THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Translated from French by David Buchanan

It begins with silence, movements in the shadows and the half-dark. That is to say noises, but not words; bodies, but not feelings. Rather, ideas – but we don’t know it yet. A good start for a film, then: what’s known as ‘Cinema’. A Cinema not in the least hindered, back when it was silent, with guardians like Griffith, Eisenstein or, in an altogether different register, Mack Sennett. And here, in the first minutes of There Will Be Blood, we’re plunged headlong into Cinema and all becomes clear: When it comes down to it, Cinema is like love. It’s about bodies, gestures, actions, and not, I repeat not, about words! Words are literature, theatre. Or theatrical cinema: Renoir, Guitry, Pagnol and the like aren’t to be sniffed at, and if we had more like them showing in today’s fleapits then our little comedies, romances and melodramas might be a bit more exciting – they might even exist! But not only in these few, magical opening minutes do we sense Cinema, and what it is, or can be, when truly great; we also realise, even knowing nothing of Paul Thomas Anderson or his four previous films, that we are in the presence of a creator, an author in images, a work of art unfurling, with its physical, palpable universe and its rich, generous ideology and morality. Which is all the more obvious if you’ve followed his career through Boogie Nights and Magnolia. [1]

Birth (of a Nation) by Forceps

What’s more, Anderson has something to say. He takes the opportunity to tell us about his country, his family, religion, capitalism (America’s other - but not only - credo!) and the conquest of a territory; the founding of a nation. It’s a simple setup: money and oil, followed by oil and power. In other films descended from this quintessential national genre, the Western, it would be gold and blood, land and genocide, railways and the destruction of nature (forests, bison and Indians all lumped in together). But always, violence and death hand in hand with the adventure. Oh, sure! The oil-man generally isn’t someone who kills directly, even though he may delegate, or be content to uproot or suffocate those who stand in the way of his ‘progress’: smallholders, stockbreeders, farmers, pioneers of a disappearing America.

The film begins in 1889, on the very edge of the ‘Western’ age, and proceeds to develop between the two wars, coinciding perfectly with the heyday of that other great Hollywood genre, the gangster movie, of which Hawks’ Scarface (1932) would be the star-spangled banner, albeit with a border of deepest black. Progress is no longer in the discovery of new territories, but in the exploitation of the resources they offer. Conquest of the West is followed by conquest of Oil, even if, at the end of the day, all roads lead to Wall Street, and the birth of a nation must be brought on with forceps. No army needed for this industrial invasion, but the sinews of war are still there: money, and its corollary, the rise of savage capitalism. Not forgetting an ideological alliance against nature with a religion still rife with the spirit of crusade: once finished with the Indians, it’s the turn of sinners of every stripe. Over here in glorious, old, colonizing Europe, they called it “Baptism by sword” – something Africa knows a thing or two about! The concept having been modernised by the New World, it’s now about the association of money with the deceitful word, used by businessmen and churchmen alike, both equally possessed (in the demonic or the literal sense, according to conviction…) by their business of conquest, one supposedly in the name of progress, one supposedly in the name of spirituality.

Culture and Business

In this sense, Anderson’s film [2] could be seen as the unacknowledged love-child of two classics: George Stevens’ The Giant (1956), about the founding of a petrol dynasty, and James Dean’s last film before his death - Richard Brooks’ Elmer Gantry (1960), in which Burt Lancaster superbly plays a manipulative preacher. [3]

It’s worth noting that, like There Will Be Blood, these two films revolving around the foundation and the soul of America were adapted from famous novels (in their own country at least), or from the work of famous novelists. For Elmer Gantry we have Sinclair Lewis, libertarian author of the satirical Babbit (1922) to thank; and for Oil!, from which Anderson partially adapted his film, we’re indebted to Upton Sinclair, militant socialist and friend of Jack London, defender of workers’ rights and tireless adversary of capitalism. Noteworthy titles in his pre-Oil! work are The Money Changers in 1908, and King Coal in 1917…

Pétrole de Upton Sinclair

Quite clearly, in Bush’s America, at the turn of this not exactly left-leaning 21st century (especially in the USA!), a filmmaker can hardly be innocent of the consequences of adapting such a polemicist and ideologue as Upton Sinclair in order to denounce his country’s original sin. No more innocent was his second film in ’97, Boogie Nights, an attack on another flourishing business: The porn film industry, which, in Hollywood, brings in greater profits than the ‘normal’ productions! From pink gold to black gold, this is how a society came to prosper, and from the ‘specialised’ cinemas and urban peepshows to the drilling fields, Anderson’s lens pans over this civilisation’s ejaculations of wealth. And what could be more symbolically, outrageously obscene than a drill tearing into the earth, than the triumphant spurting from the derrick that it causes?

The pleasant surprise is that an American film, denouncing the obscenity of capitalism, the destruction of family values (the hero, mighty Day-Lewis, unsympathetic from start to finish, sacrifices his deaf son and (false) brother in the name of his quest) and the hypocrisy of the so-called religious (the preacher longing for worldly goods just like everyone else) – the pleasant surprise is that such a firecracker of a film can be a success in its own country and make it to the Oscars. Perhaps all is not lost in Bush’s America?

Please! A little more hauteur from our auteurs…

It’s also plain to see that, as Spanish Director Jaime Rosales wrote in the Vanguardia paper, the morning after the Oscars and the victory of the Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men) and Anderson (two awards, eight nominations – not bad for a socialist film!), something is changing in Cinema: the auteur film is breaking out of the margins, out of the little arthouses, and is stepping up to the front line. First sign: last year at the Oscars, having been knocked back six times previously, Scorsese finally won the twin accolades of best director and best film. Like the Coens this year, both had been, up to that point, better served by film festivals around the world than by Hollywood.

It must be noted that the American auteur film resides in a different sphere to the European [4], in particular the French. Beside the three Oscar-winners mentioned, this year’s best writer-directors are: Brian de Palma (Redacted), Todd Haynes (I’m not there, a magnificent jigsaw-biopic of Bob Dylan’s personality), Cronenberg (Eastern Promises), Clint Eastwood (Letters from Iwo Jima), James Gray (We own the Night), Ridley Scott (American Gangster)… So of the dozen or so auteur films mentioned, seven are genre films, war or crime films – American cinema is, unlike the French, able to combine auteurism (i.e. a personal vision, engaged with society and the events that situate it in history) with generic identity (which is, on the contrary, an assembly of group elements and criteria, of collective codes). One of Hollywood’s strengths is that it’s given birth to a number of key genres, even specific ones like the Western, the Musical, and of course the Crime/Gangster movie. It’s as if every vaguely responsible American filmmaker, at least those who consider the creative process as something other than an excuse to print money, was, through their subject, situation and characters, investigating the foundation of their country. So we get the inherent problems: immigration, the capture of land, identity, freedom, the righteousness and justice of war, money, power, exploitation; skim through all the films mentioned, and it’s all in there!

All this is hardly a novelty in the American Cinema that we know and love: in fact it’s what characterises all the country’s great classics, from Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (even though the film, sadly, is horribly racist and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan) through John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks and John Huston, ending up at the 78-year-old ‘baby’ of the group, Clint Eastwood – descendent to them all. And if, from this canon, we chopped out and lined up the most representative westerns, gangster films, war films and spy films, we’d end up with a fictional history of the United States, fit to rival all the documentaries in the world, to be beautifully concluded by Sergio Leone’s double tribute to this type of cinema: Once Upon a Time in the West and its step-son, Once Upon a Time in America. That’s the secret of the American auteur film, a tradition in which Paul Thomas Anderson, at 38, is only just beginning. And all the while, auteur cinema à la Française continues to mistake auteurism for autism, intimacy for navel-gazing, forgetting that Cinema is primarily the image, not an intimate journal or a scene in a play. Even without pretending to be a Scorsese or a Cronenberg, where is the French Paul Thomas Anderson?

It brings to mind the old French joke from the ‘90s: What’s the difference between Hollywood cinema and French cinema? Hollywood is Rencontre du Troisième Type (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and the French version is Rencontre Entre Trois Types (Three Blokes Meet Up). So true it’s not even funny…