (No, not invariably.) The absence of extended solos also trains the audience to expect little individual detail via inspection of the corps. The short attention-span rules. Such dance-making habits are an inheritance from decades of Martins ballets, the majority of which are now happily retired from repertory. To see imitations of his cheap acrobatic adagios and endless allegro gauntlets welcomed into the present period is not reassuring. (It may be time to retire the imitations.) All three Digital Voices were initially encouraged by Peter Martins.
When you watch dancers collapsing for no reason into prone positions on stage or walking to place and running about with no classical enchaînement in sight, you know you are watching Ratmansky or Peck at his most self-indulgent. And I will add that Peck is unreliable in his musical taste: the aural threat of yet another Hollywood-style arrangement of sentimental pop or pseudo-folk is enough to dissuade many old-timers from further visits to the Koch. As a result, the performance of a new work at NYCB has the insistent charm of a garage band. The performers are young, eager, and trained. But, given the usual new material, the question remains whether they can dance in any real sense outside inherited repertory. They can certainly demonstrate technique. They can handle some demi-caractère roles. But serious artistry in fresh, classically-based forms? Classical values in dance have little to do with virtue-signaling, political or aesthetic. Perhaps the current viral interregnum would be a convenient moment for management’s serious reconsideration of the concept of its mission.
Luckily, Louise Ebersdorf’s proposed company, The Ballet, can provide an alternative to what New York audiences have come to expect from trips to Lincoln Center: respite from a politicized sense of the present in its relation to a dimly understood artistic past. An art form waits for no choreographer. At best, he or she creates Time and turns the current Tide. Back to work. Or perhaps I’ll catch a new Daniel LaBelle video.
M.R.
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