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Abel Ferrara
The Man: Who Cares?
by Kent Jones
There has to be something called reality in order for us to come to
its rescue.
Jean-Luc Godard
"We hate the films of Abel Ferrara just as much as the next person."
This is from a review of Dangerous Game (the late-night
cable replacement title for Snake Eyes, for which the
author admits a special fondness just because it's so terrible. The
same Dangerous Game that no less a tastemaker than Norman Mailer
calls a "bad, hysterical, messed up film" in a hot-air panegyric to
Madonna in Esquire ("I've come to the conclusion that you are a great
artist..our greatest living female artist"). Our greatest living female
artist wasted no time putting the hex on Dangerous Game
(henceforth referred to by its original title) before it was even
released and referring to Ferrara as a "scumbag" in the bargain. Root
around and you could probably dig up scores of lousy reviews for this
most provocative and dissonant of all Ferrara's films. While you're
searching, you may discover that even the raves for most of his films
are qualified. An admirer like J. Hoberman of the Village Voice
felt compelled to label Ferrara a "scuzzmeister" who had "lift[ed]
himself up to a higher spiritual plane" before his short review in
praise of Bad Lieutenant. And to the Rex Reeds or the Pauline
Kaels of the world, Ferrara is at best a harmless nuisance and at worst
a grating, annoying, irrelevant guttersnipe, an ill-mannered busboy at
a $100-a-plate dinner.
Not that Ferrara is working overtime to dispel his press image. Last
summer he substituted for Scorsese at a chic film preservation fund
raiser. The story I heard was: Abel gets up to the mike, gives it a
tap, says something like, "Okay, can everybody be quiet please? There's
something I'd like to say about film preservation." Tongues keep
wagging, glasses keep clinking. "Please - can you be quiet for a
minute? This is important." Same. "Can everybody just shut the fuck up
for a minute?" Guess who got thrown out by security guards.
But after all, what's Abel Ferrara to chic Manhattanites who like their
movies bite-sized, chewable and easy to digest? It's now early October,
and showers of million dollar bouquets are about to come raining down
on a confection called Pulp Fiction. In case you haven't heard,
this tasty, gladhanding movie is the work of a hyped-up ex-video store
clerk named Quentin Tar-antino, who was lumped together with Ferrara in
1992: "the sons of Scorsese." Pay a little attention and ask
yourself--could two filmmakers be any more different (and could two
filmmakers be any more different from Martin Scorsese)? Tarantino is a
canny audience manipulator with his eyes on heaven, and he has one
trick up his sleeve: a slow build-up to a perfect mixture of horror and
hilarity that's like a drug-rush. Scene after scene proceeds according
to this same blueprint. It's the sort of filmmaking that Ferrara, in an
interview we did last February, calls "planned parenthood, you know
what I mean? Safe sex, baby." For an underworld movie, Pulp
Fiction is pretty clean and orderly.
Over in the next galaxy is Ferrara. "The point is, you gotta make
something happen up there: something's gotta go down or there's no
sense turning on the camera...How can I put this? There's gotta be an
event, that you're gonna turn the camera on for, and if
that event isn't there, then what's the point? What're you shooting?
Are you doing this shot so you can go to that shot?" Here's a case in
point. Midway through his 1992 Bad Lieutenant, Harvey Keitel
pulls over two young girls for driving with a busted light. At this
point, we know that Keitel's New York police lieutenant is a serious
junkie, that he's into kinky sex, that he's on the trail of the rapists
of a nun, and that he's putting an impossible amount of money on the
Dodgers in the series (while he's taking bets on the Mets from his
fellow officers) and he's losing. Keitel starts innocuously talking up
the girls, on whom the camera fastens for long blocks of time. There's
nothing dramatically pointed or mechanized in their actions and--in the
process--a nice, unassuming portrait of Jersey girls develops like a
materializing photograph (they're under age, it's their dad's car and
he doesn't know they have it, they've just come from the Cat Club and,
"Look--maybe you could just give us a warning or something."). The
lieutenant responds by suggesting they do something for him in return.
"Y'ever suck a guy's cock?" They drown in their bad luck before coming
up for air: "Yeah--so what?" Keitel lets them know he means business
before he instructs the girl in the passenger's seat to put her ass in
the air and the driver to "Show me how you suck a guy's cock--show me!
You little fuck! Show me!" It's repeated like an incantation before she
snaps to attention and starts miming fellatio like a porn queen.
Ferrara cuts from a close-up of the driver to a wide shot of the whole
event. There's a light rain that puts a fog on the window between the
driver and Keitel, who is furiously beating off and mouthing
half-intelligible obscenities to himself. He comes, zips up his fly and
walks off into the darkness. The girls try to get themselves back
together, sharing a can-you-believe-what-just-happened-to-us
breather.
Dangerous Game
A good part of the beauty of this emblematic Ferrara scene is the
quiet; it's New York toned down to a whisper. Ferrara may be the most
patient director in American movies today, possessed of a deeply
contemplative sensibility under a patina of hardcore low-life. American
movies within the last ten years have been rife with obscene, exotic
flauntings (up in the pantheon would be the sex at knifepoint/gas mask
number from Blue Velvet, the broken bone jutting through the
skin in Born on the Fourth of July, the fisherman pissing on the
corpse in Short Cuts, and of course Tarantino's patented party
favors.) But the Ferrara scene is "Kinkiest Movie Scenes Anthology"
material only on paper. Part of the reason is that its action is out of
the blue, mysterious, its raison d'etre non-titillating, its effect
oddly lulling and harmonic. With any of these other scenes there's a
Point Being Made (for Lynch, its the engineering of the audience into
territory as strange and deeply uncomfortable as he can manage; for
Oliver Stone it's a boneheaded reminder of the horrors of war; for
Altman, it's a stale editorial on the callousness of American life).
The machinery behind these set pieces reveals directors in search of
big shock effects, tripping over themselves to get to them. But in this
scene, the obscenity is a private self-flagellation. Ferrara moves into
things unassumingly. Instead of reordering reality to suit his concept,
he works with what's there--the immediate reality of the rain, the "Oh
my god--why us?" non-plussed reactions of the girls, the fact that the
non- actresses didn't know how to drive a car which caused an on the
spot rethinking of the scene, Keitel's instinctive return to a civil
servant demeanor as he walks away.
"What's that Kubrick rap?" Ferrara mused, trying to answer a question
of mine about how movies are constructed. "The idea that a movie's an
inverted pyramid is bullshit." It's certainly true of his movies, which
don't really have subjects as much as destinations, end points,
outcomes. And where a Tarantino controls his framing and camera
placement to the point where you might think you're watching a puppet
show, Ferrara listens to what his locations and his actors are saying;
he lets them breathe. All of New York seems to be hovering outside the
frame. In his practice of randomness within a specific framework,
Ferrara has a strong affinity with Warhol. But Godard's his hero, and
he's a filmmaker for whom Godard's maxim, "Cinema is truth 24 frames
per second," (he quoted it during the interview) is a natural law.
Ferrara gets indelible impressions of things other directors take for
granted: a sodden, acne-faced altar boy doing first communion chores; a
strip joint with the required dose of tired pizzaz; some loose-limbed
shucking and jiving around the San Gennaro festival. More and more, he
has tended to structure his films according to site and
moment-specific, non-dramatic action, and this gallery of faces,
moments, movements, places is so vivid precisely because it is not
weighted down with the kind of thematic hope chests that have you
watching most movies the way you go through a maze.
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