Signs and wonders

Julian Schnabel, painting wunderkind of the '80s, sees signs. "There's some crazy writing, it looks like, in the tree out there," He's pointing to the Christmas lights in the Public Gardens as viewed from his Four Seasons Hotel suite. "It looks like a word. Like `mañana.' "

Could be. Schnabel puts stock in these little epiphanies, and it was a chance viewing of a short documentary about oppressed Cuban artists that got him involved in Before Night Falls, his acclaimed second feature about gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Then he read Arenas's autobiography, Before Night Falls, and all his other works, got in touch with Arenas's long-time friend Lázaro Gómez Carriles, collaborated with him on a screenplay, cast Spanish actor Javier Bardem, and made the film with $12 million of his own money. Signs can accomplish wonders.

That serendipitous, free-associative approach is also evident in the film's style. "People don't usually equate that with narration," Schnabel observes, "but I think it is. It's emotional narration as well as discursive narration, and I don't have a hierarchical take on the two. I think that the dialogue in the movie is just like people talking, rather being than designed to give you the striving meaning of each scene. It's accumulative, like a life, and at the end you understand what happened."

Schnabel, who has no problem with expressing his opinions, explains his own moviemaking by comparing it to another film about a controversial writer, Philip Kaufman's take on the Marquis de Sade in Quills. "I think Quills is a nice movie. Geoffrey Rush gives an excellent performance, it's intelligent, what he's got to say, all the reasoning is excellent, but you don't care about the guy. I didn't care about him. All those people looked fake to me. Joaquin Phoenix is an excellent actor, everybody's excellent, but it looks all stagy and fake. I don't think they have anything to do with each other, these two movies.

"Yeah, they're both about censorship in some way, and hypocrisy, but I just see a sort of humanity or humanness about my film that is much more real. This was like a pastiche or something, and mine was more like a Battle of Algiers. I thought I was showing life, rather than having to talk about it. It was about his interior life, really, about what literature meant for him."

What it meant for Arenas in part was a lot of trouble, including long stints in brutalizing prisons. In the wake of the prolonged Elián González controversy, does Schnabel see his largely negative portrayal of Cuba as having an influence on people's attitudes toward that country?

"No. This happened way before Elián ever showed up. I think they should get rid of the embargo. I think it's the stupidest thing in the world. But I'm not a politician. I don't know what's going on here or there. This is just my investigation into Reinaldo's life. Going to Cuba. Seeing the Cubans there. Seeing what they're up against. It was not just a historical story but a story that needed to be told because those things could've happened right now.

"I think Reinaldo had a really hard time. Reinaldo probably would've known that I would go to Cuba to research this thing and he probably wouldn't have talked to me. It's very hard for someone to understand who hasn't been stuck in a box, or tortured, or really made marginalized -- once you've been in prison for six months there, you're like a criminal. I mean, you won a National Book Award in France in 1969 and your prize is to go to jail? Reinaldo wasn't writing political essays. He and the others were writing about their imagination. Anything that was apolitical was `counterrevolutionary.' So it became political because it was apolitical. One of the characters says that Castro couldn't govern this thing called beauty, so he had to eliminate it. That's an incredible idea. Basically, a dictatorship is unæsthetic. I think the movie is about the drums of militarism trying to beat down the rhythm of poetry and life.

"I think it's about the artist as a free man. It shouldn't just be that -- I think it could be any human being, entitled to their imagination."
-- P.K.

---

Back to 'Before Night Falls'

---