By Steven Rybin
The phenomenon of noted film directors helming television
commercials is hardly a new one; everyone from Martin Scorsese to Jean-Luc
Godard have made advertisements during their careers, and even the recently
deceased paragon of the European art cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni, once
lensed an ad for Renault. So the fact
that news comes of Michael Mann (the director of Ali, The Insider, and Heat,
among other notable films) having directed a slate of new commercials for
Nike’s new Zoom product line should come as no terrific surprise. The
commercials themselves, which come with the tagline “Quick is Deadly” and which
feature high-profile professional athletes such as LaDainian Tomlinson and
Steve Nash, are reminiscent of the cinematography and cutting used in the
boxing sequences of the director’s biopic Ali: the camera is dropped into the
middle of the action, in between defenders and offensive linemen, generating a
sense of tension before Tomlinson runs for a touchdown. This sequence is intended to give the viewer
a sense of complete immersion in an exciting NFL play – and, of course, a sense
that one should run out and buy Nike shoes.
These Nike ads follow the Mercedes advertisement the
director made a few years ago, and commercial directing was a part of Mann’s
apprenticeship before directing his first film in 1979. But Mann’s recent return to commercials after
establishing credibility among cinephiles as well as his own place in the Hollywood industry is somewhat ironic. Many of the director’s initial films, such as
Thief (1981) and Manhunter (1986), were compared – derisively – with the
superficial patina of commercials and music videos made during the 1980s. Indeed, Mann’s Nike ads remind one of what
the French critic Jean-Baptiste Thoret, in a perceptive essay entitled “The
Aquarium Syndrome,” once pointed out about Mann’s work in television during the
1980s, when Mann served as executive producer of the popular and visually novel
Miami Vice television series. Thoret
suggested that commercial television offered the director (who did not actually
direct a single episode of Vice, but who closely controlled the visual and
sonic sheen of the series in his role as producer) the opportunity to
experiment with style before confirming the results with a feature-length film
for cinema screens. Perhaps Mann is just
using the commercial format to toy with sound and vision until his next proper
film begins production.
But given his industry success, Mann hardly needs this
sort of template anymore, and given that, except the plug for the shoes, the
“Quick is Deadly” series is largely derivative of Mann’s cinema work, it is
debatable whether or not this return to television functions in quite the same
way as Thoret claimed Mann’s earlier televisual work did. Instead of providing
Mann with the room to experiment with image (I know of more than a few people
in academia who would bristle at the thought of commercials as a site for any
kind of meaningful experimentation), the making of these commercials seems more
like the sharpening of already well-honed filmmaking skills.
Mann’s commercials also bring to mind the always tenuous
balance held between commerce and art in the realm of Hollywood. Although an idea of the filmmaker-as-author has arguably existed for as
long as the cinema itself, modern studies of film authorship were more or less
initiated in the 1950s when the film critics which became the future directors
of the French New Wave school (Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, among
others) argued that Hollywood directors (whom they called ‘auteurs’), although
working in a highly regimented and standardized studio system, were able to
“smuggle” in their own personal visions in a studio system that, on the face of
it, was inimical to the very idea of individual personality. This particularly romantic conception of
authorship – sometimes called “the cult of personality” – doesn’t hold much
weight in academic circles anymore, partially because of the very tension between
commercial interests and artistic vision that much of Mann’s own filmmaking
suggests. After all, these days, the
words “a Michael Mann film” are nearly as much a part of the marketing
apparatus of Hollywood as the presence of Tom Cruise or Will Smith in one of his films.
But these commercials, like the director’s films, suggest
that Mann himself probably doesn’t buy into the cult of personality anymore
than film academics do; unlike the recent series of American Express
commercials directed by Scorsese, Wes Anderson, and M. Night Shyamalan, Mann’s
commercials do not make use of the director’s on-screen presence, and despite
the familiarity of his name, it is at any rate unlikely that most filmgoers
could pick him out of a lineup (unlike celebrity directors such as Scorsese,
Woody Allen, or Clint Eastwood). Although Mann has claimed in interviews that he could never have
operated as an anonymous figure in the classical Hollywood studio system of the
1930s and 40s, his own work (relying as it does upon the framework of familiar
genres) suggests that he is comfortable enough with such anonymity, letting the
style itself speak for the absent presence of the director. In terms of his film work, style speaks
powerfully: in The Insider, a dramatization of 1990s television journalism,
Mann was able to use style to reflect upon his own agency (or lack thereof)
within contemporary image-making. Such
reflection is not really possible within the form of the commercial, which
suggest that Nike CEO Phil Knight could just as well be an auteur as could
Mann, something that Godard and Truffaut probably would not have been able to
predict in the 1950s.
Steven Rybin teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University and is the author of The Cinema of Michael Mann published by Lexington Books.
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