jürgen fauth’s muckworld

“You’ve got a serious artist crush,” Marcy remarked — a statement, not a question — when I sent her a link to a gallery of adorably geeky photographs of Paul Thomas Anderson during the Hard Eight period. Guilty as charged: I’ve been rewatching and reassessing and obsessing over all five of PTA’s films, reevaluating Punch-Drunk Love (which I originally hated), rediscovering the ending of Boogie Nights (much different from what I remembered), and unable to resist the pull of Magnolia even on a matchbox-sized iPod screen.

Sez Dennis Lim:

If the Altman comparisons seem grossly reductive, it’s because Anderson is liberal when it comes to borrowing from the greats. Why not combine Altman’s panoramic outlook with Stanley Kubrick’s formal bravura with John Cassavetes’ messy candor? While Anderson fits the profile of a “hysterical realist,” to evoke the pejorative literary buzz-phrase of a few years ago, his films never indulge in excess for the sake of excess. He’s a born showman—his first three films bore the Barnumesque credit “A P.T. Anderson picture”—but his go-for-broke tendencies are tied to an expansive, humanist impulse.

Lim’s entire appreciation of Anderson is spot-on, and before I swipe his video clips, I’d just like to expand on his last point: seems to me, the unifying theme underlying all of Anderson’s films is the desperate need for human connection. Yes, that’s a cloying phrase, and perhaps that’s why it’s dressed up in such unlikely garb: the incendiary monologues, the sweeping steadycams, the assaultive music, the undulating colors. What all of Anderson’s characters really need is a family, but their real families rarely work: in Hard Eight, Jack’s father is dead, Dirk Diggler’s mom throws him out, everybody in Magnolia is messed up six different ways, Barry Egan’s seven sisters are worse than the furies, and we all know that Daniel Plainview’s an oilman, not a family man.

Instead, Anderson’s heroes create impromptu families. Jack finds a father figure in his father’s killer, porn gives Diggler not just a dad (Burt Reynolds) but a sister (Heather Graham) and a mother (Julianne Moore), too. In Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler and Emily Watson start their own family, and Magnolia ends in an orgy of characters coming home to each other. And Plainview? His salvation would have been an impromptu family with a bastard from a basket for a son and a brother who wasn’t his brother-from-another-mother. That he refused them is the tragedy of There Will Be Blood.

Can’t leave you without another word about Anderson’s breathtaking audacity, and you better believe I’m lazy enough to quote Lim again:

The prominent bursts of music—and the way the narratives rely on musical principles like rhythm, tone, and phrasing—result in a kind of delirious synesthesia. His movies set off a crazy multitude of sensory triggers, leaving the impression that Anderson is working from a larger palette than most filmmakers.

Yes indeed.

Hard Eight/Sydney. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996. ***
Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997. ****
Magnolia. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999. ****
Punch-Drunk Love. Paul Thomas Anderson. 2002. ****
There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****

More from Stu VanAirsdale, who kept notes on his marathon Anderson retrospective. After the jump, videos with choice clips from Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love.

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The last word on Leni Riefenstahl seems always just out of reach. After her Memoirs, Steve Bach’s new biography provides a desperately needed corrective to Leni’s own lies, evasions, and half-truths. Anybody who has seen The Wonderful, Horrible Life knows what an extraordinarily maddening, talented, obsessive, domineering, and flirtatious creature Leni was even in her nineties–and she lived to 101. For artists anywhere–but especially Germans–Leni remains endlessly perplexing. The questions raised by her life go straight to the core of history, morality, ambition, power, and cinema. The dry statement issued after her death by the German government barely scratches the surface:

Leni Riefenstahl symbolizes a German artist’s fate in the 20th Century both in her revolutionary artistic vision and in her political blindness and infatuation. No one would deny that with her talent she developed cinematic methods that have since become part of an aesthetic canon. Her career also shows that one cannot lead an honest life in service of the false, and that art is never apolitical. (297)

Steven Bach. Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. 2006. ****

• Reviews: New York Review of Books, Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker
• Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism.”
• At GreenCine: Leni, Obits.
• Jodie Foster’s Riefenstahl project
• Previously on Muckworld

For once, a life worthy of a memoir. Leni Riefenstahl tells the gripping story of her rise from dancer and star of silent mountain films during the Weimar Republic to Triumph of the Will, Olympia, and “Hitler’s filmmaker,” followed by her long fall after the war, the Nuba, scuba. Riddled with contradictions, dubious statements and suspicious omissions, the book is also a thorny tangle that raises complicated questions about moral responsibility, political culpability, aesthetics, and ambition. Leni’s extreme unreliability (I had the uncanny sense that she started lying around page 5, about a playground incident) adds a layer of uncertainty that makes the book even more intriguing, down to the heartbreaking (or calculated?) last sentence.

After the war, when landmark achievements and intimate meetings with the Nazi elite–Goebbels, Göring, Hitler, Speer–give way to frustration and a string of canceled projects, the book slows down considerably. As Riefenstahl faces increasing hardship, it becomes difficult not to admire her dogged vitality and feel a certain degree of empathy for her. Regardless of your opinion on her life, work, and guilt, this book is bound to muddy some certainties. I’ll have to look at the two new biographies to see how some of her assertions hold up (not well, apparently), and I’m rewatching The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl for yet another take, but I don’t hope to come to terms with the confounding implications of the case Riefenstahl any time soon. Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101.

Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir. 1987. ****

Previously on Muckworld:

• The Blue Light
• The White Hell of Pitz Palü
• Triumph of the Will

Leni

• Leni Riefenstahl - Official Site
• Leni Riefenstahl’s Photography at Fahey/Klein Gallery
• Leni Riefenstahl on Wikipedia

The New Biographies

• Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach
• Leni Riefenstahl: A Life by Jurgen Trimborn
• Sleeping with ‘Hitler’s filmmaker’
• Clive James’ dismissive review in the Sunday Times
• Michikio Kakutani’s review

The diving sequence from Olympia:

I lucked into an advance copy of David Lynch’s book about “meditation, consciousness, and creativity,” and it’s splendid. Composed of short sections, the book is equal parts inspirational guide to using your creativity, anecdotal autobiography, and advocacy for Transcendental Meditation. In simple, direct language, Lynch graciously shares what he has learned about living “the art life” and his techniques for “catching” and developing ideas. There are brief sections on all of his major films (including INLAND EMPIRE) and proud stories about meeting Fellini and hearing that Stanley Kubrick considered Eraserhead his favorite movie. I ripped through this in a day but I’m looking forward to savor individual bits again and again–a generous and inspiring little book.

• David Lynch Official Site (with daily weather report)
• David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace
• Catching the Big Fish on Amazon.com
• YouTube video of David Lynch with Cow

Every hormone-addled boy wants to join a rock band because “the chicks are great.” But those kids don’t know that becoming a director is an even better way to get laid. This biography, by a bunch of Cahiers du cinema writers, drives home that point beautifully, and it names names: Jeanne Moreau, Claude Jade, Fanny Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, and pretty much every other beautiful woman who ever acted for Truffaut.

If that’s not inspiring, the book traces FT’s growth from street punk and syphilitic deserter to Oscar-winning independent auteur with admirable style. The part about his flame-out with Godard is fascinating, but I have to admit that I had to skim the clinical and terribly depressing description of his last brain-tumor infested months.

864 of Bogdanovich interviews with classic Hollywood directors. Been reading this off and on for months, and today the Queens Public Library reclaimed it from me, half finished. I got through Fritz Lang, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Allan Dwan and most of Alfred Hitchcock. Great stories and lots of practical, no-frills insight once you’re past the me! me! me! Bogdanovich introductions. I’ll have to put this back on the queue immediately to read the rest.