“ The Automat”评论：一部纪录片，可满足美味的怀旧之情
‘The Automat’ Review: A Documentary That Serves Up Tasty Nostalgia
很久以前，在遥远和遥远的美国（您知道，2018年和2019年的古代时代），独立电影可以在Megaplex上留下自己的印记，其中一些可能是纪录片。还记得“ RGB”的辉煌日子（总票房总额：1400万美元），“您不是我的邻居吗？” （2,280万美元），“三个相同的陌生人”（1200万美元），“他们不会变老”（1800万美元）和“ Apollo 11”（900万美元）？我并不是说Lisa Hurwitz的“自动机”，如果它在现在可能被击败的日子里被释放，可能会加入这些电影的商业公司（尽管也许可能有）。但是，当我在纽约电影论坛上抓住了这部出色的纪录片时，观众欣喜若狂。这不是年轻人的听众。从统计学上讲，那种老年人没有去看电影。但是他们证明了这一点，当我在最后离开时，一群中年的观众被排队参加了下一场演出。有时电影兴奋的病毒力量是关于轶事证据。我看到的“自动人”的观众对此充满了怀旧。但这不仅是怀旧。“自动”攻入了美国过去的许多共鸣方面，以至于要看它是一个迷人而奇特的漫长时光般的崇拜之情。诚然，这是一部电影，有一个非常纽约的主题 - 寓言中的自动餐厅，由Horn＆Hardart在纽约和费城的两个城市拥有和经营。Horn＆Hardart Empire持续了半个多世纪。直到麦当劳时代，每周的汽车比美国其他任何餐馆连锁店都更多的人喂食更多的人。这个概念就像苏打机一样简单，像自助餐厅一样高效，并且像尼克一样神奇。在自动机中，您面对一堵墙，在每个玻璃门后面都是一件食物：火腿三明治，鸡肉或Beef锅馅饼，通心粉和奶酪，索尔兹伯里牛排，奶油菠菜，烤豆，蛤杂烩，苹果和大黄派。您将镍弹出插槽，打开窗户并取出盘子，瞧……您是您的小吃或一顿饭！咖啡也是镍，从水龙头上倒出，带有铜头，看起来像石像鬼海豚（以意大利喷泉的雕塑为模型），在每条倒入的结尾处，毗邻的管道会爆裂。完美测量的奶油。在纪录片中，梅尔·布鲁克斯（Mel Brooks）领导着一种在自动祭坛上崇拜的名人的希腊合唱，他声称咖啡是他品尝过的最好的咖啡。 （那是新奥尔良的滴水咖啡，在任何人提供这些东西之前就充满了奇异的咖啡。）我从来没有经历过自动人物，并且是我谨慎的怀疑论者，我遇到的第一个问题是：好的，听起来不错，听起来不错，古朴，便宜，很便宜，但是食物真的有多好？ “自动机”中的每个人证明食物很美味。这一切都在加工食品时代之前（基本上是由快餐业率先提出的）。自动菜肴是在中央喇叭和哈德拉特小卖部厨房中烹制的，可以使用爱丽丝·沃特斯（Alice Waters）可以批准的新鲜时令食材每小时生产2400片馅饼。各种见证人证明了奶油菠菜和烤豆的甜美美味（实际上是烘烤的），以使馅饼的硬皮完美。但是自动机也是一种体验。这些地方很漂亮 - 高大，像教堂一样宏伟，有华丽的锡天花板和闪闪发光的大理石表面，这是由铜制成的展示窗框。“它发光了！”说一个证人。谁去了？每个人。电影中接受采访的已故露丝·巴德·金斯堡（Ruth Bader Ginsburg）回忆说：“从穷人到毛皮的妇女，都有各种各样的人。”每张桌子坐了四个，如果有一个空白空间，您可以随意坐在Whoev旁边嗯。名人去了（我们看到奥黛丽·赫本，詹姆斯·迪恩，杰克·本尼的镜头）；这些汽车成为电影《貂皮》和《虫子兔子动画片》等电影中的传说中。多样性非常公开地扩展到种族多样性。这部电影包括对已故的科林·鲍威尔（Colin Powell）的采访，科林·鲍威尔（Colin Powell）在南布朗克斯（South Bronx）长大，并说自动风格与他的家人去餐馆一样接近。鲍威尔（Powell）解释说，当他在军队中崛起时，企图建立在第二次世界大战的特征的武装部队的一体化之上，他知道完全融合会是什么样Automat。自动机的物流现在看起来很简单，它代表了一项新的日常技术 - 手头服务和麦当劳兄弟发明的快餐系统之间缺少链接。然而，步伐很温柔。这些餐馆给任何镍的人都带来了一次美味，负担得起，民主的冒险，最重要的是。 “我对索尔兹伯里牛排感到兴奋，”科林·鲍威尔说。梅尔·布鲁克斯（Mel Brooks）在这部电影中的单线持续不断（直到他写和表演的闭幕主题曲）说：“关于自动的伟大之处是您永远不必小费。” Hurwitz是一个Deft纪录片历史学家填补了自动风格的历史 - 柏林的Dumbwaiter Automat餐馆的启发，以及其创始人Joseph Horn和Frank Hardart（两者都出生于1800年代中期）如何。 ，合作的想法将智能业务与底线人性化。第一个自动机于1902年在费城开业；纽约的第一座开业于1912年开业。（最后一个生存的人，位于第三大道和第42街，于1991年关闭。） 。 （这使他得以在1935年找到工会的尝试如果50年代，餐馆举办了首场比赛 - 来自乔克（Chock）的O'Nuts连锁店，该连锁店围绕着讨价还价的咖啡建造。十年后，该公司沦为经营广告，上面写着“ Horn＆Hardart Coffee。太好了，我们亏钱了。” （这是真的。）当他们不得不将咖啡的价格从标志性的一镍提高到两个时，写作就在自动墙上了。在大流行的两年中，随着美国人彼此之间的越来越孤立，关于未来的大部分演讲 - Zoom会议！从办公室呆在家里！流！ - 植根于远程连接的奇迹。现在，我们的技术有助于使我们与众不同。但是自动机与所有相反。它利用美国工程学的表演壮举吸引了人们。一位目击者说：“这是对未来可能是一种令人非常乐观的看法。” “自动机”表明，也许我们需要回到未来。
Long ago, in a distant and far away America (you know, the ancient days of 2018 and 2019), independent films could make their mark at the megaplex, and some of them could be documentaries. Remember the glory days of "RGB" (total domestic gross: $14 million), "Won’t You Be My Neighbor?" ($22.8 million), "Three Identical Strangers" ($12 million), "They Shall Not Grow Old" ($18 million), and "Apollo 11" ($9 million)?
I’m not saying that Lisa Hurwitz’s "The Automat," had it been released in those now possibly vanquished days, could have joined the commercial company of those films (though maybe it could have). But when I caught this marvelous documentary at Film Forum in New York, the audience for it was ecstatic. It was not an audience of young people; it was the kind of older folks who, statistically speaking, haven’t been going to the movies. But they turned out for this one, and when I left at the end, a bunch of middle-aged-to-older viewers were lined up for the next show. Sometimes the viral power of movie excitement is about anecdotal evidence.
The audience I saw "The Automat" with was high on the nostalgia of it all. But it wasn’t merely nostalgia. Granted, this is a movie with a very New York subject — the fabled Automat restaurants that were owned and operated by Horn & Hardart in exactly two cities, New York and Philadelphia. The Horn & Hardart empire lasted for more than half a century. Right up until the age of McDonald’s, the Automats fed more people, every week, than any other restaurant chain in America.
What was the Automat? The concept was as simple as a soda machine, as efficient as a cafeteria, and as magical as a nickelodeon. In an Automat, you faced a wall of small glass doors, and behind each one was an item of food on a plate: ham sandwiches, chicken or beef pot pies, macaroni and cheese, Salisbury steak, creamed spinach, baked beans, clam chowder, apple and rhubarb pie. You popped a nickel into the slot, opened the window and took out the plate, and voilà...a snack or a meal was yours! The coffee, which was also a nickel, came pouring out of a faucet with a copper head that looked like a gargoyle dolphin (it was modeled on the sculptures in Italian fountains), and at the end of each pour an adjoining pipe would spurt in a perfectly measured dollop of cream. Mel Brooks, who in the documentary leads a kind of Greek chorus of celebrities who worshipped at the altar of the Automat, claims that the coffee was the best he ever tasted. (It was New Orleans drip coffee, suffused with chicory, before anyone served that stuff.)
Never having experienced an Automat myself, and being the cautious skeptic I am, the first question I had was: Okay, sounds nice and quaint and cheap, but how good, really, was the food? Every single person in "The Automat" testifies that the food was delicious. This was all before the age of processed food (which was basically pioneered by the fast-food industry). The Automat dishes were cooked in a central Horn & Hardart commissary kitchen, which could churn out 2,400 pies an hour using fresh seasonal ingredients that Alice Waters would have approved of. Assorted witnesses testify to the luscious tastiness of the creamed spinach and the baked beans (which really were baked), to the crusty perfection of the pies. But the Automat was also an experience. The places were beautiful — tall and grand like churches, with ornate tin ceilings and gleaming marble surfaces, the display-window frames made of copper. "It shone!" says one witness.
Who went? Everyone. The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, interviewed in the film, recalls that "There were all kinds of people, from poor people to matrons in furs." Each table sat four, and if there was an empty space, you could feel free to sit down next to whoever. Celebrities went (we see shots of Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Jack Benny); the Automats became fabled locales in movies like "A Touch of Mink" and Bugs Bunny cartoons. And the diversity extended, quite openly, to racial diversity. The film includes an interview with the late Colin Powell, who was raised in the South Bronx and says that the Automat was as close as his family ever got to going out to a restaurant. Powell explains that when he was rising up in the military, leading an attempt to build on the integration of the armed forces that had been a feature of World War II, he knew what total integration would look like because he'd seen it at the Automat.
The logistics of the Automat, as simple as they look now, represented a new everyday technology — the missing link between hand-to-plate service and the fast-food system invented by the McDonald brothers. Yet the pace was gentle. The restaurants gave anyone with a few nickels an adventure that was tasty, affordable, democratic, and above all fun. “I got excited about the Salisbury steak,” says Colin Powell. Mel Brooks, whose one-liners in this movie keep on coming (right down to the closing theme song, which he wrote and performs), says, “The great thing about the Automat is that you never had to tip."
Hurwitz is a deft documentary historian who fills in the history of how the Automat came to be — how it was inspired by the dumbwaiter Automat Restaurants of Berlin, and how its founders, Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart (both of whom were born in the mid-1800s), collaborated on an idea that merged smart business with a bottom-line humanity of purpose. The first Automat opened in Philadelphia in 1902; the first one in New York opened in 1912. (The last one to survive, located at Third Avenue and 42nd Street, closed in 1991.) Horn was a domineering patrician, but he believed in looking after his employees so they felt truly cared for. (That allowed him to find off an attempt at unionization in 1935.)
By the end of the '50s, the restaurants had their first competition — from the Chock Full o’Nuts chain, which was built around a bargain cup of coffee. A decade later, the company was reduced to running commercials that said, "Horn & Hardart coffee. It’s so good we lose money on it." (Which was true.) By the time they had to raise the price of coffee from that iconic one nickel to two, the writing was on the Automat wall.
In the two years of the pandemic, as Americans have grown more isolated from each other, much of the talk that's evolved about the future — Zoom meetings! staying home from the office! streaming! — is rooted in the miracles of remote connection. Our technology now helps to keep us apart. But the Automat was the opposite of all that. It used a showpiece feat of American engineering as a magnet to draw people in. Says one witness, "It was an amazingly optimistic view of what the future could be." "The Automat" suggests that maybe we need to get back to that future.
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发表于 2022-7-5 02:19:20
发表于 2023-1-17 17:20:31