bump
Excellent film. Can’t wait to discuss.
Malle: sometimes surprisingly aware of what was going on
Yeah, an unbelievably prescient film – that last scene sent chills down my spine.
Highly recommend – on a par with Watkins.
Another great review RUS.
I got a Peter Watkins vibe as well, but I’m not exactly sure what film(s) I would connect with it. A very brief flash of Edvard Munch also popped up in Joseph Strick’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which we screened at work last night, but that didn’t last too long unfortunately, otherwise I would have liked the Strick film better.
@ herbie s
It is tangential, based on the serendipity:
Malle couldn’t have known during filming was that in the six years it would take PBS to raise the money to finish post-production would see the economic destruction of Glencoe …
The serendipity found in the way in which La commune (Paris, 1871) was made and how when things go wrong, things go horribly wrong.
Makes sense. I’ve never seen La Commune (Paris, 1871) but have read about it.
OK, I’m not going to read the intro because I don’t want to see any possible spoilers for this film I haven’t seen yet, but I peeked and saw “Peter Watkins vibe” so now I’m pretty excited. I’ll be back once I’ve seen it.
bump
(just to compete with the Mabuse thread)
coming up…
Ah, I just read this. Nice intro. I already started making some comments over in the voting thread though.
They were actually quite smart, sometimes surprisingly aware of what was going on…I had wonderful surprises.
I was surprised that while passing through Harlem I wasn’t assaulted with semiautomatic weapons and when I went to Mexico I didn’t see big-moustache-sombrero-wearing little people taking la siesta under a Cactus (well, maybe only 1 or 2).
quite smart?… I didn’t see any “smart” character. Dogs bark, Cats meow, People think.
surprisingly aware?… so he didn’t find the retarded inbreds he was expecting?
If it wasn’t for the 6 years-period that went by, this doc would have had very little relevance. However, if his works from India or the underwater doc are future picks I’m looking forward to those.
“They were actually quite smart, sometimes surprisingly aware of what was going on…I had wonderful surprises”
Well sure that can be perceived in 2011 via the written word as sounding arch and patronising, but here we have a French film director, a sophisticated well educated man from a wealthy background going into a rural community of only 5000 inhabitants and NINE churches…(.I grew up in a town of about 5000 and I cannot image how it could have supported nine churches!) – he could easily have found a bunch of mindless god botherers which would have been difficult for him to embrace ….but he is telling us he didn’t.
“People think”
No often they do not & that’’s basically all he’s saying. In his sincere view he found a lot of surprisingly thoughtful and interesting people there and I thought he did too.
Thanks for your reply Meg.
“but here we have a French film director, a sophisticated well educated man from a wealthy background”
Most frequently than not, the most “sophisticated and educated” are the most surprised about people regarded as “inferior” or distant. The lower expectations one has, the higher the surprise. That doesn’t mean that the people from the film were actually interesting (not to me, at least from what Malle showed us), they were just different to what he had in mind. We could also be confusing “interesting” with “self-identification” (“oh, that girl shares my point of view about sexuality!”, “oh, that’s exactly how I also feel about politics, life, divorce etc etc”) or with the power the camera has when people are honest and personal. They aren’t more “thoughtful and interesting people” than you, me, half the members of MUBI or the people from their neighbour town. Somebody interesting, for me at least, would be Robert Crumb (Crumb, 1994) or somebody as marginal.
“he could easily have found a bunch of mindless god botherers which would have been difficult for him to embrace”
Unlikely. An open-minded, receptive individual looking for an interesting subject will find it in even the more improbable circumstances. I try not to underestimate people supposing that they don’t think, everybody in some way or another is interesting, if you don’t find him/her interesting it might be ones fault (and I might be contradicting myself here).
Were the film does and only succeeds, and where it honestly struck me, is in the before and after radical change of the people’s mentality, vision and approach towards the “new” future and to see their castles built on the sand being washed away by the sea (the cruellest thing that can happen to anybody), and how we always nostalgically remember the past as being better than the present… only 6 years had past but seemed as if they were 6 decades… the people were not the same, they had known the devil and were marked by him.
Thinking this through again, I want to change my vote for God’s Country, is it too late?… just kidding, I stick with Dr. Mabuse hehe.
Cheers.
@Canaletto
your argument is based on the assumption that Malle embarked on the project with a sense of superiority towards his subjects, which he sought to confirm with the film, only to be surprised by his subjects intelligence and humanity.
you have, in fact, grossly misread his statements. Malle was not discussing his own attitudes (which were the opposite), but of the portrayal of midwesterners and others from rural America in other documentaries and from other sources (as I explained in the intro, Malle set out to create a film that specifically held no presumptions, that was based solely on curiosity, and that would stand as counterpoint to the sort of documentary you assume he intended to make; please re-read my intro in full).
your comments only reveal your own condescension and baseless assumptions.
it’s a shame your ignorance had to spoil the match.
You’re funny
Rich Uncle Skeleton
“[…] cinéma vérité is not a word that I like to use; cinéma vérité is cinéma mensonge. Cinéma vérité has a moral implication: it’s meant to define the truth, which is very pretentious and not necessarily true. I like cinéma direct because it’s more a technique than anything else. What I call cinéma direct is a kind of documentary where you completely improvise, you work with a minimal crew, you don’t try to organize reality, you just try to find where your interest or curiosity takes you, you try to film what you find interesting or surprising, and later try to make sense of it in the cutting room. It’s a cinema of instinct, of improvisation, a cinema very much of the present. As something happens, you try to catch it. Then you examine what you have and why you shot it that way. That’s my personal definition. It seems to me that cinéma direct is the best way to describe what I was trying to do in India or the documentaries I did in France in 1972, or those American documentaries I did later on.” —Louis Malle
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Just before making Atlantic City (1980), Louis Malle shot footage for a documentary for American public television. Originally intending to make a film about shopping malls (abandoned when he realized that the constant muzak of the mall made for disturbing discontinuities in the editing), Malle and his crew of two (Malle served as director and cinematographer, accompanied only by a sound-man and an assistant cameraman) drove around instead, with the intent of making a documentary about a community in the rural “heartland” of America. The result was God’s Country, a cross-section of the community of Glencoe, Minnesota.
God’s Country examines contemporary notions (for 1979) that are the descendants of Jeffersonian ideals of rural superiority. Malle was interested in examining a community that represented popular notions of the midwest as the moral center of America, the “heartland,” God’s country. In Malle’s own words:
“I was terribly curious about these people. They were more interesting than I expected, because the cliché, I suppose, about Middle Westerners is that they are conventional—which they are in a way—and live in very tight communities, they’re churchgoers. All these clichés are true if you want. My filming and narration were slightly ironical, but I fell in love with these people. They were actually quite smart, sometimes surprisingly aware of what was going on, and it was a period when things were good for the farmers. This little community was economically in very good shape. I had wonderful surprises.”
Malle’s friendly nature and curiosity drive the film forward, as he eagerly seeks out different members of the community to talk to: the deputy sheriff; a seed purveyor; the pharmacist and his family; a cow-inseminator and amateur actor; a young farmer, his wife, and three kids; a young woman who works in an office; the town lawyer and his wife, an amateur playwright; and a young couple on their wedding day. Malle observes their views on living in a small community, away from the centers of decision-making, and lightly and obliquely examines their attitudes on broader social issues—notably Vietnam, civil rights, and the economics of agriculture.
Malle’s technique actively avoids making moral judgements. He set out with the intent of not making the standard European documentary about America, which would set out to confirm the prejudices of the filmmaker and audience (Malle cites the work of François Reichenbach, specifically). At the same time, he does not shy away from asking questions that might shed his subjects in a negative light. Asking one young farmer why there are no blacks in the community elicits a very genteel racism (“they don’t seem to fit”); while a young woman, when asked how homosexuals live in Glencoe, responds politely that they don’t (they live their private lives in the Twin Cities, in secret).
Malle’s approach to American culture is always curious and never condescending. The beginning of the film finds him joining in on a local parade and picnic, finding easy conversation with all the tiny groups of the community. God’s Country leaves its subjects as it finds them. While the tone is, as Malle intended, lightly ironic, those that he interviews are allowed to retain their sincerity and dignity; even in a scene late in the film, when Malle visits the local nursing home, filming lonely, dispossessed senior citizens ambling around a recreation room, silent, as a television blasts commercials for toothpaste and tv movies. The film stops suddenly when Malle’s questioning prompts one old man to say that he’d rather “be in the grave.” This is the only interview that seems to fluster Malle, and he nervously says that “there is still plenty of time for that.”
It is this scene that best reveals the strength of Malle’s cinéma direct. Malle seems to be a natural documentarian, whose interest and faith in the knowledge that his subject is interesting propel him to capture things that structure and planning could not; a faith in happenstance to reveal the truth.
What Malle couldn’t have known during filming was that in the six years it would take PBS to raise the money to finish post-production would see the economic destruction of Glencoe during the recession of the early Reagan years. Seeing this as an opportunity to follow up on his subjects, Malle’s film ends uneasily: revealing the failure (of whom the subjects are in disagreement) to defend the American dream of rural security. It is revealed that the farm crisis has driven the seed purveyor to embrace conspiracy theories and anti-semitism; that the young farmer and his wife no longer want their children to become farmers, but rather wish them to pursue college with the possibility of life outside Glencoe; the young woman (with whom Malle filmed his favorite interview of the film) has left Glencoe for Florida, where she feels more herself. At the same time, the young couple that Malle met on their wedding day is doing just fine with their children; Malle finishes his film at dinner with the town lawyer and his wife discussing the apparent spiritual decline of the town throughout the early 80s — Malle deems them to be the best of Americans: “dedicated, smart, educated, unpretentious.”