Eastwood: Jersey Boys (2014)

For someone who has devoted so much of his career to music, Clint Eastwood has tended to stay away from musicals. With the exception of Paint Your Wagon, he has never appeared in a musical, nor directed a musical, despite helming several musical biopics and documentaries and composing the scores to a good third of his films. Jersey Boys changes all that, but it feels more familiar than might be expected – either Eastwood has made the transition to musicals remarkably seamlessly (he took up the project because his plans to remake A Star Is Born fell through), or he has somehow been making his own kind of musical all along, depending on how you look at it.  In any case, his tribute to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons probably has more in common with, say, Bird than with the hit stage musical that inspired it – in his hands, these iconic songs never quite break free of the narrative, never quite mutate into self-sufficient set pieces. If anything, they’re weighed down by his late classicist palette, which is even more sombre than usual, anchored by bright, occlusive light sources in the extreme foreground that relegate the Four Seasons to an almost inscrutable remoteness. That’s not to say that it’s dark per se, or that it doesn’t revel in the joy of their music, but that Eastwood wraps them so tightly in his perennial bars, saloons and back rooms that it feels as if the film has to make a conscious effort to remember them. For that reason, the meditations on mortality – and masculinity – feel a little more pointed and personal than in Eastwood’s recent films, from the glimpse of Rawhide that presides over one of the most memorable scenes, to an epilogue that paints 1990 as part of the same almost-black-and-white world. By the same token, it’s fascinating to see how Eastwood handles pop stars who were undoubtedly the pinnacle of machismo in their day, but who seem to have been quite emasculated and even effeminised by history. For every plastic Jersey accent, every Goodfellas-esque address to the audience – Joe Pesci helped form the Four Seasons, and is a character in the film – there’s a new trill to Frankie’s high-pitched squeal, which remains perpetually startling for being couched in such a swaggering context. Unlike the stage production, then, Eastwood hasn’t made it his ambition to rescue the Four Seasons from datedness, or to exploit their datedness for a new demographic – he simply accepts it, and that gives the film an extraordinary dignity and poise.

Abrahamson: Frank (2014)

Frank was loosely inspired by the life of Chris Sievey, a member of the 70s punk band The Freshies, who became famous from the 1980s onwards for his alternative persona Frank Sidebottom, as well as the giant prosthetic head that he wore whenever he was in public. Frank’s appearances were alternatively described as stand-up comedy, absurd theatre, circus entertainment and vaudeville, but Frank treats them, retrospectively, as a finely-pitched parody of the high-concept prog-rock affectation and ambition that was starting to lose its appeal by the late 80s and early 90s.  At its peak, that prog ambition envisaged composing, rehearsing and recording an album as a totalising act of transformation, culminating and crystallising in quasi-mystical live experiences. Some twenty years later, Frank asks how that process might look in the 10s, by way of Jon (Domnhall Gleason), an aspiring keyboard player who suddenly finds himself shacking up in a remote Irish cabin with the members of Soronprfbs, a neo-prog band headed by “Frank" (Michael Fassbender), Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Don (Scoot McNairy). Although the stage seems set for a prog road movie - destination: live performance - it quickly becomes clear that something has slackened since prog’s heyday, since for all that Soronprfbs experiment with noise manipulation, musical meditation and field recordings, they can never quite seem to set their concept free, or settle into a truly progressive momentum. In fact, it’s only Jon’s covert use of Twitter and YouTube to document their frustration that gets them a wider fanbase, and finally an invitation to SXSW, where the last act of the film takes place. Yet it’s at this very point that Abrahamson pulls back from social media, denuding the film to such an extent that you really feel as if you’ve missed out by not being at SXSW to see the film being debuted, or even shot, since it’s clear that Fassbender’s Frank-head attracted as much curiosity and attention as any of the musical acts. Filmed concerts often make you feel you’re missing out a bit, but Frank does more than that – it’s like a filmed preparation for a concert, a concert we never really get to see. On the one hand, that suggests live music is still involable, but it also can’t help but feel like an advertisement for SXSW as well. If it’s not quite product placement, it’s certainly process placement, a promise that SXSW can manage the prog process that aimed to transcend management in the first place. Perhaps that’s why the film seems to close off a second viewing, or multiple viewings, making you feel like the next logical step is to book tickets to SXSW, just in case Soronprfbs happen to turn up again next year, playing the songs we never get to see.

Welles: F For Fake (1974)

With the exception of the television documentary Filming Othello, F For Fake was Orson Welles’ last feature-length film – and it forms a kind of bookend with Citizen Kane. Like Kane, it’s a study of a multifarious, megalomaniacal personality – in this case, the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory, who sold over a thousand paintings to prestigious art galleries all around the world. However, the sheer audacity of F For Fake makes Kane seem positively staid by comparison – here, Welles throws all caution to the wind, abandons any possible audience to craft a flight of fancy that is almost unwatchable, but in the most extraordinary way. In part, that’s because it’s a documentary – Welles never felt quite comfortable as a director of fictional narratives, decentring his stories as he shot them, producing records of the filming process more than immersive imaginative worlds. In some ways, it felt that cinema hadn’t quite caught up to him, and he compensated for that with voices that moved seamlessly in and out of the diegesis, or existed on the cusp of the diegesis. More than any other film of his career, those voices are perfected here – often a single commentary by Welles will function, sequentially, as dialogue, voiceover, direct address to camera and instruction to the film’s editors. Convoluted, concrete and cryptic, his words seems to generate themselves, proceeding by association and homonym as much as anything else, before descending to a laconic subdrawl that gradually detaches them from Welles altogether, as if to auralise the moment at which words escape the body, speech breaks free of the speaker. However, that voice is only so perfect because Welles is working in a quasi-documentary mode that finally allows him to realise his vision of a film in which the camera is the protagonist, a story that takes place at the very surface of the lens – at least half of it is set in the editing room, as Welles moves with glitchy, discontinuous glee between what appear to be three or four different cuts of the same events. At its strongest, it is like a version of Kane in which there is no distinction between the shot segments and found footage, or in which Kane himself is devoid of a redeeming Rosebud, unless you count Elmyr’s “young bodyguard and companion,” Mark Forgy. And as the film spirals out to encompass Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, Oja Kodar and others, it feels as if Welles has achieved something like a fake film – a film that is only ostensibly separate from the world it describes. Early on, Welles points out that forgery is an art of misdirection – and this is surely his most misdirected, decentred, unrealised film, which perhaps makes it his masterpiece, as he presides over it with a Shakespearean self-effacement that’s even more exquisitely Falstaffian than Chimes At Midnight.

Teshigahara: Antoni Gaudí (1984)

Antoni Gaudí is more of a tone poem than a documentary, a perfect fusion of cinema, music and architecture in which Hiroshi Teshigahara takes us on a tour of the architect’s most famed structures. With the exception of a very brief interlude, there’s no dialogue or exposition. Nor is there any information about Gaudí’s biography or personality. Instead, Teshigahara treats Gaudí’s body of a work as a sacred space, approaching it with the hushed, devotional awe that you might bring to a cathedral. Combined with a peculiarly Japanese reverence for architectural minutiae and meditation, that reders the distinctive ambience and eerie playfulness of Gaudí’s buildings powerfully present, along with the way in which they evolved and transformed over time. Gaudí’s movement from neo-Gothic to naturalism has been well documented and analysed, and that’s certainly evident here, but it often feels as if Teshigahara is seeking out a different kind of development and transfiguration – you can feel Gaudí’s faith strengthening with each new structure, culminating with the monumental Sagrada Familia, which he commenced with a twenty-day fast. That transcendent tone is all the more remarkable in that Teshigahara is careful to continually ground Gaudí’s vision in Catalan culture, and the city of Barcelona in particular. From the very beginning, we’re periodically presented with interludes depicting Catalan artefacts, traditions and ceremonies, as if to suggest that Gaudí’s edifices rose out of the same gestures and postures. Perhaps that’s why his buildings feel so liquid and organic – the film opens with one of his fountains, while Teshigahara draws on his own background in ikebana, or traditional flower arrangement, to blur any distinction between the buildings and the gardens that they generally couch or imitate. In addition, Teshigahara reserves the most evanscent, curvaceous segments of Gaudí’s exteriors – and his trademark catenary curves in particular – for his most static shots, giving the impression that these buildings have simply absorbed the rhythmic undulations of his camera; at moments, it is like witnessing a tracking-shot corporealised into something you can inhabit, with all the mysticism and majesty that entails. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that Teshigahara spends so little time on the Sagrada – but then again, it feels a little less distinctive in his particular vision, which makes all Gaudi’s buildings feel tantalisingly unfinished, liquid, open to new vistas and vanishing points.

Soderbergh: And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)

Along with a handful of other directors in the late 80s and early 90s, Steven Soderbergh filmed one of Spalding Gray’s celebrated monologues, as Gray’s Anatomy. In addition, he cast him in one of his first feature-length productions, King Of The Hill. Some twenty years later, in the wake of Gray’s apparent suicide in 2004, Soderbergh set himself a more ambitious task – a personal and professional biopic of Gray. Or, rather, an autobiopic, since Gray’s life and career was nothing if not an extended autobiography, an autobiography set in the present tense, told as it was lived. To that end, Soderbergh restricts the film to archival footage, most of which is taken from Gray’s live shows and interviews. True to his career as a monologuist, the only other voices in the film are occasional or incidental, shaping and contouring his splendid isolation, to the point where it would play as a filmed performance were it not for the tact and discrimination with which Soderbergh collates and curates his material. Specifically, Soderergh chooses to present Gray's anecdotes chronologically, from his tempestuous childhood to the events that precipitated his final depression, while taking those anecdotes from all over his career. That gives the impression of an extraordinarily kaleidoscopic life, a life that changed a little each time it was told. More than that, it makes you realise how much of Gray’s life was actually lived on the stage, at the desks where he delivered his trademark brand of sit-down comedy. Taking his cues from Gray's insistence on timing and detail - well-timed detail - Soderbergh pores overs the small objects that furnished Gray’s sparse stages, as well as the small tics that made his Waspy solipsism so homely to his audiences, until Gray has simply become those tics and objects, vanished into his monologues, which become more and more self-effacing as they evolve. And that’s probably the truest way to tell his story, or to allow him to tell it for a final time – the perfect tribute to a visionary who “liked telling the story of his life better than living it.”