The re-release of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s postmodern classic Diva at Film Forum this week may come as a surprise. Not because it doesn’t deserve it – that is, assuming that re-releases are based on desert rather than commercial viability, an idealistic proposition in the first place – but because it has aged so well. Beineix’s re-printed and re-translated directorial debut looks and sounds superb, with a hybrid score of pop and opera, bold and colorful costume and set design, and entrancing cinematography. It also flows between its romance, drama, and thriller plots more smoothly than today’s best genre-blenders.
Diva begins with Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a moped-riding delivery boy, clandestinely recording a performance by opera singer Cynthia Hawkins (the title’s diva, played by Wilhelmenia Fernandez). This recording is confused with another Jules receives accidentally, inculpating a Parisian police chief in drug and sex worker trafficking. Multiple parties come after Jules’s tapes while he falls in love with Hawkins, and befriends an intriguing couple (played by Thuy An Luu and Richard Bohringer). Throughout, Diva borrows from surveillance and stake-out movies like Blowup and The Conversation, and early blockbusters like The French Connection – whose canonic chase sequence Beineix shames when Jules rides his motorcycle through the Paris metro. But as much as Diva looks like it’s coming out for the first time, its story and style are rooted in a specific cultural situation.
Diva’s release in 1981 marked the second turning point in French cinema, the first being the emergence of the French New Wave between 1958 and 1960. This movement reanimated a stagnant French film industry – and has influenced every filmmaker since – with its self-reflexive modernist style and myriad high- and low-culture references. Once the New Wave’s disjointed style became the norm, however, the movement lost steam. Then came Diva, the second turning point, directly responding to the first. After alienating film essays by polemical directors, Beineix introduced a trendy, cool aesthetic that favored plot development. Diva sparked is own movement, dubbed “Cinéma du look,” rooted in the disenfranchised youth subcultures of Paris in the eighties, as opposed to the pedantic projects of the previous generation of filmmakers.
In its cultural moment, Diva’s crime plot pitting stylish Paris hipsters against corrupt old French men anticipated the young filmmakers of the “Cinéma du look,” reacting against the entrenched older directors of the New Wave. Beineix makes this analogy explicit by having Diva’s most brutish thug behave like a pastiche of the character played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in so many Jean-Luc Godard movies. The sense of relief when he finally falls to his death, then, is simultaneous relief for the liberation of French cinema from the self-serious airs of films from Godard’s generation. This is not to reduce Diva to an opposition between young and old, just to show that there’s a lot going on under its surface cool.
A slightly different version of this review appears in the October 31 issue of the New York Press and can be found here.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Three
For one of the greatest filmmakers to have undertaken a primetime television show as early as 1955 testifies to Alfred Hitchcock’s prescience. Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which ran from 1955 to 1962 (first on CBS, then on NBC), presented weekly half-hour vignettes in a similar vein to Hitchcock’s feature length work. Familiar themes such as the crisis in white male identity, doubling, misogyny, the oppressive weight of life under modern conditions, racism and sexism, were treated extensively throughout the show’s run. The recently-released third season has no extra features but includes all 39 episodes, several of which are outstanding, while a few are throw-aways and most lie somewhere in-between. Only three episodes are directed by Hitchcock, two others – surprisingly – by Robert Altman. The season is full of other treats: actors Joseph Cotton, Vincent Price, Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia, George Peppard and William Shatner make appearances, and two episodes are written by Roald Dahl. Despite his absence behind the camera Hitchcock seems always present, addressing the audience at the beginning and end of each episode. These hilarious monologues are the most consistently entertaining part of the show, with Hitchcock reveling in stiff-upper-lip sarcasm – though often making explicit the misogynist and xenophobic tendencies that remain just below the surface in so much of his work.
As always with Hitchcock, the misogyny of this show isn’t wholeheartedly endorsed, but instead presented as casual and problematic. In many cases the violence perpetrated against female characters is a direct result of the dishonesty, insecurity and immaturity of the male characters. In the excellent episode “Silent Witness,” for example, a male professor kills the young female student with whom he’s had an affair after she demands that he leave his wife. Though the episode is told from the professor’s point of view, his exploitation of a gendered power dynamic is clearly presented as monstrous. The episode goes a step further by staging the murder in front of a 14-month-old baby girl: the title’s silent witness. As she develops the ability to speak, the professor turns his attention to keeping her quiet. Becoming an adult, the episode shows, means entering into a set of uneven power relations more often mapped onto sexual difference than any other category. Allowing the episode’s witness to overcome her silence means undoing this profound intertwining of gender and power.
Cultural and racial stereotypes are almost as all-pervasive as fragile gender relations in Hitchcock’s work, and this goes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents as well. Unfortunately, xenophobia is too often indulged without being reprimanded to let Hitchcock off the moral hook on this issue. In several episodes the show’s use of national stereotypes is parodic and self-deprecating. British condescension and disrespect towards all other nationalities is played for laughs when outmoded and silly social conventions are juxtaposed to the flexible lifestyles of Europeans and Americans. In other episodes, however, humor dealing in national and ethnic stereotypes gives way to overt racism. In an episode entitled “The Diplomatic Corpse,” a young American couple navigates a series of misadventures in Mexico. Racist stereotypes proliferate, frustrations over the locals’ “ten-hour lunch breaks” abound, and Hitchcock’s regular any-“other” actor Peter Lorre (actually Austrio-Hungarian) plays Mexican private investigator Tomas Salgado. Parody, in this episode, does not outdo racism.
With highly politicized topics bubbling to the surface of every episode, Alfred Hitchcock Presents may be more interesting to today’s hyper-media-literate audience than it was when it began in 1955. Like the most successful TV shows today, the aesthetics and generic conventions of Alfred Hitchcock Presents more closely resemble those of cinema than other TV shows of its time. That said, the dominant themes of each episode recall many of Hitchcock’s own films, and, likewise, have remained very relevant despite the long-outdated aesthetics of the show. Certainly, the third season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is uneven from one episode to the next, but the most interesting far outweigh the boring and conventional.
A completely different review of the third season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is in the October 17 issue of the New York Press, and can be found here.
As always with Hitchcock, the misogyny of this show isn’t wholeheartedly endorsed, but instead presented as casual and problematic. In many cases the violence perpetrated against female characters is a direct result of the dishonesty, insecurity and immaturity of the male characters. In the excellent episode “Silent Witness,” for example, a male professor kills the young female student with whom he’s had an affair after she demands that he leave his wife. Though the episode is told from the professor’s point of view, his exploitation of a gendered power dynamic is clearly presented as monstrous. The episode goes a step further by staging the murder in front of a 14-month-old baby girl: the title’s silent witness. As she develops the ability to speak, the professor turns his attention to keeping her quiet. Becoming an adult, the episode shows, means entering into a set of uneven power relations more often mapped onto sexual difference than any other category. Allowing the episode’s witness to overcome her silence means undoing this profound intertwining of gender and power.
Cultural and racial stereotypes are almost as all-pervasive as fragile gender relations in Hitchcock’s work, and this goes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents as well. Unfortunately, xenophobia is too often indulged without being reprimanded to let Hitchcock off the moral hook on this issue. In several episodes the show’s use of national stereotypes is parodic and self-deprecating. British condescension and disrespect towards all other nationalities is played for laughs when outmoded and silly social conventions are juxtaposed to the flexible lifestyles of Europeans and Americans. In other episodes, however, humor dealing in national and ethnic stereotypes gives way to overt racism. In an episode entitled “The Diplomatic Corpse,” a young American couple navigates a series of misadventures in Mexico. Racist stereotypes proliferate, frustrations over the locals’ “ten-hour lunch breaks” abound, and Hitchcock’s regular any-“other” actor Peter Lorre (actually Austrio-Hungarian) plays Mexican private investigator Tomas Salgado. Parody, in this episode, does not outdo racism.
With highly politicized topics bubbling to the surface of every episode, Alfred Hitchcock Presents may be more interesting to today’s hyper-media-literate audience than it was when it began in 1955. Like the most successful TV shows today, the aesthetics and generic conventions of Alfred Hitchcock Presents more closely resemble those of cinema than other TV shows of its time. That said, the dominant themes of each episode recall many of Hitchcock’s own films, and, likewise, have remained very relevant despite the long-outdated aesthetics of the show. Certainly, the third season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is uneven from one episode to the next, but the most interesting far outweigh the boring and conventional.
A completely different review of the third season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is in the October 17 issue of the New York Press, and can be found here.
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