Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  There was this one movie that was really terrible, even worse—if you can believe it—than the one by the monkey. Carlos explained how they used the heel of a coke bottle instead of a camera lens to shoot it through, so it was all so blurry you couldn’t tell anything about it—just these washed-out colors changing around like in a kaleidoscope and some woman talking nonsense. At the end of it Carlos turned to me and said in this really loud voice, so everybody could hear, “Remind me to wash the dildo when we get back to the hotel room.” Which if you don’t think that was the perfect thing to say, especially so loud that everybody could hear, then you probably wouldn’t have liked Carlos all that much.

  There in Montreal was the first time I saw the movie all the way through, though I’d seen bits and pieces here and there during the spring, and since like I said before we did the dialogue a couple of months after the camera stuff, it was hard to tell how it was all supposed to hang together until you saw the whole thing finished. Carlos was very proud of it, and he kept looking over at me in the movie theater to see if I was enjoying it. Which I was, even if I was sort of shocked when I saw how they’d done this treatment to make the film look really old and grainy, with scratches and blips and stuff in it. I didn’t know he was going to do that. But it was fun to see how there was a kind of story hidden in there where I would’ve bet you money there wasn’t, and how Carlos had picked that story out from all the other scenes Seth had shot that he decided not to use. Some of which were my personal favorites, like the one where we go down in the abandoned subway tunnel to visit a friend of Sammy’s but can’t find her, and instead we find this regular living room set up down in the tunnel, this old sofa and lamp and coffee table, and about a hundred rats swarming over it.

  I don’t remember much else about Montreal except watching the movie. I got really drunk on champagne at some reception where everybody was dressed in tuxedos except Carlos, who never wore anything in his life except jeans and a black T-shirt and black leather motorcycle jacket; and of course me, who’s always been a bum. It was the first time I ever got drunk on champagne. The next day, I had the worst hangover of my life, so it was the last time I ever got drunk on champagne. In between getting drunk and getting hung over, though, I remember having some pretty wild sex with Carlos in the hotel swimming pool late at night when it was totally deserted.

  I guess the movie was a pretty big hit with the people that go in for that sort of thing, because it got written up in a lot of papers, and then they showed it in New York at another festival that fall, and some magazine called American Film did a big fancy interview with Carlos.

  It was this fall day when even in New York it was gorgeous and there were yellow leaves on the trees along the street—the interviewer came to the apartment, and since he said he’d buy lunch Carlos grabbed me and the three of us went to this little Polish restaurant. There were lots of restaurants like that in the neighborhood. I’d go by and see those old Polish men sitting in there, and always wonder what Sammy thought about them. He never had anything to do with any of them, even though he was Polish too. But I guess they weren’t Jews like he was, and so he didn’t trust them. There must’ve been too many things he remembered about living in Lodz for him ever to trust anything Polish anymore.

  We ate this soup made out of beets, borscht they call it. I wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of beet soup, but Carlos said it was the thing to have, and it was free, so I ate it and it wasn’t bad.

  The guy from American Film was this weasely, faggy-voiced guy with wire rims and curly black hair. He had a little tape recorder he set on the table, and a notepad with questions he’d written. He started right in, not giving Carlos a chance to eat or anything.

  That was the first time I ever heard Carlos talk about his movies, and it was incredible. It was a Carlos I’d never seen before—the Carlos I knew would rather talk about dildoes than movies, and he never seemed to take anything all that seriously. I mean, this was somebody who thought being able to shoot a flame out of your rear end was just the greatest—and now here was this other Carlos talking very seriously about things I could hardly even understand. And the interviewer was loving it—he was rocking back and forth in his seat he was so excited, though partly I think that was this nervous tic of his. But it amazed me. When Carlos started talking, at first I thought he was pulling the guy’s leg and what he was saying didn’t make any sense. But then the interviewer started asking more questions, like he understood Carlos, and Carlos answered like he understood the question, and they went back and forth like that for about an hour. When it was over I was exhausted, and they seemed like they could go on and on—which is what the interviewer said, “I wish we could just go, on and on like this.”

  I started to understand why Carlos brought me along. He wanted me to hear him talk about the movie the way he did, because he wanted me to know those things but didn’t think I’d listen if he just sat me down and tried to tell them to me directly.

  I didn’t say a thing through the whole lunch—I would’ve sounded too stupid. Plus, I figured the interviewer was so caught up in Carlos he didn’t even know who I was. But then—this is funny. When the article came out a few months later, in the little introduction where he described the restaurant and what Carlos looked like and all, there I was big as life. Which I thought was a hoot, the way he described me.

  I got Earl to find that interview for me in American Film magazine, and I want to put it in here so you can get an idea what it was like for this seventeen-year-old kid to sit there in that crowded little restaurant and listen to Carlos talk about this experience we’d all had, him and me and Sammy and all the others who were involved in it. The amazing thing was, what he’d experienced was totally different from what we experienced. Or at least what I did. If you’d asked me what that movie was about, I’d have said this old Jewish guy and this kid goofing in front of the camera. But sitting there listening to him talk, I suddenly started to see how, when Carlos looked at things, he saw them like everybody else, but at the same time he saw right through them too. I don’t quite know how to put it. He saw what was on the other side of normal things.

  That was scary. It made me think how much I was missing when I looked around at things, and how much Carlos was seeing. What it made me remember was one night when Carlos had come in, and I was reading some comic book. He took it right out of my hands where I was reading it, and stood there flipping through it. He looked sad; he shook his head. “You just don’t know how many pictures there are they haven’t put in that comic book of yours,” he said. “Miles of pictures left out, for every one they show you.”

  He let it drop to the floor. At the time it didn’t make too much sense, what he was saying—but in that little Polish restaurant that afternoon, it started to.

  This is the way they printed it in American Film, the January 1981 issue.

  Carlos Reichart had agreed to meet me at Veselka, a little Ukrainian restaurant on 2nd Avenue near his apartment. Veselka is bustling at midday, an amiable mix of old-timers and the trendy downtown crowd. Reichart entered the crowded room accompanied by Tony Blair, the sullenly attractive star of his latest film. There was an air of conspiracy about the two, a look of surprise as if they were thieves caught in the act. I half expected Reichart to challenge me, to glare at me defiantly, but he didn’t. Instead he was charmingly cordial and guarded, at least initially—though as the interview progressed and things loosened up a bit I realized he was, in fact, glaring at me. This is a director whose intriguing quality is, for me, his concentration. When he first burst upon the scene with Burning City in 1976, it seemed to many viewers as if he were intent on devouring film-making whole, transforming the entire genre with a single stroke. The intensity of his work is matched by the pace he sets for himself: Burning City (1976), Season of Swine (1977), Mother Chicago (1978), Ur (1979), and currently, at the New York Film Festival, Next Year in Gomorrah.

  AMERICAN FILM: Some critics have complained that your fil
ms tend to proliferate images with an abandon that risks incoherence. That seems a criticism to which Burning City and Ur are particularly susceptible.

  CARLOS REICHART: I seem to be an image-producing machine. You’ll say this openness could also apply to someone who has nothing to say, but I hope that’s not so in my case. The fact is that the series of films, beginning with Burning City through Ur and now this latest, has destroyed that need I had to identify myself sentimentally or ideologically with my subjects. I have to put my faith in a kindling of fantasy. Keeping my distance from my own mannerisms, my own stylistic quirks.

  AF: Some have detected in that a decadent impulse.

  REICHART: Oh I don’t think so at all. I’d rather evoke the surrealist tradition of Cocteau or Buñuel, which seems to me particularly vitalist and, in Buñuel’s case especially, fraught with overt political implications. The old surrealist tradition grafted onto the early American genius of a Keaton or Chaplin. But it’s true what you say, to some extent, in that my primary, that is to say initial impulse was definitely toward the aesthetic, what I’d call the holiness of the image—but then we’re talking the late fifties, early sixties. As you know I was a poet first. I had three books of poems out before I ever did any film work.

  AF: And your first film work?

  REICHART: Well, that’s a complicated story, but basically it was these friends in New York I met through the antiwar movement and they knew Antonioni, who was going to be in the States shooting. There was this whole crew of people going over the script for that film, Sam Shepard was one of them, for example, and somehow they put me on the payroll for it and there I was, a script doctor when all I’d done before was write some poems and know some people.

  AF: There was also the street theater work, which obviously prepared you in some way for that kind of work. How did that tie in?

  REICHART: That was mostly improv with big doses of Brecht and good old-fashioned agitprop. I don’t think we ever worked from a script, which perhaps prejudiced me against the rigidity of scripts because I still rely mostly on improv from my actors.

  AF: But clearly it’s improv that’s carefully controlled, yes? One doesn’t make film after film with the total “feel” of a Reichart film without being in some kind of control.

  REICHART: You could say I believe in an ordered chaos. The strict rules of chance. The spontaneity of my actors is invariably well rehearsed, and as a result, I’m seldom surprised by the happy accidents as they occur along the way.

  AF: Which is why you tend to work with the same people over and over.

  REICHART: Well, that and the fact that these are the people I know—people I’ve been with since ’68 or ’69, Sammy Finkelstein and Netta Abramowitz and Verbena Gray, so they’re all trained in improv, guerilla theater. It was the war that woke us all up. That made us start seeing the various structures—economic, cultural—that insinuate themselves within even casual you might almost say accidental images.

  AF: Such as?

  REICHART: Such as the structures of so-called normal life. The system of ideologies that buttresses that.

  AF: Let’s talk about Seth Rosenheim, who as cinematographer for all of your films has been widely praised.

  REICHART: Oh, Seth’s the absolute genius there. He’s entirely responsible for the look of everything. I didn’t even know about zooms when I started. I still don’t, really (laughs). No, it’s true. I think something up, I say to Seth can we do that? He either says we can do that or he says forget it.

  AF: And in that case you forget it?

  REICHART: (laughs) Absolutely.

  AF: You must be the only director in America who dubs all his films. Why that curious practice?

  REICHART: Well, I think dubbing enriches a character. It’s part of my taste for pastiche—it raises a character out of the zone of naturalism. What I often do is cross two nonprofessionals. I believe in polyvalence in a character. I like elaborating a character.

  AF: Your latest film has been met with a certain amount of incomprehension but also a great deal of enthusiasm. Personally I find the film very mysterious, unsettling—like looking at an old photograph album and realizing everyone whose picture is in there is dead now.

  REICHART: Next Year in Gomorrah is mysterious first and foremost because it’s fragmentary. But its fragmentariness is in a sense symbolic—the general fragmentariness of our civilization as it will appear to some future civilization. This is the real mystery of the film and the world represented in it. Like an unknown landscape wrapped in a thick mist that clears here and there, but only for a short time.

  AF: Hence the distressing of the actual film quality itself.

  REICHART: Precisely. I wanted to suggest an ancient film, or fragment of film found, say, in a canister dug up from the ruins of one of our cities, pieced back together but heavily damaged, much of it beyond repair.

  AF: One thinks of the Soviet reconstruction of Eisenstein’s Beuzhin Meadow after the war.

  REICHART: That hadn’t occurred to me, but yes. An example closer to home would be the stills from von Stroheim’s Greed that survive.

  AF: Even though in certain ways Gomorrah is a comic film, it’s also very sad.

  REICHART: That’s a personal impression. I agree it’s not very funny, it makes you think more than laugh. But when it was put on in Montreal a month ago the audiences laughed a lot. I should say this too—Gomorrah is also about the end of a certain kind of film-making, I think. It’s about the end of realism as a kind of limbo, and it evokes the ghost of realism, particularly in the beginning about two characters living life without thinking about it—humble humdrum and unaware. All the first part is an echo of realism, though naturally an idealized realism.

  AF: Which brings in the whole question of Hollywood.

  REICHART: I’ve never paid any attention to Hollywood, one way or the other. The main point is that in Gomorrah my love for reality is philosophical and reverent, but it is not necessarily naturalistic.

  AF: How did you find Tony Blair?

  REICHART: I met him by chance while doing Ur—he was there with some other boys watching us make the film and I noticed him at once. When I thought of doing Gomorrah I thought of him and Sammy Finkelstein without the slightest hesitation.

  AF: And you had worked with Finkelstein before?

  REICHART: Again, he dates back to the street theater. We were in Washington Square, I think it was right after Cambodia, the incursions, and Sammy walked up to me at the end of a performance—I remember we were all dressed up in these extravagant costumes, we were supposed to be mythological birds or something, it was very magical—and he pointed right at me, poking me in the chest with his finger, and he said, “I’m with you.” I took that to mean he was against the war too, but it didn’t—it meant he was joining The Company whether we wanted him or not.

  AF: That’s a funny story. And that sort of feistiness comes across in his character in Gomorrah.

  REICHART: Well, I hope. I took something of a chance, since there’s always something iffy in asking someone who may be near death himself to act his own death.

  AF: I remember the stories Satyajit Ray tells about the old village woman who played the grandmother in Pather Panchali.

  REICHART: Well, especially in that culture. But in any culture—to face your own death is a serious thing. Not just the possibility of your own death but the thing itself. Which for me is montage. Death, I mean. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. Though to be sincere I also have to say that for me death is important only if it’s not justified and rationalized by reason.

  AF: In an interview Barthes says that the cinema should not try to make sense but to suspend sense. Do you then agree with that, especially in connection with Next Year in Gomorrah?

  REICHART: Yes, I’m always trying to suggest that. None of my films are supposed to have a finished sense. They always end with a question—I intend them to remain s
uspended.

  AF: And the title? Clearly there’s the implication of diaspora, the Holocaust…

  REICHART: Oh, exactly, but here it’s combined with a vision of Jerusalem that, even if you finally manage to achieve it, or rediscover it since it’s really a kind of lost Eden, it’s going to be ruined, it’s going to disappear out from underneath you the instant you find it.

  AF: So is New York Gomorrah?

  REICHART: Is New York Gomorrah? I like that.

  “WHAT OTHER BOYS?” I REMEMBER ASKING HIM after that interview. We were walking down First Avenue and it was one of those great September days when you can just feel the sun in your bones.

  “What other boys what?” Carlos asked. I thought the question was pretty clear.

  “You said you met me with a bunch of other boys. Don’t you even remember?”

  “Well, I did meet you with a bunch of other boys, didn’t I?”

  “You met me in the laundromat. I was all by myself. You were doing your laundry and I was doing my laundry. You don’t remember that?”

  Carlos sort of frowned and then he laughed. “No, I don’t remember,” he said. “I have this very vivid image of you—you’re on your bike with about three or four other kids. It’s a very clear picture in my head. You were watching us do the shoot, and I asked you to hang around and you did.”