The attention from the paparazzi the star received was at times all consuming, but when Angelina Jolie performed, her presence was equally intoxicating.

This high octane celebrity became nothing short of invincible when playing the action game hero Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider franchise.

Croft loved preparing for the high octane of her adventures as much as the adventures themselves in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), so much so that Jolie reprised the role just two years later in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life (2003).

Jolie presents Croft as a toxic blend of dominant masculine traits with ever present underlying female characteristics. Lara is well versed in arms and munitions and motorcycles and luxury sports cars among her vast wealth living on an English estate. But Croft also enjoys dressing like a lady when the occasion requires.

Like Lara, Angelina was on a bit of a tare after winning the Oscar in a supporting role for her performance in Girl, Interrupted (1999).

Winona Ryder stars as Susanna in the lead role, joining a group of young women adjusting to admission in a mental health hospital after she attempts to commit suicide. Lisa, played by Jolie, just arrives with a bit of a splash as she is well known after being admitted for the last 8 years.

The supporting performances of Clea DuVall as Georgina, Brittany Murphy as Daisy and Elisabeth Moss as Polly and Jared Leto as Tobias are noteworthy and should not be forgotten. But Jolie’s performance of Lisa steals the headlines, just as Lisa uses her charisma and knowledge of the ins and out of the facility to lead the other women from day to day.

Susanna finds out all too late that Lisa has a dark side.

Jolie is the daughter of a movie star turned movie star herself turned game action hero into high octane movie time female role model. The toxicity of this lifestyle seen by millions under microscope creates many ups and downs.

In the Changeling (2008), Jolie plays a woman battling the patriarchal institutional biases that weighed heavily against women in all walks of life during the 1920s.

Director Clint Eastwood uses a bit of art and a bit of flash for this biopic film to show the emotional toll on a working single mother after her son disappears from their home.

Christine waits for the Los Angeles Police Department to find and return her son to her, but when the news gets to her, and she meets the boy at the train station, Christine challenges the police’s assertion that the young boy returned to her is her son.

Jolie works through the barriers present in the system, that present on many layers, until the character receives a bit of redemption when the police begin to realize their mistake.

Eastwood uses this true crime missing person case as a metaphor for female gender discrimination.

Christine is doing just fine raising her son on her own, working in a telephone room to pay their way through life.

Jolie then takes the narrative closer to real time with her feature film directorial debut, creating a dramatic and dark film about how women were treated during the ethnic conflict in eastern Europe In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011).

The camera follows a gritty street battle between ethnic groups in the Bosnian War prior to the NATO, American led intervention.

The female struggle to survive military conflict becomes a dominant parallel narrative with the men with guns and physical power in an urban war setting.

Jolie graphically shows how rape is used as a weapon to control the female population and deconstruct the strength of families, more often than not, although not always, when the men have left for the live war theater.

The camera shows the senseless sexual violence and killing and the drunken hubris of men with guns.

The film about ethnic cleansing is a multi-dimensional depiction, but one that ultimately highlights the story of how love gets lost in all the hate.

In Unbroken (2014) director Jolie shows how the camaraderie of young men so easily dissolves under the pressure of violence.

Jolie constantly stirs the emotions with oscillating moments of beauty, calm and violence.

This biopic film about Olympian Louis Zamperini begins with the rising talent of a long distance runner and his performance in the 1936 Berlin Olympics prior to the American involvement in world War II.

Zamperini eventually becomes part of a flight crew in an American fighter squadron whose plane comes down in the ocean off of Japan.

Zamperini and two other survivors spend 47 days adrift on a raft before being picked up by a Japanese naval ship.

Jolie provides the cast aways a bit of help with fish from the ocean, sharks and the sudden rain before the narrative shifts from being adrift in the ocean to being prisoners of war.

The director splashes film art throughout the prisoner of war narrative, under the shifting skies of the distinct seasons. Many scenes becoming compelling as artful portraiture.

Jolie creates several scene transitions by using the colors, tones and shapes of image composition as scene advances.

In the biopic film, written for the screen by the lead character, First They Killed My Father (2017) Jolie directs a young five year old girl through the genocidal war brought on by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the 1970s.

Loung Ung learns to survive through passive resistance when her family is destroyed and she is taken away to be trained as a child soldier.

Jolie uses more sophisticated film art to highlight the plight of Ung, played by Sareum Srey Moch, and how she survives.

The camera again is used to show how darkness consumes light when familial love and the innocence of children hides from the threat of violence and hate. Jolie uses dark shadows to paint portraits of different stages of the child’s journey of survival, but not so much art that the art overwhelms the messaging of the film.

Jolie continually reemerges from the dark shadows of celebrity life to find the bright highlights of success that her talent provides.

The directorial films better reflect her screen character, slightly more masculine than one might expect, but feminine, mysterious and somewhat alluring – unabashedly representative of a life filled with high and low octane moments.

Jolie’s father, actor Jon Voight, was brought up a Catholic Slovakian, attending Catholic University in Washington DC. Voight initially struggled to survive as an actor, but he soon enough found stardom with a leading role in Midnight Cowboy (1969) co-starring Dustin Hoffman.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ABYSS OF TEEN ANGST

Voight, and Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, soon separated. And Bertrand and Jolie moved to New York, while Voight pursued stardom in Hollywood.

Jolie experienced the great diversity of the people of New York with the ethnic mix of the population and various fringe groups living in the distinct neighborhoods of the most cosmopolitan city in the world.

As a teenager, Jolie moved back to LA with her mother, but she had clearly already found the darkside of humanity, with her punk leather outfits, studs and chains presented in stark contrast to the pretty celebrity children she went to school with at Beverly Hills High School.

Jon and Marcheline encouraged Jolie to study acting at Lee Strasberg where Jolie was taught the method, a complicated drawing out of bits and pieces of inner emotions to create a complete acting performance.

Jon and Jolie would then spend weekend nights together rehearsing character performances in various plays.

The psychological abyss of teen angst would prove to be a great source of acting talent. As an actor and as a director of film, Jolie turns everything dark and shows the struggle to reemerge into the light again.

The film characters often have a death wish and experience the adrenaline rush of being confronted by violence and hatred. But that instinctual response to a living, breathing reality of brutal hostility, perhaps not experienced by everybody, is very much the way humanity reacts and survives to live another day.

The characters, like Jolie, often manage to protect that vulnerable side so that the better parts of humanity continue on afterwards, despite the struggle with the ever present darkness.

CHILD FLED STRIFE IN BELFAST FOR LONDON STAGE

The hard way to live and survive on the streets of Belfast transferred well into the characters of stage and screen chosen by the aspiring thespian.

Kenneth Branagh left Northern Ireland for England only to take on ever bigger battles on stage and screen than a child surviving the chaos of the streets of Belfast.

Branagh eventually found escape in the picture shows.

The indelible need to take charge of that ever present madness led to directing roles behind the camera while portraying authoritarian figures confronted with extreme adversity in front of the camera.

Branagh proved that survival in and away from Belfast meant simultaneously mustering the internal and external struggles consuming the past and present.

The portrayal of Henry V in the English victory over the French at Agincourt, and other of his contemporary musing about William Shakespeare plays, meant that Branagh could enjoy one heroic victory after another, once he recovered from the exhaustion of simultaneously acting and directing reimagined classics.

Branagh was obsessed with making Shakespeare accessible to a contemporary audience.

The working class neighbourhoods of Northern Ireland, with the docks and hard drinking fathers coming home late for dinner, can be imagined in the backstories of a diverse range of characters whether playing a king or a scientist or a senior police investigator.

After a long cultural journey, the train whistle finally stopped at home again with the production of Belfast (2021).

The film depicts the chaos of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland during 1969, when Branagh was just a wee lad.

Branagh begins the narrative in a brighter future filmed in color that eventually gives way to the black and white didactic existence of his own childhood.

The Belfast family is slow to learn the hard reality of living when not knowing whether they would meet in the streets that day the angry mob full of hatred or the singing pub drunk father figure of Irish lore.

Branagh would eventually move to London as a young lad to become a world famous actor.

Before Belfast, the most self reflective role for Branagh was the part of Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn (2011). Michelle Williams has the lead as Marilyn Munroe during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957).

During his meteoric rise to fame, Branagh had precariously been compared to Olivier, considered by many to be perhaps the greatest stage and screen actor. Olivier directed and starred in the Munroe film.

Olivier had also starred in and directed a movie version of Henry V (1944). When Branagh reimagined Henry V for film in 1989, the two stars became closely aligned with Branagh needing to distinguish his performance from Olivier’s while also making the story relevant to contemporary audiences.

The success of Henry V led Branagh to Hollywood for the production of Dead Again (1991). Branagh’s character is a Los Angeles private detective who investigates the haunting of a woman, played by Emma Thompson.

The film continually oscillates from the present life to the past life until the issue is resolved. Robin Williams plays a marginalized psychiatrist, while Derek Jacobi plays an unscrupulous antique dealer who uses hypnosis to find his treasures.

The film narrative takes the audience through the overlapping moments of time to show how distinct personalities are developed.

Branagh created a film persona that he continually tinkered with for each knew film project, generally using a naturally powerful screen presence and a genuine acting sense in front of the camera to compel several films.

The same character cast in lead roles has often been used in supporting parts.

In Conspiracy (2001), Branagh plays the lead Nazi organizer of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich. The story takes place during an exclusive meeting in which Heydrich directs all the necessary players toward codifying the Final Solution.

But then in Valkyrie (2008), Brannagh plays Major-General Henning von Tresckow in a supporting role within a disenchanted group of generals conspiring to assassinate Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The big screen presence established by Branagh is enough to carry the chosen scenes given to him for supporting characters.

In Oppenheimer (2023), Branagh provides an important supporting role as physicist Niels Bohr who influenced the development of Oppenheimer’s theories. Branagh appears in just a few scenes, but he nevertheless makes his presence felt in the film without distracting the camera’s focus from the leading actor.

Branagh momentarily draws the attention of the audience, but lead actor Cillian Murphy eventually continues on as the scene he shares with Branagh becomes just one step along the journey.

Branagh moved almost effortlessly from the Renaissance Theatre Company stage to the feature length film productions of William Shakespeare’s plays and then to a Hollywood career and back again.

In Warm Springs (2005) the screen persona is modified just enough to make Franklin D. Roosevelt appear before the camera battling the effects of polio in 1921, before becoming President of the United States.

Branagh shows how Roosevelt’s unique presidential style was developed through his battle with polio. The narrative follows the future president’s inner journey from self pity in isolation to embracing other polio sufferers.

Cynthia Nixon costars as Eleanor Roosevelt, showing how Eleanor found a similar path through self discovery toward greater independence.

In Shackleton (2002) little subtleties of a different sort turn Branagh’s screen character into the world famous explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton during the icy expedition to the South Pole in 1914. Shackleton produces and directs the entire crew as the expedition falls apart in the ice flow before reaching the Pole.

The expressive power of Branagh in front of and behind the camera was necessary to overcome the greatest of life’s struggles.

Kenneth Branagh, by Mark White, London: Faber and Faber, 2005

SYNTHESIS OF MOVIE MAGIC WITH REAL WORLD SOCIAL ENGINEERING AND LOVE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The movie of the century is one that sets a high water mark in the industry but also resonates with audiences by encapsulating the circumstances of an era.

Casablanca (1942) defined the interwar years and the flight of refugees from conflict zones during World War II. The film’s charm was in part the portrayal of the universal human struggle to find and hold onto love during the most adversarial times.

A generation later, Hollywood filmmakers struggled to describe the human condition of America at war in Vietnam. This era of new filmmakers emerging as independent voices against the studio system, that often demanding hegemony with the American experience, included Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone.

These newly schooled filmmakers defined themselves at the same time meeting a universal need to define the national identity occasionally in the same film but more often than not in separate film project.

Coppola creates Italian American nuances in the Godfather (1972) but then redefines filmmaking with Apocalypse Now (1979) about the Vietnam War. Lucas reimagines a generation with American Graffiti (1973) but then redefines the future with Star Wars (1977). Spielberg and Jaws (1975) and then Spielberg and Indiana Jones (1982) and Spielberg and Schindler’s List (1994).

These films were innovative at the time in terms of storytelling and camera work and building images on screen through the editing process. But there seems to be agreement now that one of the great innovators was filmmaker James Cameron.

Like Stone, Cameron earned early credits in the film industry as a writer. Cameron though quickly distinguished himself with highly stylized films that became shaped by his artistic talents and engineering skills in prop and set design.

Cameron quickly learned how to seamless blend scenes with the camera work and the melding of all these attributes to the point of producing spectacle and big event movies releases.

Narratives were tactically edited together staccato style with constantly changing camera angles, moving from closeups to long shots and back again to close ups and shortened action bits.

Cameron loved building and engineering things beginning even before he rounded up his neighborhood friends as a child to build him an airplane in the backyard from bits and pieces of scrap reclaimed and repurposed from the neighborhood.

This creative energy became mythical by the time Titanic was released in 1997 and then Avatar in 2009.

Now the auteur label representing a creative voice in film is often thrown at the filmmaker who maintains stylized control of his voice through his many talents of writing, designing worlds and layering on the aesthetics of a visceral reality.

In Terminator (1984) the entire film project reflects Cameron’s interests in machines and the potential for machine driven apocalyptic futures. The past is merged with the future to create a running present when soldiers from the future return to Earth in an attempt to control history.

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays The Terminator, a machine sent from the year 2029 to 1984 to kill the mother of the rebellion leader before the rebellion leader is born.

A battle between man and machine begins to play out to an inevitable conclusion in front of the camera in a sort of preemptive mission when a human soldier arrives to stop the Terminator from killing Sarah Connor.

Cameron designs graphic images of a one man killing machine that continually adapts to the environment and physically rejuvenates until the mission is complete. But the auteur also designs the dark world of the future for flash forwards by painting machines in an apocalyptic landscape.

Producers initially viewed the script as a popcorn film, but the final product proves so entertaining and thought provoking as to eventually take on cult status and spawn more complicated sequels and spinoffs.

If Cameron had a silver dollar for every time someone stated: “I’m The Terminator’, Cameron would have been able to retire early.

The vision of machine and man and an apocalyptic future illustrates motivations if not influences from Star Wars, Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). So, no surprise that Cameron made a pitch to write and direct the Alien sequel, Aliens (1986) starring Sigourney Weaver as the first female lead in the feature film action hero genre.

Aliens reinforces the impressions of militaristic combat from the Vietnam War generation of filmmakers. War is ever present and everything, even science fiction fantasy, must have that tone and atmosphere of the drill sergeant and all the gadgets and toys of a modern military operation.

Cameron builds an off world space command station and a more distant settlement colony for this franchise film about violent alien creatures ten times more dangerous in space than the dinosaurs on Planet Earth.

In Terminator, filming takes place in the streets of Los Angeles. In Aliens, everything is imagined and nothing in the imagination is taken for granted.

The suspicion of and paranoia about government conspiracy theories leading to the doom of civilization spawned by the Vietnam War and those discussions within the collective consciousness begin to collide for Cameron.

Aliens highlights the military failures that diminished the moral authority of America. The reckless corporation skipping too quickly through due diligence checks becomes a companion piece.

And then the human spirit is demonstrated through love contrasted against hate.

Cameron describes with pictures how people pressured by adversity find a way to survive through that same bonding required for the love emotion. Ripley falls for a surviving officer who survives in part by listening to the experienced interstellar spaceship commander’s combat advice when trying to escape from the aliens.

The most romantic of stories combines all these elements in the modernization of a nautical disaster with reconstructed scale sets and auteur story telling.

Titanic (1997) stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet who find career defining roles in this blockbuster event film. And for Cameron, years of thought about the past, the present and the future merge with ideas he has been developing about machines, film and humanity.

And those old sepia pictures of nautical machines viewed during a lifetime of research for that perfect film narrative create a nexus washed through the new film industry magic with a 775 scale replica of the Titanic built on a 40 acres film stage.

The film won 11 Oscars, including best cinematography, best director and best picture.

Cameron creates this world view nuanced by the hubris of the newly industrialized world on the largest vessel at the time surrounded by deathly cold ocean waters.

DiCaprio plays Jack Dawson, a struggling artist travelling from Paris who must win his tickets on the Titanic in a poker game with Swedes who become angry when they lose the game as the ship finishes the last boarding call.

Cameron infused bits and pieces of his biographical information such as Jack being an artist from the working class not fitting in with the aristocratic cliches on ship. Cameron was a truck driver as a young man while he shucked for work in the film industry designing sets and writing scripts before persuading producer Gale Anne Hurd to shop the Terminator script around the movie studios. Cameron had been responsible for the fatalistic, futuristic cityscapes of John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1981), starring Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken and Lee Van Cleef as Hauk.

Cameron was actually trying to sell a script to producers David Giler and Gordon Carroll when he was offered a chance to work on the Alien sequel story. Giler and Carroll already had a basic idea for the sequel, but the producers of Alien needed a writer to bring the script to life prior to production.

Cameron’s greatest trick as an auteur is to make everything seem authentic. The characters are often strangers to one another and gradually through character development and rolling out the narrative become bonded and sometimes fall in love.

Jack and Rose had come from opposite sections of town as well as opposite sections of the Titanic to such an extent that they likely should never have even met. But Cameron pulls the characters from distinct social economic backgrounds together by having Rose rebel against her future state of being married to money and an aristocrat with few insights into feminine sensibilities.

This love story develops as the industrial age and all the hubris of the era begin to dissolve into the Atlantic Ocean when the Titanic hits an iceberg.

The industrial age is encapsulated in the Titanic with the coal fired engines and the luxurious spaces on board felt as much as the pull of lovers. The film about the worst industrial tragedy of the era caused by human frailties linked to hubris and a lack of risk aversion becomes the talk of the film industry and ultimately a bigger hit than all the director’s other films combined.

Cameron shuffles the film reels a bit selling a romantic view about humanity but then illustrating all that can go wrong in an imperfectly engineered universe. To make matters more interesting for himself, he sometimes flips the emphasis, making the love story in the present more important than the military battle in the futuristic apocalypse.

Titanic is a good example of this shuffle, as is Avatar (2009).

Cameron by now is an experienced ocean diver and deep sea explorer having learned to dive in military fashion in Buffalo, New York when he was still living at home in Ontario, Canada.

This fascination with that other world going on undersea influences film production to such an extent that Cameron totally submerges in another world, including using motion capture performances instead of actors wearing make-up, prosthetic masks and stupid puppet suits.

Avatar is right out of Vietnam with humans colonizing an inhabitable moon covered in rainforest type jungle material.

The main industrial activity is mining that is threatened by an unindustrialized indigenous village. The theme of machine and humanity forms a nexus with American imperialism and the use of specialized military forces to knock open the door in foreign markets for capitalistic democracies.

This military struggle in the jungle shares equal screen time with a love story between a US Marine and an indigenous female.

Cameron creates a double blind by having the marines inserted into the villages using a type of futuristic motion capture performance technology while the actors for the films portraying the characters primarily appear as the indigenous population by using motion capture performance technology.

The filmmaker may have by now come full circle with his own art except for the preplanning of several sequels, including Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).

The end result of course is a perfect illusion using the newest film technology to build a world that is decidedly off-world and equally glib as any other world previously created because humanity is ultimately doomed to repeat the same mistakes.

The humans attempt to colonize the indigenous population instead of cooperating with them and then use technological superiority only to lose control of the machines which ultimately makes a mutiny/rebellion of some sort possible.

Cameron’s filmography exhibits an auteur who has gradually learned to fuse his skills and build an imagined world in which to film a cinematic masterpiece.

The Cinema of James Cameron: Bodies in Heroic Motion, by James Clarke, London, Wallflower Press, 2014. The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron, by Rebecca Keegan, New York, Crown Publishers, 2009.