I'd Love to Turn You On #239 - Brian Eno - Before And After Science (1977)

An argument could be made - and I’ve made it - that Brian Eno is the most pivotal artist of the rock era. If one lays his output on a graph with music history it seems like he has been constantly either breaking up the past or predicting the future. His work with Roxy Music took a hatchet to rock and prog convention, making concept over technique a willful and meaningful choice. His first four solo albums played with the idea that pop music could be more challenging than we had been led to believe. Combining a love for rhythm, heavy beats, and prog instrumentation with avant production he created a body of work that stands up well next to Bowie and Can as the tip of the spear of what might have been called cutting edge in the mid-1970’s. With Before And After Science he reached a new level of tea leaf reading. Released in 1977, this album is split into two parts: side A is angular, joyous proto-New Wave, and side B is a gentle and beautiful preamble to his ambient period which would preoccupy the next decade or so of his solo releases. This album took Eno two years to complete, and the ten songs included were whittled down from one hundred he wrote during this period. Each one of the chosen songs feels momentous and integral to the whole.

Also relevant to Before And After Science is the fact that it was the first album in which Eno employed his recently invented Oblique Strategies cards. These production tools were a series of “oracle cards” which when drawn from a deck at random would make suggestions like “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” Eno and his fellow musicians would attempt to act on these instructions without question. This method of creation shares DNA with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s Cut Up method of writing. There was intentional art, and there was entrusting the process to the whim of the universe, and each of these ideas was given equal merit. The result was magnificent as nothing on Before And After Science is predictable and everything sounds new and unexpected.

Opening with the chaotic rhythms and phased vocals of "No One Receiving" we are immediately thrown into a woozy world of off-kilter cadences that seem to come out of the mix like lead instruments instead of their usual background position. With accompaniment by members of Cluster, Brand X, King Crimson, Can and Roxy Music among others, Eno finds the perfect musicians for his vision. With minimal instrumentation he creates a symphonic version of rock music. Infallible melodies are coaxed out of the barest use of drums, bass and synths. No matter how carefully one examines the songs and their instrumentation there remains a certain magical Eno-ness to each number that gives it immediate and permanent mnemonic properties. You can’t exactly tell why, but they live in your head forever. "Kurt’s Rejoinder" will make you feel like you are in a pop music house of mirrors as synths soar above crazy time signatures with unforgettable Lewis Carroll-like lyrics. Track four, "Energy Fools The Magician," is the first hint of the ambience to come - a slinky instrumental led by Percy Jones’ slippery bassline and Fred Frith’s spooky guitar. Side One comes to a close with what I have always considered one of the first punk songs. "King’s Lead Hat" (an anagram for Talking Heads, whom he had just seen for the first time and would go on to produce) storms out of the gates with Andy Fraser’s crashing drums, marching handclaps, and clanging metal, and is punctuated by a deranged Fripp guitar solo. It bristles with spiky energy that would have fit in on a Magazine or Buzzcocks album.

If side A is a sonic report on rock’s contemporaneous state, side two is a never ending dream balm. Faultlessly melodic, "Here He Comes" is a beautiful and simple song with Phil Manzanera’s guitar and Paul Rudolph’s fretless bass solo playing off each other ecstatically. As side B progresses, we can hear Eno working his way toward ambiance. "Julie With" is a whisper of a song whose lyrics evoke beauty, eroticism and dread equally. Nothing but sparse keyboards, droning guitar and bass provide the gentle background. Eno intones "I am on an open sea, just drifting as the hours go slowly by/ Julie with her open blouse is gazing up into the empty sky." It is the audio equivalent of a Renoir painting - hazy, dreamlike, lovely. The album closes with the sublime "Spider And I" which finds Eno alone with synth waves, moody bass and the lines "We sleep in the morning, we dream of a ship that sails away…a thousand miles away." Eno’s muse was about to set sail. When Eno followed this album with more than half a dozen contemplative instrumental albums which plumbed the quiet recesses of modern art, it should have surprised no one at all. Side two of Before And After Science sounds like a man quietly slipping under the inky surface of his own artistic impulses with no intention of breaking the surface anytime soon. It is a sublimely quiet and singular listening experience. My highest endorsement is that for years I would go to sleep to side two of Before And After Science, and I never had any nightmares.

- Paul Epstein

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #220 - Word Is Out (1977, directed by The Mariposa Group: Peter Adair, Nancy Adair, Rob Epstein, Andrew Brown, Lucy Massie Phenix, Veronica Selver)

Word Is Out is the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identity made by lesbian and gay filmmakers. There is a long history of queer cinema leading up to it - much of it rife with tragic narratives - and a flowering of the genre and queer filmmakers in the years that followed, but this landmark, released after the beginnings of the modern gay rights movement and before the AIDS crisis, really started the ball rolling.

The film was the brainchild of director/producer Peter Adair, who assembled a group of filmmakers - most of them completely inexperienced - around him to help create the film. The six filmmakers - three men and three women who ended up working in every aspect of the production and are all listed as co-directors under the umbrella name of The Mariposa Group (after the San Francisco street where they were headquartered) - interviewed hundreds of Americans who openly identified as gay or lesbian* from all over the country, from different racial and socio-economic backgrounds, and ranging in age from 18 years old to 77 years old (the oldest participant was born in 1898!). These were then narrowed down to the 26 who appear in film, and to a person they are engaging, warm, and articulate in sharing their thoughts about their status as gays and lesbians in 1970's America.

Each of the interviewees discuss various topics, ranging from first awareness of their sexuality, to coming out, to personal struggles, to reacting to societal norms and institutional pressures, to legal difficulties, and many other topics. As expected, the experiences are as diverse as the participants, each of their lives shaped by a unique set of circumstances; some had full support of their families and in some cases even spouses they separated from, others had families going ballistic, children taken away from them, or institutionalization (including shock therapy) to “cure” them. The film takes pains to make the uniqueness of the individuals clear - these are the stories of 26 individuals, not meant to be taken as a symbol of gays and lesbians as a whole; the subtitle of the film is even "Stories of Some of Our Lives" (italics mine), and within the first few minutes of the film one of the interviewees states “Even as a black lesbian, I wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘This is how black lesbians ARE’ I happen to be a black lesbian and there are so many of us - of black lesbians - who live their lives in so many different kinds of ways that I was hoping the film would be able to give, you know, a broader spectrum of a black lesbian than just me.”

But as fascinating as the differences are the commonalities - stories of the repression of the 1950s that many of them lived through as young (or even slightly older) adults coming to terms with their sexuality, stories of both family turmoil and familial love, and the same internal conflicts across the generations. And this holds true not just within the film and between participants, but for modern viewers outside the film as well. It’s startling to hear a voice from the mid-70s articulate a legal or religious struggle that still goes on today (even if perhaps in a slightly different form), affirming to hear that the same feelings and ideas - both positive and negative - that the participants grappled with decades ago are many of the same ones faced in our contemporary world.

Word Is Out premiered in 1977, got a wider release and was broadcast on PBS in early 1978, making the film widely available to thousands of viewers who might not have had the opportunity (or the courage) to see the film in the theater. The filmmakers’ PO Box in the credits was flooded with letters after its premiere, with many people crediting the film with literally saving their lives, letting them know that they were not alone in the world, that others have shared their struggles and come out OK. In intent, in concept, the film embodies the very meaning of Pride: showing those who haven’t yet found the courage to come out that it can be done, and that whatever challenges they may face in doing so, the end result is worth it. Representation, as shown with these 26 individuals whose diverse stories resonated with thousands of viewers then and continue to do so over the decades, matters.

The filmmaking collective only made this one film together, but several of them continued to make films - notably Peter Adair and Rob Epstein (whose next film The Times of Harvey Milk won the Oscar for best documentary), both of whom stuck to making films on LGBTQ* themes. And though the film summed up a history of representation on film and in the media and opened doors for LGBTQ* filmmaking in the future, there’s still nothing quite like this doc, no film I’ve seen on the topic that draws you in to its subjects so warmly and openly. And it’s that warmth, that delight in just listening to the interviewees, that makes it such a great film, even setting aside its landmark historical importance.

- Patrick Brown

* - in this review I refer specifically to gay and lesbian subjects, which is the stated subject matter of the film itself. The film’s creation predates the acronym LGBTQ, which came to prominence in the 1990s. However, there is one interviewee in the film who identifies as a gay male, but speaks of feeling in between genders, predating the modern ideas of gender fluidity and non-binary gender.

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #216 - The Devil, Probably (1977, dir. Robert Bresson)

            Concerns about increasing Russian/American tensions, ecological disasters at the hands of corporations interested only in profit, an overriding fear of nuclear war, an ineffective political left, a church that has lost touch with its ability to speak to the masses - if these were the central set of concerns of a film, when (and where) would you guess it was from? Because while this film could certainly be made here today and be 100% relevant, these are the main ideas that thread throughout French director Robert Bresson’s 1977 drama The Devil, Probably. At that year’s Berlin Film Festival, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder uttered some prescient words about the film, which took the jury prize: “...this film will be more important than all the rubbish which is now considered important but which never really goes deep enough. The questions Bresson asks will never be unimportant." And no less an authority than Richard Hell called it “the most punk movie ever made.”

            It’s certainly not a happy film - it’s a furiously angry one; but the times warranted it then and maybe today’s world does as well. If Luis Buñuel, considered one of the most pessimistic filmmakers in cinema history and two years older than Robert Bresson, ultimately resigned himself to a pattern by the 1970s of making films satirizing the things he used to attack more mercilessly in his early work, Bresson, a filmmaker usually noted for his austerity and profoundly spiritual themes, worked up an angry head of steam at the injustices of the world that got more savage as he went on, culminating perhaps with this, his penultimate film, released when he was 76 years old and one of the most ruthlessly despairing films about the contemporary world ever made.

            

          The film opens with a newspaper headline telling us about the suicide of a young man in Paris. Then another headline follows, saying that the alleged suicide was in fact a murder. Then we jump back six months to find out how this young man, Charles, got there. Charles - like all of the “models” in Bresson’s films - walks around Paris with a disaffected air. While this seems like flat acting, it’s a constant technique throughout Bresson’s works. He called his actors “models” because he simply wanted them to unemotionally recite their lines, eliminating the normal dramatics of capital-A acting and allowing the words, the sounds, and the situations his characters are in to come to the fore. His films are perfect demonstrations of the famous Kuleshov effect, in which the same film segment of a Russian actor was intercut with different images, leading viewers to believe that his expression had changed because of what he was “looking” at, projecting a new meaning out of the juxtaposition of the two images even though the clip was the same in all cases. Similarly, Bresson’s models offer no inflections or reactions while wandering through the world, which in Bresson’s script provides enough horrors that there’s no need for a trained actor to underscore them with hand-wringing histrionics. Charles drifts around the city, hanging out with other disaffected youths, attending political rallies, dating two women, going to church, trying to drop out with drugs, attending classes, searching for some meaning in his life, and ultimately we come to see how he has died, after finding most of his experiences empty, fleeting, and shallow. These are also underscored with repeated visits to a group of conservationists logging horrifying footage of ecological disasters, including the needless slaughter of animals (trigger warning for those who can't abide animal cruelty). All of these are at some point in the film mentioned in service of money - from a church that does not adapt to its constituents’ spiritual needs but protects its wealth (“A Christianity without religion” one of the flock calls it), to the therapist who is more concerned that his patient pay than helping him heal (Charles - “If my aim was money and profit, everyone would respect me.”), to the eco-disasters and animal slaughter in the name of corporate profits, to the war machine then building between the U.S. and Russia.

            These scenes are shot in a way that no other filmmaker could have done them. In a film so wrought with existential horrors, one would expect the drama of the scenes to be highlighted, but Bresson uses his typically elliptical approach, omitting standard methods of building drama or tension and focusing instead on the rhythm of a scene, highlighting movement, editing, and sound to recreate that Kuleshov effect over and over - we aren’t given everything to explain a scene, and neither music nor acting are there to underscore how we should feel about it, but our minds fill in the gaps and flesh things out as Bresson’s models speak their lines, and he lets the juxtaposition and rhythm of his images and sound do the work to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. His camera is often centered on objects rather than individuals, suggesting that the trappings of modern life are as much a part of the problem of the world as the bigger targets he’s referring to. There’s a famous scene on a city bus where the passengers collectively engage in a dialogue about the modern world, intercut with the machinery and sounds of the bus - the cash machine, the opening and closing doors, the air brake - and one passenger asks “Who’s leading us by the nose?” He’s answered by another, who provides the film’s title - “The Devil, probably.” Though Bresson would never admit to a reading so direct, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that the Devil in question is the greed that drives everything in the film. In his next (and final) film, a forged 500-franc bill ruins the lives of everyone it is passed to. The title of that film? - L’Argent, or in English, Money. He could easily have switched the titles of these two films and they'd carry the same meaning.

-          Patrick Brown