Charlie Kaufman: Synecdoche, New York

1) I suppose it truly is a crime to watch this movie in the dubbed German version, but I did so anyway and was shocked to notice that whoever's responsible for the translation managed to miss out on the fact that the poem on the radio (the very first lines in the script!) are by Rilke. Consequently, he has gone through the pains of re-translating Rilke's "Herbsttag" from Stephen Mitchell's English translation back into German! This is just way past awkward, even for a Kaufman film.

2) This is certainly a great movie, of the kind only Kaufman knows to make. It's one of the movies that really makes you wonder why there aren't more movies of this kind - ones that make really innovative use of the endless visual possibilities of the movie screen and its close affinity to the world of dreams...Nonetheless, "Synecdoche, New York" just doesn't quite match the pure genius auf Kaufman's earlier films, especially "Adaptation" - clearly one of my all-time favorites (but I guess I'm biased at least to some extent, since, after all, it's a movie about screenwriting...)

And here's what I mean: "Synecdoche, New York", covering, I would guess, at least 30 years in the life of the protagonist Cadan Cotard, ends up getting lost in all its leaps in time: years pass and all we're really seeing is that (surprise, surprise) Cotard has gone yet one more step further on his megalomanical quest for ultimate mimesis (i.e. his theater-production ends up imitating reality, especially its expansions in time and space, to a ever greater and absurd degree). Sure, there's a few Kaufmanian plot-twists along the road, but in terms of dramaturgy, it just isn't as thrilling or as anecdotally funny as I would have hoped - especially after the first 30 minutes or so were simply great stuff. For example, this is probably my favorite scene of the movie (Cotard goes to see an ophthalmologist on account of a recent accident):

It's not easy for me to come to a fully thought-through opinion of this novel. After a failed attempt of putting all my thoughts into one single review, I came to the conclusion that it would be much more interesting to have a discussion on the novel, McEwan, and story-telling in general on this site - especially, since dad has been reading the novel as well, and maybe more family members are to follow.

1) The first 70 pages: to me, the low point of my McEwan reading experience

2) The protagonist Michael Beard: a little too 'Rothian', a little too unconvincing / contrived

3) The 'show-don't-tell' debate: Has McEwan gone one step too far?

4) The 'Unwitting Thief' episode: As in 'Saturday', McEwan seems to fight a preemptive war on accusations of plagiarism. Plus: What, exactly, is McEwan's stand on postmodernism?

5) What, to me, still makes McEwan stand out amongst other novelists.

I had been anticipating it eagerly for two reasons: first, as all Winters know, I cherish McEwan more than any other contemporary writer (ever since I got my hands on "Saturday"). Secondly, I feel that climate-change is probably one of the hardest issues to tackle in a novel: So much has been said about it, but there's really not much controversy on what's to be done - so what's a novelist to add? The problem is rather how to get a global initiative going - but all the political seesaw doesn't make for a particularly satisfying plot.

Mirja and I saw this movie by chance on TV (arte) a few nights ago. All we knew from the TV guide was that it's a famous and influential psycho-thriller with a great surprise-ending (I have to admit that I can't remember having seen any of Clouzot's films). Throughout the first 15 minutes of the movie, I was getting the feeling that I had read about it somewhere - probably in Robert McKee's screenwriting-guide "Story". But certain pieces didn't fit. Nevertheless, it was once again Mirja, who saw the surprise ending coming before the first 25 minutes had gone by (just like she did when we were in "Shutter Island" a few weeks ago...) Of course, she was pretty much right on the money: To Mirja, Christina's (Verà Clouzot) heart problem gave it all away.

By that time I was of the same opinion: that, despite certain inconsistencies, this must be the movie McKee describes as a perfect example of integrating a visual 'Leitmotiv' into a film. In this case he was arguing that the central symbol of "Les Diaboliques" was water. However, as we found out by looking through McKee's book after finishing the movie, his renarration of the plot is way off target in many crucial points - especially, when he's saying that in the end, it is the sound of dripping water that half scares Christina to death - there simply is no sound of dripping water in the scene he is referring to! After having actually seen the film the entire passage in McKee's book looks more like a (pretty bad) memory-protocol than a real plot summary. I don't want to go on much longer about this, but it certainly made me doubt the authority of his book to at least some extend (especially since it's not the 1st but the 4th edition of the book).

Anyway, this was supposed to be just another short anecdote on a very good classic psycho-thriller... and ended up being an anecdote on classical screenwriting-manuals as well. If anyone's interested, maybe I'll one day find the time to type up McKee's account of the movie and point out exactly where he's off track.

The thing about good books is that they can make you feel like you have wasted a lot of time on seminars, lectures, projects or simply other books that, in comparison, all failed at getting to the heart of the problem. And even though Mament's book (which I received from Roland as a Christmas present) is only 100 pages long and as such aims at being not much more than an introduction to this director's approach to making film, there are some insights to be found which I completely missed out on in my first semester at the HFF Potsdam.

To name just one example, we did, of course, in both „Filmgeschichte“ (lecture & seminar) and „Filmästhetik“ (seminar) touch upon Eisenstein and how his technique of montage differs from the way Hollywood likes to tell it. We did not, how ever, get to the core of why he chose to do so and how his techniques really served to fundamentally change the way people thought about telling stories for the screen. Mamet, however, in the first chapter of this book, explains it in most simple terms: „Now, if the film is a record of what the protagonist does, it had better be interesting. That is to say, this approach puts the director in a position of shooting the film a novel way, an interesting way, and he or she is constantly wondering 'what's the most interesting place to put the camera to film this love scene? What's the most interesting way I can shoot it plainly? What's the most interesting way that I can allow the actor to behave in the scene in which, for example, she proposes to him?' That's the way most American films are made, as a supposed record of what people really did. There's another way to make a movie, which is the way Eisenstein suggested a movie should be made. This method has nothing to do with following the protagonist around but rather is a succession of images juxtaposed so that the contrast between these images moves the story forward in the mind of the audience. This is a fairly succinct rendition of Eisenstein's theory of montage; it is also the first thing I know about film directing, virtually the only thing I know about film directing. You always want to tell the story in cuts.“ Now, while this is certainly a simplification of Eisenstein's theories (and additionally, he was certainly not the first director to tell stories this way), it finally helped me understand why this step was so important in the history of film.

In the following chapters, which are basically overhauled transcripts of a short series of lectures he gave in 1987, he walks the reader (and his students) through a step-by-step example of how to tell a story in pictures. This, of course, is not entirely new or ingenious stuff, but it certainly allows for a lot of worth insights into the everyday decision-making-processes involved in shooting a film. The key statements being:

• „The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script. The work on the set is nothing. All you have to do on set is stay awake, follow your plans, help actors be simple, and keep your sense of humor.“
• the course of planning, the director has to make sure that for every sequence, scene, beat, and shot of the movie, he knows exactly what the goal of that particular segment is. A scene will have an overall goal (e.g. „to earn the instructor's respect“) and every beat should aim at getting us one step closer to it (e.g. beat one: show up early for the instructor's class; beat two: prepare for the class; beat three: pay homage as the instructor is coming into the classroom etc. etc.) Finally, every shot has to be scrutinously reduced to what it does for the beat: images have to be found that express the main idea, the motivation, the goal, in the simplest and clearest way. If every single small segment of the movie serves, respectivly, the bigger segments, one will end up with a film that's well told in cinematical terms.
• It is from this conviction that Mamets resentment for, well, he calls them „performance arts“, originates. In his opinion, many 'avantgarde' filmmakers choose their shots not because they will serve the story but simply because they seem original, whacky, or 'out-there'. He draws a particularly grim picture of the consequences of this kind of filmmaking: „The end of this is obscenity. Let's really see their genitals, let's really endanger the actor through stunts, let's really set the building on fire. Over the course of a movie, it forces the filmmaker to get more and more bizarre. Over the course of a career, it forces the filmmaker to get more and more outrè; over the course of a culture, it forces the culture to degenerate into depravity, which is what we have now.“ (Van Trier's „Antichrist“ comes to my mind right now...but certainly he's also referring to a lot of action movies and the like)
• Movies, by their very medium, are not fit for selling ideologies, morale, or politics. All they're really good for is telling stories: „People have tried for centuries to use drama to change people's lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn't work. It might be nice if it worked for those things, but it doesn't. The only thing the dramatic form is good for is telling a story.“ Certainly, this calls to mind our short debate on this site about political thrillers. And again, I can only agree to a certain degree with this point of view: I do admit changing a person's life or even his perspective is very hard to do – and estimating the direction in which this change will take place is harder still – I do not agree that it's entirely impossible. First of all, for all the hundreds of movies people watch in the course of their lives, I would bet that mostly every one of them could name at least a handful of movies that had a particularly strong influence on how they see the world. Secondly, it seems very plausible to me that what I think about the world is to a very large extend influenced by the input I receive about the world (well, duh, where else should it be coming from?!) and a huge portion of this input comes either directly or indirectly from what I see on TV and in movie theaters. And thirdly, the history of drama has certainly shown that if one really thinks things through, one can come up with innovative ideas that really do end up influencing the way people think about current or abstract problems – just take Brecht, for example...

However, I also have the feeling that a lot of the views Mamet expresses in the course of this book are a little overstated for educational purposes. And maybe it is precisely these pointed and incisive, if something exaggerated, statements which make the 'aha-effect' of his lectures surpass some of the ones I've been taking at the HFF Potsdam.

I couldn't find a still in the web with the Sally character in it (a wonderful Laura Dern)- I had to do a screenshot from the DVD myself. Hope Warner Broth. won't sue me for that. It tells so much:

• First of all it shows the inside of the trailer which plays an important and funny role. Meant for the govenor's election campaign (there is still the decoration at the window) it gets seized by the Chief (Clint Eastwood) for mobile headquarters right at the beginning of the film: One of two satellites orbiting each other in this movie , Butch's (Kevin Costner) stolen car being the other one. A close encounter of the two (a wonderful scene when Phillip - T.J. Lowther as the kidnapped boy who finds and looses a fatherly friend - waves to the passing surreal vehicle) is the beginning of the deconstruction of the trailer.
• The a wonderful constellation of the three protagonists: the tough but emotionally good guy with a cup of coffee (actually something worse the Chief is complaining about: probably herbal tea), the FBI bad guy smoking, hand at the neck, and eyes on Sally, already judging her as prey, and finally Sally with an not-of-this-world smile on her face - the good, the bad and the brilliant.

The plot is a standard convicts-break-out-and-cops-chase-them thing. There are two near-rapes, armed robberies, and the two escaped convicts are both dead in the end. Doesn't sound like comedy - does it? Fun and sometimes laughter come from taking the symmetry (the parallel universes of cops on one and fugitives on the other side) to extremes - a wonderfully balanced and never mingled two-world story. Till the very end the two worlds communicate of sorts but do not meet. There is an almost mystical parallelism between 'the 'cop-universe' and the 'convict-universe':

• There are two extremely intelligent people in this story (Wunderkinder almost) and each universe has one: With Sally on the up and Butch on the down side of the law.
• Each universe has its bad guy. The one in the criminal world doesn't last long and you have the feeling that there is a common understanding between Phillip and Butch about the necessity of "collateral damage". On the other hand the bad guy representing the law isn't meant to die. More so - he is the one giving the fatal shot to our secret hero. The hero doesn't die before the last spool - but die he must.
• Putting the young kidnapped Phillip and the fairly old "chief" Eastwood into corresponding roles seems farfetched, but, for one thing, they both are the ones asking the relevant questions in critical moments. And while young Phillip comes across almost like a young Buddah with eternal wisdom, the Chief seems young at heart and has an almost transcendental view on the 'cop-universe'.
• There is hardly a convict-chaser movie with as much emphasis on food as this one. While the 'cop-universe' contemplates about how the steak is done their counterpart-universe has to procure the food by trick and treat and they have to settle for eating vegetarian stuff. Trick and treat is one of the items on Phillip's what-I-want-to-do-list, Butch has made him write down. This list plays an important role in the grand finale and the drama is offset by cops collecting candy for another trick and treat.

I take it you sensed it: I liked this movie a lot! Back in 1993 when Eastwood was still a brand name for action and violence the movie wasn't that well received. More than 10 years later someone under the label of ASIDISJJDSAI wrote at imdb.com under the subject "Action/Drama/Crime ???????????": "how is this movie a Action movie, I suppose theres a few Action parts to the movie but the correct genre should be Drama/Crime". Two months later ExcursionGuy84 responded: "I think that's the right wya t o put it, me thinks." Now "A perfect World" is listed under Crime | Drama | Thriller ...... comedy still missing!
Contributed by Richard

If there's one thing to be said here about Polanski's "Ghost Writer", it's that it fits perfectly into no less than 4 different themes that we have recently discussed here on the Winter's page:

1. It is a political thriller, so it could be used to elaborate on our discussion on the genre and whether fictional thrillers tend to be more satisfying than the ones who feature the "based on a true story" tag-line. In the case of "The Ghostwriter", the plot is entirely fictional, but it is very keen exposing as many parallels to current events as it can possibly muster: Pierce Brosnan is a perfect stand in for Tony Blair and the historical events one of the characters uses to argue that since 9/11, the Brits haven't made a single major political decision that was not in line with American interests at all, of course, a taken from very recent history. (I guess some fact checking would do good on this one, though...). In my opinion, "The Ghost Writer" seems to support Dad's argument that fictional political-thrillers are more, well, thrilling, than historical ones: Polanski's creativity, in this film, isn't tied down by fact-checking and can get as much symbolism and allusions into his movie as he chooses.
2. To me, it has a lot in common with Scorsese's "Shutter Island" (discussed a few items down the page...): Both are by renowned directors who chose, for once, to adapt a novel into a thriller and try to stick to the genre as much as their personal "style" would allow. In direct comparison, I have to say that "Ghost Writer" gets some bonus points for plausibility - but on the other hand, it offers less visual innovation than "Shutter Island" and is just a little less 'Polanskiesque' than I would have hoped (except for the great, amazing, all-rewarding final shot - sort of like the ending of Chinatown)
3. It exposes, at least in the beginning and only to a certain extent, some of the hidden mechanisms behind the daily routine of media: newspapers, TV, political 'autobiographies' - so, if you like, there are at least a few hidden references to the likes of "Flat Earth News" (also discussed further down on this page.
4. I have now totally forgotten what number four is...maybe it was the thing about the ending being somehow similar to "Chinatown" - the film I got from Roland for Christmas. But I'm not quite sure now....

Renate was at an all-women-birthday-party an I, the driver had to kill some time. By chance two films I wanted to watch anyway were shown with just a 11 minute break in between. And another coincidence: Doris Dörris' social comedy is all about women (catchwords: fat, food, hair, abuse, unemployment, illegal immigrants, suburbs, divorce, shopping malls, apparel) and Grant Heslov's political-thriller-comedy is about a mens world (catchwords: military, Vietnam, American presidents, intelligence agency, desert, Iraq, ego, discipline (reversed), drugs, divorce).

The common denominator being divorce. While the wonderful fat women (Gabriela Maria Schmeide - we remember her from "Halbe Treppe") is on a quest for a petty bourgeois life in suburban Berlin (Marzahn), the man (Ewan McGregor) has to go to war and so the provincial Ann Arbor journalist ends up in Irak ... eventually.

Not sure whether that's a gender issue but I enjoyed The Men Who Stare At Goats way more than Die Friseuse. The latter is "nice" but you aren't getting really engaged in the fate of this woman and the events pass like pattern in a kaleidoscope. There were not too many laughters and the few were hysterical ones of women looking at the vast proportions of their consexual on the screen.

Expecting a weird movie after seeing the trailer many times, the goats-pic was a pleasant surprise. It is an entertaining story with a brilliant cast. Kevin Spacey plays a bad guy for a change but he is not really convincing as a schemer and wartime profiteer. Watching American security and other businesses in Iraq is kind of funny but probably to realistic to be checked under the pure-fun label. They state it's fiction at the credits but there seems to be some serious facts hidden in the source of the script. See the Wikipedia - Jon Ronson article for more.

Last night we saw by chance The quiet American on TV (3sat). We had wine with friends and coffee with family and were coming home a view minutes late. Anyway - this was quite an unusual TV evening: no sleeping, watching with amazed open eyes the Graham Greene story retold by Phillip Noyce. A menage a trois between an old and laid-back, worldly-wise, and essentially lazy journalist for the London Times (Michael Caine), an obscure young American (Brendan Fraser - CIA agent disguised as doctor bringing medical aid to war-torn Vietnam), and a ravishing Asian beauty (Do Thi Hai Yen). But the love story quickly takes a back seat and you are drawn into the thrilling secrets of the French-Vietnamese war.

My favorite film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote "Now further events have shown Greene's novel to be even more prescient about American do-gooders loose in the world. Against France's war in Vietnam in the early 50s Greene juxtaposed a romantic triangle [...] and and the story carries more bite than ever.". The movie was held back a year apparently because of 9/11 and the Irak War and today still you are immediately reminded of Afghanistan an all the Western do-gooders over there.

The film was shot by one of our favorite cameramen Christopher Doyle. Visualizing war and terror seen with the eyes of Michael Caine is breathtaking and these scenes alone are well worth watching this movie. A glance at the list of executive producers Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella, Chris Sievernich, and Nigel Sinclaie gives you a hint that this wasn't meant to be your average Hollywood love and action movie but that it has a political message to convey.

Going into the movies blindly knowing nothing more than titel, time, and location is the advantage of a film festival. And above all this is true for the Berlinale - probably the festival with the most numerous screenings worldwide.

Watching Kosmos at the remote International was one of this moments. It was just a convenient time and location (we were there anyway for the previous show) and we had no expectations at all. The film begins and ends with the protagonist Kosmos emerging and vanishing in a vast and cosmic snowscape. He is a thief and a healer and a supernatural figure strangely disconnected from human needs except one: his perpetual quest for love. Due to his healer skills Kosmos is somewhat accepted in this remote Turkish village in the middle of nowhere at a closed border. The town, the tea houses, the snow, the derelict streets and buildings, the omnipresence of the military, all this reminds you of Orhan Pamuk's Snow. This film and the book share the dense, magical atmosphere but where Pamuk has a political context, Kosmos is biblical or better: mythical. You are reminded of Pasolini's Teorema where Terence Stamp (like Sermet Yesil in Kosmos) "...gives unstintingly of himself, asking nothing in return. Then one day he leaves, as suddenly and mysteriously as he came." (Wikipedia) There are some unexplained magical scenes with an object from outer space - at least that's what you think it is - adding to the mystery.

The bottom line of the review from THR was: "Too much happens too many times in this potentially brilliant parable." (The Hollywood Reporter) For me it was neither too much nor too many, it was one of the highlights of the Berlinale and one can only hope that this film will find a distributer in Germany.

This says nothing against the quality of the movie, but only 15 (!) minutes into it, Mirja revealed to me what she thought was to be the main revelation at the end (I won't spoil it here, of course). As it turned out, she was, naturally, right on the spot. The clues were there, but I for one wouldn't have been able to think that far ahead, as the movie really keeps you short of breath. I could not really find a whole lot of "Scorsese" in the movie - it stays extremely true to the thriller / film-noir genre conventions. But at that, it is very dense and has a great atmosphere. Sometimes, though, it comes across as a bit exaggerated, especially when Scorsese tries (I guess that's one point where he's attempting to make his signature show through) to fit every single trauma of the American society in the 50s into one film, sometimes into a single sequence. "Spiegel Online" found a very peculiar, not to say pathetic, way to put it: "[DiCaprios] Mantel scheint dazu angetan, Kugeln abzuhalten. Die gigantische Krempe seines Huts wirkt, als sollte sie - wir befinden uns in den naiven Kindertagen des Atomzeitalters! - vor einem möglichen nuklearen Fall-out schützen." I have no idea how he came up with that one...
contributed by Claudio

Written in 2008, Nick Davies takes a close and very discomforting look at the current state of journalism. He declares that its main function, i.e. finding and telling the truth, has deteriorated to an alarming extend. His analysis exposes that at the heart of the problem lies the inadequate application of the free-market doctrine to the realm of media. The focus has shifted from fact-checking and critical thinking to profit-maximization. While both the number of newspapers and the number staff they employ have been in steady decline, journalists are under pressure to churn out more stories than ever before. Thus, there is less and less time for fact-checking and thorough research. This opens the doors for mere rumors, to find their way from the tabloid press all the way into well-respected flag-ships of British dailies like the "Guardian", the "Observer", or the "Sunday Times". Journalism has become mere "churnalism", as Davies calls it.

Each of the book's chapters is dedicated to a certain wheel in the man-eating machine of modern journalism: The journalists on the street who are being pressured into churning out story after story; the "wire agencies" (Reuters, AP, PA) which are being over-stretched to keep up the illusion of global coverage (which is in truth greatly distorted towards Western concerns and celebrities); the PR industry which, in turn, is growing more powerful with every minute a journalist is distracted from fact-checking; and last but certainly not least organized propaganda by powerful governments which, after 9/11 have practically restarted and updated their cold-war strategies.

True to the tradition of proper journalism, Davies illustrates each of his chapters and arguments with a bunch of intriguing and startling case studies. For example, he exposes how the millennium bug was turned from a minor glitch into a major threat of global proportions which got everybody talking except for the computer experts who were actually qualified to judge the likelihood of the many unfounded scenarios. In the chapters concerning PR, we learn of a very clever maneuver Bell Yard (a self-entitled "Crisis Communications and Reputation Management Consultancy") pulled to get three British clients who were involved in the Enron scandal off the hook: they persuaded Fleet Street to "focus [...] on a single aspect of their case, the new Extradition Act under whose terms the three men now faced trail in Texas", meaning that what was originally a case of fraud was successfully turned into a threat to British sovereignty. On the propaganda-end of the spectrum, we learn surprisingly (at least to me), that the alleged connection between Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was entirely manufactured by certain departments of the American government - as part of the well-known larger scheme to interlink al-Quaida with the Iraqi regime. Ironically, this fiction, backed by the global media, eventually gathered enough momentum to actually be turned into fact when Bin Laden decided to get al-Zarqawi on his team - a decision based entirely on Zarqawis growing reputation he received thanks to the global media.

In the last part of the book, Davies takes a very close look at the "Sunday Times", the "Observer" and the "Daily Mail" - giving telling insights into the demise of each of these papers as well as exposing some of the illegal tactics these papers use to get their hands on confidential information.

For his research he has focused mainly on Britain and on daily newspapers, but bets are that the mechanisms he exposes apply to most western democracies.

(Rather random) comments: I do find this book to be of vital importance and would recommend it to anyone who reads newspapers even occasionally. It's also very interesting to see how the British dailies have reviewed this book. Tellingly, the Guardian ( www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/feb/03/society) does praise Davie's analysis as "fair, meticulously researched and fascinating, if gloomy" but later goes on to challenge and refute some of the passages on insights into the "Observer". Of course, Davies makes himself very vulnerable to attack, especially if certain accounts of his own work should turn out to not the be the entire truth. However, as Davies himself points out, no journalist can be right all of the time. What he can do, though, is to fact-check and second-guess as much material as he

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