Eating Extras: The Guy one Booth over in Goodfellas

A diner scene in Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas encapsulates the potentially disruptive presence of the extra. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) meets Jim Conway (Robert De Niro) for lunch. Liotta's character gathers that he is about to be "whacked" because he is given a solitary task: to kill someone else in Florida. (This is the brutal adage of mob existence: to be alone ensures one's death.) As Henry takes the assignment he looks not only at Jim but at the rather corpulent extra over Jim's shoulder:

                                  
Henry says Jimmy wants to sit near a window to keep watch over whoever might be coming into the Diner parking lot. It's interesting that Jimmy doesn't bother to look over his own shoulder. For in this scene the internecine war is not between rival gangs but between extra and star. Here the leaders are "tailed" by the extra in the next booth over.

What tensions or struggles result from the strange proximity of this chomping extra? He listens and at the same time seems not to listen. He isn't tailing our two heroes but he does seem bored, like any person alone at a diner, and casually overhearing the conversation at the next table. His active jaws express all the anxiety that goes unarticulated by the main characters, who keep cool exteriors even as they assign executions and think about death. "He was jumpy. He hadn't touched a thing," observes Henry. The mobsters come to a diner but neither eat nor talk frankly. The extra behind De Niro does both at once: he eats frankly.

The extra eats, and in doing so gives this scene its real bite. When we get a freeze-frame of Jimmy's face, the blurry jowls of the man over his shoulder give the picture its ominous and unsettling quality.The extra embodies that thing about Jimmy that Henry cannot bring into focus, cannot pinpoint. As Jimmy conveys the details about the task, the extra chews as if he too were dispensing something rather than digesting something. The matter-of-factness of the extra is what De Niro (and his character, Jimmy) can only aspire to.

At the very beginning of the scene, Scorcese's signature tracking shot cuts through the crowd of the diner as if it were Moses parting the sea. In the clip above, a man at the counter gets up as if to leave but then quickly scoots forward in order to make room for Scorcese's dolly (the shot impedes his exit). Scorcese  habitually demonstrates his tracking shot "mastery" by moving the camera through the busy back rooms crammed with people not in the limelight (the kitchen area of the fancy club in Goodfellas, for example). In the conversation at the booth, however, Scorcese's camera stops cutting through the extras and gets assaulted by one. This extra doesn't pretend to eat (like an actor) and doesn't pretend not to eat (the way De Niro does), he just eats. His eyes wearily search the room as if he were looking for a way to put his finger on the joy imparted by this presumably greasy food. The solipsism of the happy eater is well known. It says: this plate I look into is the center of my world; I couldn't care less about the acting going on the booth next to mine; I will even look into Scorcese's camera as I sit here and digest, thank you very much.

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In Search of a Memorial to Film Extras: the Lew Wallace Study/Museum

A few weeks ago a friend and I drove to the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Wallace authored Ben- Hur. I thought of the trip as a kind of pilgrimage to the extra, since Wallace's novel is a veritable petri dish for anonymous crowds. The novel's epic sweep compelled readers to envision its images more spectacularly, first as a Broadway play (replete with a chariot race in which the horses ran upon hidden treadmills!), then as silent films in 1907 and 1925, and then in the 1959 version starring Charlton Heston. Though the 8,000 extras in William Wyler's Ben-Hur would later be outnumbered by the 300,000 appearing in the funeral scene in Gandhi (1982), the statistics only tell part of the story. The real measure of Wyler's epic vision, is the way it turns even Jesus into an extra. Filmed exclusively from behind, and once with his hand holding water to the mouth of the thirsty Ben-Hur, the son of God is not given a single line of dialogue in the entire movie. He is as silent as his father! The actor who plays Christ, Claude Heater, went uncredited. We can picture the anguished preparation by actors who anticipated trying out for this part, rereading the bible in search of invisible stage directions on how to play the role, some approaching the part via method acting, others taking a more Stanislavkian angle. But Wyler took a different route: he got his Jesus through Central Casting.

Of course, there's an irony to this, since most of us remember Charlton Heston's performance rather than those non-roles of countless anonymous figures over his shoulder. In an essay on Heston in the Cahiers du Cinema, Michel Mourlet declares, "Charlton Heston is an axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself, his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty." According to Mourlet, Heston is a self-sufficient mechanism. But if Ben-Hur lacked extras, wouldn't it be indistinguishable from Omega Man ? If Heston is an axiom, what kind of mathematical function is the extra? (See the next post about my answer to this).

The conflict between worshipping the celebrity and overlooking the extra is played out in a small room off of the Wallace study containing wardrobe from the 1925 and 1959 versions of Ben-Hur. Under a Roman soldier's helmet from the Wyler film, and next to a box of Ben Hur cigars and empty Ben-Hur Cologne bottles (in case you want to smell like the film) rests an information card:

(All exhibit photos by Stephanie Cain, Visitor Services at the Lew Wallace Study&Museum)

How does the exhibit present the two pieces of wardrobe differently? The information card mentions that the wristband was "worn" by Francis X. Bushman (Messala); the soldier's costume and sword, belonging to the no-name extra, are "from the 1959 movie." Implicitly, the wristband belongs to the celebrity, whereas the soldier's uniform belongs...to the movie. The first was worn by a man whose middle name began with X. The second belongs to nobody, an X (the X-tra, who belongs to the film). The information card says the wristband was "worn" but the extra's sword was "used." How was it used in the film? Was it used the way the empty bottles of Ben-Hur cologne were used? Obviously, this sword chopped no heads, but the point is that the extra's gear is consigned to a status of utility, whereas the co-star's wristband achieves the status of possession or expression.

Elevated on a glass platform, the wristband is displayed as if it were an historical relic. The still from the film shows Mr. Bushman's wardrobe in action:

Still from Fred Niblo's 1925 Ben-Hur: Bushman on left wearing wristband

"Francis X. Bushman's wristband"

It is impossible to match the Roman soldier's costume displayed in the exhibit with a particular actor, however. That body of the actor has become "generic." Here is the display and a still from the 1959 film:

The display of the soldier's uniform in fact comes closer to visualizing how it actually appeared in the movie. This is because the extra of Ben-Hur is only the fulfillment of his wardrobe, a living mannequin for the army gear of antiquity. The background characters are there only to display the work of the wardrobe department. Unlike the stars of the film, they can never appear even semi-naked. Heston's privilege as celebrity is to go draped, to be stripped down as a galley slave, and end up wearing the garments of a charioteer. The extras are condemned to their threads, like prisoners to their uniforms.

The display of the sandals drove this point home to me:

As with the paper that we find in newly purchased shoes, a crumpled sheet has been stuffed into the sandals to keep their shape. In some ways I see this crumpled linen as a stand-in for what the extra is: he is there to give form to the figments of the wardrobe department. He keeps their shape instead of being given form by his fashion (as in the case of "Francis X. Bushman's wristband"). The extra is living stuffing, living sheet. Celebrities are allowed to bear their bodies and in the process become ghosts, immortal spectres. The extra, on the other hand, only becomes an imitation ghost, a man-sheet, one crafted by the costume department. But as anyone who has needed a makeshift screen for a home movie knows, the sheet is the best surface on which to project.

In downtown Crawfordsville there is a late 19th century building slated for destruction. It once housed the Ben-Hur Life Insurance Company and still bears its logo: a relief of a chariot race.

                                                        

As I left the town I whether the wristband or the soldier's uniform had instilled a greater sense in me of the Ben-Hur Life. The logo of Wyler's film is the same as the one for the Insurance Company building slated for destruction: in our memories it has imprinted the image of a the star wrestling with his horses and against his opponents in a death-defying chariot race (an insurance salesman's greatest dream and greatest nightmare.) But the extras, the indistinguished funereal slate, are the surface on which that celebrity is written. It is they who encircle the figure, support the action, and catch the light, even off the street in Crawfordsville.

The Deaf Extra

What function do extras serve in musicals? Singin in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952) has attained the status of classic in part for the way its stars (Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds) monopolize screen movement and subsequently our attention. In many musical sequences in the movie, only the stars seen to hear the music that makes them dance. The hierarchy of star and extra performs the same function as an Ipod, isolating and privatizing sound. In the following scene, for example, Cosmo (O'Connor) sings to Don (Kelly) about the overriding imperative of the entertainment industry: make them laugh.

                                            
The division of labor in the classic musical resembles the one instituted by Odysseus on his boat: desiring to hear the song of the Sirens (who traditionally lured sailors to crash their boats on the rocks), Odysseus plugged his rowers' ears with wax and tied himself to the mast. While the master listened and emoted to song, the rowers had to keep their heads down and could not even tap their feet. In Singin' in the Rain, the extras exist in a similarly noiseless space. Each extra seems imprisoned in a separate chore, subordinated to cadence of broom, dust brush, and carrying of props rather to the rhythm of song.The deftness of O'Connor is offset by the deafness of these stagehands.

What's the effect of this juxtaposition? Do extras resist performance entirely, even if they seem to be doing assigned tasks that reflect no cognizance of the action at hand? What's interesting is how unresponsive they seem to the musical that is happening around them. This unresponsiveness to the effort at humor (or making others laugh) never achieves deadpan status (a badge reserved for the unsmiling co-star listening to the jokester) and is held one notch below decisive inexpression. The film's myth rests on the illusion crafted between working and expressing: just think of how much mileage Gene Kelly gets out of an umbrella by not using it to keep himself dry. In 'Make Them Laugh," sweeping the floor is pointedly contrasted with the way Cosmo dances and, on his knees, walks in place on it. At one point however the belabored extras seem to cross the line, or attempt to do both: they throw Cosmo off the board they are carrying in beat to his song. My grandpa said go out and tell them a joke...(workers tilt the board). Does it reflect their proletarian annoyance at this fop making their task heavier? Do this gesture merely shore up the lead (does Cosmo become funnier?) or to send Cosmo a message (do they become more serious?) Do they dispatch of Cosmo in order to make the joke at his expense (constituting a temporary strike against the production we are seeing) or to his profit (to throw the dancer off balance and thereby reaffirm his grace)? The film makes it difficult to decide on the upshot of the extras' motion to throw the actor aside: it is not even clear whether this constitutes a rare instance of workers showing good timing or whether it is yet another testament to life forced to live by the clock.

A New Wave Cameo

So a friend of mine sent me this photo the other day: can you guess what it shows?

If you said, "The finest displays in the Fust Electronics store in Etoy, Switzerland" or even "the cashier in Fust electronics" you would not be wrong. But you also would not be right.

For that man in the deep recesses of Fust is none other than Jean-Luc Godard buying a printer cartridge on July 26, 2012, at 11:05am.The image captures something about which I previously had no curiosity: what does Jean-Luc Godard look like reaching? Godard is not a tall man. So he purchases batteries the way others might strain to pick an apple from a tree. This man who has done wonders to record the incidental gestures between people on film is here frozen in a bizarre moment of pricing. Cell phones do this to even the greatest figures, resizing them to fit our civic and commercial spaces, making everyone seem smaller and the atmosphere more attenuated. Cellphone photos make the world resemble the interior of an airplane: both spaces uglify people. Cellphone images scrunch everyone into the least glamorous corners of the visual field: it visualizes us (even great directors) as extras, supplements to the society of the spectacle.

That is why this photo is a bit ironic. Godard is the director who first welcomed the obscenity of the public into his films. He exorcised filmmaking from the studio system and allowed his actors to intermingle with passers-by in the street. In many scenes from A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), people on the sidewalk gawk at the camera. Such incidences would absolutely mar a standard Hollywood production by reminding us that we are watching a movie. Yet in Godard's film, these looks only help establish the indeterminate and elusive nature of what is unfolding. Like us, these extras seem to be asking what is going on between these two people? and why is the camera filming this? These questions are posed mutely, by the sidelong glance and over-the-shoulder profile of the extra:

Man passing by on left turns head toward  Belmondo/Seberg to ascertain what is happening...

...and the woman on left does the same.

Breathless constitutes a minor archive of such Epimethean looks. Pedestrians walking around the scene compulsively look back at it. This turning of the head suggests an undigested perception of events: "Am I missing something? What did I just see?" These are our questions too. We might say that the lightness of Godard's film is registered in the simple fact that no extra breaks her stride to stare at the production. Breathless doesn't impose on its spectators: peripheral figures are free to go.

Godard's film does away with the morality of Hollywood cinema and the hierarchy of its production. This is conveyed by comparing two images, First an image from the film of Belmondo and Seberg walking down the Champs-Elysees:

...and an image of cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Godard following the two with the camera hidden in mail cart:

This photo depicting the "making of" Breathless is indistinguishable from the first image, a still from the movie itself. That is, the director and cinematographer slip surreptitiously into their own film, posing as mail men. They look incidental, not essential. They capture these amazingly intimate and amorous images by inserting cinema's technology into the apparatus of the mail deliverer (and thereby presage the cellphone which can record and send images almost simultaneously). Alfred Hitchcock posits himself in his own movies as an extra who garners all our attention and lust for detection. By contrast, Godard (and Coutard) form an image that is consonant with the one they record. They do this by assuming the guise of the everyday (the mailman). The image they deliver to us (the film itself) has the initial look of something that deserves only negligible attention, like last week's food circular.

An interview about teaching cinema on Psychanalyse.lu

The website Psychanalyse.lu has an interview with me about teaching Bad Film in my classes at Purdue University.
The interview is conducted by Luc Kinsch, who has also written a prologue to our discussion.
Here's the link:
http://blog.psychanalyse.lu/teacher-of-bad-film-2-pedagogy/

When an Extra's Life is Short.....

The Wizard of Oz is the closest thing we have to a mythic movie. Like stories of Mount Olympus  passed on from teller to teller in ancient culture, this movie is the work of an amalgam of directors: Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Richard Thorpe and King Vidor all had a hand in making the film. The mythic element pertains to the reception of the film as well: watching Oz has become an annual ritual and it is rumored that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is secretly synched with its images.

Among the myths attributed to The Wizard of Oz is the story that an extra committed suicide on the set: a Munchkin supposedly can be seen hanging from a tree in one of the scenes. Forced to live in the background (literally "overlooked" in life), act in the background, and frequently confused with the background, a Munchkin seems to have decided to take his or her life in the background. (Ironically, Munchkins die in the same place Elephants do.) If Pink Floyd's album hypothetically immerses us further in the Oz saga, this myth introduces a hiccup, a strange aftertaste, into our appreciation of the film. A Youtube video brings the hanging victim to our attention:

 

The Munchkins in Oz are quintessential extras: they appear only in large masses and much of their appeal derives from how they are marked as belonging to a group (the Munchkins speak exclusively through the "fashion statements" of their clothes, hair styles, and type of flowers growing from their shoes). The Munchkins lose their cuteness when they step out from the dwarf throng:

As they separate from the crowd, Munchkins look not like toys but like mere people with uncontrollable tics, the survivors of deep trauma, the adults who emerged scarred from their childhood within a Henry Darger drawing. Munchkins get more horrifying the more we see them alone. This dynamic fulfills itself in the single Munchkin, the solitary extra, who is elevated not into celebrity but on a gallows. From a distance we must imagine a most unsightly scene of a crime: the bulging eyes, the signature cowlick now drooping forward over a ravaged smile, cheeks the color of his ascot, the Munchkin erection, the body suspended from a branch on a fake tree. It is this hypothetical sight to which all the other Munchkin faces in fact seem to be reacting.

The Youtube clip shows us the focus and speed at which we need to see the film in order to perceive the single Munchkin. It is not coincidence that this speed also destroys the song and dance numbers of the film.

The fact that the Youtube video is a hoax does not lessen its relevance. Even as a trick it reflects our desire to see the solitary extra make a statement, and turn their life (and death) into the means by which they do so. Kept from the script, the extra instead just leaves a body, a corpse. Is a suicide marring the backdrop of this film the only means of protest available? Does this figure give vent to that unhappiness that only shows itself indirectly, in the twisted and frozen visages of the Lollipop Guild? This is the extra's revenge: to wander away from the set in which they function as plasticene ornaments and appear, unscripted, in another scene where they can finally dramatize their mortality.

This fabricated image of a Munchkin suicide is cinema's answer to the distorted shape that appears in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors:

When seen from a certain angle, that shape becomes a skull, a messenger of death into the worldly power of the men depicted in the portrait. The hanging Munchkin is no less a trick, and injects a new angle into the landscape of the Wizard of Oz. In cinema, death arrives not via the trompe l'oeil (a distorted icon of vanitas), but as a dead extra lodged in the background of a musical number, a background actor whose body swings from a branch like an offbeat pendulum.

Extra in the Flashlight: Jesse "The Body" Heiman

What do you see when you look at this still from Spider Man?

To you is this a poster of Kirsten Dunst? Or is it on your wall because of the figure behind her: Jesse Heiman?
Your next question should be....which background figure is Jesse Heiman? Will the real Jesse Heiman step forward?
The truth is extras never step forward. Like soldiers dying in the battlefield, they only fade away into the backdrop.If film is indeed a battleground (as Sam Fuller immortally proclaimed when he himself played an extra in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou) then the extra serves in the infantry of the image field, and every film retains the tombs of countless unknown extras.

Jesse Heiman looks a tiny bit like Jonah Hill:

It's hard to say what separates these two actors other than the gaping abyss of celebrity. In addition to identical initials, they clearly share a similar body type. Yet their faces seem at different stages of differentiation: Heiman's is, as it were, still downloading, looking somewhat blockier, pixellated, compared to his more celebrated counterpart. Having never been invited to stand apart from the crowd or smile at the camera, Heiman's features have not been chiselled by the spotlight and retain a generic and indistinct quality, laying claim only to an idiosyncratic blot of color on each cheek.

Some adoring fan of Jesse Heiman has compiled his greatest "work" in both television and film:

This brief film gives us a sense, no doubt, of how Mr. Heiman's parents watch his movies. The order of shots is completely indifferent to content, plot, and drama and radically decenters our attention. Notice, for example, how even the corpse in one of the clips is given more focus (a staggered zoom) than Heiman.

This "video c.v." of Mr. Heiman's work is itself a study in the peculiar way in which we speak of and designate extras. What is the funny white circle that helps us identify the Heiman? How is this different from the spotlight of celebrity? In some measure it seems closer to a digital flashlight directed rudely at the extra's face, marking him the way police might specially shade someone of interest but otherwise overlooked in a surveillance video. Yet the wholly unexpected and supernatural quality of this white light also gives Mr. Heiman a strange and temporary aura, one that extends no further than the width of his shoulders. In fact, this method of singling out Mr. Heiman echoes the halo by which medieval and early Renaissance painting distinguishes Christ from the crowds through which he frequently moved, as in this painting by El Duccio depicting the kiss of Judas:

The halo effect is no different in the video of Heiman. Both he and Jesus have been called forth by the voice and the light. Or, perhaps, kissed by the Judas of celebrity.

I Coulda Been...an Extrah

Tonight I sat down and watched the long-awaited DVD release of That's My Boy. A few summers back, I showed up at a casting call for extras for this movie (I wrote about it here: http://extrasextras.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-first-casting-call.html ). Consequently, my eyes were riveted not on Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg (the starring actors) but on the human background to this movie, which I studied as if I were trying to get a splinter out of it.

As I watched the film, the words "Sandler Vehicle" kept murmuring through my mind. When does a film actually become a vehicle for its star? Could we classify the effect of That's My Boy as a kind of vehicular homicide? I kept thinking that the title of the film would be best uttered by someone pointing, identifying a body in a morgue. I stared at everything going on behind the actors, the way one looks at one's shoes when you are embarrassed. What place, or what seat, would I have had on this Sandler vehicle?

The vehicle seems to have no room for passengers: neither for the extras in the movie nor the spectators in the theater. The operators of the vehicle take joy in insulting pedestrians and driving over animals. It inflicted a strange feeling of captivity upon me: it is the first film to successfully make me feel like I was actually watching it on an airplane.

The odd thing was, in being jilted for a non-speaking role in this film, I felt like something less than a "wanna-be." I looked at the trees and shrubs in the Cape Code landscape that serves as the backdrop to the movie and thought I could have been them. What is one notch below screen being? What do you call the person who wants to not be (in the sense of star) on screen? Who aspires to exist like a spider accidentally caught in a diorama?

The strange condition of the extra in this film became clearer to me in the scene where the characters run drunk down a bowling alley. Sandler gets the alley leading directly into our line of vision:

Could I have been a bowler? Maybe that strange figure standing against the pillar behind the disconsolate woman who just had her spare ruined by Sandler? If I had a red shirt, could I have played that figure standing behind the counter in the far distance? (In his miniscule features I read only indifference for the action he is watching, that same indifference displayed by the guy you give your shoes back to when you tell him your bowling score.) There is so little prestige to the celebrities of Sandler and Samberg that in fact they just seem like extras, only nearer to us, further down the alley, so to speak. In stills from the movie, the leads are hard to distinguish from the people who got 70.00 for their day's work. Sandler and Samberg offer a refrigerator bulb in the place of the galactic light promised by the metaphor of a star.The telltale instance, the iconic image, from this film is immortalized on the DVD cover from the movie. It shows us Sandler knocking over pins in great glee:

This is the Sandler Vehicle in a nutshell (and shaped accordingly): he has become a bowling ball. What is the semiotic role of an extra to such a cinematic figure? Had I been chosen to just be or stand or pretend to do something next to the Sandler, my screen existence would have amounted to being little more than alley wax.