1972: Cabaret

Cabaret (Fosse, 1972) 7/10

In German historiography, the pre-Nazi era interwar period between 1919-1933 is commonly referred to as the Weimar Period. Named after the city in the eastern German Land (province) of Thüringen were the German Republic constitution was drafted, the actual city of Weimar is arguably Germany's cultural epicentre. Home to the German National Theatre and located near Dessau (home of the famous Bauhaus movement), Weimar's residents have included writers such as Goethe and Schiller, thinkers such as Herder and Nietzsche, painters such as Kandinsky and Klee and musicians such as Bach and Wagner. Perhaps because of the city's link to German culture, the term Weimar Period has been synonmous with art, design and performance.

Yet, the type of art commonly associated with the Weimar Period, the cabaret, was not a product of Weimar the city, but rather Berlin. After the fall of Imperial Germany, the cabaret was briefly released from the shackles of censorship during the pre-Nazi era and became an important socio-cultural forum for political criticism and social discussion. Although cabaret is most often associated with its initial French variation featuring dancers such as Josephine Baker in venues such as the Folies-Bergère and Moulin Rouge, its more political German equivalent lost much of its edge and artistry with the rise of the Nazis: as the cabaret was suppressed resulting in the imprisonment, murder and exile of numerous cabaret performers throughout Germany.

It is during the twilight of this brief period of laxed censorship and economic turmoil that Bob Fosse sets his 1972 film Cabaret: a film focusing on a type of entertainment far removed from the classical formats traditionally associated with Weimar the city. Adapted from a 1966 Broadway musical by Kander and Ebb, Cabaret was originally offered to both Billy Wilder and Gene Kelly, who turned the project down. Instead Bob Fosse, a noted choreographer stepped behind the camera for the first time and created a film imbued with his consciously filmic interests in the erotic, ignorance and materialism.

The film stars Michael York as Brian Roberts, a graduate student from Cambridge who moves to Berlin to aid the completion of his doctorate. Penniless and homeless, Brian rents a room in an apartment building with plans to teach English to the Berlin intelligentsia and economic elite. There he meets Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) an American emigree, who becomes his friend and lover. Together the film chronicles their bohemian lifestyle amidst the decadent world of Berlin's ancien riche and the rising Nazi storm.

In several interviews, Martin Scorsese has attested that he tried to create his ill-constructed New York, New York as a "film noir musical." Despite his honourable intentions, Scorsese's vision fails to adapt to this vision. Conversely, if one were to use the rationale that noir is a mood and not a movement, then Fosse's Cabaret is truly a film noir musical. Visually the film uses limited amounts of light in its cabaret sequences, which provide these sequences with a sinister quality.

In terms of narrative, Cabaret utilizes experimental editing techniques, which enhance the off-kiler resonance of the period. Sally Bowles is an archetypal femme fatale who utilizes her sex to seduce men for power, pleasure and material goods. Furthermore, Bowles' reckless behaviour threatens to destroy her subdued lover Brian, who can be seen as noir's "fall guy:" caught up in the web of vice, sin and greed the immoral surrounding world represents and the femme fatale embodies. Additionally, the film's denouement fails to neatly resolve the world's moral order, but rather impresses the notion of distortion and paranoia in warped mirrors and the ambigious endings for several characters.

In Bob Fosse's brief directorial filmography there is an explicit interest in the erotic and sexuality. Cabaret his first film is no exception. Like All That Jazz there are several references to stripping, while the acts and performances at the cabaret often feature lewd jokes, racy puns and revealing clothing.

Interestingly, while European made films of the period such as Bertolucci's 1900, Visconti's The Damned and Cavani's The Night Porter associate Nazi's with sexual perversity, it is the bohemians, artists and capitalists who are equated with moral depravity, which is as much related to sexuality as it is materialism. Through the locale of the cabaret, sex becomes a commodity. Frequently, Bowles is seen off-stage flirting with overweight and aging businessmen in small cubicles as she tries to earn a few more Deutschmarks in order to pay her rent.

Another trademark of Fosse's cinema is his focus on duplicity and personas. In Cabaret each performance introduced by the film's anoynmous German emcee (Joel Grey) involves the creation and delivery of another identity through costume, song and style. In her make-up and costumes, Sally creates an exaggerated idealized version of herself built on half-truths about an ambassador for a father. These personas allow her, like All That Jazz's Joe Gideon, to be adored by admirers but not loved. Persona and duplicity combine when the film's homosexual transvestite performers attempt to woo clients who are unaware of their gender or orientation. The secret desires and obsessions held by Brian, Sally and her wealthy client Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) are another facet of this duplicity, which results in loss and betrayal for all parties.

Like All That Jazz's Joe Gideon, one can perhaps argue that Sally Bowles represents Bob Fosse. Like Gideon, Bowles embarks on impossible ventures, which result in self-destruction; lavishes herself in empty materialism and meaningless sex to replace true affection and is ignorant of the world around her. For Sally Bowles " Life is a cabaret" and nothing more. It is a one-act show featuring an exclusive one-night only performance. As a result, Sally attempts to do everything, yet is too naive to understand the consequences of her actions. Behind her back she is often mocked as being childish and childlike by her supposed friends such as Brian and Maximilian. She trusts people to shower her in gifts, but is unreliable to others and cannot commit to true relationships. Nor can she realize that her overly ambitious attempts to be a legitimate film actress will never be fulfilled. Thus in her bid to protect and shelter herself from the blows of the world, Sally insulates herself in a somatic world, which caters to her carnal needs, but lacks the direction and organic spiritualism necessary for a truly fulfilling life.

In Cabaret, Bob Fosse demonstrates his aptitude for provactive material and characters. His hubris and auterist conceptions of the medium are present in his aesthetic approach to the narrative, which displays his thematic concerns and interests. Liza Minnelli's career-shaping performance as Sally Bowles is filled with pep in constrast to Michael York's cold and flat demeanour. Joel Grey is particularly affecting as the cabaret's emcee: further illustrating Fosse's penchant for circus-like situations and the grotesque. Additionally Fosse also shows great strength and agility in re-working Ebb and Kander's music around the cabaret itself: integrating the songs as an instrument designed to propel the film's subtext and ideas, rather than superfluous pauses in action.

Unlike All That Jazz, the film's faults can be attributed to its editing as David Bretherton's approach to editing, results in a rather slow middle to the film. Furthermore, the film's subplot involving two German lovers Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper) and Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson) is jettisoned without care in the last quarter hour; discarding the business friendship created between Fritz and Brian, while leaving the fate of Natalia and Fritz in ominous circumstances.

In Bob Fosse's 1972 noirish musical Cabaret the illusory world of art and material decadence unfolds under the auspices of the looming Nazi era. Within the darkened corners of the cabaret, there lies Fosse's critique of the erotic, artificiality, ignorance and intent; themes and visual ideas which Fosse intricately is able to successfully transfer to celluloid in order to show the ease by which intellectual and artistic fascism develops and suppresses individuals with its inherent violent authority. Thus Cabaret serves as not only an illustration of failed aspirations and dual identities, but also a reminder of the swiftness of regressive socio-political change in a society too interested in its own carnal individual pursuits.

* Cabaret is available through Warner Brothers Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1979: All That Jazz

All That Jazz (Fosse, 1979) 9/10

The freshness of a new day never seems to reach esteemed choreographer and director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider). Each day, like the one before, Gideon embarks on a repetitious and ritiualistic cycle of ritual cleansing, dressing and re-fueling: washing away the previous night’s sins; costuming his body in his preferred black persona; and dulling the pain of another day with a lethal mixture of pick-me-ups and downers. Once his transformation is complete, he confers to his mirrored self his preferred mantra: “It's showtime, folks!”

It is fitting that a man whose career life cycle is built upon repetition (rehersals, re-viewing dailies) begins his day in such a fashion. As a cutting-edge choreographer and auteurist director, Gideon is in a continued battle with God to produce something as perfect as a rose; something which can be a testament to his genius and satisfy his ego. His streak of perfectionism is both his gift and his curse: producing moments of personal inspiration followed by crippling moments of internal anxiety. Even Joe Gideon’s name appears to symbolize his fears and aspirations. The ordinariness of the name Joe exemplifies his consternation at being ordinary; while the biblical Gideon trumpets his own celebrity.

Directorial indulgence was a charge laid against director and choreographer Bob Fosse upon the release of his 1979 magnum opus All That Jazz: a personal semi-autobiographical project in the vein of Federico Fellini’s 8½ about a director in the midst of a creative crisis. While often compared to Fellini’s film, All That Jazz is not as aesthetically surreal as 8½, but perhaps is more autobiographical than Fellini’s flirtation with anti-modernization, director’s block and the grotesque.

All That Jazz is based upon Fosse’s own experience of trying to edit his Lenny Bruce docudrama Lenny whilst simultaneously choreographing and directing the musical Chicago on Broadway. In the film, Roy Scheider becomes Fosse's alter-ego Joe Gideon, while the picture includes a slew of other actors and actresses playing either versions of themselves or parts relating to a similar individual in Fosse's life and career. Thus, All That Jazz perhaps even transcends Fellini's picture in its intimacy and autobiographical nature.

Interestingly like Fellini in La Strada and Il Bidone, Fosse utilizes in All That Jazz symbols and ideas found in the circus in order to re-affirm his celebration of performance, as well as identifying the unforeseen rapidity of death or injury as a result of the act. Fosse uses imagery of Gideon walking on along a high wire tight-rope, only to descend: noting the craft and balance required to master all facets of life, death and art in one single performance. Additionally, in one of his early hallucinations, we see Gideon dressed as a circus clown. Earlier, Fosse may have noted that "Life is like a Cabaret" (another medium that shares the circus' penchant for the absurd and the grotesque), but here he is more cynical: life is less of a continuing show, but a one-act performance.

This philosophy can be seen in Joe Gideon's attitude towards life as he burns the candle at both ends: slaving away to create the next groundbreaking dance number or brilliant cut, whilst destroying his body in a temporal womanizing, pill-popping, chain-smoking and alcoholic blaze. There is never enough time for anyone or anything. Lovers are dispatched quickly; his daughter is granted limited time with him; and his patience wears thin with performers unable to follow the minute details of his program. He is a figure like Liza Minelli's Sally Bowles in Cabaret who wants to be adored, but not loved; nor can s/he love. Thus the physical pleasure supplied from lusts and flirtations substitute for real intimacy; as Gideon rarely gives an insight into his true self: preferring to- like Sally Bowles- adorn himself in masks and personas.

Yet for all his recklessness toward the advice of his physicians, Gideon takes personal responsibility for his actions. Unfortunately for both Gideon and his physicians however work comes before his health. Perhaps through this attitude, Fosse is attempting to validate his own physical destructive streak and need for artistic fulfillment. With its pessimistic projection of his remaining years, Fosse appears to be confessing to his audience a lifetime of sins and a desire for repentance, or at the very least attempt to emit concurrence from his admirers and critics that his cycle of creation and destruction was not for nothing.

Rarely in any musical has death played such an integral role to the narrative, yet in All That Jazz the afterlife is ever-present. The appearance of an angelic blonde (Jessica Lange) in a dressing room filled with abstract mementos and souvenirs from childhood to present seems to further impress the concept of forgiveness- as though cinematic confession to a mass audience, replaces the traditional and intimate confession to one in the Christian framework. Clad in a white dress, Lange's angel represents purity and the divine, yet conversely she also corresponds with the weiße toned colour code Fosse associates with sexuality. Thus in terms of death, white is associated with the ascension to the afterlife; whilst in terms of life, white is associated with sex and sexuality, which itself perhaps corresponds to the French term for orgasm ( le petit mort) which translates as "the little death."

White is the colour of the trousers he wears as a teenager when he has his first sexual experience working as a tap-dancer in a burlesque cabaret. White is also prominently used in the clothing of female characters. Often Fosse places these female characters in situations were either intercourse ensues or the gendered sexuality comes to the forefront. The shades of black Gideon is clothed in from head to toe appear to represent power. This is significant as the female characters who often challenge Gideon's need for control are dressed in black when they attempt to subvert his power basin; red is associated with performance as noted by the rows of red seats in the theatres and the utilization of red to cover the bodies of performers via spotlights, clothes and so forth. Although the emphasis on individual colour coded symbolism fades as the film goes on, the colour green is briefly associated with jealousy and betrayal as noted by the green seats and use of green light on Gideon's rival director Lucas Sergeant (John Lithgow).

Like in Fosse's earlier film Cabaret there is also an overt accentuation on the erotic. As discussed earlier, white is equated with sexuality in the film, but there is also an emphasis on performance as sexual expression. Often throughout the film, Gideon's work (as Fosse's was) is charged by critics and paymasters as being obsessed with sexuality. Yet it is not the mechanics of sexuality which Gideon (or Fosse) appear to be mesmerized by, but rather sexual expression as art. From the burlesque dancers that goad a young Gideon backstage to aura of stripping in the proposed Airotica sequence, there are several instances in which sexuality is deployed as a verbalization of artistic intent.

Noticeably however, as in Fosse's other work such as Cabaret and Sweet Charity the director has his protagonists believe they are capable of usurping their boundaries. Gideon believes he has found the right balance for his excessive work and leisure through prescription drugs. In order to accomplish their lofty aims, characters such as Gideon and Sally Bowles resort to vanity, materialism and an excess of vices to elevate their highs and alleviate their lows. Yet, it is these internal catalysts, which end up destroying them as they become increasingly ignorant of their surroundings: falling prey to their egos and immoralities.

Notwithstanding its co-shared Palme d'Or with Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha, All That Jazz was considered a box-office failure upon its initial release, which divided North American critics who in both positive and negative reviews often derided it as indulgent. However, time has spared All That Jazz, the harsh penalties it has enacted on Martin Scorsese's ill-fated 1977 stab at the musical genre New York, New York :proving this zenith of Bob Fosse's career to be better than his more famous earlier project 1972's Cabaret. With its Oscar winning edgy editing by Alan Heim and a career-peaking performance by Roy Scheider, All That Jazz is a fast-paced thrill ride into the damaging effects of art on the artist, as well as being arguably the best musical of the 1970's.

* All That Jazz is released by 20th Century Fox Home Video in an upgraded DVD edition coming in April, 2007

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque