It's Only a Movie

As with most people, my best ideas come either in the shower, or in the liminal period between sleep and waking. Yesterday morning in the shower, it occurred to me that three films of the late Sixties and early Seventies that I've seen all use the identical strategy of revealing the filmmakers and their apparatus to the audience, thus "breaking the illusion." This strategy forms the climax of both Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie (1971) and Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973), and it is instructive to know that Hopper invited Jodorowsky to assist him with the editing of The Last Movie because Hopper was such an admirer of El Topo. Jodorowsky, who claims to have done a full edit ("it was fantastic") doesn't believe that Hopper retained any of his work. He does recall that Hopper never changed his shirt for days on end and that consequently the scent of Dennis was overpowering: "he had I think ten women there -- and I put everyone in a line in order for them to smell the perfume of Dennis Hopper." That's classic Jodorowsky, and having ten women around is classic Hopper: in The American Dreamer, the amazing feature documentary that L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller made of Hopper during the editing of The Last Movie in Taos (yes, this is all way self-reflexive), Hopper hot-tubs with a bunch of the women and speculates that he is really a "lesbian chick" at heart.

Anyway, the other film I've seen that goes in this direction is Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), as well described by Roger Ebert:

Near the end of the film, there is even a transition made by cutting from one of the actresses to a shot of the camera crew. Light men, camera operators, script girls and Bergman himself look at us dispassionately. Then the on-screen camera turns, and in its view finder we see what will be the next scene. We have been brutally reminded that the story is being filtered through technical equipment.

So this sort of revelation of the film-making process, climactic or otherwise, seems to be very much a trope of the 1965-1975 period, and I'm sure that there must be other films that use it. In fact, the ploy seems so specifically Godardian that I'd be shocked if Jean-Luc never used it himself, although I don't know as there is still a lot of Godard I haven't seen.

POSTSCRIPT: Godard did, and in a film I actually re-watched recently, Week-end. Roger Ebert points out that the film's camera crew is visible during the 360 degree shots in the barnyard with the pianist playing Mozart.