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Greg
M. Smith
In
Sayles
Talk:New Perspectives on Independent
Filmmaker John Sayles, edited by Diane Carson and Heidi Kenaga (Wayne
State University Press, 2005)
More
than any other contemporary American director (with the possible exception
of Robert Altman), John Sayles consistently experiments with making films
about groups.The maker of Return
of the Secaucus Seven, Matewan, Eight Men Out, Lone
Star, and City
of Hope
shows how graft, personal influence, and family obligation are the building
materials used to construct an American city.It
traces the way that a development deal is made to level a slum and build
a high-rent condominium complex.The
political machine seizes upon several seemingly chance events – a racially
motivated mugging entangled with allegations of homosexuality, an inept
burglary of an electronics store – and makes these the fulcrum for bringing
about the development deal.Using
the leverage provided by these events, the political operators exploit
family and community ties for their own purposes.Fathers
make deadly deals with the devil to protect their sons from prosecution,
and politicians compound lie upon lie to gain a little ground. The bad
guys and the good guys both play the same game: the local politics of expediency.Characters
take advantage of a situation and try to exploit it for their own advancement
or to further their cause.Mob furor
over a mugging can become the spark that ignites positive political change
if one plays it correctly, or a petty crime can create the opportunity
for riches if one tweaks the players properly.What
is doomed in this portrait is the politics of principle.Well-meaning
citizens trying to hold onto their values become complicit with murder.A
junior politician learns that he must compromise his high moral ground
if he is ever to achieve any real effectiveness. In
order to transform these ordinary events into political forces, we must
have a community so interrelated that even the most insignificant events
can trigger a response from others in the network.Actions
ripple across the surface of The
dominant staging move involves two characters (or sets of characters) walking
in opposite directions, passing each other.The
camera takes advantage of this brief sharing of space and moves to follow
the newly met characters.Often this
"passing" move is staged in deep space with the characters moving toward
and away from the camera.For instance,
early on in the film we see Jeanette (Gloria Foster) walking down the street
away from the camera, ignoring the obvious flirting from Levonne (Frank
Faison) at the community center.As
their interchange falters, Jeanette passes City Councilman Wynn (Joe Morton),
who is moving toward the camera, preparing to speak to Levonne, and the
camera now stays with Wynn for his next conversation scene. On
multiple occasions, Sayles does this passing maneuver several times in
a single location, going back and forth trading conversation partners,
showing how these characters' lives overlap unwittingly.For
instance, one scene begins by following Asteroid (David Strathairn), a
mentally ill man, as he shouts and walks down the street.As
Wynn passes him (walking toward the camera), he glances at the pathetic
figure, and then the camera begins to follow Wynn.Then
as Wynn walks up the street, he glances at two women (Maggie Renzi and
Marianne Leone) who are passing by, loudly haranguing two police officers
(Jude Ciccolella and Jaime Tirelli), and the camera starts to trail the
complaining women. The
passing maneuver duplicates and extends one of the basic experiences of
being in a city:the sideways glance.It
is acceptable to look briefly at the crazy homeless guy or the loud Italian
housewives, but one cannot stare without making contact with a stranger,
which can be unsettling or even sometimes potentially dangerous.To
walk down the street in a modern American city is to be constantly aware
that there are odd or intriguing or frightening characters all around us.We
intuit that some of these "characters" we pass on an urban street must
have interesting stories, but we cannot allow ourselves to pursue these
stories in the hurried rush of urban life. We know that there are a million
stories in the naked city, but we cannot follow them.City
of Hope takes this intuition and elaborates it, allowing us to follow
these characters' lives instead of merely glancing at their faces. The
passing maneuver in City of Another
mode of city life (in addition to the exchanges of passerby) is exemplified
by the traveler who flits from one thing to another in rapid succession.A
jogger, for instance, moves quickly through the urban space, covering a
great deal of ground without being able to linger in any one place.(In
some ways, the jogger is Baudelaire's flaneur[2]
passing by urban sights too quickly to be able to shop)Not
surprisingly, Sayles also uses versions of this figure to weave together
his urban tableau.Les (Bill Raymond),
the jogger who resumes running to overcome his fear after being mugged,
roams the streets, providing a useful connective to help spectators move
from one space to another.Les runs
past a police car, and we linger on the car, noticing that Mike (Anthony
John Denison) is spying on his ex-wife Angela's (Barbara Williams) window.We
follow his gaze into the apartment where Angela is engaging in her first
sexual encounter with Nick (Vincent Spano).Les's
jogging also leads us past an arsonist disguised as a repairman, and we
stay with the arsonist as he enters the soon-to-be-torched slum building. The
other traveler who structurally allows Sayles to flit from conversation
to conversation is Asteroid, the lunatic who incessantly babbles as he
lurches chaotically through city streets.When
the poor people displaced by the slum fire gather in a makeshift emergency
center, Asteroid is there, repetitively shouting, "We need help!"We
follow him until we trip across a conversation between Levonne and Jeanette
about the bureaucratic paperwork.Asteroid
then crosses in front of them, and we follow him as he travels, shouting,
"Why settle for less when you can have it all?"He
confronts a startled social service worker, and we stay with her as Councilman
Wynn approaches her and learns about the arson.At
first, Asteroid seems to be no more than a narratively efficient excuse
to move from one conversation to another without Sayles having to cut.However,
as we encounter him again and again obsessively repeating dialogue and
cliches from television commercials, he begins to function more like City
of As
the brief description of the scene in the makeshift emergency center indicates,
Sayles does much of his trading between characters in public places.Restaurants,
bars, police stations, and parties are places where a cross-section of
the community congregates, all with different purposes in mind.Such
crowded spaces make it easier for Sayles to unite the characters with his
camera, and these scenes truly showcase the stunning choreography of actors
and camera that Sayles manages in City of In
so doing, Sayles also underlines the importance of public spaces to the
community.They provide places for
the urban "tribes," as the director refers to them, to congregate. (Crowdus
and Quart, 145-6)Spaces such as police
stations and bars provide opportunities for chance encounters to occur
between tribes.An urban community
depends on having such neutral spaces where the members' stories may intermingle,
conflict, and resolve. I
have outlined a few of the most important ways that director Sayles and
cinematographer Richardson "trade" perspectives among the multiple protagonists,
but there are many more:using a single
unmoving character as an anchor in space and bringing various characters
into that space to interact; using sound to cue a switch in perspective;
changing the visual dominant from foreground to background or vice versa;
and so on.City of Hope is
a veritable catalog of inventive ways to move our attention from one character
to another.It is not, however, an
infinite catalog; examining some of the choices Sayles does not make helps
to clarify why he chooses the particular devices that he does. The
film is full of attention-getting transitions, but still Sayles avoids
certain snazzy ways to change character perspective.The
camera rarely floats away from characters (a la Wings of Desire)
to show us other characters without some strong diegetic motivation (figure
movement, sound, eyeline, and so on).The
bar scene described above provides one such rare example in which the camera
simply leaves Ramirez to anticipate and find Zip and Bobby.There
are also few matches-on-action to take us to another time and space (the
only significant one is when the film cuts from Angela and Nick having
sex to Wynn and Reesha [Angela Bassett] in bed).Nor
does the film generally give us an anticipatory cue of what is to come
and then cut to a thematically resonant object.One
example would be when Mrs. Ramirez (Miriam Colon) commiserates with Laurie
(Gina Gershon) about her demanding relatives, ending the conversation by
saying simply, "It's family."Sayles
then cuts immediately to framed family pictures of a younger Nick and Laurie,
revealing that we have begun another scene with Nick perusing old family
photos.By and large, in City
of
He
avoids these transitions only partly because these devices emphasize the
heavy hand of the director.Throughout
the film Sayles emphasizes contiguity as the main principle underlying
in his transitions from one protagonist to another.When
he cannot arrange to trade characters in relatively contiguous space, he
tends to cut to the next set of characters using a rather unremarkable
cut.The crossing passersby, the jogging
traveler, and the crowded public space are favored people and places because
these stagings require that the characters share space.Sayles
wants to emphasize there's no avoiding bumping into other "tribes" in
These
collisions initially may appear to be inconsequential.We
seem to trade perspectives for no other reason than having bumped into
another character.When Councilman
Wynn passes two African American boys, we leave his negotiation for computer
access for low income citizens to listen to the boys' inane conversation
as they play video games.Only later
do we realize that Sayles's naturalistically motivated but seemingly arbitrary
decisions of whom to follow serve larger narrative purposes.
Such
nonclassical changes of character perspective can provide surprisingly
complex moral insights.For example,
when Sayles follows two African American boys, Tito and Desmond, walking
down the street at night, suddenly they are thrown against the wall and
intimidated by two policemen.Our
instinct is to side with the boys, who were doing nothing more suspicious
than being two black boys walking down the street.We
want to follow them to hear their reaction at being so roughly handled,
but instead we trade to the policemen.After
the confrontation ends, we hear the policemen discussing their doubts about
whether they should have searched them at all.The
public bluster of the aggressive cops suddenly shifts to reveal their private
doubts.In a similar example, the
policemen harass and threaten a mother and child living in a condemned
building.We then follow the cops
as they descend the slum stairs, only to learn that one of the policemen
grew up in that same building and only left it due to the money his father
earned by running numbers.Sayles’s
choices of character perspectives initially seem to be driven solely by
the coincidences of contiguity, but as we learn more about the community,
we discover that his stylistic choices also serve narrative, political,
and moral goals.
City
of Hope wants to give us the feeling that we could follow potentially
any character we bump into, no matter how unimportant they might seem to
the narrative at the moment.After
the film builds up our expectation that characters will be traded, it then
sometimes sidesteps an opportunity to trade perspectives, making us aware
of the road not taken.As we eavesdrop
on Nick’s and Angela’s late night conversation in an empty street, we follow
their eyelines as they both notice a passing police car.Given
the stylistic norms established thus far, we could easily have transferred
our full attention to the police officers (perhaps even Angela’s jealous
ex-husband Mike), but in this instance we stay with Nick and Angela.The
expectation that the spectator will be asked to follow almost anyone who
passes by radically changes the way we interpret the space.As
such, passing cars and pedestrians are not ignored in the way that we ignore
the extras in a mainstream film.We
slowly learn that there is no such thing as a truly secondary character
in this film.
Characters
that seem unimportant when introduced to us soon return to play crucial
narrative roles.The best example
here is that of the two African American boys, Tito and Desmond.As
mentioned earlier, we meet them in Mad Anthony’s electronics store, where
Anthony (Josh Mostel) and Councilman Wynn are discussing computer access
for Wynn’s constituents.As they
walk they pass by Tito and Desmond playing video games, and Wynn and Anthony
move out of the frame while we linger with Tito and Desmond for a bit of
conversation that has little plot significance.Finally
Wynn and Anthony return to the frame, stealing our attention away from
the boys.We pass the boys again hanging
out in a night street as we follow a conversation between Reesha and her
brother Franklin (Daryl Edwards).Once
again the camera's attention is directed toward these boys, who make suggestive
comments to passing women.There
seems to be no narrative reason to be interested in this pair, but they
become the crux of one of the film's major plotlines when their mugging
of Les, the white jogger, ignites a community uproar.This
sordid event, covered with multiple lies, provides Councilman Wynn the
opportunity to change from an idealistic, ineffective politician to a practical
leader with real power.Thus, these
minor characters become major players.Without
them the plot of City of
It
is this leveling of the traditional character hierarchy of mainstream cinema
that is most radical about City of
To
see exactly how City of
Ophuls’s
La
Ronde is set up as a series of romantic entanglements in which, after
spending a moment with a particular couple, we follow one character in
the couple as he/she engages in an intimate moment with a different lover.Thus
an interlude between a philandering husband and a young woman is followed
by a rendezvous between the woman and a poet, whereupon that poet proceeds
to a romantic scene with an actress, who then seduces a count, and so on.The
baton is passed from one couple to the next, always having one character
in common to anchor our understanding.To
guide us along this narrative trajectory, La Ronde also has a superdiegetic
master of ceremonies, a character (played by Anton Walbrook) who declares
that he is neither author, announcer, nor passerby but rather the manager
of the carousel of love.This master
of ceremonies directly addresses the audience, announcing the next scene’s
participants (“The Maid and the Young Man”), but he also weaves in and
out of various diegetic spaces, interacting with the characters, now serving
as a maitre d’, at other times as a coach driver.The
scenes are doubly glued together by the connecting lover and by our metaphysical
narrator-host.In so doing,
Ophuls
makes explicit his metaphoric point:that
love is like a merry-go-round.His
lyrical camera moves passing from one character to another invite us to
ask what is the connection between this couple and the previous one, and
the master of ceremonies overtly gives us the answer:that
romance is an amusement, a joyous ride that cannot last.
It
would appear that using character “trades” encourages the audience to step
outside the immediate plot concerns to find larger connections, either
by pondering Ophuls’s metaphoric carousel of love or by discerning the
network of connection and coercion that runs a small city.Because
Ophuls’s film is constructed in circular, linear fashion (the soldier in
the first couple salutes the count in the last couple, bringing the film’s
conclusion back to its beginning), it is more concerned with elaborating
the overall metaphor of the carousel than it is with constructing a complex
society.Characters interact, they
pass the baton to the next character, and they disappear from the film.[4]In
The
other canonic art cinema film that passes visual perspective from one character
to another contiguous figure is Luis Buñuel's The Phantom of
Liberty.Although Sayles does
not cite Buñuel's film as an overt influence, the film demonstrates
another instructive alternative for how the "trading" technique might be
used.Like
City of
In
this way, Buñuel uses the "trading characters" technique for two
of his most characteristic purposes.By
abandoning plotlines and never returning to them,[5]
Buñuel once again violates the conventions of classical narration
and uses this frustration to make the audience grasp the very conventionality
of these narrational norms. In addition, the filmmaker wants to attack
one of his favorite targets:the fatuousness
of the bourgeoisie.As Joan Mellen
notes, "Buñuel follows each character only to discard him when one
more promising -- that is, revelatory of bourgeois intransigence -- happens
along." (321)The film targets a running
catalog of bourgeois foibles, including sexual perversions, irrational
denials, and prohibited desires, specifically abandoning a storyline in
order to poke fun at yet another class conceit.
Thus
Buñuel takes advantage of the way that the "trading characters"
technique encourages us to reach for broader associations between characters,
as noted with La Ronde and City of
Although
beautifully handled, the Steadicam trading of characters in City of
On
ER
and The West Wing (and in mainstream
This
distinction between stars and extras is deeply institutionalized in
The
aesthetics of classical
An
occasional Hollywood maverick may produce a rare exception to this trend
in mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, and by comparing City of Hope
to one such film -- Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, which also uses
elaborate visual devices to move between various plotlines – we can see
how Sayles’s deeply interrelated stylistic and economic structures make
his distinctive political portrait of a city possible.
Just
as Kasdan's The Big Chill (1983) provides an interesting study in
contrast to Sayles's Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), Grand
Canyon seems to be examining concerns that are similar to Sayles's
in City of Hope.Both films
(each released in 1991) deal with the fragility of human connections, given
the declining state of race relations in American cities, and both follow
a number of characters (Grand Canyon has six prominent ones) who
accidentally bump into each other.But
In
addition,
To
find comparable portraits of communities in American filmmaking, the obvious
place to look is within Sayles’s other group films.If
Sayles is so concerned with showing the politics of groups, and if the
character “trades” show interconnections so well, why does he use the technique
only in City of
Although
John Sayles’s work is frequently considered to be visually unremarkable,
this is clearly not the case (as City of
But
why didn’t future Sayles films use the contiguous trading technique, once
Sayles had mastered the Steadicam technology?Why
show this particular community in this manner, and not other Sayles communities?Because
City
of Hope is Sayles’s most urban film to date.
Sayles’s
authorship does not impose a consistent visual style across his films.Instead,
Sayles (true to his community-oriented politics) varies the look of his
films depending on his collaboration with key personnel, particularly the
cinematographer.For most of his directorial
career, Sayles has chosen to avoid the economic structures that come with
major studio backing, and this mode of production allows him to portray
communities as interconnected.But
his style can also vary based on the kind of community he wishes to portray.To
understand why City of Hope looks the way it does and has the politics
of equality that it does, we must need to understand all these factors.
For
Sayles, a community is not merely an aggregate of individuals; it is a
network of bonds both small and large.Anyone
can become a major player in the story of another person's life.In
City
of
Works
Cited
Baron,
David.1999.Sayles
Talk.In John Sayles:Interviews,
133-5.
Baudelaire,
Charles.1964.The
Painter of Modern Life.In Baudelaire
as a Literary Critic, ed. and trans. Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E.
Hyslop, Jr, 290-300.
Benjamin,
Walter.1968.On
Some Motifs in Baudelaire. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn, 155-200.
Carson,
Diane, ed.1999.John
Sayles:Interviews.
Crowdus,
Gary, and Leonard Quart.1999.Where
the Hope Is:An Interview with John
Sayles.In John Sayles:Interviews,
145-155.
Mellen,
Joan.1978.The
Phantom of
Ryan,
Jack.1998.John
Sayles, Filmmaker:A Critical Study
of the Independent Writer-Director; with a Filmography and a Bibliography.
Smith,
Gavin.1996.John
Sayles:I Don’t Want to Blow Anything
by People.Film Comment 32.3
(May-June): 57-68.
Suleiman,
Susan.Freedom and Necessity:Narrative
Structure in The Phantom of
Williams,
Linda.1981.Figures
of Desire:A Theory and Analysis
of Surrealist Film.
Endnotes