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Celebrity Profile
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| A Streetcar Named Desire | Cindy McGlynn
October 2009
Movie Entertainment
To call Elia Kazan a great filmmaker is like calling Barack Obama a nice change of pace. It falls short of the mark when discussing the multiple Oscar and Tony award-winning director who discovered Marlon Brando, co-founded the Actors Studio and directed A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront and East of Eden – just for starters.
Kazan, who died in 2003, would have turned 100 this year. In his honour, Kent Jones (U.S. critic and executive director of the World Cinema Foundation) has curated an 18-film retrospective program at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Cinematheque from Oct. 23 to Nov. 23.
The series opens with a Streetcar Named Desire and includes Splendor in the Grass, The Last Tycoon and East of Eden among the titles. If there’s a treasure above others in this program, Jones says it’s 1960’s Wild River.
“I would say that many film lovers now consider it to be [Kazan’s] greatest,” Jones says. “It stars Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick. It’s a stunning pastoral film that winds up in a state of perfect ambivalence and has some of the most moving passages of any film I know.”
It’s hard to overstate Elia Kazan’s influence on cinema. His films didn’t shy away from controversial topics like racism and alcoholism (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), and he elicited career- defining performances from actors like Marlon Brando, James Dean and Natalie Wood. Some people attribute Kazan’s naturalistic, articulate and emotional filmmaking style to the Method, a way of acting by arousing in oneself the character’s feelings, and one of the techniques used at the Actors Studio. (Think of a raging Brando screaming into the night for his Stella in Streetcar.) But Jones says the Method was not Kazan’s cuppa, though he would borrow from it – and anything else that would get the job done. Most of all, Jones says, he loved working with actors and trusted them.
“He was an actor’s director … and one of the people who revolutionized cinema by incorporating emotional expression into moviemaking.” If Kazan is a titan, it must also be said he’s a controversial figure, owing to his unrepentant testimony in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee in which he named colleagues associated with the Communist party. Whatever else they mean, Jones says those days can be viewed as a catalyst for Kazan, resulting in
films that were more expressive than ever. Ultimately, Kazan’s films changed not only what movies delivered, but what audiences expected.
“His approach to cinema was to think in very refined terms of the emotional shift of his characters and to key the action of the movie to the emotional shifts,” says Jones. “And I would say that probably changed people’s experience of what acting was and even what a movie was.”
American Outsider: The Films of Elia Kazan, TIFF Cinematheque Oct. 23- Nov. 23. Click here for details.
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