| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Harry Kreisler Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 4 of 4
You're amazing. You're hopeful. That's wonderful, but maybe it isn't. I think you've seen too many movies.
That's true, I do. I see three a week.
I want to talk to you about your movie love. There's a lot of things I would pick up on what you just said right now, about [the idea] that some people learn. I teach in a university with a very high threshold. People have to be pretty smart. In a class of about seventy-five people, I asked who knew what was happening in East Timor. One person [knew] the name, he understood the name was not the same as Shangri-La. It was a real place somewhere. And one other person had an idea of what was happening. Seventy-five people, bright people, go-getters.
My problem as a film teacher is that while I make films, most people are at the movies, and I see a big distinction between film, which is concerned with -- the word itself brings attention to the physical stuff, film -- and then the movies are fantasy: one sees through the film, one doesn't want to know anything about film, film gets in the way, it's transparent to the fantasy.
You indulge in the fantasies. And you do it for health reasons.
Let me go back a minute. Let's go back to my story --
As you mentioned.
I'll talk about that, because I've thought something about this. For the son of immigrants who loses a parent, what is constrained is your ability to understand the society you're living in. Film always did that for me. I learned how to do things and see things. It was a fantasy world.
If I have a set of values, sure, they came from my religious upbringing. I went to Hebrew school five days a week. I was bar mitzvah'd, so I drew on all that tradition. I read the classics and so on. I had liberal friends. (There are liberals in Texas just as there are Jews.) And so over time, I developed certain sensibilities. I grew up in Galveston, where there were black and white drinking fountains when I was growing up. But at some point I emerged as a liberal, humane person, even before I went to Brandeis.
How did I do that? One element in that was seeing a movie like To Kill a Mockingbird, which is about race, about a liberal lawyer and his relationship to his children. When I had to think about the Holocaust, a movie like The Pawnbroker with Rod Steiger made me understand the experience of the people who got out but didn't really get out. A movie like Zorba the Greek, which had so much hope and the vitality in one man embedded in his culture.
My point is that movies, as I was growing up, were part of my education, and at different times they helped me see things in a popular way as opposed to a religious way. In a popular way, through a medium that was popular, I was getting a sense of some values and not others.
But you surely didn't see these exceptional films three times a week.
No, I saw a lot of junk. I think it would be harder to do that today than it was then.
There were American values, and the values of American power and foreign policy embedded in these movies, and American capitalism, but there were also human stories. I'm amazed at the degree I was educated in that way.
In another way, I was educated by people like Alfred Hitchcock, who frightened me in what he was doing, and stirred me up in a way that I think you're trying to do in some of your work. That is, to be looking on the screen and not feel right about everything that's going on. And, therefore, thinking about what you see and the way you see.
You raised a lot of things. But I don't think I'm doing anything like Hitchcock in terms of unnerving you. I'm disorienting you, it's more physical. I'm not trying to tell you, in a work you see by me, that your grandmother is a predator, I'm not setting up this kind of dis-ease with this world that people are so willing to pay for. But were the movies important to you as a way of getting out of the Galveston shtetl and entering a really white world, imagining yourself in the majority world rather than the minority world in Galveston?
I'd have to think about that. I think my answer to that would be that what you see is partly determined by what you come with. Obviously, if you come from the background that I've come from, where your parents have fled from Europe, you know there was this thing called the Holocaust, you know what had been done to the Jews, you're growing up in an area where you see what's being done to blacks, the fact that they have a separate high school. When I was a senior in high school, I was a "student leader" (in quotes) and I went and spoke at a totally black high school on something like the equivalent of a human rights day or a civil rights day.
The important thing about me going to the movies is that at some point you're not a captive of what's being shown on the screen. You come to the movie, hopefully, with needs and lessons you've learned elsewhere that inform what you're seeing. So there's a positive feedback from what you bring and what the film can offer.
But you raised this question about healing. Later in my life, at a time when I was ill, I found great succor in movies. I will explain; I'll ask myself this question, how I made that transition to thinking about movies in that way. After I came to Berkeley, I started watching a lot of old films. One of the movies that I saw was a movie by Howard Hawks called Only Angels Have Wings. This is a film in kind of a Hemingway tradition of daring-do men running a mail mission somewhere in Central America. That is, they're transporting the mail to places where they won't get the mail [otherwise], and they're doing it in these primitive planes and so on.
But is it a "male" mission?
It was a male mission at that time, but now we have woman doing it also.
In the movie, there is a scene. The movie stars Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, I think Rita Hayworth is in the movie, and Thomas Mitchell. And there is a scene, a death scene, where the older pilot is injured and then taken into a hangar. It's quite a moving scene in which Thomas Mitchell, in his moment of death, really wants to be alone. And the way that Howard Hawks has shot this sequence, the way it's framed, the way you see Cary Grant, his compatriot and friend and the captain of the crew, coming to terms with the realization that there is nothing he can do, that this man has been injured, he's old, he's going to die. It's very moving, and for me, it was an emotional experience, having lost my father. It made me see things that I never could see in my own coming to terms with the actual experience. So in a way, this scene was a platform for me to confront reality, the reality of life. So sure, this was a fantasy, this never happened ...
But it's drawn from life.
Yeah, it's drawn from life.
Aspects of it are. But then, there's all these three times a week. As I say, you don't get rewarded so often.
Well, that's true. But you're reading the pulse of the country, is what I see. Or better, since you're the questioner, I would say you're reading the pulse increasingly of the powers that be. By going to a lot of movies, you learn quite a bit about what's going on in the society, and where the levers of change are. They don't seem to be very big, these levers of change these days, but you do get a sense of where America is at. It's not because the people are that way, but it's because the people who make the movies, driven by a teenage market, decree that it should be that way.
Okay, but this sounds like a social scientist going to the movies and not a movie-goer. It sounds to me as if there were your own emotional reasons for steeping yourself in movies.
Well, I bring several people to the movies. Several people bring me. I go with my wife and son, but in addition, I bring several selves. I've been trained as a social scientist, so I do some thinking. I see a movie like Three Kings with George Clooney of all people, and I say "My God, this is the most amazing commentary on U.S. foreign policy that I have ever seen in the post - Cold War world." But I'm also watching it for the entertainment, for its showing of the horrors of war, tapping the emotions that may be "rah-rah" patriotism. I'm bringing many selves, and it's not just the emotional self.
Are there other films you would like to bring to people's attention?
Well, I'm a big Hitchcock fan. I think that Hitchcock is really important. Shadow of a Doubt is one of my favorite movies [because] Hitchcock, as you were saying, brings this idealized fantasy of small-town America -- California, Santa Rosa -- on the edges of some dark evil, as you pointed out in your interview, when they go to the bar, when Charlie takes [young] Charlie to the bar. It's a very, kind of ...
It's hell.
... hellish, with a very strong reminder of the war going on. But also Joseph Cotten as Uncle Charlie brings the evil that is the core of everything. I just happen to be reading a book by Robert J. Lifton on the Nazi doctors, and what made them tick, and as we're talking, it reminds me of Joseph Cotten. Obviously, he was working on a one by one basis, but in other words, something had gone wrong with him. He was bringing a broader sense of reality than one might find in the American oeuvre. I also think Vertigo is an unbelievable movie, as a commentary on how we confront our different selves and our different fantasies.
I've never been able to really focus, as you and other people have done, on Vertigo but I have really thought about Shadow of a Doubt, a wonderful title. The shadow that splinters the benign dream of what you think is happening in Santa Rosa. When you speak of the Joseph Cotten character, you're talking about somebody who's ... I mean, you can't think of a more seductive character in film than this evil nut, this killer and hater. There is no question that the supposed good guy in the movie, the FBI man that travels around, is a cipher. He is a completely uninteresting fellow, right?
Right.
So Hitchcock, as Hitchcock does, is showing you the attractiveness, dangling the attractiveness of the devil, giving you the devil to model yourself after. This by the way ... we didn't talk about this during the interview did we?
We talked a little about it, but go on. I'm happy to turn this into an interview with you!
Well, you hit a ...
Go ahead, I'm interested in Hitchcock. Go ahead.
The war is going on. Pretty much the only time you see soldiers is in the scene of hell, with the slatternly waitress, OK? Young Charlie begins to realize that Uncle Charlie is taking her to a terrible place, a place filled with American soldiers. Otherwise, there's very little presence of the military -- during the war effort.
This is a strange movie about the stupidity of a whole town full of people who laud a psychopath, whom the FBI representative decides should be left sleeping. They should give him this wonderful funeral at the end, thinking this was a benevolent person. So they're fooled, the town is fooled. The only person that knows, really pierces the illusion of Uncle Charlie -- young Charlie -- is going to leave with the FBI man. She's going to leave that town in its delusion.
Well I think that you're offering less hope than there may be. We should remind the audience that Uncle Charlie has come partly at the request of his niece, young Charlie. For the young Charlie, the young girl, he is an ideal. He is a fantasy, the fantasy that her mother has created about her brother. And an important thing going on in the movie is her coming to a realization of who and what he is, and I think, implicitly, of the evil that might lie in herself.
I don't know ... the movie is obviously dated ... she probably wouldn't have taken on a career [after leaving town]. But I think the image remains of a journey of learning about evil in the world, even the evil within yourself. And that's still there, and that's still positive. I think it's too constraining to have her marry the FBI agent ... that made be reality, but I think we can continue the fantasy and hope that that knowledge leads somewhere else.
I think it's too easy to say that she sees Uncle Charlie as the possible evil in herself. And he doesn't come to the town because she's asked him to, she's asked him many times. His sister has asked him many times. He comes because he's trying to escape the law.
That's true.
Let's leave that. But you had this idea of imaging and health and movies.
Right.
I'd like to hear some of that.
When you're treated by conventional medicine, it's a very dehumanizing process, even as they're trying to save your life. And that's for several reasons. The doctors are dehumanizing because that's how they survive. You're the only patient you have; they have many patients, maybe hundreds of patients. Also, modern medicine is placed in bureaucracies, and that turns medicine into a Kafkaesque experience: waiting in lines, waiting for tests, waiting for appointments that aren't kept. Overall, this would resonate with everybody. It's a very dehumanizing process which makes you feel worse in the context of what is supposedly being done for you.
Finally, the medical technology, the wonder drugs, the chemotherapy, the radiation, whatever, increases your sense of hopelessness. Many times they're making you ill. If you have one condition, they're making you nauseous; or to destroy cancer cells, they're destroying good cells.
The whole problem becomes one of mood and emotions. When you're ill, depending on how serious the illness is and when it occurs, you wind up confronting your whole life, confronting the choices you've made, confronting your own self-doubt. In such an experience, you have to find ways that help calm you down, that help you see through the illusions and the obstacles that you're being put through.
What I wound up doing was turning to film images. I don't think everybody else would do it. But what I saw was that if you could take an image out of the context of the movie, at the same time remembering the movie, it provided a possibility for a secondhand emotional experience that you weren't going to generate any other way. That was for me.
Doctors always tell you -- I've had a lot of experience with doctors, they always tell you -- to relax, to take it easy. Why should you relax or take it easy in their office, naked on a cold table, while they're poking into places that you don't want to be poked? So then the question is, how do you create a set of images that you can turn to, that you can escape to, when you confront these realities?
Do you feel that you have been cured by images?
No. I think that images allow you to take what medicine has to offer. I would never suggest that they are a substitute for conventional medicine. It really is about their navigation tools that help you survive the negative consequences of traditional treatment.
But then you have the problem of living in mass society. There are a lot of people -- we have this enormous factory of education over here. You can understand why there would be a factory of curing, and why it would have to be functional. You couldn't go into someone's nice apartment or house, sit down in a living room, and it's like you're cured. Maybe that happened at one time ... I think it happened up to forty or fifty years ago, and then the mass production of wellness started. I agree with what you're saying, as somebody who has experienced that.
Let me just add one more thing, because I think it goes back even further. What "witch doctors" and traditional doctors in traditional societies had to offer with their cures was an explanation of how those cures fit into the stories of the people, and hence of the individual who was experiencing the illness. Maybe they were placebos, but maybe sometimes they worked. They worked because they helped people understand their own lives, to make sense of it in some broader context than their own. That's where medicine totally fails, [although] there are people who are trying to change that.
But the fact of the matter is, in my particular case, I was confronting an illness, Hodgkin's disease, in which the chemotherapy was mustard gas. It was [discovered] as an accident of war [when] a mustard gas plant exploded. It shrunk the lymph nodes. Hodgkin's Disease is a cancer of the lymph node. And it worked.
So this was a surreal experience. This was reality and there was no way to comprehend it. It works, though. At the time I was told I had this, I interviewed Linus Pauling. Linus Pauling was a big advocate of vitamin C, and so after I had this diagnosis, I went and looked up his book on vitamin C, and he has a footnote where he says, "In the case of Hodgkin's disease, the traditional therapy works, so I don't recommend vitamin C." So I took that as a signal.
But this was an extreme case of what I'm trying to say. The experience you're put through is so surreal, so unbelievable, so horrifying, [that] your humanity requires that you come up with some concept, some set of images that allow you to go to another realm. I worked out an elaborate way to do that in each case, watching a movie not in its entirety but extracting scenes, and then using the story that those scenes came from in the movie as background material. What I was looking for was a substitute for what the witch doctor could offer in primitive or traditional societies.
So for me, if you're ill, and you watched your father die when you were very young, when you were five, then maybe scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird, where you see this very strong relationship between the attorney and his daughter Scout, maybe those little pieces are something to look at to get over the hump.
Pretty good. I want you to know that the reason I wanted to do this [was that] I really wanted to learn something about Harry Kreisler. It's because I felt that you were were on a quest with all this interviewing, that you weren't simply about making yourself a master interviewer, that it wasn't enough to be a technician of interviewing, but you wanted to learn things, you were truly interviewing, and so I appreciate that desire to learn.
Thank you.
Thank you. Any last note? This might be your only chance to say something you've always wanted to say in these fifteen years.
No, I think we've covered a lot. You've renewed my sense of the need sometimes to cut the guest off when he starts talking too much! Thank you.
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