Past Programs
Community and Society - 2008
There Will Be Blood
07/02/2008
The opening of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
puts us down a hole. A shaft, dug by a sweating, whiskered man whose hands, boots, clothes, and whole body are grimed by dirt. The camera directs our gaze to the hardness of the rock the man is gouging, the dust, the strain on his muscles, the dour tenacity. He packs the hole, lights a fuse, hauls himself up a rickety ladder, slips. The fuse ignites. The man is splayed in the shaft, leg awry. And we watch every painful second as he dazedly recovers and hauls himself up the ladder once again, to lie gasping under the sky.
Meet Daniel Plainview, prospector.
Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the most gifted physical actors of a generation, a man who went and worked in a cobblers shop for months to learn a previous role, here joins Paul Thomas Anderson to present a film which, for its first fifteen minutes, has us riveted with the most extended close-up examination of physical toil we have seen for years. We will get to know this shaft, and others like it, intimately. When oil begins, for the first time, to ooze and gush in the bottom of these hard-scrabble shafts, we will feel the stuff oozing and mingling with dirt, sweat -- and more blood. Men will die in these primitive holes, and we will watch it happen, so that the black sticky fluid will enrich a man who registers his first claim lying on the dusty wooden floor of the mines office.
Such a hymn to toil -- hard physical labour -- would no doubt have been appreciated by Upton Sinclair, the socialist writer whose 1927 novel Oil was the platform on which Anderson has sprung his film.
Sinclair, a lifelong apostle for the working class, wrote nearly a hundred books, of which the most famous, Jungle, exposed the brutal working conditions in Chicago abattoirs. It led to legislation regulating both the products and the safety conditions in the industry, and eventually the Food and Drug Administration, which was not what Sinclair the Utopian socialist had in mind. He wanted the abolition of wage slavery and the exploitation of poor and often under-age workers.
But there is quite a deal of Sinclair's fascination with American archetypes: the ruthless capitalists, impoverished farmers, and slyly opportunistic evangelists in Anderson's film.
Lewis was inspired in part by a couple of scandals of the twenties: the so called Teapot Dome affair, in which Warren Harding's Secretary of the Interior was paid in no-interest loans for leasing out crown land to oil barons. He was also, it's said, inspired by some of the scandals surrounding the holy roller evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson.
Anderson has heightened these elements in Sinclair's sprawling novel. Much of the film's drama is a conflict which plays out between Paul Dano as the preacher Eli Sunday, a man with a grievance, a man Plainview first meets when he comes to persuade the poor, godfearing Sundays that he wants a lease on their farm so he can go quail hunting with his young son.
He wants no such thing. He wants the oil he knows by then is under their hardscrabble dirt. And teenage Eli, a boy with a gift for preaching, wants royalties for a new church and a road to its doors. He will re-appear throughout this film to taunt and torment, and at one stage strike a devilish bargain with Daniel Plainview as the oilman builds his empire.
The other character in this film is the son who Daniel thrusts forward as he presents himself to the hardworking, Christian farm families to persuade them to sell their leases. 'This is my son, HW,' he says. 'We have no secrets. I'm a plain man, a family man and I am building the business for him. I believe in plain speaking.'
He believes in no such thing, and HW in fact is not his son. He was a baby in swaddling when his father died down Plainview's first shaft, and for reasons best known to himself, Plainview adopted him. He may even love him, as much as he can. But HW comes in mighty useful in these transactions with poor farmers.
And when, later, the boy who has always modelled himself on his so-called father is in great need, Daniel has a choice between business and family. Guess which way the oil man jumps.
In many ways this is an anachronism of a film, one which has way more in common with such great American social realist parables as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath than it does with the oil men of Dallas or Dynasty.
It's a vehicle for Anderson, a filmmaker interested in big ideas, to re-examine some of the foundation myths of California, a state in which oil, fundamentalist Christianity and cinema have all been historical engines. And he has said the parallels with current political themes in America made the film irresistible.
With Day-Lewis driving the film, in one of the most towering, completely physical and compelling performances of his career, and with Anderson's attention to the blood and guts, to the ooze and sweat on which both wealth and ideologies were built, it should have been a masterpiece. But I found the endgame less satisfying than it should have been. It takes a very long time for HW as a man to find his way, and the closing scenes, audacious as they are, are somehow empty. Maybe this was the point.
Magnificent poetry if flawed, explosive drama from two very material boys. After you've spent time on these oilfields, special effects explosions won't easily satisfy you.
Night
07/02/2008
Australian director Lawrence Johnston made a big impression in the nineties with his documentary,Eternity , telling the story of Arthur Stace, a man who spent his nights chalking the word in beautiful flowing script on Sydney pavements. It was a gentle, contemplative film which left room for reverie on the back of his beautiful images.
After a stint as a film bureaucrat, and some intriguing short films, Lawrence has returned with another feature documentary: this one exploring what Night means to a collection of Australians.
Once again, the images, captured this time by cinematographer Laurie McInnes, are beautiful. To tell the truth I was rather dreading a film which worked in sound and image only, on the model of Godfrey Reggio's Koyannisqatsi. Not that I don't enjoy a film which makes us look carefully at images, but I feared an imitation.
But Lawrence Johnston has done something more. He's also talked with a gaggle of Australians about what night means to them. At first, their voices are anonymous. Later, we glimpse faces, but they are always subservient to the image. I could have done with an even larger range of people, in fact.
What this does do though is prompt us to pursue our own memories and reveries.
