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  Truffaut's Day for Night (1973) remains not only one of his best films but one of the most enjoyable of the many self-reflective film-within-a-film movies that have been made. An Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, this romantic farce features Truffaut as a French director trying to direct a hopelessly flawed love story with an international cast. Truffaut captures the insanity, the humor and the passion both behind the scenes and on camera, as real and temporary romances are played out among the cast, all under the umbrella of making a movie. The warmth of feeling that is a trademark of Truffaut is clearly evident here in many scenes, as Truffaut the character emerges as an understanding and at times lonely "director" who must play lover, father, best friend, psychiatrist and dictator in order to get his film made. The ultimate romance in the film, of course, is that between Truffaut and his cast, no matter how badly they have let him down: if it weren't love, they wouldn't be there. Day for Night does become a carnival of mixed motives, characters, farces, but it is a carnival held together by mutual affection and, finally, acceptance.

  The Former Yugoslavia

  Balkan Black Humor and Magic Realism

  Certainly the former Yugoslavia would seem the last place for a writer of comedy to search for fresh approaches to the Muse. But filmmakers from this troubled part of the world have been highly successful in tapping into rich comic sources as both a form of survival and a celebration of life beyond the absurdity of wars, ethnic and religious conflicts, and poverty. Similarly, the filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia also have drawn from a long tradition of what we can call Balkan magic realism or surrealism that is not unlike the magic realism practiced by South American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Dusan Makavejev, for instance, remains perhaps the world's foremost "cine-surrealist" after Luis Bunuel for his hilarious and bizarre collage features such as Innocence Unprotected (1966), Loves of a Switchboard Operator (1964) and W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971). In Innocence Unprotected documentary footage of the Nazi occupation of Belgrade during the war is crosscut with one of Serbia's first sound films-a ludicrous melodrama starring an acrobatic strong man of that time-and with contemporary documentary footage of the old actor/acrobat in the 196os, all interwoven with a musical soundtrack that counterpoints the images on the screen with either Hawaiian music or highly nationalistic folk songs. The result is a true carnival of images that are at times both very funny and also provocative in their juxtapositions, so that the film also serves as a critique of the past as well.

  Screenwriters wishing to broaden their comic perspectives can learn much from many of the Yugoslav films of the 196os up through the present. Let us mention two examples briefly.

  Slobodan Sijan's Who Is Singing over There? (1980) won awards around the world for its fresh and festive dark comedy of a country bus winding its way to Belgrade on the day that the Germans bombed and destroyed the city in 1941. This ensemble road film tracks a wide cross-section of Yugoslav society, including an old peasant, a sick schoolteacher, a would-be pop singer, village newlyweds and others, all under the tyrannical scrutiny of a walrus-sized bus owner and his halfdemented bus-driving son (who at one point drives several kilometers blindfolded!).

  What is particularly innovative about Sijan's war comedy, written by Dusan Kovacevic, is the use of two gypsies who open the film, facing the camera and singing what is about to happen, punctuated with a chorus of "I'm miserable, I was born that way. Oh, Mother, but to have dreamed it all." This opening does signal us comically and engagingly that the film is, in a sense, a song, a structuring device that becomes all the more clear as the journey progresses and the gypsies punctuate the film by stepping forward, looking at us, and singing the events unfolding.

  A blend of elements of the comic with an exaggerated form of reality close to that of magic realism takes place in the final scene. After a number of raucous, satirical and at times warmly amusing moments, the bus reaches Belgrade. At that moment the gypsies are wrongly accused of stealing a wallet, and as the passengers beat up the gypsies, we hear the German planes approaching overhead. There is a raid, and we end the film with the whole bus destroyed and everyone killed-except the gypsies, who climb out of the ruins and face us one last time, singing their by-now-familiar song.

  At such a point comedy and irony cross paths, as we realize the filmmaker has shown us those on the margins of society-the gypsies-as the only survivors. Sijan and his screenwriter have, we realized, pulled off a rare feat: they've made us laugh for over an hour and a half and then managed to make us care emotionally and think about the implications of both the sudden-death ending and the triumphant survival of the gypsies through it all.

  Bosnia-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica takes an even more surrealistic approach in his 1996 film Underground, which won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or award as best film. With a script once more written by Dusan Kovacevic, Kusturica fashions a darkly comic tale of a group of Yugoslavs who are held under the streets of Belgrade by a Mafia-like figure, Blackie (Miki Manoljovic), supposedly to protect them from the Nazis. What he neglects to tell them, however, is that at a certain point World War II ended. Thus begins a surrealistic nightmare, at times funny and always bizarre, as weddings, funerals, births and celebrations all take place "underground," until they finally break out during the Bosnian war. The ending moves even further into the realm of magic realism, as the whole segment of land that the main characters are assembled on near the Danube River breaks off and begins to float away as some kind of boat-like island.

  Both films therefore suggest the power of employing a wide comic canvas that stretches beyond the confines of everyday logic and experience.

  Japan

  Ceremony and Carnival in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

  Akira Kurosawa gave the world some of the most memorable dramatic Japanese films, including Rashomon (1951), Seven Samurai (1955), Yojimbo (1962) and Dersu Uzala (1980). In Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1991), however, the aging master allowed himself the freedom to put together a film made up of six distinct dream narratives, separated by fade-outs so that each stands as a story within its own right but related to the others in thematic concerns if not by tone, style or narrative.

  Several of the episodes in fact might best be described as nightmares of war, hunger, death and destruction, vividly but darkly etched on the screen. The final episode, which we are concerned with here, in which a young male traveler pauses by a water mill to talk to a very old man about his life by the river, thus becomes particularly important given its concluding position. How to end a series of dreams bright and dark?

  The focus in the beginning on the beauty of the river is our strongest cue and clue that Kurosawa is aiming for a triumphant conclusion.

  As the old man talks about his simple life of few possessions, we suddenly hear festive but stately music. Then we see a long funeral procession come into view, led by dancing children, all brightly costumed.

  The old man explains it is a funeral for a woman he once loved. As they talk, the soothing river in all its beauty flows on around them. As the young man asks more questions, the old villager begins to dress in costume. We and the young man sense that the funeral is not an occasion for wailing and tragic expression. Rather, we see the participants are joyous, not dejected or sad. And when the young man asks the old man's age, he replies, "103," tagging this with a smile and "It's good to be alive. It's exciting!" The old man, now with the costume on, grabs some bells and dances off into the procession. The young man watches quietly, leaves a flower on a stone by the river where someone else died years ago, and walks off down a wooden bridge. We close on the beauty of the sound and image of flowing water, much like a Japanese painting or a haiku.

  After the dark sadness of the preceding sections, Kurosawa, like the 103-yearold man, leaves us with joy, with triumph of the individual and group spirit over death, with music, dance and community sharing, in nature. It is "exciting" but it is more: Kurosawa's final section weds us to the comedy of life itself an
d that is the last laugh, the best laugh, the deepest smile.

  A challenge to all writers of comedy: even if you think of yourself as a writer of feature narrative comedy or episodic television comedy, consider the carnival of possibilities that await you in the field of documentary film, television and video work. We will emphasize this point in chapters ii and 12. But it is worth making here as well, for documentary can allow you as a lover of the comic a more immediate medium that is even more open to experimentation, and at a much lower cost.

  Upon its Warner Brothers release, Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989) became the most popular feature documentary ever to play in American cinemas. In part its popularity had to do with its exposure of General Motors' callous closing of a plant in Flint, Michigan, in favor of a new one in Mexico, where labor is cheaper. Moore, a resident of Flint, is the "me" in the title, and Roger is Roger Smith, then the president of General Motors, whom Moore wishes to show what the loss of 40,000 jobs has meant to a once prosperous but now deeply depressed "motor city."

  Advocacy filmmaking alone, however, would not have attracted so many paying viewers. What was particularly brilliant about Moore's approach was his use of humor, irony and comedy in pursuit of his goal. What he ended up with is what I have come to call performance documentary: a documentary in which one of the characters is "playing" in order to bring out unrehearsed reactions from others. In the case of Roger and Me, Moore becomes, on camera, a kind of goodhearted goofball innocent carrying out a simple "anarchistic" idea, as he tells us in voiceover: if Roger Smith really knew the suffering he was creating by closing the plant, he wouldn't have done it, so if Roger can be shown what has happened, he will somehow reverse his actions.

  Audiences laughed throughout the screenings, realizing, of course, what a comic set-up the film has. As Moore attempts to enter GM's corporate headquarters in Detroit to meet Smith, without an appointment, dressed in baggy blue jeans and wearing a wrinkled, soiled lumber jacket and an odd cap, of course we laugh as security guards swiftly elbow him out, glancing menacingly at the handheld video camera capturing it all.

  Humor, comedy and documentary. Three words that we don't see coming together often enough, for we have all sat through dry and boring documentaries as schoolchildren, and even after graduation most of us came to think that documentaries had to have either Walter Cronkite's fatherly voice or CNN-style jerky, in-your-face shots of disasters, murders and demonstrations. But the theme of this chapter is that Roger Moore and others are on to something important that anyone working in documentary should "seriously" consider: the power of comedy to make documentaries even more effective.

  Documentaries with Humor

  It is one thing to set out to make a funny documentary, in the old Candid Camera style, say, setting up a silly situation and then capturing people's reactions. This section, on the other hand, concerns serious documentaries made more memorable through humor in either conception or execution.

  Let us now salute the irrepressible Les Blank (see Horton, "A Well Spent Life: The Films of Les Blank"). Les has made some of the most feisty American documentaries of the past twenty-five years, including his New Orleans Mardi Gras film, Always for Pleasure (1978); his Polish-American polka film, In Heaven There Is No Beer? (1984); a study of Gap-Toothed Women; his record of what American twenty-one-day tours of Europe are like in Innocents Abroad; and a look at Louisiana Cajun music and culture in Spend It All, to name but a few.

  Les's humor is both in his subjects and in his relaxed shooting style, which puts those he is filming at ease. Humor strikes us immediately in the title of one of his best documentaries, Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers. Les loves food and music, especially regional American and ethnic, and thus it was inevitable that he would make a film dedicated to garlic, affectionately known by millions as "the stinking rose." We could label this anarchistic documentary comedy, as the title provides the very loose thematic structure that allows Les to investigate any and all aspects of garlic lore, from its growth, cultivation and harvesting to its use in foods Hispanic, American, Cajun and more, as well as its powers to cure illness and as an aphrodisiac. I have described Les's approach to filmmaking, in which he eats and drinks with the best of them and shoots miles of film, as cinema vitalite, a truly carnivalesque approach to the medium. He participates fully and thus becomes part of the scene he is documenting. Editing becomes the key factor, both to focus his documentaries and to bring out the humor. And he reaches the audience in direct ways as well. I attended one New York screening at the Film Forum during which garlic was cooked onstage and passed down the rows of the theater by scantily clad young women, so that we breathed and ate garlic while watching garlic on the screen. This is participatory cinema at its finest, and such an "embrace" of film, filmmaker, subject matter and audience is comedy in the largest sense of creating and nourishing a community. (Catalogue and tapes are available from Flower Films, 10341 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito, CA 94530. Phone: [510] 525-0942; Fax: [510] 525-1204. E-mail: [email protected]. Website: www.lesblank.com.)

  Louis Alvarez and Andy Kolker, documentary filmmakers based in New York, are also adept at making humor work for them. In Yeah, You Rite! (30 min., 1986), they capture much of what is unique about the various speech patterns and dialects of New Orleans. The subject matter, regional language and culture, is quite serious, and because this is an "educational" film, they were able to obtain various humanities grants and media organization funds to make it. But beginning with their title, humor is a central character.

  They begin in New York's Times Square, asking people in the street if they understand the following sentence: "If someone said they would give you a muffalata for laigniappe what would they mean?" Of course New Yorkers come up with hilarious answers, none of them correct. The film then cuts to New Orleans, Dr. John singing on the soundtrack, as it is explained that everyone in New Orleans understands that a muffalata is a spicy Italian submarine sandwich with cheese, cold meats and a special olive sauce, while laigniappe means "something extra," such as a baker's dozen.

  Alvarez and Kolker do have experts in language and cultural anthropology speaking in this half-hour documentary, but we are continually entertained by signs misspelled because of dialect rather than lack of spelling ability, by heavily accented locals in Mardi Gras costumes using a carnival vocabulary peculiar to New Orleans, and by the pure variety of individuals interviewed, old and young, black and white, poor and wealthy. It is humorous to cut from a snooty Uptown gentleman who claims his family is new to the city because they have only been there a hundred and fifty years, to a black teenage girl having her hair fixed doing a hilarious imitation of Tulane University East Coast coeds.

  This dynamic duo has gone on to make highly successful documentaries shown on PBS and other venues, including a feature documentary on American dialects called American Tongues that follows in the footsteps of the New Orleans film, as well as a similar treatment of American politics and of American pop culture influences on Japan, The Japanese Version. In this latter film, the concept itself is funny: how do the Japanese adapt and adopt our culture? In one scene in a Japanese "cowboy" bar, business executives after work dress as cowboys and drink bourbon on the rocks. When interviewed as to why they like to dress as cowboys, one fellow says that they admire cowboys for their ability to work together as a team and get the cattle to market so they will succeed in their line of work-the exact opposite of what Americans see as the cowboy image: the lone individual surviving in a harsh but beautiful landscape. (These videos and a catalogue are available through The Center for New American Media, 589 Eighth Ave., 21st Floor, New York, NY 10018-3005).

  Performance Documentary

  We have mentioned that Roger and Me blurs the boundaries between strict documentary and fiction film by creating the "me" character and using him as a "performance" mechanism to bring out the subject matter-General Motors and its negative effect on Flint, Michigan-in a way that is much more dramatic and comic than a Voice of
God narration with an unidentified narrator would be.

  Such use of comic characters inside a documentary is clearly an example of performance documentary. I suggest that this "comic" approach is a very fruitful one indeed. One other example immediately comes to mind. In 1994, while the Bosnian war was being waged, a well-respected Yugoslav feature filmmaker, Z. Zilnik, torn by these events but having almost no money, shot Tito for the Second Time among the Serbs on video. What did he do? He dressed an actor up like Tito, complete with sunglasses and uniform and a thick military jacket worn in a kind of Napoleonic pose, and had the actor walk around the central part of Belgrade, talking to "the people" as if he had come back from the dead for a visit.

  The anarchistic impulse is clear. And in carrying out this crazy "performance," Zilnik succeeded far more than any CNN or TV news documentary could ever hope to do in catching the feeling of the Serbian people at that very confusing and desperate period. Marshall Tito was a particularly heroic figure in the history of Yugoslavia, for unlike the leaders of many of the Soviet puppet states established in Central and Eastern Europe after World War II, Tito and his Communist partisans did actually defeat the Nazis and thus bring in a popular Communist government in 1945. And, despite all odds, he managed to hold together all the disparate sections of what became Yugoslavia until his death in 1980, with amazing accomplishments in literacy and medical care and a general rise in the standard of living, while (after 1948) standing up to Stalin and the Soviets to establish an independent socialist vision.