'Black Peter' and slice-of-life

Black Peter - Cerný Petr

Milos Corman

1964, black& white, Czechoslovakia

Writers: Milos Forman & Jaroslav Papousek

Loose-limbed New Wave slice-of-life, Czech style. It’s about nothing-and- everything: about a hapless 17year-old starting out in the world of work and romance, and none too successfully. This age of uncertainty is captured wonderfully, without judgement, and often funny. There are truthful organic details such as Peter/Petr (Ladislav Jakim) being ever-so-slightly more confident with his own age-group but just sitting and absorbing his parent’s concern and hectoring, browbeaten. Every time he is with them it seems like an interrogation: they aren’t mean, just overbearing and old-fashioned and not understanding of their son’s underdeveloped sense of confidence and ability.

There’s subtle political context in the way Peter’s first job is employed/trained in a store to spy and inform on shoplifters – with his boss’ spin of “we’re just trying to educate our customers to themselves” quickly dissipating – and how even the painting of the Madonna is watching them at home. The parents hector and lecture because, probably, they just feel it’s their job, not aware they are giving away their own discontent. They aren’t really inspiring aspiration. Aside from the political allegory, overbearing parents are something any teen could understand. But Peter isn’t intending to rebel, just trying to fit in or do what is expected. Even Peter’s acquaintance, the boorish Cenda (Vladimir Pucholt), isn’t quite the bully and rebel he initially might seem to be, but as equally awkward and embarrassing as he is pushy. Hey, he even comes to give Peter his money back. He’s the light relief.

The slice-of-life sub-genre is easily dismissed as inferior to something more strident and obviously trying to say something. Not that they don’t have a point and themes, but I am defining these as films that are led more by incident than narrative; less defined and marred by tragedy than accentuating the incidental the trivial. I seem to be thinking slice-of-life as the lighter side of neo-realism’s trend towards the downbeat. It’s about tone, editing, a feel an intention. So ‘Kes’ qualifies more as neo-realism but ‘We the Animals’ is slice-of-life, with its elliptical editing and dreaminess, even though they are both tragic.  But the modest agenda of something like ‘Black Peter’, or ‘We are the Best’, or a litany of other coming-of-age dramas that don’t hold with clamorous character “journeys” holds their own considerable power as reflections of daily life; of capturing moments between all the vivid dramatics. ‘Jim Jarmusch excels at this, perhaps the slightest of his slice-of-life being ‘Paterson’ (a favourite: it tells acres about daily artists; Jarmusch is less reliable when doing genre narrative). Or you have the likes of Linklater’s ‘Before’ Trilogy, or indeed his ‘Boyhood’. An example like ‘Les Centre Cents Coups’ is an example where the New Wave condenses that slice-of-life lightness with neo-realist tragedy.

There’s a lot of flash-and-dazzle in the New Wave, but in ‘Black Peter’ Forman only allows for one obvious trick: a freeze-frame that can’t help but nod to the aforementioned ‘The 400 Blows’, but for different intent: here, it stops Peter’s father’s lecturing in his tracks, as if saying make-way-for-something-new, or is-that-all-you-have? Certainly, Peter looks up expectantly.

Forman keeps the tone low-key and unaffected, but like the work of Yasujirô Ozu, the understatement allows for themes to bubble under and captures a mundane truth of daily life that something more bombastic can’t ease in to. For example: I never was a Czech teen starting work in the Sixties, but I certainly related to the slightly rudderless stumbling into adulthood that starts with Peter’s slightly difficult road crossing. For example, the prolonged aimlessness of the scene at the dance is a highlight, a delight in its capturing adolescent navigation of awkwardness and bravado and expectation. This slice-of-life genre captures the universality of experience, its randomness, despite the specifics, however strong our proclivity to impose narratives.

 

Permanent Vacation

Jim Jarmusch, 1980, USA

The opening narration of Jim Jarmush’s debut ‘Permanent Vacation’ is worth quoting at length as it sets the agenda for his entire career: having name-checked Charlie Parker, the voice-over says of this story, 

“I don’t expect it to explain that much, but what’s a story anyway except one of those connect-the-dot drawings that, in the end, forms a picture of something? That’s really all this is. That’s how things work for me. I go from this place, this person, to that place or person. And, you know, it really doesn’t make that much of a difference.” 

2016’s 'Paterson' may be slicker but despite Jarmusch’s dalliances with genre – thriller, westerns horror – this philosophy hasn’t really changed. In fact, it’s Jarmusch’s application of this philosophy to the formal rigidity of genre that has produced such distinctive results (with perhaps 'The Only Lovers Left Alive' showing a failing of application).

The opening credits of ‘Permanent Vacation’ play over alternations of views of the crowded city and deserted litter-strewn back streets, which is where our story takes place. Allie (Chris Parker) walks around a dilapidated Manhattan thinking he’s cooler than his surroundings. He gives his introduction over a montage of various places, from prison cells to upper-class lounges via unremarkable bedsits, possibly places he’s been. The first thing we see him do is tagging his name on a wall, as if staking a claim. Refusing to be tied to anything, he goes from barely furnished apartments with women to unpopulated lobbies of cinemas via slightly hysterical encounters with women on fire escapes. These vignettes do not articulate a narrative but rather a mood of deliberate and delicious aimlessness. No need for dramatic denouements here. 

Michael Wotjas calls this a “freeform, rough draft of a film” with its no-budget and student-film formal deficiencies clearly and somewhat proudly on its sleeve, but it’s this that gives it a no-money authenticity. It’s a view of the city more in line with Buddy Giovinazzo’s ‘Combat Shock’, Frank Henenlotter’s ‘Basket Case’ or William Lustig’s ‘Maniac’ rather than, say, Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’. Yes, it’s a class thing. He wanders into parts of the city that like look like bombsites. There’s the sense that there’s not much art design at all, that the camera was just pointed in the right direction. This teenage aimlessness is the point: Allie can be conceived as Jarmusch’s avatar, roaming through long takes, looking for cool and the end point. Occasionally, like youth do, Allie says inadvertently funny things that he thinks are profound. Jarmusch would soon hit comedy gold with his use of non sequiturs with Roberto Begnini in ‘Down by Law’. Jarmusch hasn’t quite perfected his mastery of random encounters here, but all the elements of his approach are present. The comedy is droll: an apathetic cinema girl, when Allie asks if she thinks he’ll like the film he’s just bought a ticket for, proceeds to synopsise the plot to him; or how he meets someone who seems to be his French doppelganger on the waterfront and they proceed to swap cool instead of hanging around to be friends.

He visits his mother in hospital, displays his yo-yo skills, steals a car. It’s quite a romantic view of homelessness conceived as an expression of ultimate wanderlust and freedom. Here, Allie is a long way from Paterson in ‘Paterson’ – which is like ‘Permanent Vacation’ come middle-age – who has made peace with the intimacy and subjectivity of art. Allie still seems to think the whole world is watching. And when he dances for his own amusement while a woman he is being cool for looks disinterestedly out of a window, Jarmusch shows that from the start he could capture people at their most entertaining in the most humdrum of contexts. It's a humane, generous, disarming and amusing wordview.

"Down by Law"

Jim Jarmusch, 1986, b/w, US

 

This year, Joe Sangre and I saw Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film “Only Lovers Left Alive”, and we liked it but we decided that there was something about Jarmusch’s aesthetic that left the actors looking bad. Was it the dialogue where the vampires couldn’t last a scene without referencing how they had met some renowned artist in history? The final image showed that Jarmusch could do Horror if he wanted to. Perhaps he is least successful when trying to be clever and poignant? Perhaps he was unaware that vampires meeting Famous People In History is a stale Horror conceit, although having high art the domain of hipster vampires was a decent gag. The film is most successful when just travelling around deserted streets in a car, or poking its camera through a bar door to listen to a deliciously haunting singer.

 

Perhaps that is why his early feature “Down by Law” works so well: it just rambles, and therein lies its magic and realism. I don’t mean that anyone would mistake the compositions and atmosphere for realism, but the sprawling and open-ended agenda feels akin to the unresolved relationships and dramas of life. “Down by Law” certainly feels bluesy and jazzy, loose-limbed and funny because people are naturally funny, but it’s also true whenever Roberto Benigni turns up citing from his book of English the film is a full blown comedy, not just an amusing slice-of-life tale about three guys thrown together in a cell that make a jailbreak. I have seen “Down by Law” many times and it always exists in my memory as a scratchy, pock-marked feature, as amateurish as it is sublime in its modesty. But watching the blemish-free Critereon edition reveals not only gorgeous black-and-white but that perhaps I misremembered the amateurish elements and that in fact Tom Waits and John Laurie’s performances are equally as strong as Benigni: Waits is deadpan but no less funny in a different manner and Lurie holds his own as the straight man. They know that Benigni is there to steal the show – that’s his character, after all – but the film is no weaker in Benigni’s absence. It’s the other characters that stop this from being just a funny film, because “Down by Law” is so much more. Like Malle’s “Lift to the Scaffold”, “Down by Law” seems to capture that blues and jazz mood, that sense of life as a series of coincidences and small dramas that remain relevant to maybe two or three people. But that’s all. It is the smallness and the ellipses that the truth of life comes through.

There is indeed something appealing in the scratched-and-warped vinyl feel of the well-used prints I’ve seen before, but the Critereon print shows “Down by Law” in its best light yet.