According to J. Hoberman's book, The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties, Henry Kissinger knew he'd made it into Richard Nixon's inner circle when the President welcomed him aboard his yacht to war-game Cambodia. The evening concluded with Nixon, high on martinis, screening his personal print of Patton. The President, Kissinger believed, was watching the military epic for the second time that day.
Weeks later, war movie became war when Nixon embroidered upon actor George C. Scott's famous prologue in Patton. ("All real Americans love the sting of battle. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.") "We will not be humiliated," Nixon added during a rare televised presidential address from the White House war room. "We will not be defeated."
Politicians weren't alone in catching film fever in the sixties. The success of Bonnie and Clyde brought about fashion change -- maxi skirts, wide ties. American retailers hosted Bonnie and Clyde sales ("everything's a steal").
"Researching the book, the thing that struck me is how many films [in the sixties]provoked a visceral response," says Jim Hoberman, in Toronto tonight to introduce The Manchurian Candidate as part of Cinematheque Ontario's nine-film celebration-investigation of the author's work: The Dream Life: J. Hoberman on Sixties Cinema.
"The kind of vitriol unleashed during the release of [Mel]Gibson's The Passion of the Christ once occurred regularly," maintains The Village Voice critic. "Even films like The Dirty Dozen sparked debate. Commentators called it immoral -- too violent. What did The Dirty Dozen say about [America]"
Hoberman's thesis might seem foreign today. Indeed, the author argues it took a "perfect storm" to create a condition where movies became shared fantasies that, in effect, directed their directors.
Vietnam and the civil-rights movement disturbed a society made ready for Armageddon by the Cold War. During the Kennedy era, Hoberman writes, "the dream life was at all times percolating with unrealized scenarios that longed to actualize themselves."
The conspiracy thrillers, Advise and Consent and The Manchurian Candidate actually preceded what many consider the era's defining, yet-unsolved conspiracy: JFK's assassination.
"There is no way to overstate the trauma of Kennedy's death," Hoberman says. "This was a national catastrophe shared on TV. The event changed how we see things . . . When Jack Ruby killed Oswald on TV, our need to see the event again created instant replay, which was soon adopted by football broadcasts.
"Then came the long-rumoured Zapruder film. Life magazine ran excerpts three different times. Because there was no satisfying explanation for JFK's death, we studied the [assassination]photos looking for clues."
The search for What Happened became epidemic in movies. Antonioni used the motif of a photographer stumbling upon murder to give meaning to his sixties meditation, Blow Up. With the 1966 film, The Chase, director Arthur Penn offered a dramatic restaging of Ruby's shooting of Oswald.
Star Marlon Brando, who plays a Texas sheriff in the movie, even offered to take a slow motion, Zapruder-esque beating. Penn declined, deciding instead to let events of the day play out by torching a set on screen, acknowledging the fire burning in Watts.
The following year, slow-mo assassinations finally arrived with Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch. To paraphrase H. Rap Brown, violence and voyeurism were now as American as apple pie.
Filmmakers became civil-war correspondents. Haskell Wexler and Antonioni travelled to the famously violent Chicago Democratic convention in 1968. Wexler came away with the cinéma-vérité classic, Medium Cool. And Antonioni, who was tear-gassed during a riot, absorbed material for his American travelogue, Zabriskie Point.
The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, Medium Cool and Zabriskie Point will all be shown during the Cinematheque series. They're also key departure points for Hoberman's book, a witty, improbably acrobatic history that looks for politics in film and art in popular culture.
Queens, N.Y.-born Hoberman became an amateur filmmaker after college. He loved underground movies (Warhol, Michael Snow) and made his own work out of found film. What Hoberman wasn't making in the early seventies was money, so he turned to writing film reviews at the New York weekly, The Village Voice.
In a way, the 55-year-old writer-academic continues to work with found materials in The Dream Life, whether it's putting the summer of protest into a cultural context by discovering lost car ads ("The Dodge Rebellion wants you!") or finding a haiku in the arrangement of a 1968 Life magazine front-cover headline: "New frenzy in the war/Vietcong terrorize the cities/ SUICIDE RAID ON THE EMBASSY."
Hoberman will be signing his book at Cinematheque prior to the screening of The Manchurian Candidate.
Cinematheque Ontario's Dream Life series:
Tonight -- The Manchurian Candidate (1962): Laurence Harvey is brainwashed zombie Raymond Shaw. Shaw would rematerialize months later, Hoberman observes, as "The Secret Agent of History" -- Lee Harvey Oswald.
Saturday -- Dr. Strangelove (1963): "The Cuban Missile Crisis replayed at high speed for laughs."
June 29 -- The Chase (1966): High Noon all liquored up, with loaded guns and pants ready to go off everywhere.
June 30 -- Bonnie and Clyde (1967): Warner Bros.' ad blurb: "They're Young, They're in Love, and They Shoot People!"
June 30 -- Wild in the Streets (1968): Shortly after Time magazine named the under-25 generation Man of the Year, a film is made out of an Esquire magazine parable: "The Day it All Happened, Baby" -- the story of a rock star who wins the White House and banishes everyone over 35 to Paradise Camps, where they are force-fed LSD. As Paul sang in Penny Lane, "very strange!"
July 1 -- Zabriskie Point (1970): A student activist steals a plane and meets an (until now) aimless girl in the desert. They make love at the lowest point in Death Valley -- Zabriskie Point -- with the Grateful Dead's Dark Star playing in the background. Then the cops arrive and the light show begins.
July 2 -- The Wild Bunch (1967): Bandit William Holden's snarled opening line, upon entering a bank: "If they move, kill 'em!"
July 3 -- Medium Cool (1969): Part documentary, part drama. A TV cameraman goes to the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968. Flashpoint: During a riot, a crew member is heard warning director Haskell Wexler, "Look out Haskell, it's real."
July 3 -- The Parallax View (1974): An alcoholic reporter (Warren Beatty) investigates the assassination of a presidential candidate and discovers that the entire democratic system has been murdered.
Dream Life screenings take place at Jackman Hall of Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. For more information: 416-968-FILM.