From the Vaults: Commentary Tracks Are Tricky Things...

From 2008-ish:

Uh... so I now see why so many dvd commentaries are so awful. It was an experiment, sort of: Dr. Adams wasn't all that interested in just another discussion of Sunset Boulevard, especially since half the class never says anything as it is.

So he cued up Sunset Boulevard on the dvd player and said "let's do our own commentary". Mercifully, it wasn't recorded, because when the room gets dark, even the chatty students seem to shut up. Some of them fell asleep (I think).

There were fits and bursts of analysis, particularly regarding the way Billy Wilder was playing with expectations for his second fore into film noir. Sunset Boulevard could, in fact, be considered a proto-neo-noir; much like Ace in the Hole (or The Big Carnival, whatever you've heard it called), Sunset Boulevard is Billy Wilder playing with the conventions of noir in very different circumstances. He subverts and in many cases reverses shots, themes, and motifs established in Double Indemnity (six years separate Indemnity from Boulevard), so it's hard to say it fits cleanly into "classic" noir*.

But that's getting away from the discussion of our group "commentary", which ended up being mostly Dr. Adams pointing something out, one of three of us occasionally piping in noticing something strange (like the connection between Mabel Norman and Norma Desmond in a biographical sense) or pausing to appreciate the deep focus during the coffin scene. Most of the time we just watched the movie. For long stretches I'd want to say something but instead got caught up watching what was happening on-screen and not wanting to narrate the action.

To be honest, I don't know how many of you listen to commentaries, but they frequently fall into one of the two traps I just listed. The other big one is the actor commentary which is generally anecdotal stuff about pranks on the set or "how great it was to work with blah blah blah". Very rarely do you get a commentary track that provides solid technical information, decent analysis of subtext, narrative, or intertextuality.

One of the reasons I enjoy Steven Soderbergh's films so much is that when he records commentaries (for his films or others like Point Blank, The Third Man, and The Graduate), they're frequently very informative beyond "it was really sunny that day". For as bad of a movie as it is, the commentary on his remake of Solaris is endlessly fascinating. Soderbergh is teamed up with director James Cameron (who produced the film), and they have very different styles of direction which leads to a good discussion of the process of adapting existing material and approaches to shooting it.

There are some good commentaries out there, but often they're a lot like the Film Noir class was this afternoon: lots of dead air, sporadic bursts of qualitative content, and two hours better spent watching the film itself. Next time I'll try harder, or maybe MST3K had the right idea all along: riff til you see the credits rolling.


* there's the possibility of a series of really long essays about elements of Sunset Boulevard: it's place in film noir, the long list of citations in the film (obvious or otherwise), and the way that Wilder, knowing audiences were expecting another Indemnity, set about deconstructing the style he helped make famous.

2010 Thoughts: I wish that'd I had been able to point out that Jean Luc Godard lifts shots from Sunset Boulevard near the beginning of Breathless, but the Cap'n wasn't as up on his film history as he ought to have been. In retrospect, it may be that with better preparation and more gregarious participants, a commentary could work. As I'd pointed out, the students were never chatty to begin with, but in the ensuing years the Cap'n has frequently considered recording "rogue" commentary tracks for Night of the Lepus, Terrorvision, and very recently Shit Coffin. It remains to be seen whether those will ever come to pass, but it was something I considered doing as a semi-regular feature in the Blogorium.