I have been away a while, but am still here to keep adding to this blog all things Michael Mann. The Guardian newspaper here in the UK ran an excellent video interview for their website with Michael Mann, from their "In the director's chair" series. Mann touches insightfully into the making of Public Enemies, and gives a glimpse of his working philosophy, some of which mentions the duality of humanity that comes across in so many of his films. Intriguingly, he says he would love to revisit 18th century America, and his movie The Last of the Mohicans. Check it out here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2009/jul/02/michael-mann-public-enemies
Saturday 3 October 2009
Thursday 30 July 2009
Your views on Public Enemies - post them here!
"STICKY" POST
Although I am presently "lost" in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland with no hope of seeing Michael Mann's Public Enemies until the 7th July, I am sure you will be lining up to see the movie on its opening public debut. I really want to hear all the feedback from all you Michael Mann fans, so having seen the film please leave your initial comments, views and reviews in the comments under this post. Should be fascinating to see the responses from you guys.
I have made this post a "sticky", so don't miss any new posts below this one.
Although I am presently "lost" in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland with no hope of seeing Michael Mann's Public Enemies until the 7th July, I am sure you will be lining up to see the movie on its opening public debut. I really want to hear all the feedback from all you Michael Mann fans, so having seen the film please leave your initial comments, views and reviews in the comments under this post. Should be fascinating to see the responses from you guys.
I have made this post a "sticky", so don't miss any new posts below this one.
Thursday 2 July 2009
Collateral Best Served Large
Anyone following this blog knows I am stuck on an island in a remote corner of NW Scotland and unable to see Public Enemies. Well, like all good Mann movies, life has its peculiar convergencies. One particular irony in my life, well lets make that two actually, are worth mentioning. The first I had in mind was the fact that I live a moderately stressed life, working hard to pay a reasonably high mortgage paid on a suburban semi-detached 1930's house at the height of the market value (which plummeted during the current recession). So high that for all my years I have never been able to justify converting my uncool, almost antique status 21" cathode TV for a LCD flat screen, super size HD TV. All my Mann DVD's are played exclusively within a 21" square. Religiously, I make sure it is in widescreen aspect - which makes the real estate even smaller. Now true, the resolution is lovely and saturated. I can't tell you how I have been tempted to stick a new TV on the credit card, or add a new monthly payment plan on top of the sofa I bought. However, the irony is this. That I am castaway on a remote island, but what my moans don't reveal, is that I am in a self-catering place that is set on a private beach with unseemly tourqoise waters lapping serenely across them, housing nothing less than a 50" monster Sony Bravia TV (in this sentence my voice elevated excitedly when I got to 50"). In my home I don't even have satellite. Can't afford it. Here I do. And 5 minutes ago, Collateral finished. For some reason, even if you have it on DVD, you always want to watch a Mann movie if it is on TV - I have no idea why.You may ask, "why are you telling me this?" Well, seeing it on a 50" screen opened my eyes once again to how Mann most wanted it seen. The incredible visceral nature of those really dark night time shots, with light ebbing in and out, like an ocean reflecting moonlight. And the hugely stunning conpositions that suddenly stand out even more when the details present themselves in the larger format. I had no idea just how much I was missing. It just made me marvel even more at just how big a pay off we get from Mann's relentless need for detail. I was revelling in this movie afresh tonight. The moral of this story is, if you want to watch a Mann movie as he intended it to be seen, watch it 50" wide or larger. Any smaller, and you miss half the craft. The irony? Well, I had to travel to a remote island to miss the opening of Public Enemies, but be thrilled by Collateral in a completely new way. It's kind of destiny. I did see it at the cinema, but as anyone knows... you can't take all of a Mann movie in a single viewing. So, it was a real treat tonight.
If you got this far reading you may be wondering about my second point of irony for the day. Well, I was for a time a professional nature photographer, specializing in the 5x4" large format. Like Mann, I am bent on quality. But I also believe in technological advancement if it serves a purpose. The irony is, that despite being reasonably accomplished in landscape photography I cannot afford to buy a digital SLR - or at least the large CMOS sensor version and lenses required to ensure the highest possible resolution and sharpness - unlike the scattering of tourists that dot this island in their flourescent cycling tops. The male tourists brandish their cameras like a fallic symbol. As for me, I had to borrow my fathers D90 with a 18-200 zoom lens that is as sharp as Mr. Bean. The lens barrel slides if you try to tripod mount it and point it to the floor. But with two children in tow, who has time for dark cloths, dark slides, spotmeters and camera movements? And there are tourists with full frame sensor cameras that don't know their apertures from their flipflops. Such is the irony of life. Imagine Vincent (from Collateral) trying to do his job with a water pistol, and you will suddenly know how I feel in this stunning scenery I am in.
Just to reassure you all. I am having a very relaxed time on holiday! But it will be hard going back home... back to 21". But as a comedian once observed in the context of those with small wage packets that spend their benefits on huge TV's, if your house is 90% plasma, you need to work for a bigger house.
Whilst waiting for Public Enemies
As I mentioned, I am a castaway (sort of) on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. So my viewing of Public Enemies is late. So, I thought I would post some images I have taken. Here is the first. Nothing to do with Michael Mann, but, well.....
Zen Pulp: The World of Michael Mann
With the advent of Public Enemies, everyone has become Michael Mann focussed, which is great. Here is a link that is worth highlighting for particular attention, and features video and narration on what is a Mann retrospective of his work. The author Matt Zoller Seitz writes:
This is the first in a five-part series of Moving Image Source video essays on Michael Mann, whose new film, Public Enemies, opens July 1. Part 2 will be posted on Friday, with parts 3, 4, and 5 to follow next week. To read a transcript of the video's narration, click here. To read the author's review of Public Enemies at IFC.com, click here.
Visit the link here.
This is the first in a five-part series of Moving Image Source video essays on Michael Mann, whose new film, Public Enemies, opens July 1. Part 2 will be posted on Friday, with parts 3, 4, and 5 to follow next week. To read a transcript of the video's narration, click here. To read the author's review of Public Enemies at IFC.com, click here.
Visit the link here.
Tuesday 30 June 2009
Mann HD Public Enemies Interview
Here is a link to a high def interview with Michael Mann talking about Public Enemies found on YouTube. The Embed code was disabled, so I can only send a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFCUL4pwx2Q
It isn't a great, flowing interview, but it is nicely shot and there are some signfiicant director insights into the movie, so well worth watching.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFCUL4pwx2Q
It isn't a great, flowing interview, but it is nicely shot and there are some signfiicant director insights into the movie, so well worth watching.
Public Enemies Chicago and London Premier
If you couldn't go to the Chicago or London Premier of Public Enemies, here is what is looked like, in short. There is a ton of stuff on YouTube. All the actors seemed rather tired at the Chicago premier, and were more conversational at the London event. And oh, did you know Johnny Depp is in this movie? Sorry Mann fans, at these premiers you would never have got to the front of the Depp frenzied, idolizing crowds. At least one fact is straight, Johnny Depp is a great kisser... just in case any of you had any doubt, or were concerned... he is... Marion tells us so... the legend of Depp remains intact. Phew. But he is good isn't he... I mean as an actor...
Monday 29 June 2009
Radiator Heaven feeds us a week of Mann
Radiator Heaven kicks off a season of Mann mania following the US launch of Mann's latest offering, Public Enemies. Why not take a trip over there and get a wealth of information from other bloggers wanting to give their thoughts about the great man and his work.
I have been away from the computer for a while, so am just picking up on the latest Mann action. I am presently holidaying in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, a beautiful and currently hot and sunny place, but one without any July 1st screening of Public Enemies for the launch of the movie in the UK. As an all out Mann admirer, it is of course rather galling to blog my opinion way behind everyone elses! Nevetheless, I will certainly be doing that when I eventually return to greater civilization at the end of my Hebridean holiday July 7th! I had hoped to be at the Premier just to see Mann waltz up the red carpet in London. Alas, the Outer Hebrides is just as close to Iceland as it is to London, so a casual trip to London is not going to happen. Mann is rather an elusive character, and Premier's are one of those few opportunities to see him in the flesh. I would just love to have the satisfaction of being in proximity to the understated genius that has so enriched my life through his art. That isn't geeky is it? I recently read Empire magazines interview with him. Anyone else jealous that the reporter got to see a private viewing at Mann's very own screening room in LA? The interview was average, but what was irritating was that the reporter never told us the answer to Mann's question to him following the screening, which was, "So, what do you think?" What, a reporter without an opinion? I take it he didn't like it. There has been so much bad press about Public Enemies, praising the cinematography (see my earlier post where I said months ago that this could win an Oscar for cinematography having see the stills, and behind the scenes shots) yet pulling apart the script and pace. The same happened with The Insider. It got panned, but it is, in my view, one of the best films ever made. So, I reserve judgement. Mann films are like a good wine - not to be downed in one, but savoured and understood.
Just in case you forgot, go read about the Michael Mann week over at Radiator Heaven!
Tuesday 2 June 2009
Depp, Bale and Mann introduce Public Enemies
A few short words from Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Michael Mann on the much anticipated Public Enemies.
Monday 25 May 2009
Miami Vice Interview
For the sake of archive, here is a small Michael Mann interview about Miami Vice. F0r those interested in Mann's movie making approaches, I thought it was interesting that he doesn't story board...
"Doing a hardcore Miami Vice meant doing it right, so the actors had to go practically undercover before they started filming. "Everybody went through training, and went through a lot of it. A lot of hard work went into it, and they look good because they are good, and they are good because they really can do everything that we see in the film, including all of the physical stuff. The most difficult thing to acquire is all the skills that I think these folks have, in terms of really being in an undercover situation. When they're confronted at Jose Yero's, and these guys have responses, and they accuse Yero of being the man hooked up with the DEA, or the street theater that they put down on Isabella in the house, when they pretend that they're bringing back the dope which we know they stole, and the skill and the self-confidence they have came from lots of scenarios that Colin and Jamie and Naomie and Gong Li did, with real folks who really do do this stuff. They did simulations that were very, very realistic, and they did it a lot. I'm real proud of their work, and the benefit of it is what you see on screen."
When the action breaks out, it's in grand Michael Mann style. "I don't story board. I do something else, which is I block it. We then train to the blocking. In other words, when everybody's training, they're actually training a lot of the moves that we are definitely going to use, and then, I do a lot of photography of that, and that becomes where the cameras go."
Read full article >
"Doing a hardcore Miami Vice meant doing it right, so the actors had to go practically undercover before they started filming. "Everybody went through training, and went through a lot of it. A lot of hard work went into it, and they look good because they are good, and they are good because they really can do everything that we see in the film, including all of the physical stuff. The most difficult thing to acquire is all the skills that I think these folks have, in terms of really being in an undercover situation. When they're confronted at Jose Yero's, and these guys have responses, and they accuse Yero of being the man hooked up with the DEA, or the street theater that they put down on Isabella in the house, when they pretend that they're bringing back the dope which we know they stole, and the skill and the self-confidence they have came from lots of scenarios that Colin and Jamie and Naomie and Gong Li did, with real folks who really do do this stuff. They did simulations that were very, very realistic, and they did it a lot. I'm real proud of their work, and the benefit of it is what you see on screen."
When the action breaks out, it's in grand Michael Mann style. "I don't story board. I do something else, which is I block it. We then train to the blocking. In other words, when everybody's training, they're actually training a lot of the moves that we are definitely going to use, and then, I do a lot of photography of that, and that becomes where the cameras go."
Read full article >
Thursday 30 April 2009
FILMS AND FILMING jan 1980 including MICHAEL MANN interview
Here is a magazine from January 1980 that features an interview with Michael Mann. It is being sold on www.ebay.co.uk. Could be useful information for anyone wanting original source quotes from this relatively early period of Mann's work. It is unclear how long the interview is or what it centres on.
Monday 13 April 2009
Now search this blog via labels
To make this Michael Mann blog more user friendly to the casual visitor I have organized each post with limited labels, which are now featured on the right hand side like categories. I hope this makes it easier for you to find what you need about Michael Mann. It highlights a lot of areas that I need to improve on information wise.
How do you find this blog? Is it useful for all you Mann fans? Would you prefer more images?
How do you find this blog? Is it useful for all you Mann fans? Would you prefer more images?
Gravity of the Flux: Michael Mann’s Miami Vice
There are not that many intelligent write ups available on Mann's underestimated movie, Miami Vice. Here is one that makes a lot of sense to me personally. With Miami Vice, my most personal journey, that somehow I could emotionally connect with, was this relationship between Sonny and Isabella. It was one of the most powerful and significant elements of the whole film. Whilst the very end of Miami Vice was rather disappointing, it was just before the end of the film that I actually found my most emotionally engaging scene. Isabella wistfully leaves the shores of Florida Keys (the actual location of that scene) on a boat. It was a beautiful, brilliantly acted and shot "moment". I found a great essay about Miami Vice, which I want to share with you. I quote below one interpretation, which relates in particular to that closing scene. I agree with the author's comments. What do you think?
The film closes as abruptly as it opened: Isabella escapes from the flux by the sea (the eternal utopia of Mann’s characters): “It’s magic”, says a fisherman about the sea near the beginning of Thief (1981), Sonny turns his back on the sea and returns to the flux. And loses himself therein. Life suspended on one side, perpetual flux on the other. No dead time or respite: the system runs at full speed but on empty, and possesses no other end than that of its own stability. To such an extent that one could, like Isabella, pass one’s entire life there: “It’s all that I know how to do; I’ve been doing that since I was 17”, she tells Sonny when the latter questions her on the possibility of an elsewhere, of an alternative life. The only thing that counts is the global balance of the system and its capacity to restore the unchanging order of things (disappearance of Jesus Montoya/death of Jose Yero, disappearance of Isabella/reappearance of Trudy, etc.). At bottom, between the beginning and the end of the film, nothing has changed. Like Frank (James Caan) at the end of Thief or Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) in the last shot of The Insider, Sonny recedes in depth of the field, with his back to us, and disappears. In the world in flux that Miami Vice follows, the human is only an event, a lost atom in the multitude, similar to the one described by the hired killer in Collateral. It is either arrogance and/or naïveté of the couple, Sonny-Isabella, to have believed that the human could be stronger than the flux.
See the full article here >
The film closes as abruptly as it opened: Isabella escapes from the flux by the sea (the eternal utopia of Mann’s characters): “It’s magic”, says a fisherman about the sea near the beginning of Thief (1981), Sonny turns his back on the sea and returns to the flux. And loses himself therein. Life suspended on one side, perpetual flux on the other. No dead time or respite: the system runs at full speed but on empty, and possesses no other end than that of its own stability. To such an extent that one could, like Isabella, pass one’s entire life there: “It’s all that I know how to do; I’ve been doing that since I was 17”, she tells Sonny when the latter questions her on the possibility of an elsewhere, of an alternative life. The only thing that counts is the global balance of the system and its capacity to restore the unchanging order of things (disappearance of Jesus Montoya/death of Jose Yero, disappearance of Isabella/reappearance of Trudy, etc.). At bottom, between the beginning and the end of the film, nothing has changed. Like Frank (James Caan) at the end of Thief or Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) in the last shot of The Insider, Sonny recedes in depth of the field, with his back to us, and disappears. In the world in flux that Miami Vice follows, the human is only an event, a lost atom in the multitude, similar to the one described by the hired killer in Collateral. It is either arrogance and/or naïveté of the couple, Sonny-Isabella, to have believed that the human could be stronger than the flux.
See the full article here >
Michael Mann's cinema of images - Anna Dzenis
I recently had the pleasure to come across a 2002 analysis of Michael Mann's movie making by Anna Dzenis. She has apparently written a book about Michael Mann published by the University of Illinois. For those who are writing essay's about Michael Mann, this article has some extremely useful insights. I include the whole essay below:
Michael Mann's cinema of images
Anna Dzenis
Stanley Kubrick. Eisenstein. Dziga Vertov. And 'Kino Eye'. I mean that's really my limitation. So my approach to films tends to be structural, formal, abstract and humanist. (Michael Mann) [1]
Michael Mann has been a writer, director, producer and an actor on a range of film and television projects spanning a period of over thirty years. He has also been writer, director and producer on most of his own films. He has a significant body of work to his credit. And yet -- curiously and surprisingly -- his work has not received a great deal of critical attention.
David Marc and Robert J. Thompson's book Prime time, prime movers[2] devotes a chapter to Michael Mann in a survey of key creative contributors to prime time American television. He is also represented in Jim Hillier's book The new Hollywood[3] as one of the few creative personnel who shifts fluidly between the big screen and the small screen. Acknowledgement of his contribution as one of America's great film directors has been less well documented. This, however, has been slowly changing. He is included in the recent Wallflower critical guide to contemporary North American directors[4]. And Pocket Essentials have just published a slim book on Mann in their Directors Series [5]. There are also a number of longer essays, written after the release of each new film; Gavin Smith's essay, written after the release of The last of the Mohicans[6], Richard Combs'[7] and John Wrathall's[8] essays, written after the release of Heat. Nick James'[9] and Christian Viviani's[10] essays which follow the release of The insider. And Adrian Wootton's[11] and Legar Grindon's[12] essays on Ali. There is also Jean-Baptiste Thoret's important essay "The aquarium syndrome: on the films of Michael Mann." [13] In addition to this, Mann himself has actively contributed to the literature surrounding his films by giving a number of lengthy interviews. Amongst these is an important early interview with Julian Fox which appears in Films and filming[14] after the release of his first feature film Jericho mile; an interview with Harlan Kennedy where he discusses The Keep [15]; a key interview anthologised in Projections 1 [16] where Mann discusses The last of the Mohicans; an interview in Sight and Sound [17] where he also discusses The last of the Mohicans; and an interview with Geoff Andrew in Time out[18] on Heat.
What this handful of writers, essays and interviews all share is a recognition that Mann is the author of the films that he has directed. What they also share is a tendency to scrutinise the films for traces and marks of authorial enunciation, for the signature and voice of the author. And while the films certainly support these auteurist readings, there remains something else, something elusive and resistant about the cinema of Michael Mann, something that provokes Richard Combs to describe his own essay on Heat as an "interim assessment of the interim nature of Michael Mann" [19].
The style and stylisation of his films is part of the explanation of both some of the elusive and resistant elements in Mann's cinema, and the existence of so few serious essays, and only one book-length study, about his work. This critical neglect relates to a larger issue: the limited critical and analytical attention in studies of the cinema to the work of film stylists, and matters of style more generally. In this essay I want to make a small contribution towards redressing this imbalance by exploring critical elements of Mann's audio-visual palette, his distinctive sound-image fusion and the ways in which stylistic elements are linked to a narrative of desire in Mann's cinema. I also want to suggest that not only is a particularly commanding art of image and sound central to Mann's style but that images, ideas about the image and the desire for the image are also central to the theme and content of a Michael Mann film.
The Pathos of the Photographic
The magnificent Ambersons is one of a group of great films that have built the pathos of the photographic into their textures and made it part of their thematic material. (V.F Perkins)[20]
Films whose textual economy is pitched more at the level of a broad fit between elements of style and elements of subjectWorks by Robert Altman, Michael Mann, Abel Ferrara, the Coens and Alan Rudolph provide relatively distinguished examples of this practice, in which general strategies of colour coding, camera viewpoint, sound design and so on enhance or reinforce the general 'feel' or meaning of the subject matter. (Adrian Martin).[21]
A number of elements characterise a Michael Mann film. To begin with, Mann is recognized as a director of genre films -- specifically crime stories, and also action/adventure films. Secondly, his films are complex and elaborate investigations into character and personality -- primarily focused on the relationships between men. Third, his work exhibits a continuing quest for a more epic, monumental form of storytelling, for the ever-longer story arc. And fourth, there is a realist impulse that is realized in the stories he tells and the actors he chooses to work with. However, what is most distinctive about the cinema of Michael Mann, what is most remarkable and most problematic for some, is his style and stylization. What makes his films more than just genre films is his experimental audio-visual palette -- the way that images and sounds function poetically, materially, sensually and affectively.
Some early critical reaction to his work pivoted around the accusation that he was a stylist without substance. These accusations were partly tied to his association with Miami vice and a particular reading of that series which suggested that it was only concerned with glossy surfaces and glorious images. But there are others who have found cause to compare aspects of his oeuvre to some of the greatest cinema stylists. And in doing so, they have situated his work in a lineage of the greatest filmmakers in the history of the medium. His attention to detail, his obsessiveness and the length of time it takes him to complete his films has been compared with Kubrick. His lateral tracking camera movements have been regarded as mercurial as those of Max Ophuls. His compositions, his experiments with colour, and the way in which he selects and renders architecture have invited comparisons with the work of Antonioni. And, in a recent article, in which film-makers nominate the films of their "imaginary cinematheque" [22] Olivier Assayas positions Mann alongside Bresson, Tarkovsky, Pasolini, Visconti and Hou Hsiao Hsien
But while there are evident claims for Mann's status as a great stylist, I also want to propose that Mann is not a stylist who simply glories in the display of style for its own sake, in the pyrotechnics of style's performance. In a remarkable essay tracking the many practical and critical approaches to film style, Adrian Martin proposes a 3 tier model of style-subject relations.
First are those films and directors that still 'essay a strategy of style' in the classical sense works in which there is a definite stylistic restraint at work, and in which modulations of stylistic devices across the film are keyed closely to its dramatic shifts and thematic developments"
Second are films whose textual economy is pitched more at the level of a broad fit between elements of style and elements of subject.
Third are mannerist films..in which style performs out on its own trajectories, no longer working unobtrusively at the behest of the fiction and its demands of meaningfulness. [23]
In this essay Martin situates Mann alongside contemporary directors like Robert Altman, the Coen Brothers and Abel Ferrara -- film-makers for whom there is a "broad fit" between form and content, style and narrative, technical choices and the story that is being told. But he also goes on to say that many film-makers wander between these categories. He gives the example of Scorsese as someone whose "characteristic style virtually functions on all 3 tiers simultaneously".[24]
This observation about "a broad fit between form and content" certainly characterised Mann's style in the early nineties. However, Mann's more recent approach to style-subject relations can be better described as wandering between "close-fit" and "broad-fit" stylistics, at times classical and at other times almost mannerist. Dante Spinotti, Mann's cinematographer on four of his films, described the director's visual processes in the following way. "It's a little like being in front of a Caravaggio scene and changing it into a Kandinsky painting." [25] The Kandkinsky-like qualities Spinotti is evoking are Mann's intoxicating passion with the painterly, expressive, plastic possibilities of the cinema, with the way that framing, colour and light can transform a room in a house or a street at night. But while images in Mann's films can sometimes be abstracted, expressive or surreal they are almost always tied to a character's point of view, or the mood of the narrative, and always linked to emotion and affect. When Spinotti was interviewed about the "look" of the film Manhunter, he spoke of the way the choices of colour and light were based on emotions and desire. The examples he gave were "the romantic blue" light that cloaks the lovers in the beach house, and "the unsettling purple light" invading Dollarhyde's house in the film's penultimate climactic shoot-out.
In his BFI book on The magnificent Ambersons V.F. Perkins described Welles's film as one "of a group of great films that have built the pathos of the photographic into their textures and made it part of their thematic material" [26]. Perkins positions Welles with a group of filmmakers -- Mizoguchi, Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir -- "notable for the way that the steadiness of the camera's attachment to a passage seems gauged to capture movements into the distance, the dying of the light, fading of an echo, in relation to the longing to hold the moment and to escape with it outside time" [27]. Perkins is talking here quite specifically about the long take and the way it enables us to stay with an image, enter its diegetic space and hold onto it as if it was a photograph. He locates this use of the long take in the work of filmmakers whose subject matter is concerned with "time, pastness and loss".[28] Perkins' observations about these relations between form and affect can also be applied to Mann's audio-visual palette. The formal choices Mann makes -- his mise en scene, the length of time he holds onto an image, the use of false colour filtration and lighting, extended sequences filmed with a hand-held camera, and strikingly original music and sound scores -- are composed with the deliberateness and resonance of still images. Finally, Mann's films are also replete with this nostalgic, elegiac feeling of pathos for worlds and relationships that are disappearing and falling apart.
A discussion of scenes from three of Mann's films -- Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995) and The insider (1999) will show how Mann configures these relationships between form and affect. These scenes show Mann continuing to experiment with the recombinant possibilities of sounds and images, whether he is adapting a novel, rewriting his own scripts or telling a true story. In doing so, these three films reveal a continuing impulse to stylisation that can be attributed to the directing presence of Michael Mann.
Manhunter: snapshots of disconnection
Manhunter is Mann's fourth film. It was the film he made at the height of the Miami vice phenomenon. While continuing his role as executive producer on Miami vice, he pursued his love for the cinema and made a very distinctive film of his own. Manunter is based on the Thomas Harris novel The red dragon and has the historical claim of being the first Hannibal Lector film. It is the first of four films on which Mann collaborated with cinematographer Dante Spinotti. In his oeuvre it is the film that really starts to look and sound like a Michael Mann film.
Manhunter is about the pursuit and capture of a serial killer but this film is clearly more than just a crime story. It is also a meditation on images, vision, visuality, and the photographic. It has been called Michael Mann's Peeping Tom (1960) and it involves a similar kind of voyeurism, a similar kind of intoxicating and deadly engagement with images that is so central to Michael Powell's film. Images in Manhunter work on a number of levels. They function narratively as motivation, memory, evidence and clues. They are part of the fabric of the film, as material objects in the world. But most compellingly, they are present as highly expressive, often disturbing, formal compositions, emotively complicated by the way they intersect with the sound design.
One of the most distinctive features of Mann's style is to be found in his highly expressive compositions -- in particular, the way in which figures are positioned in metaphoric spaces. Mann is a master of place and location, of architecture and urban landscapes. His films are full of empty houses, lonely hotel rooms, endless oceans, dark and wet city streets at night, industrial sites, and flickering lights in panoramic vistas. These spaces have been carefully selected for their poetic and metaphoric resonances. Sometimes two people are positioned in these spaces - together but spatially separate. Quite often there is just one person alone. Manhunter's FBI agent Will Graham is a good example of this kind of solitary figure in Mann's cinema. His task of solving the crimes and his unorthodox method of placing himself into the mind-set of a killer, takes him on a journey that is both spatial and emotional.
There are a number of scenes in Manhunter that situate Will in such emotionally charged, metaphoric spaces. Two scenes are notable for the way they foreground the photographic as a subject of investigation.
The first scene takes place after Will arrives at the home of one of the dead families - the original crime scene. The camera tracks his shadowy entry into the house as he opens the glass doors of the kitchen and comes in flashing a torch. The low angle, torchlight and his walk up the stairs immediately associate him with the killer. He enters the starkly lit bedroom, and the contrast from dark to light is shocking. What is more shocking is what the bright light reveals - a bloodied scene of slaughter -- white walls splattered with red blood. The image is both disturbing and strangely surreal - it is a crime scene but it also looks like an abstract painting. The next shot of Will alone against a white ground is minimalist and understated. His body against the white background reinforces his solitariness as well as locating him in a stark negative space. He begins reading descriptions from a forensic report into a tape-machine -- words about the past -- a conversation with no-one. His low, cool, measured monotone belies the emotion of the scene. He then moves into the bathroom -- and its myriad mirrors begin to fracture and multiply his reflection -- suggesting an emotional disturbance that wasn't there in his voice. While he is in the bathroom the phone rings, triggering the answering machine and Valerie Leeds pre-recorded message. This scene is characterised by such spatial and temporal disjunction -- we look at images from the present at the same time as we are hearing words from the past.
In the scene that immediately follows, these sound-image relationships are inverted. Will is alone once again -- this time in an empty hotel room -- and now we see images from the past and hear words from the present. Will watches home movie footage of the murdered family on a monitor. These images occupy the centre of the frame and they float in blackness. The darkness that frames them separates them from a living context, as well as calling attention to their materiality. They are ordinary, everyday images of a family eating breakfast, reading the paper, kids coming up to the camera and pulling faces, letting a dog into the room. Will talks to the monitor and to the killer whom he does not know yet. His words speak of afterwards -- when the family in the home movie were dead. This leads to another striking composition in which Will is looking at the monitor and half the screen is black. It appears as if he is talking into the darkness, into the unknown. Visually it is a dramatic contrast to the earlier scene. As he starts to speak of smeared blood stains he finds himself unable to continue and he rings his wife. The cut to his wife is supported by a rising musical beat. She is asleep in a bedroom bathed in a blue light. The brief conversation juxtaposes his family, from whom he is separated, with the families who are now dead, amongst whom he now walks. The effect of this exchange reinforces his solitariness, but somehow the communication with his wife gives him added impetus. When Will returns to the monitor he begins to ask more questions. As his voice gets louder, the music rises and there is an epiphany in which the images start to reveal some truths to him. And so images, words, music and revelations come together in a crescendo-like moment.
This sequence has several narrative points to make about Will's working methods. But its real resonance comes from the way it is composed and edited. Its play with sounds and images draws our attention to material fragments from the past -- home movie footage and answering machine tape.
Its compositions focus our attention on absent families and what is now lost. Mann's camera lingers over minimalist images of Will in a stark white room where a family once slept, and then alone in a hotel room surrounded by darkness. A further allusion to separated families is made with the cut to Will's wife sleeping by herself, awash with a blue light. The contrasts from stark whiteness to shadowy darkness, from grainy, muted tones to painterly, blue light draws our attention to the formal properties of these scenes, to the way in which they were constructed as if they were photographs. These are snapshots of families torn apart -- snapshots of disconnection.
What might seem surprising in a film about serial killers is the way in which images and sounds are foregrounded as poetic constructions. But it is the way these compositions function as "images in the aftermath" of what has been that underlines their pathos.
Heat: phantom images
After Manhunter, one of Mann's projects was a television pilot for a series that never went into production but was subsequently repackaged as a tele-movie called L.A. takedown (1989). The film that Mann made some time later, the epic crime tale Heat, is an elaborate retelling of this original story. With Heat Mann took a telemovie and fully developed its cinematic possibilities. Because Heat is a remake of his own work, it can be regarded as one of Mann's most personal films. It is the film that he had thought about for some time -- the film that he really wanted to make.
Heat is an epic heist film about two tribes and three couples. The first tribe is a group of professional criminals gathered around Neil McCauley (Robert de Niro). The second tribe is a group of policemen headed up by Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). The three couples are Vincent and Justine (Diane Venora), Neil and Eady (Amy Brenneman) and Chris (Val Kilmer) and Charlene (Ashley Judd). The narrative develops by paralleling these individuals and their relationships and watching them unravel until every couple has separated. In the final sequence we are only left with two men - Neil and Vince -- who meet each other in an archetypal battle to the death.
Heat is also more than just a crime story. It is a dreamscape -- a poetically rendered world. Its poetry can be found in Mann's mercurial oscillations between elaborately choreographed montage action sequences and close, intimate interior views. Mann's vision is both panoramic and intensely subjective: he both maps the larger terrain and investigates the detail. In a key essay on Mann's work written just after the release of Heat, film critic Richard Combs was compelled to characterise Mann as both a cartographer and a botanist. "A cartographer, with a love for the whole, abstract view, and a botanist with a fascination for how the life within it actually works." [29]
While the pathos in Manhunter came from staged photographic moments that reminded us of what was no longer possible, Heat is awash with death and a sense of pathos from the very start. It is as if the end is already enacted at the beginning and the characters are like ghosts that walk through this dream world. This is apparent as the camera descends into the film's ethereal, smoky netherworld of ambling trains, flickering lights and sombre music. It is also set up in the spectacular opening sequence that involves an ambush, an explosive car crash, a robbery and a shoot-out. The robbery is the work of a very close team of professional criminals, but on this job they have included a man called Waingro (Kevin Gage) who acts according to his own rules and kills three security guards. These killings set into motion a cycle of killings. At the film's end, when Neil is free to leave, the news of Waingro's whereabouts leads him back to the beginning and inevitably to his own death.
Mann's approach to stylisation is most evident in Heat's kinetic action sequences. Three major set-pieces structure the film and these sequences are larger-than-life epic battles. The film's opening ambush is matched by a spectacular, concluding cat-and-mouse game of hide and seek amongst large airport containers with planes flying intermittently overhead. At the centre of the film is a ten minute long shoot-out in the streets of Los Angeles. This elaborate shoot out begins with a bank robbery and spills out onto the streets. The street battle is a complex formal construction -- a tour-de-force of montage and tracking shots. The music by Elliot Goldenthal sets up a percussive beat that gets progressively louder. The pace of the editing starts to quicken creating an accelerated rhythm. A series of lateral tracking shots, right to left, then left to right, follow Neil and his tribe, and separately Vincent and his troop, as they prepare to do battle on the streets. The battle combines close-ups down the barrel of machine guns with long shots of street scenes -- continuing the interplay between the intimate and the panoramic. Police cars form barricades in L.A. streets, cars smash into each other, and supermarket trolleys become war zones. Incessantly loud gun-fire shatters car windows, brings down men and causes a hysterical scatter effect amongst civilians on the street. This particular sequence marks a half-way point in the narrative after which everything is about revenge and consequences, but while its narrative place is evident, its length and excessiveness invite audiences to recognise its bravura construction.
Mann is as masterful at depicting the fragility of human relationships as he is at choreographing epic montage sequences. Even the dialogue in this film is full of figurative images and mythical allusions. Vincent's wife is almost lyrical when she tells him why their relationship is falling apart. Framed in darkness, her speech is like a performance: " You don't live with me, you live among the remains of dead people, you sift through the detritus, you read the terrain, you search for signs of passing, the scent of your prey, and then you hunt them down. That's all you're committed to. The rest is the mess you leave as you pass through. What I don't understand is why I can't cut loose of you." When Vince and Neil finally meet face to face their words are imagistic in similar ways. As well as talking about their work, they also share their dreams. Vince describes ".sitting at this big banquet table and all the victims of all the murders I ever worked are sitting at this table and they're staring at me with these black eyeballs because they've got eightball haemmorages from the head wounds" Neil responds by talking about his own dream. " I have one where I'm drowning and I got to wake myself up and dreaming or I'll die in my sleep." Vince asks him " You know what that's about?" Neil replies "Yeah - Having enough time." This talk of dreams between these two leonine men verges on the Shakespearean.
But the images that resonate most affectively in Heat are the intimate exchanges between couples. Two scenes are particularly noteable for their expressive use of colour and light, their elegiac music of longing, and the emotionally suggestive patterns of editing. The first scene takes place very early in the film. It is about a coming together, a falling in love. Neil and Eady are on the balcony talking. They are enveloped in a warm orange light and the city at night is illuminated behind them. The exchange is shot with long lenses so they are separated from an abstracted background as if they are in a world of their own. But their happiness will be temporary and this is already underlined by the suggestively sad music.
The other scene that takes place later is about a separation, a falling apart. Charlene has been tricked into setting a trap for Chris. He arrives at the apartment to which he has been summoned and she walks out onto the balcony. He looks up at her from the street and smiles. She looks at him for what seems like forever and then signals him to leave. The two faces awash with blue light are framed separately, but the alternating pattern of editing connects them visually and emotionally. There is, however, a more devastating series of shots to follow. Charlene walks back inside into the warm light of the room, and there is a cut between her and a tight blue-lit shot of Chris's face in the car as he drives away. This final image of Chris's face has the spectral appearance of a photographic phantom, and it reminds me of the words of Tom Gunning: "..that such images could display the iconic accuracy and recognizability of photographic likenesses and at the same time the transparency and insubstantiality of ghosts seemed to demonstrate the fundamentally uncanny quality of photography, its capture of a spectre-like double." [30]
The blue-lit spectre-like quality of Chris's solitary face driving into the unknown is reminiscent of so many other characters in Mann's cinema: an image of a face on the edge of a precipice.
The insider: grains of truth
As his work has continued, Mann has become increasingly interested in stories about real people and real situations, although this impulse to the real has been present from the very beginning. Mann's very first film Jericho mile (ABC, 1979) was actually set inside Folsom prison and prisoners were employed as actors. In Thief (1981) and Crime story (NBC, 1986-88) he used ex-police and ex-cons as story consultants and character actors. But his interest in the really true and important story has been most compellingly realised in The insider. The source of The insider was a Vanity fair expose article written by Marie Brenner in which she reported the true story of whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand and his relationship with Sixty minutes journalist Lowell Bergman who wanted to broadcast his story.
And yet even in this true story, in which there are facts to be told, Mann's story-telling is still drawn to the poetic heart of the characters and their perceptions. The first shot of the film is instantly enigmatic. We are immediately placed inside the point of view of someone whose eyes have been covered with a blindfold. This subjective point of view is reminiscent of the opening scenes of both Manhunter and The keep (1983) The sequence shifts between interior views of the threads of the blindfold and external views of a military-run country. The sounds and the music of this Middle Eastern country are loud and commanding. Very soon we find out that the man behind the blindfold is Sixty minutes reporter Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) trying to score a difficult interview. The scene functions to let us know what kind of reporter he is as well as what lengths he will go to get an important story. It gives us a sensuous, impressionistic sense of this foreign country. And it also introduces a key metaphor about blindness and concealment in a film where so much is hidden and so much remains unclear.
The insider contains as many striking set-pieces as you would expect from a Michael Mann film, but here they are primarily tied to a character's point of view. One of the great accomplishments of this film is the way it visualises the interior life of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe). The anxiety that Jeffrey feels finds form in the things that he looks at, the scenes that he visualises and the sounds that he hears. When he plays golf at night at a practice range, the golf range is a surreal, artificial space, awash with blue-green light. The green is like an abstract painting, dotted with white balls that are gathered up by a robotic machine driving around in circles. Jeffrey is in a heightened state of paranoia, and this is constructed formally. The sounds of golf balls being hit and of lights being turned off are excessively loud. A ball comes flying into the net in an extremely elongated gesture. Everything in the scene -- colours, lights, sounds, people -- are exaggerated, elliptical, hyper-real.
There are many other scenes in this film that communicate these feelings of anxiety and paranoia, but one in particular appears as if it is a dream. It takes place as Jeffrey is being driven home after his deposition in Louisiana. Through the car window he sees another car burning in the distance. The music is loud and operatic and a voice is singing. Inexplicably and mesmerically there is an image of a car ablaze in the night and it is hard to imagine a more apt or poetic metaphor for Jeffrey's current woes.
But just as Manhunter and Heat told a story of two men and their complicated relationship, The Insider is also interested in the growing bond beetween whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand and Sixty minutes reporter Lowell Bergman. Bergman's struggles to get to know Wigand and to tell his story on Sixty minutes are plagued with obstacles. The relationship between the two men gets played out in a soundscape of fax machines and telephone conversations, but most impressively the ticking of the Sixty minutes clock is the sonic beat that underlines Bergman's own struggles to air Wigand's story. While Bergman does not share some of the hallucinatory images that characterise Wigand's psychic world, there are still some striking scenes in which Mann envisions his circumstances. One of these is a scene in which Bergman paces up and down in the shallows of the seashore screaming into a mobile phone before he drops it into the water. The other is a moment full of bitter pathos as Bergman, a fragmented and watery figure, adjusting the collar on his coat, disappears through a series of revolving glass doors into the grey city streets. It is the last image of the film.
The desire for images or images of desire
Some of the greatest films in the history of cinema are about images and the desire associated with images. Films as provocative or as eclectic as Peeping Tom (UK 1960), Blade runner (USA 1982), Rear window (USA 1954), Blow up (UK 1966), Blow out (USA 1981), La jetee (France 1962), Under fire (USA 1983), The year of living dangerously (Australia 1982), Smoke (USA 1995), Killing fields (UK 1984), Badlands (USA 1973), 400 blows (France 1959), Thelma and Louise (USA 1991), Apocalypse now (USA 1979) Letter from an unknown woman (USA 1948), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (USA 1969), The shining (UK 1980), Philadelphia (USA 1993), Proof (Australia 1991) and Memento (USA 2000) all have moments where they engage with issues and questions about the relationship between the still and the moving image.
Michael Mann's films can be added to this list. They can be read, in some cases, as meta-texts -- texts which not only choreograph elaborate images and sounds, but also engage in a dialogue about images and their construction. In a number of Mann's films the image itself is at the centre of character's trajectories. Images are linked to desire, to dreams, to wished-for situations, hopes and longings. They are also linked to the death of those dreams, things in the past no longer possible -- memories and mementos. And, in a number of cases, we are invited to reflect on the way images are also capable of duplicity and deceit, and can be used against the grain of their original intentions.
The preoccupation with images begins, in a small way, in Thief. There is a scene in this early Mann film (aka Violent streets) that involves Frank (James Caan), recently released from prison, and the woman he desires Jessie (Tuesday Weld). They are sitting together in a diner talking, when Frank produces a collage of images that he made while he was in prison. This collage represents what he wishes for in his life -- the desire for family and human connection. It includes real people who are important to him and representations of others who he hopes for. He shows this composite image to Jessie, and explains it to her simply by saying "That is my life". She has a hesitant reaction to it, asking him where he found all the images. To her they seem like dead people. He tells her that she is the woman in the picture. He sees it as a map, a template, an image about a dream, an image that sees life as a series of disparate elements that can somehow be brought together. And there is even an epiphanous moment in the film, where Frank walks along the beach with Jessie, their adopted son and a friend, as if his dream image has been accomplished. But this is not the film's conclusion -- it is a temporary reprieve from the inevitably tragic ending. It turns out that this carefully composed image of desire will be finally unattainable.
This play with images finds its apotheosis in Manhunter. The film is littered with still images, family photos, photos of crime scenes, home movies transferred to video, and photos fabricated for newspapers. FBI agent Will Graham studies these photos and home movies in order to find clues that will lead him to the killer of these families. It is, in fact, two family snap shots that his colleague Crawford shows to him that convince him to take on the job. And it is these images, amongst others, which he tries to read and interpret -- like clues or evidence. He uses these images to engage and re-enter the past and the experience of others. These very same images, however, are also memories and mementos of what is now no longer with us -- happy families in all of their innocence.
Images also have another narrative function in Manhunter. The serial killer Francis Dollarhyde works in a film processing lab. And it is in this lab that he has selected his victims from the films that have been sent there for processing. Dollarhyde is clearly using images for transgressive purposes. The television sets screening only static in his house are further evidence of his prismatic and distorted perspective. In Manhunter, what is perhaps most unsettling is the way that images transcend their original purpose and context and are used in ways beyond ordinary imaginings. The way that the function and meaning of images change in Manhunter can be explained by the sense that Barthes invokes "that the reality offered by the photograph is not that of truth-to-appearance but rather of truth-to-presence, a matter of being rather than resemblance." And the being and presence of one moment becomes something entirely different in another moment in another's head and heart.
When Mann came to make Heat he was interested in making a crime story that extended the boundaries of the genre. And while Heat certainly tells the story of a heist-gone-wrong, it is also a film in which the two central characters spend a lot of time tracking each other, following and pursuing each other and engaging in various kinds of surveillance strategies. In fact, in a film in which everything seems to be leading to the face-to-face meeting of Al and Bob, what is noticeable here is that they actually meet each other as images first through various imaging machines. For Al it takes place in a factory stake-out inside a truck filled with high-tech surveillance equipment. When someone on Al's team inadvertently makes a noise, Robert looks directly at the truck and at Al, and although he can't see him, it is as if an exchange has taken place. It is Al who sees Robert as a heat sensor image -- his captured image looking directly at him. Shortly after, Robert takes tele-photo shots of Al and his team in an industrial landscape from the top of a container. He then uses these images to find out information of his own. It is this cat-and-mouse game of tracking and knowing through images that takes place in the first half of Heat, before the critical face-to-face meeting. It invites us to consider images as particular ways of knowing, particular forms of knowledge.
When it comes to telling the expose story of The insider in sounds and images, Mann portrays two men whose relationships to the construction of images couldn't be more different. As a reporter for Sixty minutes, Lowell Bergman is in the business of telling stories with images. The mise-en-scene of his work-place is littered with monitors, and questions about the truth of those images are raised on a number of occasions. A pointed example is the footage of the 7 CEOs of tobacco corporations and the public broadcast of their deceptive declarations on television. Lowell's struggle to have Jeffrey Jeffrey's story told is tied up with his idealistic notions about the truth power of images. For Jeffrey, however, his desire to have his story told and broadcast is a desire to be seen and heard, to have his story publicly acknowledged, particularly to his children. In different ways, The insider shows that many of our experiences are mediated through images. When Jeffrey has his breakdown and the mural in his hotel room comes alive, the images on the wall transform into memory-images of his children. These are children whom he is currently unable to see -- and so they are images of desire in a very real sense.
Mann's most recent film -- the biopic Ali (2001)-- acknowledges that the story it is telling about the famous boxer Muhammad Ali already exists as a well-known visual record in the world, in the historical memory of photographs, newspaper stories, television reports, biographical films and documentaries. Mann even employed Ali's personal friend and photographer Howard Bingham as a consultant. A production still shows Mann holding up a famous photograph as a key point of reference in the shot he is composing. The film tries to be true to real people and real events, so we do see Ali's close friendship with Malcolm X, sports reporter Howard Cosell, and a number of wives and we do get to watch key fights replayed blow by blow. The film that Mann has made, however, tries to move beyond this visual record, to create a much more impressionistic re-telling of ten years in Ali's life. We are also placed inside the ring, with cameras on the boxers' heads and get strangely vertiginous feelings as a sea of faces and Nikon cameras flash incessantly around Ali forming a vibrant palette of colour, shape and tone. Ali himself made a prescient observation about the way images occupy our lives, when he was asked about his conscientious objection. "I know where Vietnam is," we hear him tell a reporter in the film, "it's on the television."
Images are central to the cinema of Michael Mann. They tell so many different stories, trying to get to the very heart of characters and their perceptions. They are about a love for the texture of the medium, for its material, plastic qualities. They also self-reflexively make us think about the way those images have been constructed and how we might read and interpret them. This is film-making that delights in its own processes. It is also film-making that keeps inviting us back to the cinema in so many ways.
Endnotes
(To return to your place in the text, simply click on the endnote number)
[1] Julian Fox, "Four minute mile," Films and filming, (1980): 20.
[2] David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, Prime time, prime movers (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992), 231-240.
[3] Jim Hillier, The new Hollywood (London: Studio Vista, 1993) 99-121.
[4] Nick James (ed), The wallflower critical guide to contemporary North American directors (London: Wallflower, 2000).
[5] Mark Steensland, Michael Mann (UK: Pocket Essentials Series, 2002).
[6] Gavin Smith, "Mann hunters," Film comment 28, no. 6 (1992): 72-77.
[7] Richard Combs, "Michael Mann: becoming," Film comment 32, no. 2 (1996).
[8] John Wrathall, "Heat," Sight & sound, (1966).
[9] Nick James, "No smoking gun", Sight & sound, (2000).
[10] Christian Viviani, "Lacarriere de Michael Mann", Positif, (2000).
[11] Adrian Wootton, "The big hurt," Sight and Sound 12, no. 3 (2002): 16.
[12] Legar Grindon, "Ali," Cineaste 27, no. 2 (2002): 32-4.
[13] Jean-Baptiste Thoret, "The Aquarium Syndrome: on the films of Michael Mann," Senses of cinema, May-June 2002, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/19/mann/html (July 2002).
[14] Fox.
[15] Harlan Kennedy, "The keep," Film comment 19, no. 6 (1983): 16-19.
[16] Graham Fuller, "Making some light: an interview with Michael Mann" in Projections: a forum for filmmakers, no. 1, eds. John Boorman & Walter Donahue (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).
[17] Gavin Smith, "Wars and peace," Sight and sound 11, no. 7 (1992): 10-15, 45-46.
[18] Geoff Andrew, "Mann to man", Time out (1996): 16-17.
[19] Combs, 10.
[20] V.F. Perkins, The magnificent Ambersons, (London: BFI, 1999), 68.
[21] Adrian Martin, "Mise en scene is dead: or the expressive, the excessive, the technical and the stylish," in Film - matters of style, ed. Adrian Martin, Continuum 5, no. 2 (1992): 90.
[22] Olivier Assayas, "La cinematheque imaginaire," Cine-regards, (July 2002).
[23] Martin, 90-91.
[24] Adrian Martin, P. 91
[25] Les Paul Robley, "Hot Set," American cinematographer, (1996): 46.
[26] Perkins, 68.
[27] Perkins, 68.
[28] Perkins, 68.
[29] Combs, 17.
[30] Tom Gunning "Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations" in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995): 47.
Michael Mann's cinema of images
Anna Dzenis
Stanley Kubrick. Eisenstein. Dziga Vertov. And 'Kino Eye'. I mean that's really my limitation. So my approach to films tends to be structural, formal, abstract and humanist. (Michael Mann) [1]
Michael Mann has been a writer, director, producer and an actor on a range of film and television projects spanning a period of over thirty years. He has also been writer, director and producer on most of his own films. He has a significant body of work to his credit. And yet -- curiously and surprisingly -- his work has not received a great deal of critical attention.
David Marc and Robert J. Thompson's book Prime time, prime movers[2] devotes a chapter to Michael Mann in a survey of key creative contributors to prime time American television. He is also represented in Jim Hillier's book The new Hollywood[3] as one of the few creative personnel who shifts fluidly between the big screen and the small screen. Acknowledgement of his contribution as one of America's great film directors has been less well documented. This, however, has been slowly changing. He is included in the recent Wallflower critical guide to contemporary North American directors[4]. And Pocket Essentials have just published a slim book on Mann in their Directors Series [5]. There are also a number of longer essays, written after the release of each new film; Gavin Smith's essay, written after the release of The last of the Mohicans[6], Richard Combs'[7] and John Wrathall's[8] essays, written after the release of Heat. Nick James'[9] and Christian Viviani's[10] essays which follow the release of The insider. And Adrian Wootton's[11] and Legar Grindon's[12] essays on Ali. There is also Jean-Baptiste Thoret's important essay "The aquarium syndrome: on the films of Michael Mann." [13] In addition to this, Mann himself has actively contributed to the literature surrounding his films by giving a number of lengthy interviews. Amongst these is an important early interview with Julian Fox which appears in Films and filming[14] after the release of his first feature film Jericho mile; an interview with Harlan Kennedy where he discusses The Keep [15]; a key interview anthologised in Projections 1 [16] where Mann discusses The last of the Mohicans; an interview in Sight and Sound [17] where he also discusses The last of the Mohicans; and an interview with Geoff Andrew in Time out[18] on Heat.
What this handful of writers, essays and interviews all share is a recognition that Mann is the author of the films that he has directed. What they also share is a tendency to scrutinise the films for traces and marks of authorial enunciation, for the signature and voice of the author. And while the films certainly support these auteurist readings, there remains something else, something elusive and resistant about the cinema of Michael Mann, something that provokes Richard Combs to describe his own essay on Heat as an "interim assessment of the interim nature of Michael Mann" [19].
The style and stylisation of his films is part of the explanation of both some of the elusive and resistant elements in Mann's cinema, and the existence of so few serious essays, and only one book-length study, about his work. This critical neglect relates to a larger issue: the limited critical and analytical attention in studies of the cinema to the work of film stylists, and matters of style more generally. In this essay I want to make a small contribution towards redressing this imbalance by exploring critical elements of Mann's audio-visual palette, his distinctive sound-image fusion and the ways in which stylistic elements are linked to a narrative of desire in Mann's cinema. I also want to suggest that not only is a particularly commanding art of image and sound central to Mann's style but that images, ideas about the image and the desire for the image are also central to the theme and content of a Michael Mann film.
The Pathos of the Photographic
The magnificent Ambersons is one of a group of great films that have built the pathos of the photographic into their textures and made it part of their thematic material. (V.F Perkins)[20]
Films whose textual economy is pitched more at the level of a broad fit between elements of style and elements of subjectWorks by Robert Altman, Michael Mann, Abel Ferrara, the Coens and Alan Rudolph provide relatively distinguished examples of this practice, in which general strategies of colour coding, camera viewpoint, sound design and so on enhance or reinforce the general 'feel' or meaning of the subject matter. (Adrian Martin).[21]
A number of elements characterise a Michael Mann film. To begin with, Mann is recognized as a director of genre films -- specifically crime stories, and also action/adventure films. Secondly, his films are complex and elaborate investigations into character and personality -- primarily focused on the relationships between men. Third, his work exhibits a continuing quest for a more epic, monumental form of storytelling, for the ever-longer story arc. And fourth, there is a realist impulse that is realized in the stories he tells and the actors he chooses to work with. However, what is most distinctive about the cinema of Michael Mann, what is most remarkable and most problematic for some, is his style and stylization. What makes his films more than just genre films is his experimental audio-visual palette -- the way that images and sounds function poetically, materially, sensually and affectively.
Some early critical reaction to his work pivoted around the accusation that he was a stylist without substance. These accusations were partly tied to his association with Miami vice and a particular reading of that series which suggested that it was only concerned with glossy surfaces and glorious images. But there are others who have found cause to compare aspects of his oeuvre to some of the greatest cinema stylists. And in doing so, they have situated his work in a lineage of the greatest filmmakers in the history of the medium. His attention to detail, his obsessiveness and the length of time it takes him to complete his films has been compared with Kubrick. His lateral tracking camera movements have been regarded as mercurial as those of Max Ophuls. His compositions, his experiments with colour, and the way in which he selects and renders architecture have invited comparisons with the work of Antonioni. And, in a recent article, in which film-makers nominate the films of their "imaginary cinematheque" [22] Olivier Assayas positions Mann alongside Bresson, Tarkovsky, Pasolini, Visconti and Hou Hsiao Hsien
But while there are evident claims for Mann's status as a great stylist, I also want to propose that Mann is not a stylist who simply glories in the display of style for its own sake, in the pyrotechnics of style's performance. In a remarkable essay tracking the many practical and critical approaches to film style, Adrian Martin proposes a 3 tier model of style-subject relations.
First are those films and directors that still 'essay a strategy of style' in the classical sense works in which there is a definite stylistic restraint at work, and in which modulations of stylistic devices across the film are keyed closely to its dramatic shifts and thematic developments"
Second are films whose textual economy is pitched more at the level of a broad fit between elements of style and elements of subject.
Third are mannerist films..in which style performs out on its own trajectories, no longer working unobtrusively at the behest of the fiction and its demands of meaningfulness. [23]
In this essay Martin situates Mann alongside contemporary directors like Robert Altman, the Coen Brothers and Abel Ferrara -- film-makers for whom there is a "broad fit" between form and content, style and narrative, technical choices and the story that is being told. But he also goes on to say that many film-makers wander between these categories. He gives the example of Scorsese as someone whose "characteristic style virtually functions on all 3 tiers simultaneously".[24]
This observation about "a broad fit between form and content" certainly characterised Mann's style in the early nineties. However, Mann's more recent approach to style-subject relations can be better described as wandering between "close-fit" and "broad-fit" stylistics, at times classical and at other times almost mannerist. Dante Spinotti, Mann's cinematographer on four of his films, described the director's visual processes in the following way. "It's a little like being in front of a Caravaggio scene and changing it into a Kandinsky painting." [25] The Kandkinsky-like qualities Spinotti is evoking are Mann's intoxicating passion with the painterly, expressive, plastic possibilities of the cinema, with the way that framing, colour and light can transform a room in a house or a street at night. But while images in Mann's films can sometimes be abstracted, expressive or surreal they are almost always tied to a character's point of view, or the mood of the narrative, and always linked to emotion and affect. When Spinotti was interviewed about the "look" of the film Manhunter, he spoke of the way the choices of colour and light were based on emotions and desire. The examples he gave were "the romantic blue" light that cloaks the lovers in the beach house, and "the unsettling purple light" invading Dollarhyde's house in the film's penultimate climactic shoot-out.
In his BFI book on The magnificent Ambersons V.F. Perkins described Welles's film as one "of a group of great films that have built the pathos of the photographic into their textures and made it part of their thematic material" [26]. Perkins positions Welles with a group of filmmakers -- Mizoguchi, Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir -- "notable for the way that the steadiness of the camera's attachment to a passage seems gauged to capture movements into the distance, the dying of the light, fading of an echo, in relation to the longing to hold the moment and to escape with it outside time" [27]. Perkins is talking here quite specifically about the long take and the way it enables us to stay with an image, enter its diegetic space and hold onto it as if it was a photograph. He locates this use of the long take in the work of filmmakers whose subject matter is concerned with "time, pastness and loss".[28] Perkins' observations about these relations between form and affect can also be applied to Mann's audio-visual palette. The formal choices Mann makes -- his mise en scene, the length of time he holds onto an image, the use of false colour filtration and lighting, extended sequences filmed with a hand-held camera, and strikingly original music and sound scores -- are composed with the deliberateness and resonance of still images. Finally, Mann's films are also replete with this nostalgic, elegiac feeling of pathos for worlds and relationships that are disappearing and falling apart.
A discussion of scenes from three of Mann's films -- Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995) and The insider (1999) will show how Mann configures these relationships between form and affect. These scenes show Mann continuing to experiment with the recombinant possibilities of sounds and images, whether he is adapting a novel, rewriting his own scripts or telling a true story. In doing so, these three films reveal a continuing impulse to stylisation that can be attributed to the directing presence of Michael Mann.
Manhunter: snapshots of disconnection
Manhunter is Mann's fourth film. It was the film he made at the height of the Miami vice phenomenon. While continuing his role as executive producer on Miami vice, he pursued his love for the cinema and made a very distinctive film of his own. Manunter is based on the Thomas Harris novel The red dragon and has the historical claim of being the first Hannibal Lector film. It is the first of four films on which Mann collaborated with cinematographer Dante Spinotti. In his oeuvre it is the film that really starts to look and sound like a Michael Mann film.
Manhunter is about the pursuit and capture of a serial killer but this film is clearly more than just a crime story. It is also a meditation on images, vision, visuality, and the photographic. It has been called Michael Mann's Peeping Tom (1960) and it involves a similar kind of voyeurism, a similar kind of intoxicating and deadly engagement with images that is so central to Michael Powell's film. Images in Manhunter work on a number of levels. They function narratively as motivation, memory, evidence and clues. They are part of the fabric of the film, as material objects in the world. But most compellingly, they are present as highly expressive, often disturbing, formal compositions, emotively complicated by the way they intersect with the sound design.
One of the most distinctive features of Mann's style is to be found in his highly expressive compositions -- in particular, the way in which figures are positioned in metaphoric spaces. Mann is a master of place and location, of architecture and urban landscapes. His films are full of empty houses, lonely hotel rooms, endless oceans, dark and wet city streets at night, industrial sites, and flickering lights in panoramic vistas. These spaces have been carefully selected for their poetic and metaphoric resonances. Sometimes two people are positioned in these spaces - together but spatially separate. Quite often there is just one person alone. Manhunter's FBI agent Will Graham is a good example of this kind of solitary figure in Mann's cinema. His task of solving the crimes and his unorthodox method of placing himself into the mind-set of a killer, takes him on a journey that is both spatial and emotional.
There are a number of scenes in Manhunter that situate Will in such emotionally charged, metaphoric spaces. Two scenes are notable for the way they foreground the photographic as a subject of investigation.
The first scene takes place after Will arrives at the home of one of the dead families - the original crime scene. The camera tracks his shadowy entry into the house as he opens the glass doors of the kitchen and comes in flashing a torch. The low angle, torchlight and his walk up the stairs immediately associate him with the killer. He enters the starkly lit bedroom, and the contrast from dark to light is shocking. What is more shocking is what the bright light reveals - a bloodied scene of slaughter -- white walls splattered with red blood. The image is both disturbing and strangely surreal - it is a crime scene but it also looks like an abstract painting. The next shot of Will alone against a white ground is minimalist and understated. His body against the white background reinforces his solitariness as well as locating him in a stark negative space. He begins reading descriptions from a forensic report into a tape-machine -- words about the past -- a conversation with no-one. His low, cool, measured monotone belies the emotion of the scene. He then moves into the bathroom -- and its myriad mirrors begin to fracture and multiply his reflection -- suggesting an emotional disturbance that wasn't there in his voice. While he is in the bathroom the phone rings, triggering the answering machine and Valerie Leeds pre-recorded message. This scene is characterised by such spatial and temporal disjunction -- we look at images from the present at the same time as we are hearing words from the past.
In the scene that immediately follows, these sound-image relationships are inverted. Will is alone once again -- this time in an empty hotel room -- and now we see images from the past and hear words from the present. Will watches home movie footage of the murdered family on a monitor. These images occupy the centre of the frame and they float in blackness. The darkness that frames them separates them from a living context, as well as calling attention to their materiality. They are ordinary, everyday images of a family eating breakfast, reading the paper, kids coming up to the camera and pulling faces, letting a dog into the room. Will talks to the monitor and to the killer whom he does not know yet. His words speak of afterwards -- when the family in the home movie were dead. This leads to another striking composition in which Will is looking at the monitor and half the screen is black. It appears as if he is talking into the darkness, into the unknown. Visually it is a dramatic contrast to the earlier scene. As he starts to speak of smeared blood stains he finds himself unable to continue and he rings his wife. The cut to his wife is supported by a rising musical beat. She is asleep in a bedroom bathed in a blue light. The brief conversation juxtaposes his family, from whom he is separated, with the families who are now dead, amongst whom he now walks. The effect of this exchange reinforces his solitariness, but somehow the communication with his wife gives him added impetus. When Will returns to the monitor he begins to ask more questions. As his voice gets louder, the music rises and there is an epiphany in which the images start to reveal some truths to him. And so images, words, music and revelations come together in a crescendo-like moment.
This sequence has several narrative points to make about Will's working methods. But its real resonance comes from the way it is composed and edited. Its play with sounds and images draws our attention to material fragments from the past -- home movie footage and answering machine tape.
Its compositions focus our attention on absent families and what is now lost. Mann's camera lingers over minimalist images of Will in a stark white room where a family once slept, and then alone in a hotel room surrounded by darkness. A further allusion to separated families is made with the cut to Will's wife sleeping by herself, awash with a blue light. The contrasts from stark whiteness to shadowy darkness, from grainy, muted tones to painterly, blue light draws our attention to the formal properties of these scenes, to the way in which they were constructed as if they were photographs. These are snapshots of families torn apart -- snapshots of disconnection.
What might seem surprising in a film about serial killers is the way in which images and sounds are foregrounded as poetic constructions. But it is the way these compositions function as "images in the aftermath" of what has been that underlines their pathos.
Heat: phantom images
After Manhunter, one of Mann's projects was a television pilot for a series that never went into production but was subsequently repackaged as a tele-movie called L.A. takedown (1989). The film that Mann made some time later, the epic crime tale Heat, is an elaborate retelling of this original story. With Heat Mann took a telemovie and fully developed its cinematic possibilities. Because Heat is a remake of his own work, it can be regarded as one of Mann's most personal films. It is the film that he had thought about for some time -- the film that he really wanted to make.
Heat is an epic heist film about two tribes and three couples. The first tribe is a group of professional criminals gathered around Neil McCauley (Robert de Niro). The second tribe is a group of policemen headed up by Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). The three couples are Vincent and Justine (Diane Venora), Neil and Eady (Amy Brenneman) and Chris (Val Kilmer) and Charlene (Ashley Judd). The narrative develops by paralleling these individuals and their relationships and watching them unravel until every couple has separated. In the final sequence we are only left with two men - Neil and Vince -- who meet each other in an archetypal battle to the death.
Heat is also more than just a crime story. It is a dreamscape -- a poetically rendered world. Its poetry can be found in Mann's mercurial oscillations between elaborately choreographed montage action sequences and close, intimate interior views. Mann's vision is both panoramic and intensely subjective: he both maps the larger terrain and investigates the detail. In a key essay on Mann's work written just after the release of Heat, film critic Richard Combs was compelled to characterise Mann as both a cartographer and a botanist. "A cartographer, with a love for the whole, abstract view, and a botanist with a fascination for how the life within it actually works." [29]
While the pathos in Manhunter came from staged photographic moments that reminded us of what was no longer possible, Heat is awash with death and a sense of pathos from the very start. It is as if the end is already enacted at the beginning and the characters are like ghosts that walk through this dream world. This is apparent as the camera descends into the film's ethereal, smoky netherworld of ambling trains, flickering lights and sombre music. It is also set up in the spectacular opening sequence that involves an ambush, an explosive car crash, a robbery and a shoot-out. The robbery is the work of a very close team of professional criminals, but on this job they have included a man called Waingro (Kevin Gage) who acts according to his own rules and kills three security guards. These killings set into motion a cycle of killings. At the film's end, when Neil is free to leave, the news of Waingro's whereabouts leads him back to the beginning and inevitably to his own death.
Mann's approach to stylisation is most evident in Heat's kinetic action sequences. Three major set-pieces structure the film and these sequences are larger-than-life epic battles. The film's opening ambush is matched by a spectacular, concluding cat-and-mouse game of hide and seek amongst large airport containers with planes flying intermittently overhead. At the centre of the film is a ten minute long shoot-out in the streets of Los Angeles. This elaborate shoot out begins with a bank robbery and spills out onto the streets. The street battle is a complex formal construction -- a tour-de-force of montage and tracking shots. The music by Elliot Goldenthal sets up a percussive beat that gets progressively louder. The pace of the editing starts to quicken creating an accelerated rhythm. A series of lateral tracking shots, right to left, then left to right, follow Neil and his tribe, and separately Vincent and his troop, as they prepare to do battle on the streets. The battle combines close-ups down the barrel of machine guns with long shots of street scenes -- continuing the interplay between the intimate and the panoramic. Police cars form barricades in L.A. streets, cars smash into each other, and supermarket trolleys become war zones. Incessantly loud gun-fire shatters car windows, brings down men and causes a hysterical scatter effect amongst civilians on the street. This particular sequence marks a half-way point in the narrative after which everything is about revenge and consequences, but while its narrative place is evident, its length and excessiveness invite audiences to recognise its bravura construction.
Mann is as masterful at depicting the fragility of human relationships as he is at choreographing epic montage sequences. Even the dialogue in this film is full of figurative images and mythical allusions. Vincent's wife is almost lyrical when she tells him why their relationship is falling apart. Framed in darkness, her speech is like a performance: " You don't live with me, you live among the remains of dead people, you sift through the detritus, you read the terrain, you search for signs of passing, the scent of your prey, and then you hunt them down. That's all you're committed to. The rest is the mess you leave as you pass through. What I don't understand is why I can't cut loose of you." When Vince and Neil finally meet face to face their words are imagistic in similar ways. As well as talking about their work, they also share their dreams. Vince describes ".sitting at this big banquet table and all the victims of all the murders I ever worked are sitting at this table and they're staring at me with these black eyeballs because they've got eightball haemmorages from the head wounds" Neil responds by talking about his own dream. " I have one where I'm drowning and I got to wake myself up and dreaming or I'll die in my sleep." Vince asks him " You know what that's about?" Neil replies "Yeah - Having enough time." This talk of dreams between these two leonine men verges on the Shakespearean.
But the images that resonate most affectively in Heat are the intimate exchanges between couples. Two scenes are particularly noteable for their expressive use of colour and light, their elegiac music of longing, and the emotionally suggestive patterns of editing. The first scene takes place very early in the film. It is about a coming together, a falling in love. Neil and Eady are on the balcony talking. They are enveloped in a warm orange light and the city at night is illuminated behind them. The exchange is shot with long lenses so they are separated from an abstracted background as if they are in a world of their own. But their happiness will be temporary and this is already underlined by the suggestively sad music.
The other scene that takes place later is about a separation, a falling apart. Charlene has been tricked into setting a trap for Chris. He arrives at the apartment to which he has been summoned and she walks out onto the balcony. He looks up at her from the street and smiles. She looks at him for what seems like forever and then signals him to leave. The two faces awash with blue light are framed separately, but the alternating pattern of editing connects them visually and emotionally. There is, however, a more devastating series of shots to follow. Charlene walks back inside into the warm light of the room, and there is a cut between her and a tight blue-lit shot of Chris's face in the car as he drives away. This final image of Chris's face has the spectral appearance of a photographic phantom, and it reminds me of the words of Tom Gunning: "..that such images could display the iconic accuracy and recognizability of photographic likenesses and at the same time the transparency and insubstantiality of ghosts seemed to demonstrate the fundamentally uncanny quality of photography, its capture of a spectre-like double." [30]
The blue-lit spectre-like quality of Chris's solitary face driving into the unknown is reminiscent of so many other characters in Mann's cinema: an image of a face on the edge of a precipice.
The insider: grains of truth
As his work has continued, Mann has become increasingly interested in stories about real people and real situations, although this impulse to the real has been present from the very beginning. Mann's very first film Jericho mile (ABC, 1979) was actually set inside Folsom prison and prisoners were employed as actors. In Thief (1981) and Crime story (NBC, 1986-88) he used ex-police and ex-cons as story consultants and character actors. But his interest in the really true and important story has been most compellingly realised in The insider. The source of The insider was a Vanity fair expose article written by Marie Brenner in which she reported the true story of whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand and his relationship with Sixty minutes journalist Lowell Bergman who wanted to broadcast his story.
And yet even in this true story, in which there are facts to be told, Mann's story-telling is still drawn to the poetic heart of the characters and their perceptions. The first shot of the film is instantly enigmatic. We are immediately placed inside the point of view of someone whose eyes have been covered with a blindfold. This subjective point of view is reminiscent of the opening scenes of both Manhunter and The keep (1983) The sequence shifts between interior views of the threads of the blindfold and external views of a military-run country. The sounds and the music of this Middle Eastern country are loud and commanding. Very soon we find out that the man behind the blindfold is Sixty minutes reporter Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) trying to score a difficult interview. The scene functions to let us know what kind of reporter he is as well as what lengths he will go to get an important story. It gives us a sensuous, impressionistic sense of this foreign country. And it also introduces a key metaphor about blindness and concealment in a film where so much is hidden and so much remains unclear.
The insider contains as many striking set-pieces as you would expect from a Michael Mann film, but here they are primarily tied to a character's point of view. One of the great accomplishments of this film is the way it visualises the interior life of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe). The anxiety that Jeffrey feels finds form in the things that he looks at, the scenes that he visualises and the sounds that he hears. When he plays golf at night at a practice range, the golf range is a surreal, artificial space, awash with blue-green light. The green is like an abstract painting, dotted with white balls that are gathered up by a robotic machine driving around in circles. Jeffrey is in a heightened state of paranoia, and this is constructed formally. The sounds of golf balls being hit and of lights being turned off are excessively loud. A ball comes flying into the net in an extremely elongated gesture. Everything in the scene -- colours, lights, sounds, people -- are exaggerated, elliptical, hyper-real.
There are many other scenes in this film that communicate these feelings of anxiety and paranoia, but one in particular appears as if it is a dream. It takes place as Jeffrey is being driven home after his deposition in Louisiana. Through the car window he sees another car burning in the distance. The music is loud and operatic and a voice is singing. Inexplicably and mesmerically there is an image of a car ablaze in the night and it is hard to imagine a more apt or poetic metaphor for Jeffrey's current woes.
But just as Manhunter and Heat told a story of two men and their complicated relationship, The Insider is also interested in the growing bond beetween whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand and Sixty minutes reporter Lowell Bergman. Bergman's struggles to get to know Wigand and to tell his story on Sixty minutes are plagued with obstacles. The relationship between the two men gets played out in a soundscape of fax machines and telephone conversations, but most impressively the ticking of the Sixty minutes clock is the sonic beat that underlines Bergman's own struggles to air Wigand's story. While Bergman does not share some of the hallucinatory images that characterise Wigand's psychic world, there are still some striking scenes in which Mann envisions his circumstances. One of these is a scene in which Bergman paces up and down in the shallows of the seashore screaming into a mobile phone before he drops it into the water. The other is a moment full of bitter pathos as Bergman, a fragmented and watery figure, adjusting the collar on his coat, disappears through a series of revolving glass doors into the grey city streets. It is the last image of the film.
The desire for images or images of desire
Some of the greatest films in the history of cinema are about images and the desire associated with images. Films as provocative or as eclectic as Peeping Tom (UK 1960), Blade runner (USA 1982), Rear window (USA 1954), Blow up (UK 1966), Blow out (USA 1981), La jetee (France 1962), Under fire (USA 1983), The year of living dangerously (Australia 1982), Smoke (USA 1995), Killing fields (UK 1984), Badlands (USA 1973), 400 blows (France 1959), Thelma and Louise (USA 1991), Apocalypse now (USA 1979) Letter from an unknown woman (USA 1948), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (USA 1969), The shining (UK 1980), Philadelphia (USA 1993), Proof (Australia 1991) and Memento (USA 2000) all have moments where they engage with issues and questions about the relationship between the still and the moving image.
Michael Mann's films can be added to this list. They can be read, in some cases, as meta-texts -- texts which not only choreograph elaborate images and sounds, but also engage in a dialogue about images and their construction. In a number of Mann's films the image itself is at the centre of character's trajectories. Images are linked to desire, to dreams, to wished-for situations, hopes and longings. They are also linked to the death of those dreams, things in the past no longer possible -- memories and mementos. And, in a number of cases, we are invited to reflect on the way images are also capable of duplicity and deceit, and can be used against the grain of their original intentions.
The preoccupation with images begins, in a small way, in Thief. There is a scene in this early Mann film (aka Violent streets) that involves Frank (James Caan), recently released from prison, and the woman he desires Jessie (Tuesday Weld). They are sitting together in a diner talking, when Frank produces a collage of images that he made while he was in prison. This collage represents what he wishes for in his life -- the desire for family and human connection. It includes real people who are important to him and representations of others who he hopes for. He shows this composite image to Jessie, and explains it to her simply by saying "That is my life". She has a hesitant reaction to it, asking him where he found all the images. To her they seem like dead people. He tells her that she is the woman in the picture. He sees it as a map, a template, an image about a dream, an image that sees life as a series of disparate elements that can somehow be brought together. And there is even an epiphanous moment in the film, where Frank walks along the beach with Jessie, their adopted son and a friend, as if his dream image has been accomplished. But this is not the film's conclusion -- it is a temporary reprieve from the inevitably tragic ending. It turns out that this carefully composed image of desire will be finally unattainable.
This play with images finds its apotheosis in Manhunter. The film is littered with still images, family photos, photos of crime scenes, home movies transferred to video, and photos fabricated for newspapers. FBI agent Will Graham studies these photos and home movies in order to find clues that will lead him to the killer of these families. It is, in fact, two family snap shots that his colleague Crawford shows to him that convince him to take on the job. And it is these images, amongst others, which he tries to read and interpret -- like clues or evidence. He uses these images to engage and re-enter the past and the experience of others. These very same images, however, are also memories and mementos of what is now no longer with us -- happy families in all of their innocence.
Images also have another narrative function in Manhunter. The serial killer Francis Dollarhyde works in a film processing lab. And it is in this lab that he has selected his victims from the films that have been sent there for processing. Dollarhyde is clearly using images for transgressive purposes. The television sets screening only static in his house are further evidence of his prismatic and distorted perspective. In Manhunter, what is perhaps most unsettling is the way that images transcend their original purpose and context and are used in ways beyond ordinary imaginings. The way that the function and meaning of images change in Manhunter can be explained by the sense that Barthes invokes "that the reality offered by the photograph is not that of truth-to-appearance but rather of truth-to-presence, a matter of being rather than resemblance." And the being and presence of one moment becomes something entirely different in another moment in another's head and heart.
When Mann came to make Heat he was interested in making a crime story that extended the boundaries of the genre. And while Heat certainly tells the story of a heist-gone-wrong, it is also a film in which the two central characters spend a lot of time tracking each other, following and pursuing each other and engaging in various kinds of surveillance strategies. In fact, in a film in which everything seems to be leading to the face-to-face meeting of Al and Bob, what is noticeable here is that they actually meet each other as images first through various imaging machines. For Al it takes place in a factory stake-out inside a truck filled with high-tech surveillance equipment. When someone on Al's team inadvertently makes a noise, Robert looks directly at the truck and at Al, and although he can't see him, it is as if an exchange has taken place. It is Al who sees Robert as a heat sensor image -- his captured image looking directly at him. Shortly after, Robert takes tele-photo shots of Al and his team in an industrial landscape from the top of a container. He then uses these images to find out information of his own. It is this cat-and-mouse game of tracking and knowing through images that takes place in the first half of Heat, before the critical face-to-face meeting. It invites us to consider images as particular ways of knowing, particular forms of knowledge.
When it comes to telling the expose story of The insider in sounds and images, Mann portrays two men whose relationships to the construction of images couldn't be more different. As a reporter for Sixty minutes, Lowell Bergman is in the business of telling stories with images. The mise-en-scene of his work-place is littered with monitors, and questions about the truth of those images are raised on a number of occasions. A pointed example is the footage of the 7 CEOs of tobacco corporations and the public broadcast of their deceptive declarations on television. Lowell's struggle to have Jeffrey Jeffrey's story told is tied up with his idealistic notions about the truth power of images. For Jeffrey, however, his desire to have his story told and broadcast is a desire to be seen and heard, to have his story publicly acknowledged, particularly to his children. In different ways, The insider shows that many of our experiences are mediated through images. When Jeffrey has his breakdown and the mural in his hotel room comes alive, the images on the wall transform into memory-images of his children. These are children whom he is currently unable to see -- and so they are images of desire in a very real sense.
Mann's most recent film -- the biopic Ali (2001)-- acknowledges that the story it is telling about the famous boxer Muhammad Ali already exists as a well-known visual record in the world, in the historical memory of photographs, newspaper stories, television reports, biographical films and documentaries. Mann even employed Ali's personal friend and photographer Howard Bingham as a consultant. A production still shows Mann holding up a famous photograph as a key point of reference in the shot he is composing. The film tries to be true to real people and real events, so we do see Ali's close friendship with Malcolm X, sports reporter Howard Cosell, and a number of wives and we do get to watch key fights replayed blow by blow. The film that Mann has made, however, tries to move beyond this visual record, to create a much more impressionistic re-telling of ten years in Ali's life. We are also placed inside the ring, with cameras on the boxers' heads and get strangely vertiginous feelings as a sea of faces and Nikon cameras flash incessantly around Ali forming a vibrant palette of colour, shape and tone. Ali himself made a prescient observation about the way images occupy our lives, when he was asked about his conscientious objection. "I know where Vietnam is," we hear him tell a reporter in the film, "it's on the television."
Images are central to the cinema of Michael Mann. They tell so many different stories, trying to get to the very heart of characters and their perceptions. They are about a love for the texture of the medium, for its material, plastic qualities. They also self-reflexively make us think about the way those images have been constructed and how we might read and interpret them. This is film-making that delights in its own processes. It is also film-making that keeps inviting us back to the cinema in so many ways.
Endnotes
(To return to your place in the text, simply click on the endnote number)
[1] Julian Fox, "Four minute mile," Films and filming, (1980): 20.
[2] David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, Prime time, prime movers (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992), 231-240.
[3] Jim Hillier, The new Hollywood (London: Studio Vista, 1993) 99-121.
[4] Nick James (ed), The wallflower critical guide to contemporary North American directors (London: Wallflower, 2000).
[5] Mark Steensland, Michael Mann (UK: Pocket Essentials Series, 2002).
[6] Gavin Smith, "Mann hunters," Film comment 28, no. 6 (1992): 72-77.
[7] Richard Combs, "Michael Mann: becoming," Film comment 32, no. 2 (1996).
[8] John Wrathall, "Heat," Sight & sound, (1966).
[9] Nick James, "No smoking gun", Sight & sound, (2000).
[10] Christian Viviani, "Lacarriere de Michael Mann", Positif, (2000).
[11] Adrian Wootton, "The big hurt," Sight and Sound 12, no. 3 (2002): 16.
[12] Legar Grindon, "Ali," Cineaste 27, no. 2 (2002): 32-4.
[13] Jean-Baptiste Thoret, "The Aquarium Syndrome: on the films of Michael Mann," Senses of cinema, May-June 2002, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/19/mann/html (July 2002).
[14] Fox.
[15] Harlan Kennedy, "The keep," Film comment 19, no. 6 (1983): 16-19.
[16] Graham Fuller, "Making some light: an interview with Michael Mann" in Projections: a forum for filmmakers, no. 1, eds. John Boorman & Walter Donahue (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).
[17] Gavin Smith, "Wars and peace," Sight and sound 11, no. 7 (1992): 10-15, 45-46.
[18] Geoff Andrew, "Mann to man", Time out (1996): 16-17.
[19] Combs, 10.
[20] V.F. Perkins, The magnificent Ambersons, (London: BFI, 1999), 68.
[21] Adrian Martin, "Mise en scene is dead: or the expressive, the excessive, the technical and the stylish," in Film - matters of style, ed. Adrian Martin, Continuum 5, no. 2 (1992): 90.
[22] Olivier Assayas, "La cinematheque imaginaire," Cine-regards,
[23] Martin, 90-91.
[24] Adrian Martin, P. 91
[25] Les Paul Robley, "Hot Set," American cinematographer, (1996): 46.
[26] Perkins, 68.
[27] Perkins, 68.
[28] Perkins, 68.
[29] Combs, 17.
[30] Tom Gunning "Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations" in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995): 47.
Sunday 12 April 2009
Public Enemies script available online
Michael Mann's Public Enemies script has been posted online. I could post the direct link here, but I am wary of getting on the wrong side of the producers! However, it is out there and the following blogsite provides the link (see right column):
http://tvcalling.blogspot.com/2009/04/script-of-week-23.html
http://tvcalling.blogspot.com/2009/04/script-of-week-23.html
Bob Cashill shares his knowledge of gangland dramas, setting hopes that Mann will do his subject justice on the upcoming movie Public Enemies. An excerpt is below:
I trust Mann to do a good job with the rich, myth-busting material provided him by author Bryan Burrough; his book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in J. Edgar Hoover’s “war on terror” in the Depression era, though I’m sorry HBO didn’t pursue a miniseries as had once been planned. (I suspect that only that portion of the book recounting the oft-told story of Dillinger, played by Lawrence Tierney, Warren Oates, and Robert Conrad in past movies, will make it to the big screen.) Through meticulous research, Burrough succeeded in making Dillinger, the Barker gang, Bonnie and Clyde and the whole den of thieves that erupted in the early Thirties smaller than life, shrinking them down to wormy, human size while simultaneously deflating Hoover’s vastly inflated PR about the trackdowns.
Read full article >>
I trust Mann to do a good job with the rich, myth-busting material provided him by author Bryan Burrough; his book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in J. Edgar Hoover’s “war on terror” in the Depression era, though I’m sorry HBO didn’t pursue a miniseries as had once been planned. (I suspect that only that portion of the book recounting the oft-told story of Dillinger, played by Lawrence Tierney, Warren Oates, and Robert Conrad in past movies, will make it to the big screen.) Through meticulous research, Burrough succeeded in making Dillinger, the Barker gang, Bonnie and Clyde and the whole den of thieves that erupted in the early Thirties smaller than life, shrinking them down to wormy, human size while simultaneously deflating Hoover’s vastly inflated PR about the trackdowns.
Read full article >>
Thursday 9 April 2009
Mann loves his Shower Scenes
I couldn't help but laugh when I read this particular blog, noticing that Michael Mann seems to have a thing for "shower scenes". This blogger picks up on a nuance of understanding in Mann's movies that until now, eluded me. I now feel enlightened. His post is called April Showers: Miami Vice.
In between Michael Mann (Public Enemies) movies I always forget that I really like his work. If you could reach into one of his movies you would be able to feel something... a cold surface maybe, vibrations from a loud noise or a drop of sweat hitting you. He has a real gift for atmosphere and texture. And apparently he has a thing for sex in the shower since two of Miami Vice's three big sexual scenes take place there.
The first shower scene is basically relationship detail. The music is soothing and we're just observing the easy intimacy of co-workers/lovers Naomi Harris's Trudy and Jamie Foxx's Tubbs.
Ok, ok, before you get too hot under the collar, read the rest over at this blog! >>
In between Michael Mann (Public Enemies) movies I always forget that I really like his work. If you could reach into one of his movies you would be able to feel something... a cold surface maybe, vibrations from a loud noise or a drop of sweat hitting you. He has a real gift for atmosphere and texture. And apparently he has a thing for sex in the shower since two of Miami Vice's three big sexual scenes take place there.
The first shower scene is basically relationship detail. The music is soothing and we're just observing the easy intimacy of co-workers/lovers Naomi Harris's Trudy and Jamie Foxx's Tubbs.
Ok, ok, before you get too hot under the collar, read the rest over at this blog! >>
Second Public Enemies Trailer
With talk in some quarters of the first trailer looking too much like video, a second trailer was posted by Universal Pictures seemingly first on MSN. Why MSN? Not sure. The second trailer is quite different to the first in flavour. If you want to see the entire film story condensed into about a minute, then watch the trailer. It reminds me of the trailer for Heat, which was also quite detailed in dialogue, plot and visual style. This trailer, more than the first, will give you a feel for this movie. My initial impression is that the talk about a video feel in the visuals is rather pointless - I didn't sense that at all. The only shot in the trailer that I felt could have been done better on film is the crowd lighting up a plane with flares, on an airstrip, presumably delivering Dillinger. Film would possibly have made the yellows and oranges much more silk like and "yummy" (cinematographer's term, cough, cough). Unfortunately, on the small YouTube size screen, the colours look washed out having been shot in HD digital. Granted, more detail in the shadows can be rendered with HD Digital, but I would have preferred this scene in film, despite the extra challenges this would have given Dante, the DP (Director of Photography). Anyway, who the heck am I to start picking at the methods of one of the industry's most brilliant and acclaimed cinematographers and directors? I am hoping Dante picks up an Oscar in 2010. Here is the trailer Universal are treating us with:
Tuesday 7 April 2009
Legends of the Fall: Tristan writes again
Michael Mann movie appreciator, Tristan, has written yet another short essay, this time focussing on The Last of the Mohicans. Enjoy more new words such as elegiac and prelapsaria. Here is an excerpt:
The best way to view Mohicans in relation to the rest of Mann’s filmograhy is as an evocation of the American frontier as an Edenic wilderness prior to the urbanised, corporatized world of Mann’s other films. To put it more precisely, it is an Edenic wilderness which is in process of being civilized, ironically enough, through struggle and violence. The trio of Nathaniel, Chingachgook, and Uncas are clearly presented in the introductory scenes as a prelapsarian ideal of roaming independence, decency, and piety for the natural world. It is part of tragedy that this ideal is not destined to survive, either for the characters as individuals, or as a prevalent way of life in the future America whose birth pains form the film’s backdrop.
For the full essay click here>
The best way to view Mohicans in relation to the rest of Mann’s filmograhy is as an evocation of the American frontier as an Edenic wilderness prior to the urbanised, corporatized world of Mann’s other films. To put it more precisely, it is an Edenic wilderness which is in process of being civilized, ironically enough, through struggle and violence. The trio of Nathaniel, Chingachgook, and Uncas are clearly presented in the introductory scenes as a prelapsarian ideal of roaming independence, decency, and piety for the natural world. It is part of tragedy that this ideal is not destined to survive, either for the characters as individuals, or as a prevalent way of life in the future America whose birth pains form the film’s backdrop.
For the full essay click here>
"Damage Control" Mann's next movie?
Frankie Machine featuring Robert DeNiro was dubbed since 2007 as being Michael Mann's next movie project, after Public Enemies, which is being released this July. However, news featured on the MTV movie blog has Jamie Foxx (Ali, Collateral, Miami Vice) saying Mann has not yet shelved the 2006 rumour of a collaboration on Damage Control.
It’s been nearly three years since Jamie Foxx and Michael Mann last collaborated on “Miami Vice” and just as long since the pair announced plans for a fourth team-up. Now Foxx has confirmed with MTV News that their “Damage Control” is still on the way.
It’s been nearly three years since Jamie Foxx and Michael Mann last collaborated on “Miami Vice” and just as long since the pair announced plans for a fourth team-up. Now Foxx has confirmed with MTV News that their “Damage Control” is still on the way.
The film is planned as a sports drama, focusing on Foxx as a professional publicist/spin doctor who represents troubled players. With steroid abuse a major part of today’s headlines, Foxx believes that there’s no better time to get “Damage Control” to the big screen.
Though he admitted that the film had been gestating for some time, Foxx implied that it was still very much on the radar. He’s taking off acting for a little while to go on tour with his music, but “Damage Control” could theoretically be Mann’s next project after this summer’s upcoming “Public Enemies”.
Click here for the full article >
Does anyone out there have any production information on Mann's next movie? Whilst I thought Jamie Foxx's performance in Collateral was excellent, I would be somewhat disappointed if he was a lead in Mann's next movie. I would rather see Mann exploit some undiscovered nuance in a relatively unknown actor, similar to what he did for Russell Crowe. There is something very authentic about a movie when the characters are unknown actors, and Mann seems to bring the best out of them. What do you think about Foxx's involvement in Mann's next project?
Saturday 4 April 2009
Dante Spinotti talks to Sight and Sound about Public Enemies
April's issue of Sight and Sound Magazine published by the British Film Institute feaures an interiew with Public Enemies's renowned cinematographer Dante Spinotti. I must try to get a copy! So far, I havn't seen his work on Public Enemies featured in the ASC magazine, American Cinematographer.
See Sight and Sound Magazine on the BFI homepage
Dante's Paradiso
Cinematographer Dante Spinotti turned to digital cameras to penetrate the darkness of his fifth collaboration with director Michael Mann, the gangster epic Public Enemies. He talks to Roger Clarke
Friday 3 April 2009
''Public Enemies'' author is extra in movie
An article from the Chicago Tribune:
MILWAUKEE - The author of the book from which the movie "Public Enemies" was made said it gave him the chills to be on set during filming.
Writers Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman and Director Michael Mann used Bryan Burrough's book "Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34" to help craft the screenplay for "Public Enemies" starring Johnny Depp as bank robber John Dillinger. It's due out July 1.
Burrough is an extra in the movie, portraying a reporter who runs to Dillinger's body after he's killed outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago.
"Johnny Depp goes down on the same exact piece of pavement that John Dillinger went down on," Burrough said Friday in a phone interview from his home in Summit, New Jersey. "To see what Mann had done with the period costumes, the period automobiles, everything looking as everything must have looked. For someone who put five years into writing about that, it just kind of gave you chills."
Read the full article here >
MILWAUKEE - The author of the book from which the movie "Public Enemies" was made said it gave him the chills to be on set during filming.
Writers Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman and Director Michael Mann used Bryan Burrough's book "Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34" to help craft the screenplay for "Public Enemies" starring Johnny Depp as bank robber John Dillinger. It's due out July 1.
Burrough is an extra in the movie, portraying a reporter who runs to Dillinger's body after he's killed outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago.
"Johnny Depp goes down on the same exact piece of pavement that John Dillinger went down on," Burrough said Friday in a phone interview from his home in Summit, New Jersey. "To see what Mann had done with the period costumes, the period automobiles, everything looking as everything must have looked. For someone who put five years into writing about that, it just kind of gave you chills."
Read the full article here >
Tuesday 17 March 2009
Christopher Plummer Releases Autobiography
Christopher Plummer, who brilliantly played Mike Wallace in Michael Mann's The Insider, has written his autobiography. I quote from the The Chicago Tribune below:
"It was one of the better roles," Plummer says. "My fellow artists — Al Pacino and Russell Crowe and the director Michael Mann — were superb."
In www.MovieMorlocks.com there is also an interview with Plummer:
TCM: I’m going to jump ahead to something more recent, your performance as “60 Minutes” Reporter Mike Wallace in THE INSIDER. Was that intimidating to play someone who is still quite active and visible in their profession and would probably see your performance?
CP: Well, it was kind of dangerous and I like danger because, you know, I think you have to go in where angels fear to tread. And I met Michael and have even been interviewed by him. And I watched him when I was a youngster…and he was barely a youngster too then…as the angry young man of television. So I didn’t have to do much research because I remembered very well how his voice sounded…and how he attacked everybody and was an extraordinary, probing commentator. No, that was wonderfully challenging and greatly helped I was by Michael Mann [the director] who kept me from imitating him. He insisted that I put some of my own personality into the Mike Wallace character which is correct..because otherwise that’s just a simple imitation of the man and that’s cheap. So he guided me very well though that and I admired him. And of course my friendship began with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, both of whom I admire enormously. It goes without saying about Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, who is probably the most talented leading man that Hollywood has had in a long time.
Saturday 14 March 2009
Public Enemies Trailer Soundtrack - Otis Taylor
One of the great benefits of watching a new Michael Mann film is that you can be introduced to a new style of music that when put in the context of a moment expressed on film suddenly reverberates with the soul. And then you want to buy it. Otis Taylor, Ten Million Slaves, from the album Return of the Banjo is the leading track on Michael Mann's Public Enemies.
Here is the track:
Friday 6 March 2009
Public Enemies Trailer Now Online
At long, long last, the much anticipated trailer for Public Enemies by Michael Mann can now be seen at www.publicenemies.net
Having seen the trailer, I have to say, it looks beautiful in colour and cinematic depth. The sheer scale of production is conveyed in the trailer, with some superb settings and switching of colour pallets. It is almost Heat and Collateral mixed together, with night and day intermingled through the trailer, each with blazing effect. There will be much written about this trailer, but don't waste any more time reading this - go watch it!
My verdict: Looks superb. What else would you expect from Michael Mann? The trailer starts slow and ramps up more dramatically towards the end. I think I can see where the next cinematography oscar is going already! Johnny Depp looks convincing too.
Monday 16 February 2009
Wisconsin tax credits for Michael Mann's Public Enemies
The Chicago Tribune reports on some of the financial tax breaks on filming Public Enemies in Wisconsin:
Wis. tax credits help pay for Depp's entourage
By SCOTT BAUER |Associated Press Writer
2:58 PM CST, February 13, 2009
MADISON, Wis. - Wisconsin taxpayers contributed $450,000 toward Hollywood director Michael Mann's salary when he came to the state last year to film the big-budget Johnny Depp
movie "Public Enemies."Records obtained by The Associated Press show the state's film tax credits not only covered a quarter of Mann's $1.8 million salary, they paid for a portion of his assistants' salaries, entertainment, meals and stuntmen's living expenses.
The state's tax credits even covered about $100,000 of the cost of Depp's entourage of chauffeurs, hair stylists and assistants, said Zach Brandon, executive assistant at the Wisconsin Commerce Department.
Filmmakers even tried to claim $8,600 toward the $35,800 wrap party, but the Commerce Department denied that because it wasn't an actual production expense, Brandon said Friday.
Read more...
Wis. tax credits help pay for Depp's entourage
By SCOTT BAUER |Associated Press Writer
2:58 PM CST, February 13, 2009
MADISON, Wis. - Wisconsin taxpayers contributed $450,000 toward Hollywood director Michael Mann's salary when he came to the state last year to film the big-budget Johnny Depp
movie "Public Enemies."Records obtained by The Associated Press show the state's film tax credits not only covered a quarter of Mann's $1.8 million salary, they paid for a portion of his assistants' salaries, entertainment, meals and stuntmen's living expenses.
The state's tax credits even covered about $100,000 of the cost of Depp's entourage of chauffeurs, hair stylists and assistants, said Zach Brandon, executive assistant at the Wisconsin Commerce Department.
Filmmakers even tried to claim $8,600 toward the $35,800 wrap party, but the Commerce Department denied that because it wasn't an actual production expense, Brandon said Friday.
Read more...
California Test Screening Reviews of Public Enemies
Best Movies 2008 has quoted a number of new test screening reviews of Public Enemies. The blog starts:
Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was test screened on Thursday night in Sherman Oaks, CA. It was a blind screening, which means that they didn’t give the name of the film when soliciting for moviegoers. A bunch of reviews have been floating around the message boards. You can read five reviews after the jump.
Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was test screened on Thursday night in Sherman Oaks, CA. It was a blind screening, which means that they didn’t give the name of the film when soliciting for moviegoers. A bunch of reviews have been floating around the message boards. You can read five reviews after the jump.
The first review comes from MovieTVWatcher:
Last night I attended a screening of Public Enemies in Sherman Oaks, CA. I have to say that I was really, really excited to see it and I had great expectations to see it. Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Michael Mann and Marion Cotillard? I couldn’t wait. I arrived at the theatre almost 2 hrs before it started so I was guaranteed to get in. By the time the movie started, there were about 400 people and many did not get in. Michael Mann was there as well and I sat two rows behind him. So what did I think? I was very mixed about it. As soon as the movie ended I couldn’t tell if I liked it or not.
Anyways, let’s start with the good:
Johnny Depp WAS John Dillinger. It was an amazing performance and he is going to be considered at the Oscars next year. He was one of the few reasons that the movie didn’t fail. He wasn’t too over the top but he was very believable. I really thought this was one of his best.
Marion Cotillard was excellent as well. She and Depp had believable chemistry but I couldn’t tell what her accent was supposed to be. Some words didn’t have any accents at all while others sounded like her normal speaking voice. I will have to say that by the she surprised me very much. She has the final scene in the movie and it ended well. (I will say that she surprised me even more because I thought she wasn’t *THAT GREAT* in La Vie En Rose–Nom? Yes. Oscar win for that movie? No.)
Friday 13 February 2009
Michael Mann get's a Valentine's day vote
In a distinguished honour, Megan Smith from www.blogher.com lists Michael Mann's Last of the Mohican's as one of the film's featuring in her list of top seven movie love scenes. I personally was amazed to see a Mann film featured in such a list, but here is what she said about it for all you luvvies out there.
Last of the Mohicans (1992) - Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe: Directed by Michael Mann, this film is based on the James Fenimore Cooper novel. Madeleine Stowe is Cora Monroe, Daniel Day-Lewis is Hawkeye, the adopted son of a Mohican elder. The two are drawn together when Hawkeye, his father and his brother escort Cora and her sister to Colonel Monroe's fort during the French and Indian war in 18th century North America. The fort is under attack and in the midst of all the death and destruction Cora and Hawkeye acknowledge their love for each other.
One night after Cora leaves the infirmary where she works Hawkeye finds her. He grasps her hand and without saying a word leads her to a quiet corner before taking her in his arms. This scene is so satisfying because up until this point Cora has abided by the prim and proper rules of the period while still being attracted to the freedom Hawkeye represents. In this scene all conventions are shed in a whirl of long dark hair and passionate embraces.
Original Music by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman.
Last of the Mohicans (1992) - Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe: Directed by Michael Mann, this film is based on the James Fenimore Cooper novel. Madeleine Stowe is Cora Monroe, Daniel Day-Lewis is Hawkeye, the adopted son of a Mohican elder. The two are drawn together when Hawkeye, his father and his brother escort Cora and her sister to Colonel Monroe's fort during the French and Indian war in 18th century North America. The fort is under attack and in the midst of all the death and destruction Cora and Hawkeye acknowledge their love for each other.
One night after Cora leaves the infirmary where she works Hawkeye finds her. He grasps her hand and without saying a word leads her to a quiet corner before taking her in his arms. This scene is so satisfying because up until this point Cora has abided by the prim and proper rules of the period while still being attracted to the freedom Hawkeye represents. In this scene all conventions are shed in a whirl of long dark hair and passionate embraces.
Original Music by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman.
Tristan's Thief
It was a pleasure recently to read a new post by Tristan, a "follower" of this blog (using the term "follow" in the loosest of terms), in his blog Kirby Dots. It features an intelligent appraisel of Mann's film Thief, that brings an interest in the roots of film noir, it's french origins and influence on Mann. Michael Mann was of course in Paris a short time, involved with documentary film making. It would be a stretch though to see this as having any particular influence. Such influences come from a far deeper place.
There is much to Tristan's insightful study of Thief, and yet such examinations yield more questions. Tristan mentions towards the end the heroic, yet tragic nature of Mann's protaganists. Anti-heroes if you will. I think of The Insider, and how both characters gain something, but at the same time lose something.
Read Tristan's blog for youself, and enjoy his panache, using vocabulary such as Peckinpahesque, Mephistophelian and simulacra. Good stuff! (a term to stretch my own level of expository!). I look forward Tristan to future posts.
You can see Tristan's blog repeated on www.hollywood-elsewhere.com, where there are some useful pieces of information fed by those leaving comments.
See a classic clip from Thief below:
There is much to Tristan's insightful study of Thief, and yet such examinations yield more questions. Tristan mentions towards the end the heroic, yet tragic nature of Mann's protaganists. Anti-heroes if you will. I think of The Insider, and how both characters gain something, but at the same time lose something.
Read Tristan's blog for youself, and enjoy his panache, using vocabulary such as Peckinpahesque, Mephistophelian and simulacra. Good stuff! (a term to stretch my own level of expository!). I look forward Tristan to future posts.
You can see Tristan's blog repeated on www.hollywood-elsewhere.com, where there are some useful pieces of information fed by those leaving comments.
See a classic clip from Thief below:
Friday 6 February 2009
Mann discovers the next big actress: Carey Mulligan
According to the latest buzz, Carey Mulligan is going to be the next big thing in tinseltown. She has been cast alongside Ewan McGregor in a forthcoming movie, The Electric Slide. The article talks about Carey having the potential to take Hollywood by storm. The reason I mention this is to highlight just how perceptive Michael Mann is in finding the right talent. Carey will appear in a role in Public Enemies.
I was always amazed how Russell Crowe was so brilliantly cast into the role in The Insider. Crowe became an A-lister. I believe Val Kilmer was originally slated for that role (an actor I think is very under rated).
Read the article
I was always amazed how Russell Crowe was so brilliantly cast into the role in The Insider. Crowe became an A-lister. I believe Val Kilmer was originally slated for that role (an actor I think is very under rated).
Read the article
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