Essence of Mannstyle: Blackhat

Mannstyle
No film director gets the sound of gunfire like Michael Mann. It's not just that he typically uses recordings of live fire; plenty of people do that. There's an alchemy he performs with his sound designers, a way of manipulating both the sound of the shots and the ambient sound to create a hyperreal effect. It's not the sound of gunfire. It's a sound that produces the effect of standing close to the sound of gunfire.

Mann is celebrated and derided for his visual style, a style so damn stylish that any Mann film is likely to get at least a few reviews saying, "All style, no substance." I can't empathize with such a view; for me, style is the substance of art, and if any object has value beyond the functional, that value is directly produced by style. (Which is not to say that Mann's style is above criticism. Not at all. But to say that it is "only" style, and that substance is something else, something that can be separated from style, seems nonsensical to me. You may prefer the style of an Eric Rohmer or Bela Tarr or a Steven Spielberg or just the general, conventionalized style of mainstream Hollywood or mainstream TV ... but it's still style, and it's still substance created and transmitted through style.)

The Sound of Movies

The wonderful online film magazine Reverse Shot has just released an entire issue devoted to sound, with essays on the sound of specific and quite varied films:

If one shot can contain an entire film in essence, then can a sound? And if the instantaneous break between two images contains shifts in perception that are the exclusive domain of cinema, then what happens when the aural element is added? Since the late twenties, sound has been as essential an ingredient as the shot or the cut in film’s construction, yet more often than not it isn’t discussed in film criticism, with all elements of mise-en-sc癡ne making it take a back seat.

I'm very sensitive to sound in general, and whenever I used to direct plays I spent nearly as much time on the sound design as anything else.  For the past eight months or so, I've been working as the sound recordist for an independent film some friends of mine are making, and that's made me even more aware of film sound than I was before.  Movies are often said to be "a visual medium", but this isn't entirely true -- they are, certainly, a visual medium, but they're not just that.  Part of the magic of cinema is that it uses so many different art forms at once, and sound is a central part of our experience of any movie.  Even silent films weren't actually silent.

There are lots of good essays at Reverse Shot, though a couple of moments stood out for me.  First, I was glad to see Matt Zoller Seitz writing again about The New World, since he's been one of the film's most intelligent champions ever since it was released.  (BFI should hire him to write one of their Film Classics monographs about it.)

Taken together, Malick’s multiplicity of mirrored images and situations, repeated music tracks and sound effects suggest that the story of The New World isn’t meant to be interpreted as self-contained and linear—locked-off from the rest of time and space—but as a microcosm of a larger cycle, a lone rotation of a clock’s second hand. When spring and fall arrive, we open our windows. The sound of wind moving through hallways and rooms reminds us that one phase, one chapter, is ending, and another is beginning (or vice-versa); that we’re forever leaving one place, one space, and entering another. 

I was pleased, too, to read Elbert Ventura's essay on Heat, because one of my strongest memories from first watching the film (which I saw three times in the theatre on its first release) is of thinking, "Wow -- that's the most realistic gunfire I've ever heard in a movie!"  I was nineteen, still living in a gun shop when I wasn't at college, and I knew what those weapons sounded like.  I also knew, to some extent, how hard it is to capture the sound of guns, having taken a video camera to a couple machine-gun shoots (the noise totally overwhelmed the puny mic in the camcorder and almost liquified the tape).  There's a resonance to gunfire that is difficult to replicate.  Michael Mann cares about the weapons in his movies, he's fanatical about accuracy, and in the "Battle of Los Angeles" scene, he and the sound designers ended up choosing to use the live production sound of the guns firing.  There is a meaning more important than verisimilitude, though, as Ventura notes: "Beyond its authenticity, the bruising boom feels definitive, taking us beyond the disposable sounds of mayhem in other movies."

Directors of the Decade

The ever-wonderful Matt Zoller Seitz has written a great feature for Salon.com -- "Directors of the Decade: The Sensualists". Actually, this is one of ten features Seitz is writing for Salon about "Directors of the Decade", but for me this is the group that matters most, because it includes Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, and Wong Kar-Wai, some of my absolute favorites, though I had never thought of them as a group before.  Or maybe I have -- I've been thinking a lot recently about why Lynch, Malick, and Mann in particular appeal to me so deeply. (I love some of Wong Kar-Wai's films, too -- 2046, In the Mood for Love, and especially Happy Together, though My Blueberry Nights proved nearly unwatchable and Ashes of Time, in either version, left me cold. Hou Hsiao-hsien I hadn't really thought of in relation to the others, and I'm least familiar with his work, having only seen Flight of the Red Balloon and The Puppetmaster.)

Here's how Seitz defines the group:

The sensualists are bored with dramatic housekeeping. They're interested in sensations and emotions, occurrences and memories of occurrences. If their films could be said to have a literary voice, it would fall somewhere between third person and first -- perhaps as close to first person as the film can get without having the camera directly represent what a character sees.

Yet at the same time sensualist directors have a respect for privacy and mystery. They are attuned to tiny fluctuations in mood (the character's and the scene's). But they'd rather drink lye than tell you what a character is thinking or feeling – or, God forbid, have a character tell you what he's thinking or feeling. The point is to inspire associations, realizations, epiphanies -- not in the character, although that sometimes happens, but in the moviegoer.

You can tell by watching the sensualists' films, with their startling cuts, lyrical transitions, off-kilter compositions and judicious use of slow motion as emotional italics, that they believe we experience life not as dramatic arcs or plot points or in-the-moment revelations, but as moments that cohere and define themselves in hindsight -- as markers that don't seem like markers when they happen.

Bingo -- if I could sum up the mix of aesthetics and worldview that most appeals to me, that reflects and extends my own take on how it feels to live, I doubt I could come up with a better description than Seitz has.  Indeed, it reveals succinctly what I most favor in art.  That's not, of course, to say that all other approaches are wrong or don't work or whatever, but that the fastest, surest way I've found toward the pleasures of recognition (of life, of living, of being and time) and the evocation of emotion (without what feels to me to be sentimentality) is via exactly what Seitz describes.

(If my preoccupations of late seem mostly to be with the world of cinema, you're right. A profound sense of having burned out on prose fiction has been replaced by a deeper fascination for film and film criticism than I've felt for years. [The timing is appropriate, since I'm teaching an intro to film course next term, about which more later.]  I always return to prose fiction -- it is, in so many ways, the foundation of what I know -- but sometimes need to take a little break.)

Zen Pulp: The World of Michael Mann

Matt Zoller Seitz, one of my favorite film critics, has created a 5-part video series about one of my favorite film directors, Michael Mann. A few of the episodes are stronger than others, but they're all insightful, and give an excellent sense of what makes Mann special:

Zen Pulp, Pt. 1: Vice Precedent: Michael Mann's existential TV drama

Zen Pulp, Pt 2: Lifetime subscriptions: Michael Mann's honor-bound individualists

Zen Pulp, Pt 3: I’m looking at you, Miss: The women of Mann

Zen Pulp, Pt. 4: Do you see?: Michael Mann's reflections, doubles, and doppelg瓣ngers

Zen Pulp, Pt 5: Crime Story: Michael Mann's influential pre-Miranda police procedural

The best episodes are the middle ones, and part 4, which focuses on Manhunter, is the best of them all. Video essays are a particularly fine way to explore film, because the evidence for an argument can be shown, specific scenes and even frames can be analyzed, and illuminating visual juxtapositions and comparisons are possible.

The power of these web essays is heightened for me by my fascination with Mann's work -- among living American directors, he ranks nearly as high as Terrence Malick for me. There is a similar appeal to both directors, with Mann creating gritty, crime-obsessed cousins to Malick's more ethereal explorations of time and light. Indeed, the only Mann film I actually dislike, The Last of the Mohicans, may suffer in my view as much for not being The New World as it does for any of its other flaws (an overwrought script, clunky acting, an annoyingly intrusive score).

Zen Pulp does not discuss Mann's latest film, Public Enemies, but Matt Zoller Seitz has written an insightful review of it at IFC (other reviews worth reading are those of Scott Foundas and Manohla Dargis). There's a lot I love about Public Enemies (even beyond Johnny Depp and Thompson submachine-guns), but what struck me first was how different it is from Mann's previous film, the much-misunderstood Miami Vice, though both movies are exploring, among other things, the visual potential of digital cinematography. Vice, though, is like Mann's version of a Wong Kar-Wai movie; Public Enemies now and then feels like Jean-Pierre Melville. (I would say more, but for now everything I have to say has been said by the reviewers I linked to.)