Search for a film:

April 06, 2006

America, America, This is You!

European directors on America

By Andrew

Time magazine's latest cover asks "Who gets to be an American?" Lady Liberty looms large in the background, her palm outstretched. What is Time's big idea? As the Minute Men would have it, she means to slap us; but if those among the millions protesting House Bill HR-4437 prevail, Liberty's about to land an affirmative high-five. This afternoon I was happy to be a part of a crowd of five hundred plus walking out at Western Washington University to oppose the most recent tide of awfully misdirected anti-immigrant anger — a tide that is only the latest in a history of white people struggling to defend a country that was never really ours to begin with.

As people are out there putting their asses on the line on the streets, now I'm in here with my ass on a chair. But my issues aside, the question of "Who gets to be an American?" is a tough-one, no matter what Time may think of it. "American" is an ever-elusive term; defining it is tough because it is forever in flux. In Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love, the equally elusive character Elle harangues an American producer for the United States's lack of a true name: it cannot be simply "America," she says, for that term inevitably includes Canada and Latin America as well. This moment earned Godard more than a few harangues himself, from critics who were sure it betrayed a simple-minded "anti-Americanism" on the filmmaker's part. But no matter what one thinks of how he asked it, Godard was posing an essential question — "What is America?"

Godard is far from the first director to ponder "America;" European directors have been at it for decades — the likes of Antonioni, Herzog, von Trier, Wenders. Sometimes the films they produce are brilliant, subtle, telling; sometimes they're incredibly transparent, stupid, dumb — just like, I suppose, Americans themselves.

I have only just begin to watch a lot of these films, and I'm yet to even tease out the "America" in some of them. For instance, while red, white and blue forms the striking and brilliant color scheme of Wim Wender's Paris, Texas [1984] — making the analogy to "America" inescapable — it will take another viewing or two of the picture before its intentions are clear. If anything, the almost total absence of non-white people in Texas may seriously test the value of Wender's analogy, if one really is intended (Wenders' reportedly celebratory reception of Malick's The New World may further bespeak a certain misunderstanding of American history). Still, I am not confident to say for sure until I can truly grasp what the film is all about. The same goes for Wenders' earlier The American Friend, an ode to Alfred Hitchcock and a murder mystery adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. Beyond a cowboy hat, what is so "American" about the Friend — an art dealer by the name of Tom Ripley (played by Dennis Hopper) — is lost on me. Unlike Paris, Texas, the film plays out on the home turf of Wenders himself, West Germany, and while commentary on the relationship between Germany and the United States might be implied, I'm far too unfamiliar with European history to have caught any of it.

In Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger [1975], the meaning of an American in Europe is somewhat clearer to me. The character of David Locke, an aloof reporter vainly seeking the beat of a new life of adventure, is said to have been raised in the States. Here, Americanness denotes individualism, aloofness, disconnection, all themes the Italian Antonioni would take up again in Zabriskie Point [1970], a film actually set in America. According to film lore (i.e. IMDB trivia), Antonioni had set out to document the Sixties counter-culture in California, and he was hounded by the authorities because of it. Despite the repression, the final result shows Antonioni indelibly succeeded in achieving what he set out to do — too well, in fact. The first quarter of the picture is both (perhaps unintentionally) satirical and strangely charming in a Medium Cool sort of way. An early scene gives us priceless footage of debates between Black Panthers and would-be white Berkeley revolutionaries, but the protagonist of the film finds it all to be a drag, stands up and declares his feelings of alienation. As he stammers off, he takes the film along with him, where it becomes surprisingly tedious (whereas Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool never is, even today). Much like the Sixties counter-culture itself, Zabriskie Point is full of many, many excesses, most of them laughable. How else to explain the minutes upon minutes of naked white bodies writhing in the California desert to the incessant wails of a steel guitar? The original ending — reportedly excised by studio censors — was a shot of an airplane skywriting the phrase "Fuck You, America." Alas, as silly as it sounds, it might have made a saving grace for the viewer of the film, who is left completely bored out of their mind otherwise — not in the usual, thought-provoking Antonioni fashion, but a cheaper, tie-died edition.

When Antonioni's protagonist leaves behind the Panthers, he also leaves a lot of American history behind. Any film purporting to tell an American Tale has to address the issues of race, gender, and violence, or else it is a mere tall tale, hardly based on a true story. Unfortunately, most European directors seem as oblivious towards these issues as their American kin continually prove themselves to be. Danish director Lars von Trier's "USA: Land of Opportunity" trilogy at least gets the issues right. By enacting each film on an elaborate soundstage, he brilliantly strips away the dominating landscapes that are so central to American romanticism, effectively foregrounding the violence, misogyny, and racism that are just as central to American history (for another brilliant, and ultimately more successful take on American landscapes, see the paintings of Sandow Birk). This is about as far as the brilliance goes, however, and it is not all that original, a page taken straight out of Bertolt Brecht's playbook. Of the trilogy, only two films are currently released, Dogville [2003] and Manderlay [2005]. While I've only seen Dogville, it is likely to be the only one I see. While Von Trier makes the film purposefully painful to watch, I feel this accomplishes very little accept to alienate the viewer, and strikes me as inevitably an incredibly inept illustration of the American story von Trier is trying to tell.

Werner Herzog's Stroszek (1977) is its own American tragedy, in its own playful, absurd way. The film begins in Herzog's native Germany, where we are introduced to Bruno Stroszeck. Back on the streets after many years in prison, Bruno is an absent-minded street musician; he walks the streets with his zipper undone, and croons tunes in alleyways. He's also kindhearted, perhaps, as he invites a battered prostitute named Eva to take refuge in his apartment. After pimps come calling, violently, Bruno and Eva join their old (i.e. elderly) friend Scheitz and flee their persecution, seeking refuge anew in America. From there, things look good, at least for a while. The three settle down in Wisconsin with Scheitz's nephew; Bruno works as a car mechanic, Eva as a waitress at a truck stop, and Scheitz wanders around testing his theories of animal magnetism. Yet slowly, for whatever reason — Bruno's absentmindedness one suspects — the story slowly begins to fulfill the prophesies of the saddest country western clichés. Bruno loses most everything; if he had a dog, it would probably get run over. As Bruno's life unravels, the film's ends on a note that is so outlandish, it ought not to be revealed, maybe not even by a "serious" film critic. I'll leave the final line of the film to speak for itself: "We have a 10-80 out here, a truck on fire, we have a man on the lift. We are unable to find the switch to turn the lift off, can't stop the dancing chickens."

Herzog, in his DVD commentary for Stroszek, lets the last image of the film speak for itself as well. In fact, his whole commentary seems to defer to the images, for he explains very little of what the film's sad story is supposed to tell us about America, or anything else for that matter. Prodded by his fellow (rather kiss-ass) commentator for his feelings about America, Herzog just tells us he likes America, that everyone here is exceptionally nice. He spends the bulk of the commentary doing his usual Herzog routine, which involves telling of all his adventures in making the film. We learn that Bruno really is an absentminded street musician who indeed spent years in a mental institution, while one of the pimps, Herzog tells us, is a real pimp, who showed Herzog the Hamburg underworld. Plainfield, Wisconsin, where the American scenes of the film were shot, was also the planned location for a late night grave digging with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris; and all the Native Americans in the film, Herzog assures, are "authentic" Native Indians.

The commentary tells us all about Herzog's assorted hijinx, not to mention his racist notions of authenticity. But it tells us very little about America. Stroszek is no less enjoyable because of it, but it bespeaks something that happens whenever European directors point their camera towards America: their films tell us as much about these directors they do about us. Antoninoni's America is one of total alienation; von Trier's is one of total violence. Yet when we look back towards Europe in this way, we mustn't point our nose towards the air. Certainly, in all these films we learn things about America we would be hard pressed to find on our own. I'll never forget what strength and resolve the experience of exile in Europe gave James Baldwin; he often said he could have never ventured into the American South otherwise (see his essays in Notes of a Native Son).. The European take on America gives us a view outside ourselves, and that alone makes these films worth the price of admission, for we ought to point a critical view, not just towards Europe, but on everything — "America" most of all. As Baldwin ever reminded us, the price of the European's ticket into "America" was very often to lose this critical perspective entirely. Failing to heed Baldwin, Lady Liberty's hand takes the shape of an "L" — meaning we're all losers.

Back to Top