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14 September 2002 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
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
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. 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. 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. 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. (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, <http://www.proto.bifi.fr/cineregards>
(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.
13,833 words
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]
The Pathos of
the Photographic
Manhunter:
snapshots of disconnection
Heat: phantom
images
The insider:
grains of truth
The desire
for images or images of desire
Endnotes
