Michael Mann

Abstract

This article was written in celebration of the release of Michael Mann’s last film Public Enemies (2009). It offers a unique examination of Mann’s 90s triumvirate: The Last of the Mohicans, Heat and The Insider. It assesses the influences of the Renaissance on the director’s technique at that time and concludes by asking has Mann now abandoned this approach to filming with his embrace of Hi Def Digital Video?

Article With regards to this writer the attraction of discussing a Michael Mann Film, the real motivation or incitement, was for the longest time complex and irreducible. Did it lie in the wonderful deployment of his camera or the grand symmetry of his compositions or his films’ perplexing but fascinating clash between realism and stylisation? Whatever my thoughts were on what kind of a director Mann was though, I always tried to assiduously avoid an easy canonising.

The unfair categorisation that did parasitically attached itself to him, as simply a peddler of existential crime drama (like the pigeonholing that befell – and to a degree, continues to befall – the Scorseses or Almodovars), has of course been rebuffed in recent times by those proponents of Mann who sought to inculcate a more erudite view. Defenders of the faith abound in film criticism and Mann is in no short supply of this kind of supplicant, fans who continually ask for him to be reconsidered, reassessed and revaluated. Yes there is a preponderance of crime stories in Mann’s oeuvre; yes there is a measure of recycling of hard-boiled lines of dialogue or visual motifs or character names in these films (albeit in a self-conscious manner); and yes there is a commonality across the stringent male characters that inhabit Mann’s world - these aspects are undeniable and evident to even the casual viewer. Yet, as one of the supplicants, I asked myself and begged of others, are these things not just surface contours, identifiable dramatic conventions that permit Mann access to something deeper and more profound?

Heat was the film that introduced me to Michael Mann. Ignorant of the director himself, I was struck more than anything else in 1995 (as were most it now seems) by the tantalising prospect of seeing Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, that dramatic odd couple, united at last, albeit in what appeared to be just a crime film.

However, from those first images of De Niro being ferried towards us on the Blue Line of Los Angeles’ MTA I was hooked, succoured that this was not just going to be a crime film with the incidental attraction of a Pacino/De Niro concoction. The images of the opening gambit were cool, modern and above all relevant to today’s experience of living in a large city. The loneliness of the contemporary urban environment was palpable as De Niro alighted from the train and made his way into the emergency room of the hospital. There is no social contract between the members of the public on show here!

After the immediate appreciation of Heat’s obvious qualities subsided, what struck me about the film, and Mann’s approach to filming it, was the, for want of a better word, tidiness that Heat evinced. Yes here was that crime story, the Mann man, and the obsessive pursuit of work but there was something else too. There was an…immaculate quality and symmetry to Heat. The use of the camera, the precision of the sound design, the delivery of the actors’ lines, the construction of the character arcs and the spatial awareness of Los Angeles; all of these are indebted to something with inestimable clarity and vision, a way of seeing that wants to be truthful and yet attractive to the eye. But what could that something be?

My love of Heat led me on to the start of Mann’s 90s back catalogue and The Last of the Mohicans. Again the opening of the film had me in awe of its efficiency and proficiency, its fleet handling of character, action and sound. Here was that clarity again, that forging of precision, geometry and creativity that, as with Heat, was seemingly hidden behind the commonalities of character and work. It was here that I began to pick up on Mann’s conscious recycling of ideas, names, dialogue and visual motifs. Look at the way Hawkeye raises his rifle to his eye line in the opening hunt of Mohicans and compare it to the conclusion of the bank shootout in Heat, where Hanna raises his gun to his eye line to take out Cheritto – professional traits shared by hunters.

Despite the satisfaction with finding some simpatico between the two films, the nagging feeling that haunted my understanding of Heat surfaced here too. What is the creative force that influences the

presentation of the Huron attack on the English Army near Fort Henry? Why are Magua and Chingachgook framed against the strongly linear horizons of the American frontier at the climax of the film?

In 1999 Mann directed The Insider, his dramatisation of whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand’s legal wrangling with the tobacco giant Brown & Williamson. Around two thirds of the way through the film Wigand is standing on a lawn in Mississippi, looking out at the water trying to decide whether or not to go to court. It was this image of a lonely figure dwarfed by the immensity of his linear surroundings (such as can be found in all of Mann’s films) that suggested a possible means for understanding the elusive, deeper force at work.

In his book The Art of the Renaissance Nathaniel Harris describes the Italian Renaissance as “the creation of an art based on observing, faithfully reproducing and celebrating the world of man and nature.” The Roman writer Vitruvius is largely credited with being the conceptual founder of the Renaissance movement. He produced a series of highly influential scriptures that outlined the importance of symmetria, geometric balance and an ordered vision. The result was an artistic movement that used modern innovations to produce compositions that came very close to approximating the 3 dimensional human experience.

Was this, the veracity and formal rigour of the Renaissance, the deeper, more profound vision that infused Mann’s work and had so far eluded me? Was the aesthetic framework maintained by the likes of Piero di Cosimo or Paolo Uccello or Antonello da Messina the key to understanding Mann’s worldview?

I returned to The Last of the Mohicans in an attempt to test the theory. Watching the pivotal battle sequence once more, where the Huron attack the English Army on route to Fort Henry, I was reminded of Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano, a Renaissance painting that used broken lances, colonnades of trees and grass verges to denote the perspective of the battlefield.

On closer inspection of Mohicans’ centre stage battle I was struck by the similar approach Mann adopts, the way in which he seems to be guiding our attention towards these fundamental principles of perspective and symmetry. The battle sequence begins with the high angle shot of a road running centrally through a clearing in the forest. Surrounding the road

on either side is lush grass, bounded by a colonnade of trees. The organising principle of this sequence is clearly the delineation of perspective, an attempt on Mann’s part to explore the spatial dimensions of the battlefield in a way redolent of Uccello’s approach.

The English Army move along the forest path from a background to foreground, all the while bounded on the right and the left by the Huron attack party hiding in the foliage. The attack on mass begins and Huron rifle fire erupts, again moving from background to foreground, down the line of the English Army. Mann maintains his compositional symmetry throughout this sequence, constantly reverting back to the formalism of the Renaissance eye, even as the paroxysm of battle serves to disrupt narrative events. By battle’s end the field of slaughter is littered with strewn hatchets, rifles and bodies, all directing the viewer’s eye into the depth of field in a manner reminiscent of Uccello’s strategy. The film provides other instances for the sceptical reader.

In Michael Mann, Taschen’s recent hardback on the director, the writer notes that in Mohicans “Mann introduces the British Military with symmetrical compositions” such when the Military officials cross a stone arch bridge. Others worth noting are when Heyward and Cora are having tea amidst the trompe l’oeil of an expansive field and the climatic fight between Magua and Chingachgook, where a symmetrical duality is offered by Mann before Magua is slain.

The measure of precision and fastidiousness apparent in Mohicans is not just relegated to, or corralled by, its visual construction. This adherence to the Vitruvian principles is also evident in the exactitude of Mann’s editorial selections (the Taschen book specifies the cut “to an arched bridge, reflected in symmetric harmony upon the calm surface of a stream”), the clarity of his sound design and the proficiency of the film’s central characters at what they do, to highlight but a few examples.

It seemed a dialectic had emerged that offered one possible framework for analysing and understanding The Last of the Mohicans – the question now was whether it could be applied to Heat and The Insider?

The return to Heat and its opening sequence quickly offered substantive evidence. Neil’s arrival at the train station and his journey to the ER is formidable in its spatial organisation and the way Mann delineates the space that Neil is moving through. The opening shot of the arriving train revels in a great depth of field, reminiscent of the work of Antonello da Messina and, like the battle sequence in Mohicans, utilizes the movement

of something from background to foreground to highlight perspective and the extension of real space. Mann then counteracts this in the next moment by filming Neil’s descent to ground level on an escalator with an extreme, telephoto lens. The effect here is that this lens reduces the depth of field to such an extent that it appears as if Neil is moving straight down, on a vertical plane! Already Mann is establishing a template that draws on, as integral to its nature, the Renaissance principles of perspective and symmetrical contrast.

Before the opening sequence is over Neil will also stride past a pieta outside the ER, a remnant of the Renaissance era that foreshadows not only Pacino’s cradling of his stepdaughter in the hotel bathroom after she has tried to kill herself and the closing shot of Heat, but also reinforces the film’s (and Mann’s) embrace of Renaissance art and philosophy as an necessary artistic adjunct.

Following the initial hiatus of Heat’s bearer-bonds robbery sequence, Mann guides us to another subtle but rewarding dissemination of Renaissance perspective. In what Nick James terms the Blue Interlude in his BFI treatment of the film, the scene sees Neil returning home to his empty beach house, setting his .35 and keys down on a glass table and moving to the floor to ceiling windows that separate him from the Pacific expanse. Although Mann has acknowledged the scene’s blocking and ennui to the Alex Colville painting Pacific, there is arguably a larger more unspoken debt at work here. Antonello da Messina’s painting St. Jerome in his Study was a fine example of Renaissance perspective that succeeded in directing the viewer’s gaze across multiple planes, via its use of parallel lines and surfaces.

Assessing this scene in Heat in terms of its attention to this criterion it becomes clear that, the scene’s lack of narrative purpose notwithstanding, the moment does serve an important function in terms of appreciating Heat’s Renaissance aesthetic and, as a direct result, Neil’s character. Once Neil is standing at the window the camera pans up from the table and adjusts slightly, bringing the top of the glass terrace wall into perfect symmetry with the horizon; Neil is now framed by the vertical separations of the glass panels (both in the room and by those that form the terrace wall) and dissected by the distant horizon of the Pacific.

It is a composition of immaculate and precise beauty, a moment that does nothing for the film’s story but speaks volumes about the influences impacting on the film’s aesthetic. The multiple planes of perspective and judicious use of light here produce an image that directs the viewer’s gaze

in the same way that Messina intended with his painting: from the foreground interest of the handgun to De Niro to the window bars to the terrace wall and finally, to the horizon of the ocean, this is Mann crafting the illusion that, in the words of Nathaniel Harris, his “painted surface” actually belongs “to the world of three-dimensional reality”.

The scene is also revealing about Neil’s character in Heat. When we consider that in the earlier bearer-bonds robbery sequence the psychotic Waingro (that Neil presumably hired) ran riot and killed one of the armoured car guards, we can conclude that this would constitute a failure on the part of Neil’s rigid doctrinaire. When assessed in this regard the Blue Interlude is Neil, the dedicated loner, reaffirming his ideals of restraint, precision and veracity amidst the sanctity of his sparse and lofty domicile – qualities not uncommon in Renaissance art.

As with The Last of the Mohicans, Heat abounds in other moments that can be evaluated in terms of their relationship with the Renaissance principle, not least the scene where Neil meets with Nate under a freeway overpass, entrenched in their car on each side by the strong vertical support columns holding up the road above.

The Insider constitutes the last of Mann’s 90s films and in many ways seems to mark the end of his formal experimentation with Renaissance structure and composition. The Insider was Mann’s first foray into filming a true story (as opposed to the anecdotal basis of Heat’s central conflict) and, rather than restricting his ability to express himself through the medium of the Renaissance, this real life account of corporate whistle-blowing actually provided Mann with some of the most astonishing opportunities for structure and composition to date.

When Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman meet for the second time in a local Japanese restaurant Mann begins the scene with some traditional, over the shoulder shots of the two men as they trade observations about their fathers and the merits of coming forward with sensitive information. As the discussion proceeds Wigand injects some truculent comments about what he perceives to be the hollow function he serves in the eyes of corporate news networks.

At this point Mann punctuates the tonal shift in the men’s tete a tete by disrupting the shot choices he established earlier. He first uses an abrupt side angle shot of the men facing one another, quickly followed by a diametrically opposite shot, followed by a return to the original side angle shot. The first and third shot in this sequence are exactly the same, the

two men seated centrally at a table bounded by wooden pillars on either side and two black lines running along the carpet from the camera towards them.

The horizontal line of the table and vertical lines of the pillars provide the framework for a very strict organisational composition, whilst the black lines that form the carpet detail create the sense of perspective or even slippage, as if the men are falling away from us. The second interstitial shot is closer to the men, more intimate even, but still boasts the same perspectival lines and organisational framework. Like the scene in Heat before it, this short sequence is redolent of the same mastery of perspective and geometric precision present in the work of Renaissance masters like Messina or Da Vinci. Here, Mann is using these qualities not only to punctuate this important point in the men’s conversation but also to establish the duality between them (as in Mohicans and, to a lesser extent, Heat), via the back and forth movement and the confrontational blocking of Wigand and Lowell, and finally comment on the austerity of the decision Wigand is about to make.

This sequence is linked thematically to the final scene we will examine in The Insider. Shortly before Wigand departs for the circuit court to provide his all-important deposition he is taking time near the water in Pascagoula, Mississippi to resolve the conflict in his mind. During this scene Mann repeats a shot of Wigand and Bergman talking where the camera is tight on the right side of Bergman’s face looking at Wigand, a solitary tree and the distant horizon of the water (the frame within a frame of Bergman’s tinted sunglasses provides the metaphor of Pacino’s character seeing events with a hue that is at times distinctly different from that of Wigand).

As with the other examples cited above, what this shot does is showcase yet another attempt by Mann to view the space of his filmic world through the prism of the Renaissance and its parallel lines, contrasting directions, symmetrical images and deployment of perspective. The shot recalls The Death of Procris by Piero di Cosimo, a Renaissance painting that foregrounds Satyr and a nymph, two figures involved in a conflict who are at once the focus of the painting and at the same time dwarfed by the immensity of the distant horizon.

That distant horizon (of Mohicans and Heat) appears here as a signifier and a character in its own right, something that codifies the hierarchies at work in the scene. As with Cosimo’s painting, the ostensible focus of this shot – the two figures – is actually diminished by the infinity of

nature, here elucidated by the strongly linear horizon. This horizontal line, coupled with the vertical lines of the trees, set up the organisational framework, or gestalt, that we have previously noted in Heat and Mohicans.

“So, my approach to film tends to structural…formal”, says Mann in the recent Taschen book appraising the director and his work. An apt admission, and one that fits well with the focus of this article and the three films, I nevertheless wonder if it really applies anymore? His first film of the new millennium, Ali, seemed to signal a change of tempo in this regard, a more freeform approach to blocking, framing and structure that appeared to coincide with his embrace of Hi Def Digital Video. Both Collateral and Miami Vice, the two films that followed after Ali, increasingly drew on the same digital technology and evince a similar opening up of the strict form that Mann established in the 90s.

Is it possible that the liberties afforded by the likes of the Sony F900 digital camera – strong focus in low light levels, chromatic intensity and much longer shooting times – coerced Mann into the looser, more unrestrained style we now find? One need only look at the trailer circulating on the net for his upcoming Public Enemies to see that, four films on from The Insider, something has definitely changed. In a film whose subject matter would traditionally dictate the kind of polished formalism and theatrical staging of The Untouchables or Road to Perdition, what we find instead is Mann continuing his rejection of his 90s style, in favour of post-millennial, handheld incursions into the sodium vapour hue of night time Los Angeles, Louisville, Miami and now Chicago.

The paintings

Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano

Messina’s St Jerome in his Study

Colville’s Pacific

Cosimo’s The Death of Procris

Film timings in relation to painting comparisons

The Last of the Mohicans – battle scene on route to Fort Henry – 1:06:50

Heat – the Blue Interlude – 0:20:13

The Insider – Wigand by the water – 1:23:30