Paul Auster & the Movies

Film collaborations with Wayne Wang

Apr 25, 2023

black Corona typewriter on brown wood planks — Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

This is the last installment of our deep investigation of Paul Auster this month. However, next week, we’ll use these investigations as a springboard for our own writing. So far, we’ve looked at:

Typewriters & metafiction

You might be thinking: what’s a typewriter got to do with Paul Auster & the movies?

I’ve mentioned that Auster (still) writes his books on a typewriter. Auster collaborated with Wayne Wang on a couple of films, one of which featured the typewritten story by a character called “Paul,” based on a short article Auster had published in the New York Times. He’s also often interested in metafiction and inserting versions of himself (Freudian doubles?) in his fiction. To a seemingly exponential effect, these elements interact within and between his works with the effect of asking us to question our realities (and that of the author’s) as we insert ourselves into art, making a part of our real worlds.

In fact, it was the original real-life article that prompted Wang to contact Auster for a collaboration.

I looked at this near-infinite maze of reflection through a theoretical lens of mise-en-abyme in a dissertation I wrote (freely accessible through HKU Scholars Hub), called: “Mise-en-abyme in Wayne Wang's New York and Hong Kong films.” To add to that element, the other protagonist in the story is a photographer who documents a street corner in Brooklyn where he has his shop over the years. There are many layers of fiction, reality, and artistry working together.

Here, Auster talks about his film work and the way he wanted to direct silent, philosophical films in his twenties and going to see a bunch of movies at the cinema as a student in New York, then as a poor writer in Paris:

Auster also talks here about the difficulty of being a solo writer at times. He had many experiences on sports teams and found that the act of creating a film gave him that team community he had been missing.

As a writer who used to be a part of sports teams, as an athlete and coach, as well as be a part of teaching teams, I can relate. It can take a lot more effort to form your community when you’re working in isolation. As much as I love time to myself, that’s something I miss. I gain some element of the team through writing collaborations, digital kinning, and running partners. Yoga classes and workshops I deliver also fill this void at times. So do friends and family, but this is different than working on a project together, toward a common goal. You-readers-who-work-alone, how do you find your communities?

Smoke

This beautiful indie film is about Auggie, who owns the Brooklyn Cigar Co. In the same vein as Clerks, the shop is the meeting point for the characters we meet and a way to process the experiences of both Auggie and the main protagonist, writer Paul Benjamin.

One day, Paul is saved by a young man named Rashid who is in search of a lost father. They form a great connection and the related side story of finding the boy’s father is sparked. Paul and Rashid watch baseball and have great conversations about life in the writer’s apartment.

It’s worth checking out simply for the great cast: Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Stockard Channing, Harold Perrineau Jr., Giancarlo Esposito, Ashley Judd, and Forest Whitaker.

“Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” was published in The New York Times on Christmas day, 1990. Although Auggie is a pseudonym, Auster claims the story is true. Basically this friend of his who owns a cigar shop has been taking photos of his streetcorner for years, capturing the people and the place. As Auster looks through the photo album with him, he remarks:

And then, little by little, I began to recognize the faces of the passersby on their way to work, the same people in the same spot every morning, living an instant of their lives in the field of Auggie's camera.

This is a beautiful clip of (fictional) Paul looking at Augie’s photo album with him. It contains echoes of ‘old Brooklyn’ as well as Shakespearean allusion:

Blue in the Face

This sequel film is a little more piecy and experimental. The story doesn’t follow as clear of a line; some would call it more postmodern in this way, at least in describing the structure.

And it’s not surprising considering that this second film came from work done on set for Smoke:

"'Blue in the Face' came as a result of improvisation done in rehearsals of 'Smoke,' " Mr. Keitel explained. "I had asked Wayne if I could try some improvisation with the actors. Wayne said yes. Out of this improvisation came Wayne and Peter's idea to make 'Blue in the Face.' " (The title comes from the adage that says that actors placed in front of a camera will talk until they are blue in the face.)
…
Each take was filmed as a full 10-minute reel, with no time to cover the action from multiple angles. During the shooting, directors held up flash cards to tell the actors how they were doing. The cards carried messages like "faster," "get to the point," "lighten up" and, of course, "boring!" When Mr. Wang became ill, Mr. Auster, who had never been behind a movie camera, replaced him. Shooting began on a Monday morning and was finished the following Friday. Because there was no screenplay, a credit line reads, "Situations created by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster in collaboration with the actors."

The film feels like a free exploration of what it means to be a New Yorker or an actor and centers more on Auggie’s character and relationships than the first. Keitel told The New York Times that he hoped it would be an inspiration to young filmmakers without big budgets to just go ahead and make a film.

And then, there’s this awesome, raw clip from Lou Reed:

Mise-en-abyme

In the research I linked above, I explore the concept of mise-en-abyme (especially, but not only, theorized by Jacques Rancière and André Gide) in connection with an exploration of identity in these films as well as another pairing of films by Wayne Wang taking place in Hong Kong.

Both of these films contain many elements of metafiction, including the novelist named Paul Benjamin, reflective of Auster’s two first names, and a shop owner who Auster later claimed is “a part of me” (p. 28). The many writers and artists within the films as well as some inserted documentary, like that of Lou Reed, constantly play with the notion of identity for the viewer.

Here’s a short excerpt from my research about this connection, specifically connected to the work of Stuart Hall and cultural studies (pp. 28-9):

Auster seems to have fragmented his own identity into each of the characters in the film. The audience may conversely pick up with one fragmented identity that most closely resembles their own. [Stuart] Hall explains that the shattered being emphasizes the future of “what we might become” rather than a definition established by society:
[I]dentities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation. (Questions of Cultural Identity, p. 4)
Every author gives us pieces of himself in his writing, but Wang and Auster each split their experiences, memories, and dreams into many characters. The “multipl[icity]” of reflection allows for “intersect[ions]” and, therefore, “transformation.”

A lot of the research is about linking concepts of postmodernism’s instabilities to positive manifestations of new culture and the formation of new identity through, for example, alternative families, like the adopted son that “Paul Benjamin” forms a union with.

A couple weeks ago, I spoke how Auster’s work is often not only linked with postmodernism but seen as perhaps the prime working author in this artistic movement.

Just to give you a sample of how I bring together researchers like Derrida, Hall, Deleuze, and Ackbar Abbas, here’s another short excerpt (p. 19):

For Derrida, Becoming is différance; it is the friction in the frames themselves, the juncture of récits. In Questions of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall links Derrida’s use of writing as différance and its inherent paradoxes with the paradoxes of identity creation: “Identity is such a concept -- operating `under erasure' in the interval between reversal and emergence; an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all” (2). This space can be looked at as the Flesh that bridges the Actual with the Virtual for Deleuze, though he chooses to remain on one side of the Flesh. Perhaps Deleuze was not able to see the possibility of a functional unstable postmodern identity that Wang embraces in his films.
Culture is a necessary tool in talking about identity; but is culture stable in itself? Do we seek identity through established culture or can we create culture?

I expand on these ideas with analysis of the examples of Wang’s films. So, if these topics interest you, maybe following my line of reasoning in the paper will be helpful.

Other Auster films

Auster also wrote and directed Lulu on the Bridge (1998), again starring Harvey Keitel and set in New York. This time the protagonist is a jazz saxophonist who’s been shot during a performance by a deranged man.

In fact, Auster is connected in some way to a ton of cinema, especially as a screenwriter but also with cameo appearances. All of these you can easily find on his IMDB page. Many are adaptations of his novels, such as these edgier words: The Music of Chance (1993) and In the Country of Last Things (2020, in Spanish…and also featuring a typewriter).

However, this is his only solo director stint, perhaps because of such poor reviews:

The film is original and intermittently touching, but ultimately frustrating due to the meandering nature of the riddle-like script and Auster’s lethargic direction. … Nonetheless, pic falls apart in the last reel, and the downbeat ending, while original, is bound to frustrate viewers.
One can only speculate on how German helmer Wim Wenders, whom Auster originally suggested for this project, would have approached the material. Auster lacks the technical skills to translate his episodic story into an intriguing movie the way Wayne Wang did in “Smoke” and the companion piece, “Blue in the Face” (on which Auster was credited as co-filmmaker).
“Lulu” contains many powerful moments, but Auster doesn’t succeed in turning what is basically a riddle into a coherent and resonant film, faltering particularly with the sluggish pacing.

Well, I would say it’s pretty cool that he tried. And maybe if Auster had stuck with it, he would have garnished success in the director category as well. I wonder how the author feels about it now.

Wang had some early flops as well, like Life is Cheap…But Toilet Paper is Expensive (1989). Although I have to admit I sort of love that film. It’s strange but it shows some interesting elements of old Hong Kong, including the Kowloon Walled City.

For further reading, I recommend these articles (in addition to my academic research):

Man in the dark: Paul Auster and the cinema (interview with BFI)
Paul Auster: "Je m'intéresse au cinéma depuis mon enfance" (RTS Culture, in French)
Against the Ontology of the Present: Paul Auster's Cinematographic Fictions (in Twentieth Century Literature)

I’m struck by how many writers work in several huge realms like Auster. I also think of Jorge Palinhos, interviewed in this publication last December, and writer-creators like Inua Ellams, discussed in The City as Text, or, of course, David Bowie.

Is it about meaning-making? Reaching people? Money? Bursts of creativity and ideas? Probably some of each. But I do think that working among genres allows us to fully access both our own ideas and a variety of readers/viewers. It also keeps us from getting bored. Or working in too much isolation.

What keeps you writing and why do you choose to stick to one genre/text type or to open yourself to a variety? This might apply to you as a musician or painter or some other kind of artist as well. Are the reasons more about what’s within, whom you will reach, or how you will work (ie with other people or in a certain place/time)? We’d love to hear your ideas here.