William Friedkin: Director/Sorcerer

One of my favorite SIFF screenings so far this year was the Unstreamable screening of To Live and Die in LA in February. It was one of the last major works from William Friedkin I had not seen, and as with every Friedkin film, there was a moment (the car chase) where I became aware of a certain kind of cinematic mania. I’m not talking about on-screen mania, like the chaotic work of the Safdies or Sam Raimi. I’m referring to the mania of the people behind the camera that, in a pre-digital world, led them to believe they could get away with filming what they were filming. Not only is the car chase a fantastic externalization of the thrill-seeking delusions of the lead character, it also looks so dangerous and real that I am in shock that no one died making it. This shock is common across Friedkin’s filmography.

Friedkin’s major works include police films like The French Connection and Cruising, horror milestone The Exorcist, and June’s SIFF Movie Club pick Sorcerer. All of these films focus on characters confronting deeply held beliefs about themselves and their world, externalized with some of the most extreme set pieces of their era. From the mother in The Exorcist confronting her ideas of faith and belief in the face of something incurable and unspeakable happening to her daughter, to the cop in To Live and Die in LA realizing his position of political power as a police officer appeals more to his adrenal glands than his sense of morality, Friedkin’s characters all are pushed into dire situations and must examine their fundamental conception of the world. All of these films are punctuated with lengthy genre sequences that bring these foundation-shaking feelings out into the open. Even considering, for example, The Exorcist’s permeation throughout all of horror, or Cruising’s muddled read on the relationship between the police and the queer community, Friedkin’s fundamentals remain rock-solid. Sorcerer, arguably, stands as the strongest distillation of this style, with its random bursts of violence in the first half and harrowing truck set pieces in the second half standing atop an exploration of the violence of capital, the value of life, and whether one can escape their hellish fate.

Something that separates Sorcerer from these other works is in how little reprieve it offers from its portrayal of evil. All of these other films feature characters that exist in mainstream society, and these characters are brought down into something hidden or illicit. Similar to contemporaries like John Carpenter or David Lynch, Friedkin would often give the audience a sense of normalcy before exploring the evil underneath. From the opening moments of Sorcerer, the audience is given no such opportunity.

Sorcerer is based off of a 1950 French novel “Le Salarie de la peur” by Georges Arnaud, a novel that also served as inspiration for the classic 1953 French film The Wages of Fear. When discussing why he titled his take on the novel “Sorcerer,” Friedkin said that he was thinking about the doom for which his characters are destined when a sorcerer came to mind. Friedkin describes a sorcerer as “an evil wizard and in this case the evil wizard is fate,” which ties in thematically with much of the film. There is a twisted sense of predestination entwined throughout much of the film, and even before the film reaches the jungle, the world is permeated with random bursts of violence enacted at the behest of capital. All of the main characters exist above the law as violent criminals at the beginning of the film, both the cause of and subject to this random violence, and they each arrive in a South American jungle in order to escape their grisly fate.

In this jungle, the bloodshed enacted in pursuit of capital is portrayed as explicitly systemic, as laborers regularly die in horrific accidents as they work at an oil rig owned by an American corporation. The section establishing these conditions is so bleak and upsetting that the audience can understand why the lead characters (or anyone) would volunteer for labor that spells near-certain death for an opportunity to get out. By the end of the film, the question of whether any of them could “get out” of this violent, bloodthirsty, capital-seeking world is murkier than the jungle mud the men have to drive the trucks through. These men’s fate is inexorably tied to capital, ties that the film suggests can never be broken.

The lengthy set piece that takes up the back half of the film is one of the most accomplished of the entirety of the 70s, resulting in some of the most stress-inducing sequences ever put to film as the men have to navigate the jungle in trucks whose cargo will explode if shaken too much or subjected to any sudden agitation. However, here is where any responsible discussion of William Friedkin’s work must turn to his on-set behavior. Friedkin started his career in documentary, and in moving into fiction, he believed that audiences must buy into a grounded reality and would be able to identify anything artificial. While this is a valid artistic mission statement, this led to dangerous, harmful tactics on his sets. The French Connection’s most famous scene, also a manic car chase, was filmed entirely without permits, a choice that led to the endangerment of hundreds of unsuspecting NYC drivers. Both Linda Blair and Ellen Burnstyn suffered spinal injuries during stunts for The Exorcist, Burnstyn’s being permanent. Sorcerer is the biggest example, where, according to Friedkin himself, 50 crew members had to leave the jungle due to getting sick with diseases like gangrene, food poisoning, and malaria. Star Roy Schieder (Jaws, All That Jazz) said that shooting Sorcerer “made Jaws look like a picnic.”

This behavior is not unique to Friedkin and calls to mind the conditions of contemporary jungle-set films like Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. It is imperative that, 50 years on, we recognize these behaviors as irresponsible and dangerous. It is good that we now hold filmmakers to a higher standard for their set conditions, and it is unreasonable to think that the only way to achieve the “realism” that Friedkin was going for was to endanger the crew.

However, at this point, we are only left with the work. In my opinion, even knowing the conditions of the set, Sorcerer is one of Friedkin’s most powerful statements. It stands as a film darker than The Exorcist, exploring an even more tangible evil than a demon: the pursuit of capital. If the June SIFF Movie Club screening is your first time seeing it, expect a movie that must be seen to be believed.

Sorcerer screens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Wednesday, June 4 as part of SIFF Movie Club. 

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