Word: roemer
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Last week Roemer accompanied his film to Boston. Although he grew up in Germany, Roemer speaks highly articulate American. He perfected it by writing a trunkful of plays "to acquire an ear." The modesty and straightforwardness which inspired that venture show up again and again as he describes his pilgrimage through the film industry: "I botched my first script and lost my job as a writer... I was lucky enough to get a job in deRochement's cutting room... I wrote five more scripts, none of them commercially robust enough..." Roemer doesn't apologize for his failures any more than...
Such candor and modesty has a direct bearing on Roemer's work. He has spent most of his career working on educational and documentary movies; objectivity is the first thing he looks for in any film--"I'm not even interested in the filmmaker. The best photography is that which I don't even look at." Few directors would express innocent amazement at the quality of acting in their films; Roemer points to Abbey Lincoln, who had never acted before, and Julius Harris (the father) who had been a male nurse. "They put themselves in a situation where they were...
...Roemer's modesty is deceptive, like his naturalistic technique. He spent six or seven hours with Julius Harris on each one of his lines. Roemer doesn't mean to suggest that he simply transfers reality to film, by aiming a camera at life. He explains, "I'm not a very physical person... I first got the idea of what Duff was like by reading Jack London, who used to row a boat across to an island and listen to the seals singing... I thought of Duff as me, which is the only way you can make a film really...
...Harvard English Department introduced Roemer to the neo-classicism of T.S. Eliot. He admits, smiling, "I was very romantic, which is what all neoclassicists are really--trying to step on themselves." He identified with Eliot's search for "objective correlative"--form and imagery which allow a reader to relate the poet's subjective experiences to his own. He wanted to believe what he saw in the theatre, but plays only worked on the printed page. So he turned to the movies--"Considering the intimacy of the film, you must believe...
Film spoke directly to his own experience; it rendered the speed and randomness with which things happen to modern men: "You pick up the phone in your office and hear that somebody has died." Films, lacking the conventional devices of the theatre, have to deal with what Roemer calls "this contiguity of unrelated affects." Nothing But A Man, for instance, switches without warning from inside to outside, from a home to a factory, from one city to another. "I had not though of my life as heroic, at least in any classical sense. But film made me aware...