Everybody Has His Reasons: John Sayles's City of Hope and Lone Star
1999; Issue: 49 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoJohn Sayles began as a writer, publishing two novels -- Pride of the Bimbos (1975) and Union Dues (1977) -- and a collection of short stories: The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories (1979). He also wrote scripts for Roger Corman's New World (e.g. Piranha (1979), Lady in Red (1979) and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), and made his debut as a writer-director with the very low budget Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), filmed on 16mm. for a total production budget of $125,000. (1) He continued to wrote genre scripts to support himself, whilst making his own personal movies in parallel. In 1982, he made Baby It's You for a Hollywood major. Interviewed in Cineaste, he expressed his dissatisfaction with the experience: that's the last time I want to go into a situation where I don't contractually have final cut. (2) (The importance of editing to Sayles may be seen in the credits to his films which typically say Written, Directed and Edited by John Sayles.) With his partner, Maggie Renzi -- who appears in small roles in most of his films -- as his producer, and by working to tight budgets and with `actors' rather than `stars', Sayles has since managed to maintain his artistic independence from the Hollywood system. The result is a series of unusually distinctive films. The other eight films Sayles has made as writer-director to date may, in fact, be grouped in pairs: two small-scale films dealing with an intense relationship between two women: Lianna (1982) and Passion Fish (1992); two fantasies: The Brother from Another Planet (1984) (sci fi in Harlem) and The Secret of Roan Inish (1993) (folk-tale in Ireland); two films based on real-life incidents given a Sayles slant in their awareness of economic exploitation: Matewan (1987) and Eight Men Out (1988), and the two films which are the subject of this article, both of which deal with a large cast of characters in a multi-cultural, multi-racial society: the city (City of Hope, 1991) and the border town (Lone Star, 1995). (Since then, Sayles made the Spanish language Men with Guns and the just-released Limbo). City of Hope and Lone Star illustrate typical ways in which Sayles's films differ from mainstream Hollywood products. Both show the interaction of the political and the personal, and depict a complex weave of character interaction across a social cross-section of their respective societies. Whereas most mainstream films develop only the main characters in any psychological depth, and resort increasingly to stereotyping as one moves down the cast list, in these films there is an attempt to understand all the characters and their behaviour. City of Hope arguably goes further in this deviation from the norm. In it there are over forty characters given significant speaking roles, but the film offers neither a clear identification figure nor a comfortable position from which to view the events in the narrative; all the characters who have any power, and many who don't, are shown to be compromised. The other modern director whose work is perhaps closest to this is Robert Altman; Short Cuts (1993), for example, has a similar city-based network and number of characters. But Altman's position towards his characters seems to me fundamentally misanthropic: almost everyone is unpleasant, or selfish, or both. Although Sayles is quite prepared to criticize his characters, his wish also to understand them leads to a strong sense, in Jean Renoir's famous phrase from La Regle du Jeu (1939), that everybody has his reasons. Inevitably, some characters are crooks and some are aggressive and unsympathetic, but ultimately it's the system, not the people, which is indicted. Stylistically, City of Hope is dominated by long takes -- many of over a minute; some of several minutes -- which are used to weave the different characters and narrative strands of the film together. The opening shot, for example, introduces three of the major characters (Nick, Joe and Wynn) and two of the minor (Yoyo and Riggs) in a take of two mins. …
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