Visiting subUrbia

by Alicia Potter

In a motel in Memphis, between rehearsing and shooting a scene for his Elvis-flavored film Graceland, Harvey Keitel finds time to talk about a very different film, city, and kind of music.

"Compared to a sound I'd say it was like being in the middle of a dirge," says Keitel of his first impressions of Sarajevo, where much of Theo Angelopoulos's Ulysses' Gaze was set. "I had been in Sarajevo about two years previous [to shooting the film], on a visit with Vanessa Redgrave for Unesco. I spent two or three days there then." For Ulysses' Gaze, he adds, "We had set out to go to Sarajevo to shoot, but the airport had shut down. The plane just before ours was fired upon, so they canceled our flight."

They shot, instead, in another battered Bosnian city, Vukovar. The smoking ruins of the baroque, Balkan buildings that give the Sarajevo segment of Ulysses' Gaze its apocalyptic unearthliness are not clever set designs but the aftermath of generations of warfare.

"Vukovar is a town contested by the Croatians and Serbs," Keitel explains. "It was leveled by the Serbs during the recent civil war, and many thousands of Croatians were killed there. And it was leveled during World War II, when many thousands of Serbs were killed there. There's scene in the film where two young actors perform Romeo and Juliet during a lull in the fighting. That actually took place in the city while we were shooting."

Keitel, of course, is no stranger to the most remote, desolate, disputed human habitations -- both external and internal. From his incandescent performances in such Martin Scorsese films as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to his literally naked displays in Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant and Jane Campion's The Piano, he has been driven to seek out and express the most extreme experiences and circumstances. In Ulysses' Gaze he takes on one of the most primal and universal roles: that of the wanderer trying to find his way home in a world of prodigious evils.

In this case, Ulysses is a moviemaker, and he's searching for three cans of undeveloped film shot in pre-World War I Greece. His hunt draws him deeper and deeper into the Balkan inferno, forcing him to confront not only his past and that of the region but the validity of his art in the face of political and historical realities.

Keitel acknowledges that such realities are largely ignored by people in this country, but he defends America's recent involvement in the area. "After traveling around there, I want to say how ignorant the Croatian, Serbian, and Muslim leaderships are -- not just the Americans. We are there trying to help. Americans were there making the situation known and calling out to others to come. And some did. Certainly not in the numbers we should have come. I mean, children were dying."

Keitel is also intolerant of the kind of ignorance that causes a masterwork like Ulysses' Gaze to be neglected by American audiences. Made in 1995, it is just now being released. "They don't see it as a piece of entertainment that will make money," he says of Hollywood film distributors. "It's a difficult movie to sell. As opposed to a story that needs to be experienced. That's the way to sell this movie: sell the experience."

This notion that film is not an art but a consumer product undermines not only the industry, Keitel believes, but the culture as well. "There is no lack of material. There's a lack of interest and support from the economic quarter. Independent films now are really making a strong impact. But I am afraid it might just be momentary. I am not so sure that the economic factor is either that interested or educated well enough to place a value on these stories.

"I don't want to be presumptuous, but film certainly is or can be epic poetry in the hands of the right filmmakers. But film is not given its storytelling value. They say that what is missing mostly now for us to advance from our culture is that the art of storytelling has left. So here is a way for us to tell these epic stories of our citizens. This is important for our culture. It's not purely for entertainment, but for the pleasure of evolving. And I'm someone who loves the Three Stooges."

His new film, Graceland, is about a myth perhaps as great as Ulysses, if not the Three Stooges -- Elvis.

"I don't want to talk too much about it," says Keitel. "Not because it's a big secret, but because I want people to experience it first-hand. It's a film about myth, about America, and its creation of myth. It has to do with mythology and mythologizing."

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