Elusive Lucidity

Damien Bona, 1955-2012

2012-01-30T20:32:00.000-05:00

The recent passing of a dear friend and mentor, Damien Bona, came as a shock. He was the co-author of Inside Oscar and the sole author of its sequel, Inside Oscar 2 (among other books). The stance Damien (and his collaborator Mason Wiley) took toward the Academy Awards is a very instructive one: acknowledging the ridiculousness of the Oscars and yet taking them seriously and enthusiastically as a cultural phenomenon. I first started to correspond with Damien online, twelve years ago, when he was nice enough to supply this greenhorn cinephile with a copy of Man with a Movie Camera. The email correspondence continued from then onwards and continued into "real life" when I went to New York for college. A lot of my own ways of looking at the world, and film, were forged in conversation with him. Damien was an incredibly kind, generous, warm human being. I cannot stress these qualities enough; even those who only met him briefly sensed as much. His commitment to great cinema (favorite directors included Ford, Ozu, Mizoguchi, McCarey, Edwards, Kiarostami, Sirk, etc.), to fighting the good fight politically, to great food and drink, to cats, and to human kindness, serve as an instructive example to all people everywhere. It is no exaggeration to say that my own life would have probably turned out significantly different had I never met him. There is much more that I could say, but I'm afraid I might not stop. He will be deeply missed, and his memory cherished, by myself and many, many others.

Commonplace

2012-01-26T19:33:00.017-05:00

Various quotes from others that I've pinned down over the last several months, in hopes of working them into something or other, but I've either deferred the material I've put them into, or just couldn't come up with something big enough ... provocative points of departure, some of them ...

"The films of Philippe Grandrieux pulsate. They pulsate microcosmically: in the images, the camera trembles and flickers so violently that, even within a single, continuous shot, no photogram resembles another. And they pulsate macrocosmically: the soundtrack is constructed globally upon unidentifiable, layered, synthesised, ambient noises of breath or wind, sucked in and expelled, which underlie the entire film and constitute its disturbed heartbeat, returning to our ear when all other sounds have disappeared. In the very beginnings and endings of his films, over the credits, there is nothing but this strangely bodily sound." (Adrian Martin)

"Consumerism is a Calvinist sadist's word for "pleasure". Attacking rioters' "consumerism" is just saying they should have no pleasure. There is a moralising left willing to forgive the rioters a little so long as what they are doing IS NO FUN. So long as its sacrifice for the commonweal, like these pundits subject themselves to in their commodity consumption. Watching The Wire isn't "consumerism" it's a duty!" (alphonsevanworden, back in August)

"The body of the movie could rethink itself into new forms across a 20th-century history of B-movies, the nightmare responses to the violent, daylight realities of women held at stainless steel ovens to smell cobbler and dream of their men at war." (Gina Telaroli)

"Nevertheless, I do not wish to suggest that we abandon radical political film theory, nor radical politics more generally. Just the opposite. What I would suggest instead is that we might take more seriously the dead-end that radical theory takes in its insistence only on displeasure, which is, as I am suggesting here, always predicated on a claim that truth is an unhappy event. For one, if we abandon the idea that the work of the political is the excavation of truth—and it is tempting not to do so precisely because we are so accustomed to denying the status of truth to any image that offends us—we might be in a better position to see the work that images can do in and for the social, especially as we come to understand the social as something that cannot be, and should not be thought to be, beyond representation. Likewise, if we understand the movement of the social as a process of representation, then we are in a better place to understand just how important it remains to think images politically, but to do so on the promise of pleasure instead of violence, happiness instead of deception. We might begin, then, by thinking about the terms of compromise and recognition rather than identification and interpellation. To proceed in this way is to bring moving image theory even closer to political philosophy, and allow us to both understand and effect change in the social along more peaceable and productive lines." (Brian Price)

"Although Lav Díaz arrives touted as an important new directorial talent, there's scant evidence to support the claim in his two featured films. The eponymous protag of his Dostoyevsky-inspired The Criminal of Barrio Concepcíon (1999) is a naive farmhand who gets involved in a kidnapping that goes violently wrong. This plodding drama, laced with ludicrous English dialogue, is not a total dud - it draws a good deal of strength from Raymond Bagatsing's beautifully understated central performance. Díaz's next effort, Naked Under the Moon (1999), a somewhat Bergman-esque tale about the limits of faith, concerns an impotent ex-priest and his tormented family. A chronicle of agonized morality, it's carved in lead." (Elliott Stein)

This last quote in particular should not, I hope, deceive as though its repetition were my endorsement. Still, it can be illuminating to look into early reviews of important films or figures before wider critical recognition (and in some cases orthodoxy) kicks in.

Image of the Day

2012-01-25T17:25:00.000-05:00

Overlaps

2012-01-13T13:10:00.000-05:00

The Star of the Show

2012-01-02T20:29:00.000-05:00

(Quotes taken from Raymond Durgnat's "Pleading an Aesthetic Excuse" section in Films and Feelings, presented not as endorsement so much as food for thought. More to follow on these topics, at some point.)

"In a sense the star is to the public as the sumptuous women of Tintoretto and Veronese were to the nouveau-riche of Renaissance Italy, or as the languorous favoured by the Pre-Raphaelites: in Edgar Morin's words, 'Movie glamour bears witness to the presence of the ideal at the heart of the real ... the archetypal beauty of the star acquires the hieratic quality of the mask. ... The star's ideal beauty reveals an ideal soul.' Movie glamour is part of the artistic urge which tends, not towards the real, but towards the ideal. It is the Platonism of l'homme moyen sensuel, for whom 'heaven' is more Garden of Eden than a cloudy realm of sexless angels."

"There are stars without superior beauty - Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler - for glamour is, perhaps, just one over-used facet of the life-force which stars assert as the classical Gods asserted (with Charlton Heston for Mars, Jerry Lewis for Dionysus ...). Glamour without this streak of life-force can never make a star. Of all Rank's charmschool girls only those who broke the mould made the grade - Diana Dors (by being brash, vulgar and working-class), Jean Simmons (by the glint of intensity, of Celtic feyness, in her well-balanced middle-class persona), Belinda Lee (after being liberated by an Italian love affair), and Honor Blackman (after donning black leather, high-boots, and topical fetishists' rig)."

"The physical and the psychological interweave: 'Invariably what made them stars' observes Arthur Mayer, 'was some physical attribute or personal mannerism' - he cites, 'John Bunny's jovial bulk, Mary Pickford's golden curls and sweet smile, Maurice Costello's urbanity, Clara Kimball Young's yearning eyes.' We might add: Alan Ladd's deadpan, Bogart's paralysed upper lip and pebble voice, Veronica Lake's peekaboo wave - far from being just gimmicks, they are more even than iconographic emblems: fans take them as metaphors for personality traits, as lyrical assertions of character. To see such traits as being, by the literary standards asserted by Henry James, psychologically crude, is only half the story. The well-loved characters of Dickens and Conan Doyle, or for that matter of Fielding, Richardson and Racine, are no more complex; Dickens endowed his characters with 'catch phrases' corresponding to a visual medium's visual 'tags.' And what makes an 'unrealistic' star seem, to an audience, realistic, is these feelings of theirs which his personality 'accommodates.' They are his resonance in him."

...

"The intelligentsia's disdain of the star is motivated by the fact that the public's demands on a star's personality tend to limit the range of his performances. (There are exceptions: T.S. Eliot was a Marie Lloyd fan, and her range was as narrow as Kim Novak's - or as Mr. Micawber's and Sherlock Holmes's.) Second, intellectuals like to identify with creative artists, and current dogma has it that stars are witless things who do only what they're told by the director. This content is often quite false: Lillian Gish contributed as much as any of her directors, Mae West and Burt Lancaster are famous for directing their directors. In any case, the director works through his actors, just as a painter works through his paintings, and it is the work of art to which we should first respond. An older tradition of film criticism talked about Bette Davis films (rather than Aldrich, Sherman, Rapper films); James Agate and La Revue du Cinema (the grandfather of Cahiers du Cinema) criticized in terms of stars as much as of directors; and it's a pity that such criticism in terms of stars has been left to the ladies of Films in Review, or degenerated into half-facetious cults by solemn intellectuals gigglingly off-duty. (Which perhaps explains why slapstick is criticized in terms of stars - but not 'serious' films.)"

Year's End

2012-01-02T20:13:00.000-05:00

I haven't really compiled, or been able to compile, a year end top ten in quite a long time. Perhaps after I've caught up with more titles I can add something. Usually what I've done, annually, around the 31st of December is to make a list of memorable first time viewings from the year. Generally, highlights are decidedly 20th century. But that doesn't satisfy me this year - I could cite incredible things that I only just saw in 2011 (like Garrel's L'Enfant secret on a digital copy, or a print of Raoul Walsh's wonderful Sailor's Luck, or the monumental Eniaios II screening that the Siskel Center showed here in Chicago). But instead I want to look to the future, and so I'll just write a few words about a few important films from the past year ...

Howls in Favor of Sade Award. Qu'ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre) (Sylvain George, 2010), which has a rare balance for "political" cinema in that one can discern the virtues of both patience (human and aesthetic) and urgency (in feeling and in policy). Sadly, few will have seen it. And I myself can offer little in the way of analysis, certainly not the verbiage I've spilled on Tree of Life, because I've only seen Qu'ils reposent... once, and it calls for greater contextualization than I am able to provide. But these readings might prove instructive, here and here.

Film of the Year. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011). I've already written a lot about this film. No need to keep going now; those who were disappointed (either because the movie didn't tell a clear story or that it allegedly "universalizes") won't find what I write convincing. It would be interesting to re-read the love letters & hate mail to the movie just to see how they use the name of Papa Malick. This points the way to the sociopolitical "problem" of The Tree of Life that I do think is worth calling into question but that almost nobody seems to want to talk about. Perhaps this reticence stems from the possibility that it might implicate critics too (gasp! clutch the pearls!) and not just the figurehead of the author. I'm referring specifically to the construction of The Tree of Life as a high romantic modernist work, and the subsequent, cannibalistic critical lineage which then denigrates that moment before it as too naïve, too recherche, too declasse. The underbelly of the history of criticism (maybe just one underbelly) is also a history of fashion, and what one says often carries greater significance for what it strategically leaves unsaid, but communicated, to the right kind of listener. This, I feel, is a problem in a lot of criticism of The Tree of Life but also a problem in the film, itself, this address to a specialized audience.

Commercial cinema was very disappointing in 2011, though the 2010 festival cinema provided a number of good works filtering, in 2011, into area theaters and the digital domain (like Apichatpong's Uncle Boonmee, Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light, Breillat's La Belle endormie, Hellman's Road to Nowhere, among others). My favorite genre film, just off the cuff, was probably Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins.

The best (very) short film I saw would have to be Ars Colonia (Raya Martin, 2011).

Recent Commercial Cinema

2011-12-13T20:38:00.000-05:00

In the 1982 Milius Conan the Barbarian, Schwarzenegger's musclebound bumbling hero exhibits patience and guile to exact a measure of revenge (the slaughter of his family & his village), only to find - the film suggests at the end - more emptiness and unhappiness. In the 2011 Conan the Barbarian, Jason Momoa is ostensibly just born a badass. He doesn't struggle much. When there is a job to be done he simply knows how to go about it - doesn't appear to need money or time or help (except when his sidekick, a wise and loyal black man who speaks in aphorisms [of course!], comes to his aid unbidden). Once Conan embarks on his quest to avenge his father (and unlike the earlier film, his mother is not a figure to be avenged) by killing the murderers, the path to the climax is quick and direct. Easy victory after easy victory, punctuated by one or two narrow escapes amidst impossible odds. Deus ex machina after deus ex machina. Sword slashes that would gruesomely kill a man don't even draw blood on him. We know he's formidable, and the film shows us he's formidable, solely because the narrative seems to require it. This Conan can catapult a henchman into the roof of his enemy's fortress, even "aiming" so superbly as to target the bedroom of the main villain. It could all be quite entertaining if only the movie had the proper infusion of wit & levity, and the right kind of self-awareness. (This is what Van Helsing attempted and failed at, and what perhaps Jonathan Rosenbaum saw in the 1997 Kull the Conqeuror, which I've never watched myself.) Instead ... well, John Milius, the paleoconservative, in 1982 slyly provides an extremely troubling and almost nihilistic view of patriarchy, religion, and vengeance in his early film (almost against his own professed politics) - which is why the first Conan the Barbarian is some kind of pulp masterpiece. But this new product is just the re-entrenchment, and reification, of the subject's mastery over the (othered) world around him.

The early Conan the Barbarian fascinates me, as a movie, partly because of its ambiguity with respect to the supernatural - this new one just kowtows toward the supernatural, and it positions its heroic subject as the rightful steward of all this supernatural power, all this prophecy and all these vaunted bloodlines. Whereas the authority of patriarchy is subtly and perhaps unintentionally exposed as myth in '82, it's reinscribed as gospel in '11. Or, to put it another way - in Milius' Conan, the "riddle of steel" involves the recognition that there are no gods, no existential certainties, no homelands, no authorities but those established, contingently, through force. In Nispel's Conan, "understanding the sword" means you do a lot of cool shit until people respect your authoriteh.

Sociocultural notes - the new Conan also features non-white ethnic figures as its first raiders to the Cimmerian village. (In Milius' film, the counterpart invaders approximate Picts.) This just goes along with The Lord of the Rings and 300, movies that figure an external social threat by ridiculously blunt markers of nonwhite otherness. Furthermore, Schwarzenegger's Conan finds his (sad) romantic interest in a fellow professional, a strong and mature woman, the excellent Sandahl Bergman. This Conan finds his (hopeful) romantic interest in a "pureblood," a young lillywhite nun - i.e., very similar to the ultra-femme character whose advances Conan declines in the 1984 sequel (helmed by Richard Fleischer). Of course, she's a "strong female character" - in neoliberal 2011 spectacle terms - because she's a little bit snarky and stubborn and haughty and says things like "I take instruction from no man" with the stilted, 20% faux-British accent of contemporary fantasy/historical movies. She also appears handy with a blade despite no apparent training. Conan is a "barbarian" because he likes to drink alcohol and kill bad guys and he talks about possessing women - just like an image of the abundantly heteronormative dudes that comprise this movie's market. His personal journey entails only the acceptance that his pureblood nun girlfriend is tough too - i.e., that women can be tough like him.

But by framing things this way, the producers of this film, and the cultural shorthand upon which they draw, simply couldn't be sexist, could they? Could they?

The problem is not the use of appealing female love interests, or even of white heroes and eurocentric iconography per se. It is rather a matter of what representational strategies are employed and what assumptions these strategies call upon. So why does a pulp fantasy movie about brawns & revenge, made by an NRA figurehead, during the Reagan years, seem so, so much more radically uncertain about its genre rhetoric (i.e., the value of heroism, love, destiny, authority, etc.) than this 2011 piece of junk?

Similarly, Super 8 is a rather incredible pastiche of late '70s, early '80s Spielbergiana. The messy boys' rooms exhibit some of the year's finest production design, and the cast of children proves excellent. (Or maybe by "excellent" what I only mean - if I'm honest - is that they are appealing in a way consonant with the commercial movies of my childhood, rather than the cloying, irritating, wiser-than-thou moppets of present-day cinema.) But what motivates this movie? Absent parents & bourgeois "creative class" aspirations. And while I doubt the J.J. Abrams & Co. want Super 8's viewers to extrapolate practical lessons from the film, one could conclude: "In the face of an evil alien threat [punned connotations possibly intended], all you've got to be open-minded and empathetic, and presumably also a creative type, like a rich Hollywood liberal Democrat perhaps ... and then the destructive, evil alien threat won't kill you." But, again, it's worth calling into question the shallowness of the monster-movie representational strategies Super 8 uses alongside its skin-deep X-Files-ish anti-fed politics.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is competent in a depressing way: it underwhelms because it doesn't appear disproportionately awful in any one respect, even though none of it adds up to much. Its premise and outcome are bleak but formulaic, thus robbed of much force. I haven't looked into any information about sequels, but I imagine the expected sequel will see heart-of-gold chimp Caesar overthrown by the ugly, mottled chimp - a representational strategy, again, that approximates if not duplicates the visual rhetoric of ethnic otherness. (This is why largely unheralded works like Dante's Small Soldiers or the Spierigs' Daybreakers, whether they're excellent films or something much less, are still intriguing and encouraging in their representational politics. They trouble distinctions of "ugly [ethnic/monstrous] them" and "beautiful [white] us.")

J. Edgar, like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, neither excels nor fails in any outlying way - though it's a better film. While not top drawer Eastwood, and full of problems the way that post-Blood Work Eastwood often is, it's the sort of movie I wouldn't mind seeing just a little more of, simply because it approaches things with a measure of seriousness, compassion, and equal parts discretion and curiosity. When it comes to how to treat the movie, David Ehrenstein has already said it well enough.

Monte Carlo isn't so great, but it's not so bad either - see this review by Ben Sachs.

Stray Thoughts

2011-12-07T15:03:00.001-05:00

"Well, to me it's two very different things [film and literature] … I mean there are principles that you can take from one and apply to the other but—no, I really make an effort not to see movies on literary terms, with plots and characters centrally… I try to see them as sound and image, essentially." (Dave Kehr)

Reading this interview with DK from a short while back, I was struck by the above, succinct sentiment. I've voiced a similar sentiment before, as have a great many cinephiles with a more formalist (and often auteurist) bent. I don't often make statements like this these days, but at the same time, in the proper circumstances all it takes is someone's snide dismissal of all experimental cinema, or of certain Robert Mulligan films (to name one name) for me to flip on the "sound and image" switch. Still, there is a massive weakness to this defense and it's strange how formalists seem nevertheless willingly to overlook it despite predicating their taste and connoisseurship on attention to the materials of the medium. "Plot and character" are simply not parallel, not congruous, not comparable, with "sound and image." You can attend to one at the privilege of the other; certainly this is the level at which a lot of formalist cinephilia pitches itself polemically. But 'sound and image' are for cinema what characteristics like words, sentence, diction, or grammar are for the written word. Concepts like plot and character require perception but also comprehension. Plot and character are not "uncinematic," nor are they "anti-cinematic," nor are they "cinematic." The means of narration and emplotment certainly vary from the moving image to the written word, just as they vary from film to film, type to type. But if they're there ... Formalist cinephilia can rail against very real crutches & impediments to understanding, but can rely upon its own crutches if the viewer isn't careful, and takes on dogma like a security blanket. (This last isn't a coded accustation of Kehr or anyone in particular, by the way - that interview was the springboard, it's not a target.)

I've had various kinds of reactions to "mumblecore" movies (does this label mean anything anymore?) ... but I've yet to see one that doesn't cause me to wonder, "Who are these people?"

The first section of The Nun's Story crossed with Times Square would equal something not unlike Ida Lupino's The Trouble with Angels.

And if you look at The Trouble with Angels, it's refreshing to see how rough-edged commercial cinema once allowed youths to be - blemished skin, seemingly unrehearsed body movements. One can't imagine a hair going astray on the head of Hugo's Asa Butterfield.

Sympton and Theme

2011-10-27T08:41:00.001-04:00

Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009) could be described as crypto-conservative - respect for military (check), longing for the order and authority of the days of yore (check). But it's crypto because it takes care not to code its racial anxieties racially. In fact the majority of the criminals in the film are white. Nevertheless, it would be possible to insert a mouthpiece into the film along the lines of David Starkey. Everything else is in place for Harry Brown to hypothesize that the problem with contemporary, welfare state Britain is from its "culture" turning "black." There's just no one in the script connecting those dots explicitly. I presume this is because writer Gary Young, director Barber, etc., are more concerned with articulating a storyline that can be comparably more broadly marketed than they are mounting an ideological critique (that is, one from the right). I suspect socially divisive (e.g. racist, classist, jingoistic) nostalgia is usually easier to market when it's an overtone or undertone, rather than a front-and-center theme.

*

Early in Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris (2007), the American boyfriend - played by Adam Goldberg - misdirects a gaggle of American tourists by giving them false directions to the Louvre. His reasoning is that this has drastically cut their wait in the line for a cab at the airport. They're Bush-voting Americans here on a Da Vinci Code tour, he rationalizes to Delpy. They deserve to see something outside of their little worlds, such as a riot. (Nevermind that this film seems to whitewash Paris as much as Amélie ever did.) "You're so mean," Delpy replies, "but you're so right!" Then she kisses him. The class privilege on display here is totally nonchalant. It's good for American tourists from flyover country to "see some riots." But does the syndicalist bohemian Parisian culture of Delpy's gentle caricature admit many - or any - nonwhite people? Perhaps it might, if the nonwhite person is an artist, poet, designer, photographer, etc. Goldberg's character, suggested to be a Clinton Democrat (!!!), speaks no language but English, went through Italy simply snapping photos ... he's not so unlike these ugly Americans after all, and his real quarrel with the Bush-Cheney tourists he lies to is that they have such poor taste. They read Dan Brown, not the Faulkner-Kerouac axis of respectable literature. They live in Kansas or something like it, whereas he lives in New York. They voted for Bush, not for a proper left-wing politician like, ahem, Clinton or Gore or Kerry.

And this division constitutes the heart of 2 Days in Paris, which is in many ways a sophisticated film. Delpy is an intelligent person and though I don't think the movie is totally successful, her intelligence shows. Almost everything annoying on display, that I want to read as a symptom, is at least implicitly or subtly acknowledged by the film itself - a line of dialogue, a choice of setting or blocking. (For instance, Goldberg goes to McDonald's in a moment of crisis, underlining his proximity to the compatriots that he so despises.) The Before Sunrise/Before Sunset diptych, which Delpy was so crucial in helping to create, does an even better job than this, though - one of the great recent achievements of cinema in displaying a particular class position (rootless, precarious, but nonetheless privileged, educated, culturally savvy youth), not treating it with scornful distance but inhabiting this position, all the while subtly pointing to its limitations, the fact that it's not the center nor the apex of the world. Even if it's easy to think that the films' so-called "message" is equal to Jesse's worldview, or Celine's. This is a common refrain in virulent criticism against those two movies (as against a lot of Malick) - ignoring the structure in order to have one part (usually one or two characters' POV) stand in for the whole movie, a critical upgrade via synecdoche. Of course there are films, and other artworks, where this is a valid enough operation. But it should be demonstrated instead of assumed. 2 Days in Paris tempts this kind of reading, and indeed I'm not certain how one could examine the content of the film without it, and yet proves quite slippery ... the lesson being that it's a tricky and provisional thing to arrive at conclusions about an artwork's conclusions. There are too many variables, too many contingencies - and cultural products have potentially long afterlives, they can be re-purposed, re-articulated, by people and from variable perspectives.

Hence the necessity of materialist (not moralist) analysis, when asking political and social questions of culture. If we return to the example of Harry Brown, we could jump to the conclusion that the film is not only an indictment of an ineffectual nanny state bureaucracy, but also a thinly veiled lamentation that Britain's culture is "becoming black" ... even if the racial aspect is precisely what is veiled. What then? Having cracked the film's code, do we move on to the next? Do we "combat" the film somehow? (Why this one and not countless others?)

Tech Notes

2011-10-25T10:11:00.000-04:00

"[T]he arrival of any new technology that has significant power and practical potential always brings with it a wave of visionary enthusiasm that anticipates the rise of a utopian social order. Surely the coming of this machine, this new device, this technical novelty will revitalize democracy. Surely its properties will foster greater equality and widespread prosperity through the land. Surely it will distribute political power more broadly and empower citizens to act for themselves. Surely it will cause us to cultivate new and better selves, becoming larger and more magnanimous people than we have been before. And surely it will connect individuals and groups in ways that will produce greater social harmony and a relaxation of human conflict." (Langdon Winner, "Sow's Ears from Silk Purses")

"The technological plane is an abstraction: in ordinary life we are practically unconscious of the technological reality of objects. Yet this abstraction is profoundly real: it is what governs all radical transformations of our environment. It is even - and I do not mean this in any paradoxical sense - the most concrete aspect of the object, for technological development is synonymous with objective structural evolution. In the strictest sense, what happens to the object in the technological sphere is essential, whereas what happens to it in the psychological or sociological sphere is inessential. The discourse of psychology or sociology continually refers us to the object as apprehended at a more consistent level, a level unrelated to any individual or collective discourse, namely the supposed level of technological language. It is starting from this language, from this consistency of the technological model, that we can reach an understanding of what happens to objects by virtue of their being produced and consumed, possessed and depersonalized." (Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects)

“My point is that Marx is not working to create an undivided subject where desire and interest coincide. Class consciousness does not operate toward that goal. Both in the economic area (capitalist) and in the political (world-historical agent), Marx is obliged to construct models of a divided and dislocated subject whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other.” (Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”)

I've taken the above quotes from out of their contexts and chosen them to populate this post, which has no real point - it's blunt and vague, instead. But I've been thinking the last several days about the grafting of politics into or onto technological forms. Politics and technology are not equivalent and mutually exclusive spheres, but what I mean is the substitution of the latter for the former. Or maybe the relocation of the former to the latter. I.e., the rhetoric that Langdon Winner evokes. But it's something that has prompted me to take a look at one of the earlier books by that joker Baudrillard, The System of Objects, because it now seems worth entertaining what he means when he provocatively suggests that the essential feature of the object resides in its technological abstraction - not its "psychology or sociology." Something appealingly anti-determinist ...

TV Waves

2011-10-24T22:13:00.000-04:00

"The cover centers on a television set seen from the side. To the right are two little blond viewers in their pajamas, presumably siblings, who watch the illuminated screen raptly, one seated and the other lying on his stomach, head lifted at attention. This domestic scene takes place in a void - the uniform black of the cover allows for no spatial orientation whatsoever. But framing the floating vignettes are two twisting configurations of rainbow-colored electromagnetic waves. Here the gap between the television commodity, represented photographically, and the network, represented in abstract wave patterns, is almost traumatic, as though some monstrous science fiction force had invaded the cozy children's world. The cover of All About Radio and Television insinuates a startling fact: the network and the commodity, though structurally linnked in the ways I have suggested, are profoundly dissimilar and even antagonistic." (David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy)

For all its virtues, Joselit's book is also highly symptomatic: very much the work of an art history professor deciding to take on the brave new world of television studies, absorbing some of it, but also forming an argument without completely attending to the literature's findings. (Such is the challenging nature of interdisciplinarity ...) Interpretation suffocates a lot of Joselit's readings; if the electromagnetic waves are "almost traumatic" then one wonders what could possibly not constitute a trauma. Instead the fashionable buzzword of trauma serves to contextualize an image that, to my own "art historian" eyes, is much more mundane than that.

In Joselit, network broadcasting culminates (more or less) in the object, the physical object of television as well as its mainstream programming. The network is represented abstractly, at least when in the context of commercial broadcasting, and video art rides in to save the day when finding more sophisticated or literal ways of representing it.

Image of the Day

2011-08-31T23:38:00.002-04:00

Starting Eleven?

2011-08-31T21:45:00.001-04:00

(Note: I see the above selection is fairly uncontroversial, as Arsenal fan Piers Morgan has recently tweeted support of the same eleven - Szczesny in goal, Santos at left back, Mertesacker and Vermaelen in central defense, Sagna at right back, Song and Wilshere and Arteta in midfield, Gervinho wide left, Walcott wide right, Robin Van Persie in the middle. Though I hope the front three play fluidly and swap positions.)

Apologies for breaking my recent blogging hiatus with Premier League talk instead of, oh, the Toronto International Film Festival (not that I'm going) or FX's Louie (which I'm enjoying) or similar cinephilic-telephilic objects. I've spent the last few days (a) reading, (b) writing, and (c) fretting obsessively about the end of the European league transfer window.

To make a long, armshair sports column a little more concise - I'll just repeat that I'm an Arsenal fan.

(Already I want to introduce a tangent into my "concise" blog entry: We American fans of the English game are so predictable. Most of us witlessly gravitate to Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool - the three most successful clubs in English history. I knew Arsenal were a big club when I ceremoniously devoted my allegiance to them, but it took me just slightly longer to realize what a damn statistic I was. Whatever. I could have jumped ship at any of the low points before, but I didn't and I won't. On one hand, I don't call myself a "supporter" because that sounds like an unbearable affectation coming from someone who's never even set foot in London. On the other hand, the big European leagues are very much a global game now, so there's no shame in being a Malaysian, Hungarian, or American fan of an English club. I've roused myself at ungodly weekend hours for years just to see Arsenal try to pass the ball into the net.)

This past weekend, of course, saw the Gunners humbled by Manchester United ... 8:2. That's right. That's a soccer score. If you're not aware of the significance of this and - strangely - are still curious, Google will direct you to countless pages of commentary and analysis. Suffice it to say that this was definitive proof that the club's, and the manager's, actions in the transfer market and their policy on young talent has simply not been good enough on their own. The squad needed skilled and determined players, and while some of the youth talents had that, they needed to embed it with a lot of experience on the pitch.

So you see, Arsenal's last gasp flurry of transfers was a highly satisfying - here are several experienced new players, all past college-age, who can help anchor all the youth talent in the club. I think the average age of this ideal starting eleven is about twenty-five, and with some other recent signings, Park Chu-Young and/or Yossi Benayoun, in the squad, we'd even be a hair closer to greybreard. This did not at all seem the case in the early part of the transfer window, when Arsene Wenger was signing - it seemed - mostly teenaged, unproven wide players when fans were clamoring for strength in so many parts of the pitch. I am optimistic that the team will finish fourth, maybe even third (at the expense of Liverpool or perhaps Chelsea), and that they could even grab a cup trophy by season's end. Finally.

That said, a tiny morbid part of me still expects Vermaelen, Van Persie, Song, Wilshere, and Szczesny all to pick up season-ending injuries before the end of October.

Image of the Day

2011-08-12T12:20:00.002-04:00

Quote of the Day

2011-08-12T12:19:00.000-04:00

"Let us retrace, more slowly and gradually this time, the step that Patrice Blouin made in his Shirin pan from classical mise en scène to the modern dispositif. It is not a matter of declaring, in this progression, that mise en scène is dead, whether as a mode of filmmaking or of film criticism. Perfectly fine classical films are still made today (whether by Clint Eastwood or Lone Scherfig), and mise en scène criticism, as we have known and loved it, is far from exhausting the field, historical or contemporary, of its research (see Gibbs 2006, McElhaney 2009, Perkins 2009). Rather, the question is: has there been a certain tendency in cinema (and audiovisual production more generally), not necessarily only an invention of recent times, that has been marginalised or literally undetected by the protocols of mise en scène critique, with its inevitable, in-built biases and exclusions? A tendency which is not the opposite of mise en scène or its negation, but a particular, pointed mutation of it? (Indeed, many auteur signatures—those of Bresson, Ozu, Angelopoulos, to take only a few classic art cinema examples—resemble the structure of a dispositif, even though auteurism, with its Romanticist attachment to a creed of unfettered creativity, has long fought shy of apprehending this intuition.)

"Or—the most radical notion—does the notion of the dispositif name or point to something that is and has always been inherent in mise en scène—maybe even larger or greater than it, as an overall formal category? This is what Raymond Bellour suggested in 1997 when he proposed that la-mise-en-scène (as, with a literary flourish, he dubs it) is a classical approach that corresponds “to both an age and a vision of cinema, a certain kind of belief in the story and the shot”, but is ultimately only one of the available “modes of organising images” in cinema (Bellour 2003: 29). And if the dispositif idea should rivet our attention to anything, it is the modes of organising filmic materials: Christa Blümlinger, for instance, defines a dispositif as the “spatial or symbolic disposition of gazes characterising a medium” (Blumlinger 2010), where gaze refers to all manner of looks, orientations and perspectives (fictive, technological, spectatorial)—and this is a matter not only of our eyes but also our ears. Naturally, within an art gallery—where directors including Akerman and Pedro Costa have literally disassembled some of their feature films and spatialised them across several screens in an architectural arrangement—the idea of dispositif as installation (and this can serve as yet another possible English translation of the term) is obvious enough. But can we also project the concept, and everything it raises, back into the single-screen medium of cinema, illuminating this medium in a new way?

"A key thrust of the machinic or systematic side of the dispositif concept is to remind us—a 1970s notion too quickly forgotten or repressed since then—that a dispositif is heterogeneous, that it is truly a matter of bits and pieces of very different substances brought into an often volatile working relation. For the great German critic Frieda Grafe (who died in 2002), all cinema—no matter how seemingly neutral or classical—came down to something resembling this: “Only the calculated mingling of formative elements originating in various media, each with its own relative autonomy, generates the tension that gives the film life” (Grafe 1996: 56). And she was, on this occasion, speaking not of any conceptual art installation but Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)!"

(Adrian Martin)

Roll the Credits

2011-08-11T11:10:00.000-04:00

It's a cool film, and unhurried. Road to Nowhere is perfectly content to let its viewers wallow in several blurred layers of fiction. Any "truths" emerging soon acquire counterparts and negations. (This would make for an intriguing double bill with Ferrara's Dangerous Game.) The humor is wonderfully dry - "fucking masterpiece." Hellman stages the images with a remarkable sense of enigma - not just in terms of where they fit in the story's reality, but also in the way that something on the soundtrack (a gunshot, a character's high-pitched shriek-crying) or from out of the frame will stunningly transform the meaning of the shot we've just been watching. Even if one doesn't like Road to Nowhere, I think it would be difficult to deny how unformulaic is its narrative construction.

For Real, Bro (Ephemera)

2011-08-10T15:40:00.002-04:00

Let's take a handful of the best American TV comedy from the past few years. We could say that NBC's Parks and Recreation exists almost entirely in Sitcom Land. Starz's Party Down edges a bit closer to the domain of realism. FX's Louie engages heartily with realism. This is not to say that the show is (ugh) a "truthful representation of reality." Because Louie also has a lot of cartoonish gags, like the tiny cup of water the flight attendant gives Louie on a plane ride. Realism has less to do with mimetic fidelity to reality than it it does to the establishment of a certain anchoring relationship between the screen and the world.

*

A movie like The Fighter, constructed from inanities and cliches as though they were bricks, hasn't the slightest engagement with "reality." Its only engagements are with some commonly accepted signifying practices for "reality" that have emerged in mainstream media over the last several decades. Think of the reflexivity evoked, though not developed, through the use of the camera crew following around the family. Or better still: sweat. Readers may recall some months ago I suggested that the sweat stain on the back of a cop's shirt in the Bill Murray vehicle Quick Change evinced a certain kind of realism. That is, it indicated a certain relationship to the indexical register of the images being captured. It strikes me neither as a "detail" (i.e., a detail made to be noticed as such) nor a secret (something you aren't supposed to notice, like a continuity error), but a part of the texture of an image. The Passion of Darkly Noon (Phillip Ridley, 1995) is a film in which people sweat, and the sweat isn't much textualized (one could conceive of the treatment & screenplay making nary a mention), and yet this unremarked and frequent visual touch plays to a range of effects: eroticism (Ashley Judd's legs and back), stifling imprisonment, healthy labor. It plays a part in anchoring the images to the trees and structures and chores. In The Fighter, working class men are denoted by their near-permanent sweat marks. And poor people, you see, don't bother to shower or change clothes when they go out to the bar after a day of manual labor and a workout at the boxing gym. That's how you know they're poor. It's the Eric Cartman approach to prestige cinema ...

Axioms of American Soccer

2011-07-30T11:26:00.000-04:00

American sports commentary on US national soccer teams always seems to angle to position the team as an "underdog." Even against opposition that is, on paper, inferior, the commentary will bend over backwards to point out that the team with "nothing to lose" has an advantage - thereby still making the US squad "underdogs." At the same time, this same establishment will grasp at whatever crumbs of official credibility they can - such as the ludicrous ranking of the United States' mens team at #5 worldwide at the time of the one of the recent World Cups.

I heard commentators justifying Manchester United's dismantling of several MLS squads by pointing out how, this being the MLS mid-season, the American squads were riddled with injuries and were focused on other matters. Yet if an MLS squad went to Old Trafford in January, and still found themselves trounced, no doubt the same sophists would argue that the Red Devils "are in the peak of their stride," that it would be unfair to expect an MLS team to perform very well in their off-season.

Image of the Day

2011-07-21T21:27:00.002-04:00

Factors

2011-07-16T09:39:00.002-04:00

Watching a cropped video of a Preminger film seems almost completely beside the point. Nevertheless, I tried this - as the avi file I had downloaded of The Human Factor proved not to be 1.85. The film seems to remain "durable." If its spaces are violated by the cropping, visually, they nevertheless appear to retain a certain character. (Usually drab; always lived-in.) This points to the tendency in Preminger to make his films work on a number of levels, overlapping, not simply "framing" - as though the frame is the only thing against which profilmic space interacts - but organizing materials together, putting them into a lot of smaller "frames." And as any Hollywood director with a strong visual sense surely knew by 1980, television would likely crop, pan, and scan your most brilliant wide compositions anyway. This travesty of aspect ratios nevertheless provides an interesting aesthetic challenge. (Though I still would like to watch The Human Factor in 1.85, projected, also, of course.) Favorite films that seem to "survive" a transition from widescreen to 1.33?

Cases Closed / Problems Opened

2011-07-15T13:57:00.000-04:00

Two of the primary impulses toward the sanctity of authorship are ownership and (pace Foucault) punishment, and in film culture we can see this not only in conservative and less-conservative celebrations of favorite "auteurs" but also in the highly moralizing (and not always exactly wrong) skepticism toward same when they make a film that is supposedly too indulgent (like with Malick's recent efforts), or even morally reprehensible (as with Mel Gibson). Even many of those who've moved on from the cult of the author when it comes to celebration nevertheless fall back onto these presumptions when we're left looking for someone, something to blame. In the end, the ideological operation of this type of critique - itself sometimes couched as an ideological critique - can be an astringent defense of the critic himself, a sort of puritanical consumerism which establishes clear borders around the holy temple of one's own taste.

"This film / this author is too modernist, too accessible, too lazy, too simplistic, too classical, too frenetic, too indulgent, too conventional, too puritanical (!) for my tastes. I can't have it; can't get behind it." The last defense of the person of taste is the elective ability to verbally demarcate what won't be consumed and enjoyed. And it is difficult not to be, not to house within our complex selves, "persons of taste." With the analysis of artistic objects, then, it is better to continue reminding oneself to attend to what it does (and can do) rather than what it is. Establishing an understanding of the former is not the same thing as - essentially - finessing a noun into a verb. Case in point: the common charge that in The Tree of Life Malick "universalizes." The implication being here that Malick's quasi-autobiographical film propels, even forces, the viewer to see the linkage between cosmology and lilywhite mid-century Waco as incontroveritble evidence of Malick's ingrained sexism, racism, religiosity, etc. This charge is often not fleshed out very much beyond innuendo, and is often hastily rushed over. (As in my earlier point that in The Tree of Life, critics swiftly associated the "simplistic" nature/grace binary with Malick rather than with a character in the film, though it's clearly the latter.) And it might behoove many of us to ask, first, what it would mean to universalize? That makes two questions in one: What does the verb mean, to universalize? and What is the significance of an instance of universalization in a cultural object?

Far be it from me to willingly shield Malick from due criticism, ideological or otherwise. His film is, I think, deeply metaphysical and romantic/Romantic in its concerns, and it does perpetuate some iconic visual tropes of Americana. These may register far more clearly than the sophisticated context in which he places them. So this is where certain fallacies in thinking bout authorship come to the fore: critics of the film want to shift discussion from what the film does and can mean, and conclusively place blame at Malick's misguided intentions. It's easy to just say "Malick universalizes white Americana, and that's bad."

Yet does The Tree of Life whitewash a multicultural reality for reasons of nostalgia (like, say, Amelie)? The film is specific, and its view of the world rooted in class as well. (This is the aspirant middle class, a distinctly American inflection, whose ambitious failings - associated heavily with Mr. O'Brien and his patriarchal legacy - the film explicitly lays out.) And The Tree of Life frequently provides glimpses of interactions with "others" - both within a community (e.g., the epileptic) and outside it (e.g., the black people selling barbecue). The experience of childhood also involves the inculcation of codes in dealing with these "others" - i.e. one learns to treat an epileptic seizure as a shameful, one understands in the 1950s South that poor black neighborhoods and lower middle-class white neighborhoods may be quite distinct but there are conditions under which one may cross over (commerce, namely). [In the segment where the O'Briens grieve over their son's death, there is a brief close-up of Chastain's hands clasped by a black woman's. A neighbor? More likely - given this historical specificity - a maid: another subtle example of the local cultural and economic ordering of hierarchies and the conditions in which these play out.] That Malick pictorializes and dramatizes these does not imply that he also endorses them, especially when his portrait of this family/social life is so profoundly inconclusive (bitter and sweet, traumatic and lovely, cruel and loving: a "wrestling" verbalized in Sean Penn's voice-overs). If one wants to criticize The Tree of Life further, one must build upon the recognition of this violent interplay, instead of lazily presuming only nostalgia. And sometimes of course, even retrograde or seemingly conventional forms and artworks can be reinhabited, repurposed, lived-through in unanticipated ways by audiences who would not have seemed to be an unintended audience. And we should not presume that the meaning of nostalgia itself could only ever mean one thing, across all histories, all places, and all situations, in all cultural objects.

In Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light (2010), for example, a superb documentary which bears a few key resemblances to The Tree of Life (particularly a running link between cosmology and autobiography), the nostalgia is explicitly an injunction against political quietude. Guzmán's ethical model for film is more left-wing than Malick's. That is, though Nostalgia for the Light is no less subtle and layered than The Tree of Life, it would be difficult to imagine any viewer coming away from it not knowing precisely which side Guzmán is on within a very specific national and historical framework: Chile after Pinochet's coup. The Tree of Life is not divorced from politics, and though I would defend it from charges of blatant reaction or regressive nostalgia, it certainly exists in a tradition whose historical and material association is with Western imperialism and its sanctioned aesthetics. And it is a Hollywood film, made with Hollywood money: absolutely a product, among other things. Malick's work, though, is virtually alone these days in the particular register of these imperial-sanctioned traditions: this is why his films seem so strange, because it's Hollywood talent used for a number of decidedly non-Hollywood ends and purposes, a dense assortment of codes, gestures, links that seems to me to hearken back to the early modernism about which Guy Davenport always wrote so cogently. But it doesn't point outward, clearly, in the way that a film like Nostalgia for the Light does (or, say, the work of John Gianvito).

Below are some examples of writing I've read recently that point to what good discussion of art cinema, or "authored" cinema, might unfurl into ...

“So as to best grasp the amplitude of what Jacobs' film tackles and its formal initiatives, I will begin by laying out the various forms by which an image can work on another image – a taxonomy of recycling.

“But, before plunging into the film [Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son], a few more preliminary remarks. First, such enterprises, deliberately or not, actively contest, even completely destroy, the traditional division of labor between art and criticism.

“Second, we would obviously come up with different results and questions by considering other visual studies, for instance – and mentioning only a few key references – the pioneering films of Adrian Brunel (Crossing the Great Sagrada, 1924) and Joseph Cornell (Rose Hobart, 1936); Kirk Tougas' The Politics of Perception (1973) and Lemaȋtre's Erich von Stroheim (1979); certain fundamental works by Malcolm Le Grice, David Rimmer, or Raphael Monatñez Ortiz's decompositions … but also the entire work of Godard, Pasolini's La Ricotta (1963), Antonioni's Blowup (1966); certain films by Raúl Ruiz, or Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Cézanne (1989). And also the John Ford film that possibly invented this form in 1948 when, at the end of Fort Apache, we learn that the entire story we have witnessed exists in order to criticize a painting exhibited in Washington: an official, “true” image, against which the film itself can only register as false. This criticized painting is absent, but the film's argument, via a beautiful effect of substitution, reaches its conclusion in front of an official portrait that Ford has by now equipped us to judge: a picture of Henry Fonda as Colonel Thursday. It is not hard to see in this the (perhaps unconscious) origin of Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Letter to Jane: An Investigation about a Still (1972), a major example of the visual study.

“Lastly, the visual study belongs to a far vaster field in which it figures as one type, and doubtless the most rigorous: all those exegetical visual forms, from the “making of” to poetic art, from the monograph to the historical essay – an enormous genre that can be rightfully confused with the entire existing body of film, since every image-based work can be considered a discussion of phenomena, of its own motifs, of conventional arrangements and linkages.”

(Nicole Brenez, from her essay “Recycling, Visual Study, Expanded Theory – Ken Jacobs, Theorist, or the Long Song of the Sons,” in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, eds. Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur)

II.

“It is for this reason that the Marxist tradition of television studies has expended so much energy “demystifying” the medium's hegemonic illusions at the level of content; if the contents of Today [NBC] do not necessarily coincide with the contents of “today,” then the impulse to distinguish the ontological status of the two – one is presumably material and the other is not – makes a certain amount of sense. And yet, it is also for this reason that so many scholars working in this same tradition take it for granted that technological forms of mass media forge different scales of “imagined communities,” “technoscapes,” and/or “mediascapes,” all of which indeed constitute the existence of the social world in some important sense. Since the variously scaled industrial technologies of print capitalism, television, and the Internet help forge social connections in what can safely be described as material social space, there is never much need to question whether this “effect” is also part of material reality; the ontological status of television technology can simply be cleaved apart from that of the image it displays.”

(Meghan Sutherland, “Death, with Television,” in On Michael Haneke, eds. Brian Price and John David Rhodes)

III.

“During the shooting of a Miklós Jancsó film it is, then, the actors who follow the elaborate tracking choreography performed by the camera, not the other way around. The camera does not simply "cover" the action; rather, the protagonists' actions provide the content that is fitted into the a priori patterned movements of the filming apparatus. The tracks along which the camera is moving outline, as if in a diagram, a non-determinate dynamic structure: Cinema as a relational Master Code. The "second degree" procedure of filming actual diegetic actions fleshes out this abstract matrix, giving it a variety of particular audio-visual forms. In films intent on exploring the history of class struggle (the fundamental theme of Jancsó's cinema, from The Round Up, to The Red and the White, to The Red Psalm, to Electra, My Love), this approach gives rise to a sense of History as inherently and unavoidably dialectical. The human subject's mandate is to accept it as such, and to participate in it. In other words, Jancsó does not use the camera to interpret history dialectically—to detect, in different epochs and socio-economic constellations, examples of an ongoing struggle between classes, between the oppressor and the oppressed. Instead, he creates filmed testimonies to his conviction that History, much like the Cinema, is an always already dialectical but, initially, also an empty Structure. The actual praxis of human history is, in turn, not unlike the practice of filmmaking: the particular manner in which the abstract cinematic Code is actualized in individual films (giving rise to distinct filmic enunciations), is analogous to the manner in which the dialectical Structure of History is brought to life by the human protagonists' concrete socio-political actions, undertaken amidst the specific circumstances of their existence. “

(Pavle Levi, "Toward a Meta-Reality of the Cinema")

Tree of Life (2)

2011-07-09T01:35:00.002-04:00

With The Tree of Life, some would assert - as if it is self-evident - that "the film" sets up a nature/grace dichotomy. (Usually the next step is to grant that it's a simplistic binary, etc.) But I am not convinced that it is "the film" which does this. The binary itself is associated with the character of the mother, Mrs. O'Brien. It is her voice-overs which introduce and maintain the concept, and I think it is a hasty rush to judgment which presumes that "the film" aligns her with grace and Pitt with nature. "The film" - if we attend to what's up on screen, and on the soundtrack - instead associates the the nature/grace distinction as a binary with Jessica Chastain's character.

One of the opening segments depicts what we might presume to be Mrs. O'Brien's childhood - we see a ginger girl on farmland. Why does this sequence exist at all, especially when it bears no explicit story relation - in dialogue or voice-over - to the rest? I suspect that its role is to ground Mrs. O'Brien herself in a specific milieu, to grant her character a bit (but a crucial bit!) of historical specificity precisely to circumvent the criticism that she's a long-suffering wife, i.e., more or less a sexist failing on Malick's part. But I think the glimpse we get of her upbringing, if indeed it is that, instead works to ground this character. She's a farmgirl, brought up with a Christian sense of love and grace. She remarks, when she introduces the nature/grace distinction in VO, that it is what "they" told "us." She was gettin' religion on the farm.

These very values - the ever-renewing sense of grace and acceptance, which also provide her with her almost saintly ability to be that long-suffering, quiet, ideal housewife. But the film does present us with cracks in the facade, and as Jack tells his mother, "You let him walk all over you." Pitt's Mr. O'Brien doesn't have a similar scene of his own childhood because of his dominating presence: we can draw out something about his background and his beginnings by looking at how he verbalizes, how he gestures and acts.

... We can maybe think of Malick as something like a "symphonic modernist." When I say this, though, I specifically want to avoid the vagueness that comes with airily gesturing toward Malick and his films as being "poetry," "poetic," "musical," etc. Maybe "symphonic" is not the best word. (But can we borrow from letters? To call Malick "literary" might just invite people to automatically assume that I mean "novelistic" ...) I use it to gesture, perhaps clumsily, to the way he organizes his material so as to construct meaning. In Tree of Life, there are "movements" (Mrs. O'Brien; adult Jack; birth of the universe; etc.). The connective significance of these movements is not narrative, though the film sort of tells a story. (But more primarily it organizes a web of experiences: this is something narrative does, but not all things that do this must be narrative.)

Cut!

2011-07-05T10:00:00.002-04:00

In The Bellboy, when The Kid steals the plane, we cut the sequence thirty times before finally deciding to drop two frames. The sequence was in the hotel manager's office. The camera was positioned about ten feet from him, holding the desk and a secretary. The manager receives a phone call.

"Yes, hello. Stanley, the bellboy? Yes, he works for me. Yes."

The camera is moving slowly up to the desk, choking the manager. As it stops, he says, "He what?"

Before the t is out of his mouth, we straight cut to the Douglas DC-8 jet taking off. Bwwwwwooooh!

We had a couple of frames too many.

"He what?" Then four frames, then the jet engine roar. Out came two frames, and then the bwwwwoooh was on the manager's t. It was that critical.

(Jerry Lewis, The Total Film-Maker)

En Rachâchant

2011-06-30T22:43:00.000-04:00

Recently I caught up with the Straub-Huillet short film En Rachâchant ('82), which is wonderful in its simplicity. (The embedded YouTube video I'm including here has no English subtitles, though the intrepid digital explorer can find her own subtitled copy. Otherwise the primary thing to know is that the child, Ernesto, decides he doesn't want to stay in school because learning things there isn't worth the trouble. He remains stubborn.) Mitterand = "a gentleman," a butterly pinned in glass = "a crime," a globe is a football as well as a representation of the earth ... am I wrong to react to this, initially, as a sly, Ivan Illichesque treatment of school as a site of ideological confrontation?

Deadlier Than the Male

2011-06-30T22:13:00.000-04:00

Lately my bottom-of-the-barrel consumption has been Spike's Deadliest Warrior. For those of you who have not sampled this program (available streaming on Netflix or also on Spike's own website), the premise is that two prototypical, unlikely, and mostly historical combatants (say: viking vs samurai, pirate vs knight) are put into a hypothetical battle. Though the shows always culminate in a simulated live-action "face-off" between each of the contestants, the bulk of the running time follows specialists from either side demonstrating their weapons. A computer simulation runs a thousand virtual battles to determine "the deadliest [meaning: deadlier] warrior."

The most repetitive and unimaginative trash-talking and punditry pads out the program. Think something along the lines of, "Oh man, that samurai sword is intense. It will definitely kill you [i.e., if you are standing there being passively sliced by it]. But the chainsaw just has too much power. Gotta give the edge to the chainsaw." I believe Noam Chomsky once indicated that the general public is presumed to be a bunch of chumps, but if you listened to something like a call-in radio show about local sports, you'd hear people volunteer intelligent commentary. This may have been more true in the past than it is today. I wonder if sports punditry - which these days is just beyond idiotic, as with mainstream political punditry - might operate with similarly sinister effects on public culture. Discourage people - The People? - from ever even thinking about strategy or tactics, which of course is what sport still offers the spectacularized public an opportunity to do ... so that the only end a person will end up ever being encouraged to achieve is selling labor in order to obtain and maintain the opportunity to eat and sleep.

At any rate, in Deadliest Warrior we see what happens when puerile but admittedly fascinating questions - like could an Apache defeat a gladiator? - are posed. (Let's recall for a second that Guy Debord was a great student of war and martial matters.) The show has a curious feature in that, when it pits like weapons against each other - such as the mid-range ones - it does it only by separating them and tabulating data based on what each weapon does to an inanimate object like a pig carcass or forensic gel torso. (If the software the show uses does anything more complicated than this, we are not informed of it.) Does even such a childish question as this show thrives upon require such dissembling? This show simply cannot conceive of actual conflict, but instead can only run on the engines of simulation, of R&D execution. It may be "totally rad" to see a katana blade slice through an entire swine, but the consistently evaded question is exactly what the show vocally promises. Who would win? Which weapon actually wins?

Not that one should ever expect that a show like Deadliest Warrior would deliver what it evokes. I just find it interesting how baldly - and yet unconsciously - the film divorces itself from its actual premise. I've plenty more episodes to go, but have yet to see a single woman on the show. I am no expert on Spike and its demographic-marketing strategies, but this channel is still gunning for the heternormative dads-dudes-and-bros market. (Right?) It seems, at first, strange that they don't even offer the spectacle of "hot babes" as with boxing, professional wrestling, and mixed martial arts. But perhaps it's an illustration of the separation between men and woman that war is supposed to engender - war is man's domain, and woman is man's repose. (So bellowed Nietzsche, if I recall.) In any event, a show like Deadliest Warrior promises a certain appreciation of violent, macho effectiveness while in fact nullifying this very thing. Not from a feminist perspective, mind you ...

Image of the Day

2011-06-30T21:57:00.002-04:00

Tree of Life

2011-06-21T21:24:00.001-04:00

Though I haven't revisited The Tree of Life, as I still hope to, it's been stewing in my head for several days now.

Brad Pitt is probably as good as he's ever been. The hands-on-lovehandles machismo he played to comedic effect in Inglourious Basterds here re-emerges as the performance of midcentury masculinity. A rough Don Draper (with a dash of Single Man's Colin Firth, or maybe that's just midcentury modern home design talking), he embodies the marriage of a certain tough minded, indelicate approach to the world (similar to the materialist Sean Penn character in The Thin Red Line) and the Mortimer Adler / modernist self-improvement endemic to a certain class in the period. Pitt's pouting lip and jawline, his gruff voice - these things glimpsed so many years ago in Legends of the Fall come out and are used to tremendous effect here. There's no essential distinction between Pitt's performance and the father's "performance." Or as the doc says in WR - Mysteries of the Organism, you don't have a body, you are your body.

I'm still thinking about the way The Tree of Life situates its women characters. Jessica Chastain's silent, strong, long-suffering wife: is this a theme of the film, or one of its symptomatic conventions? I think it may be some of both. We see here one of cinema's great arguments against patriarchy - that it's neither beneficial nor eternal. That much is clear. The question remains, for me, as to Tree of Life's self-awareness with regard to how it uses its male/father/female/mother figures. I suppose that what we have, in a certain sense, Malick's own examination of a loosely autobiographically informed childhood. It's tricky to try to tease out what might be meant as historically specific and what might be meant as trans-historical. Because I can certainly see how one could watch The Tree of Life and roll the eyes at parts, since the gazing-through-trees aspects might suggest the nuclear white 1950s family as the transcendental milieu, the natural context ... rather than a more strictly, more contingently historical one. On one viewing I'm not sure if the film has really delineated, one way or the other, how it might mean to finesse its viewers' reception of this family microcosm: universal or particular?

The esteemed Peter Tonguette takes the film to task for its departures from classical storytelling craft. But I don't know how fair this is. Can one think of a film released by a Hollywood studio that more explicitly marks out the fact that its aims - whatever those might be - are not at all those of crafting a clear story with minimal spatial ruptures? Peter suggests that The Tree of Life often feels like a trailer for itself. I think I understand precisely what he means but I'm not sure it appropriately applies to this film, where the editing indeed departs from many fiction cinema norms but is nonetheless an extraordinary achievement. More than any other Hollywood-released film I've ever seen, The Tree of Life reminds me of the likes of not only Nathaniel Dorsky but also Gregory Markopoulos. The editing rhythms gun for the proprioceptive, the kinaesthetic, rather than the cognitive fundaments of a narrative. I also think that, in the middle, most "story" heavy section especially, the editing is highly evocative of memory. Instead of being efficient, images and actions overlap, we feel them more than understand them; they create a surplus without actually telling everything. Granted, this is not how an economical, 1940s-style Hollywood film typically operates. But given Malick's track record and the themes of the film, it's a more than reasonable way to produce meaning and sensation through cutting. All this may, indeed, prove frustrating to some viewers - because the film suggests that there is a clear and compelling story "lost" in the editing.

Now, one doesn't have to love Terrence Malick's work. And just because one likes the '70s films need have no bearing on reception of the more recent titles. Even so, as Richard Neer's brilliant recent piece on The New World indicates, the editing patterns and sound-image relations that characterize later Malick are by no means just pretty or picturesque but in fact rather dense, sophisticated, and intricate. This does not mean they are somehow above all critique. Yet this is why I'm puzzled by Peter's objections - of all the potential skeptical approaches, is the best (or even the tenth best) to chide the film for "failing" to edit in such a way as to clearly and economically convey narrative information, as if this is the only criterion by which a film can or should ever be edited? (Is Stan Brakhage a bad editor as well? Do Bunuel and Dali's cuts fall short too?)

These are still just mostly initial thoughts ...

Historiography (I)

2011-06-17T08:28:00.000-04:00

"A structure belonging to modern Western culture can doubtless be seen in this historiography: intelligibility is established through a relation with the other; it moves (or "progresses") by changing what it makes of its "other" - the Indian, the past, the people, the mad, the child, the Third World. Through these variants that are all heteronomous - ethnology, history, psychiatry, pedagogy, etc. - unfolds a problematic form basing its mastery of expression upon what the other keeps silent, and guaranteeing the interpretive work of a science (a "human" science) by the frontier that separates it from an area awaiting this work in order to be known. Here modern medicine is a decisive figure, from the moment when the body becomes a legible picture that can in turn be translated into that which can be written within a space of language. Thanks to the unfolding of the body before the doctor's eyes, what is seen and what is known of it can be superimposed or exchanged (be translated from one to the other). The body is a cipher that awaits deciphering. Between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, what allows the seen body to be converted into the known body, or what turns the spatial organization of the body into a semantic organization of a vocabulary - and vice versa - is the transformation of the body into extension, into open interiority like a book, or like a silent corpse placed under our eyes. An analogous change takes place when tradition, a lived body, is revealed to erudite curiosity through a corpus on texts. Modern medicine and historiography are born almost simultaneously from the rift between a subject that is supposedly literate, and an object that is supposedly written in an unknown language. The latter always remains to be decoded. These two "heterologies" (discourses on the other) are built upon a division between the body of knowledge that utters a discourse and the mute body that nourishes it."

(Michel de Certeau, from the Introduction to The Writing of History)

This and That

2011-06-17T07:52:00.000-04:00

Whose Life Is It Anyway?: the narrative construction is both sharply professional, deeply felt, and bathed in too-much, too-soon pathos. (The vase the falls and breaks?) Lightning, at certain points, provided a clear illustration of the pathetic fallacy. But overall I liked the way the film uses weather, glimpsed from inside through windows. It was neither remarked upon by characters and music for "mood," most of the time, yet remained quietly and open-endedly expressive.

If they make The Hangover, Part 3, it should simply be called Ken Jeong's Hangover. I would still see that. Otherwise, what's the point?

Dame Maggie sure seems immortal, sometimes.

I took down a post I made on The Tree of Life for a couple of reasons - mainly because it wasn't really ready to be posted. I think I just absent-mindedly hit "publish" and directed my attention elsewhere. Normally that kind of slip doesn't bother me since I rarely revise posts extensively, anyway. But when I noticed it some hours later, I realized that what came out was a lot of unnecessary and mean-spirited snark, not to mention a straw man argument that was more a heuristic device for me to get to a particular rhetorical space than a "position" I had intended to put out into the ether. It was my way of working through certain ambivalent feelings I have toward a lot of, hmm, extratextual questions. Elusive Lucidity is a public notebook, not a polished journal - but it's also not open mic night for every little slice of its author's brain. If anyone read my earlier post and rolled their eyes (as I would have done myself), mea culpa. For the record, I loved the film and think it is incredible on a lot of levels, though I do have some reservations, and will probably still post something on it after my thoughts and feelings ripen.

Random Gripe

2011-06-07T22:57:00.000-04:00

I don't know what's more irksome, Cisco's "the human network" or American Express' "the social currency."

Scribbles

2011-06-07T21:05:00.002-04:00

(Colossus: The Forbin Project, dir. Joseph Sargent, 1970)

Serge Daney dit: "The word “power” came at one moment, synchronically with Foucault... We can say that our cinephilia helped us to go forward. For a cinephile, the power of the cineaste, even if it’s really imaginary, is out of proportion socially and real in regards to what he manipulates as material. Therefore, we see a moral preoccupation which comes back to Bazin, which is to evaluate films not really on their aesthetic quality but in ethical terms. It’s a period when we speak of “direct.” Then there’s a third period when, from the idea of power, we moved to the realization of the power of media. Power today is the new management of media which is a problem on which the Leftists have been nil, pre-historic, with the exception of someone like Baudrillard. But let’s say that, in general, Marxist reflection on media is nil. This is a little bit the Mattelart period. From then on we saw how we could re-interest ourselves in cinema, in films that were coming out, to become once more a film review while being a little bit ahead which consists in recognizing that film is one piece in the more general game of the media and that we can’t disassociate them. To approach these media, everything we learned before 1968, in psychoanalysis for example, is helpful." (h/t, of course, to Kino Slang)

Daney's suggestion about leftist or Marxist reflection on media seems both true and untrue - maybe less true now, some decades after he made the claim. Still, there's a barb that remains: we haven't come very far. Especially when Michael Moore and Slavoj Zizek seem like very tenable "choices" for significant portions of what we'd call, I suppose, a "progressive" public. Some tentative postulates -

Culture always involves trade-offs.
This doesn't mean that the complexity, richness, and nuance of culture at any time and situation equates to the proposition - or excuse - that culture is always "too complex" to make any political judgments about it.
That said, judgments can come from puritanical positions as well as non-puritanical positions. The puritanical positions hold virtually all sway in society. "False choice in spectacular abundance, a choice which lies in the juxtaposition of competing and complimentary spectacles and also in the juxtaposition of roles (signified and carried mainly by things) which are at once exclusive and overlapping, develops into a struggle of vaporous qualities meant to stimulate loyalty to quantitative triviality. This resurrects false archaic oppositions, regionalisms and racisms which serve to raise the vulgar hierarchic ranks of consumption to a preposterous ontological superiority. In this way, the endless series of trivial confrontations is set up again, from competitive sports to elections, mobilizing a sub-ludic interest. Wherever there is abundant consumption, a major spectacular opposition between youth and adults comes to the fore among the false roles - false because the adult, master of his life, does not exist and because youth, the transformation of what exists, is in no way the property of those who are now young, but of the economic system, of the dynamism of capitalism. Things rule and are young; things confront and replace each other." (Debord, Society of the Spectacle, section 62.)
It seems important to reject an overly simplistic "false consciousness" model when it comes to a population's consumption of media, and their affective, social, and political relations to media. At the same time, it seems foolish to overlook the possibility that no deception is happening anywhere, when probability deception is occuring more than almost anything else.
Anyone looking for a simple formula that consigns, to ethico-political statuses, a particular "kind" of film - art film, auteur film, slow film (like slow food?), "popular" film, popul-"ist" film, people's film, mise-en-scene films, avant garde film - is probably wasting his or her time. (Cf. bullet point one.) The Cahiers du cinema "categories" from that famous editorial are intriguing, perhaps useful for analysis, but in fact a clumsy way to start going about political analysis of cinema, let alone media more broadly. (Still, it is a start, which is more than most can ever say.)

More to follow in this vein later ...

Pixar Thoughts

2011-06-01T20:25:00.000-04:00

If perhaps at one time after their invention as something other than "small adults," children couldn't wait to access - illicitly or not - the pleasures of adulthood, American culture has by now fully entered the inverse situation. It's adults grasping for fantasy, wonder, splendor, who don't simply elevate low forms to respectable heights (like the comic strip form into the graphic novel) but come to value young adult fiction and texts alongside, even in place of, "adult" culture. Thankfully the mania for Harry Potter has died down enough that one can express skepticism towards its merits, publicly, without the tar-and-feather gang emerging from out of nowhere. It's still in force for Pixar, I think - though I think that by now, the cinephiles who don't expect to get much out of Pixar's movies simply steer clear of them. Perhaps it's wisest this way.

The Pixar product has usually struck me as a little too pitch-perfect in its wide-eyed (though expert) conventionalisms - really, a hyper-Disney. This is a mark one can hit a little too well, in fact; affectation is the cancer of whimsy and self-aware humor. (It's a line drawn in American TV comedy all the time: Parks and Recreation tends to skirt on the acceptable side of this line, and has additional merits, whereas I've never been able to shake the bad vibes I get from the NBC Office, which is of course very similar in form and tone.) It can be grating to keep hearing about how amazing the Toy Story films are, mainly because a substantial amount of the acclaim seems to be a really good consumer review - 'this is new, and it pushed my buttons.' There's a formula to Pixar appreciation: express fascination with the dexterity of its use of technology (not soulless like those Final Fantasy movies), then wax gee-whiz about the deep moral lessons and emotional textures the film imparts. This gets to the heart of the problem: it's not, of course, that I take issue with treating animation seriously. I don't even take issue with treating "cartoons" (the commercial, juvenile, formulaic things) with care and attention. It's simply that "the culture of Pixar" (or the culture around it) has fashioned a particular way of treating these films seriously.

It's this ingrained analytical toolkit towards which I'm most resistant. I'm not a heartless person, and in fact I think that sentiment is an underappreciated tool in the array of artistic effects (this upper-middle and just-plain-upper cultural bias is probably largely a more unfortunate holdover from modernism). So the techniques in films like Monsters, Inc., Wall*E, and Up - extremely faint but definite echoes of a Fordian way of dealing with on-screen objects, time, and memory - do indeed move me. And I even take pleasure from the fact that a film as unrelentingly sad as Up is somehow targeted toward children. What I do also appreciate about Pixar is, because of their privileged place within the mainstream film industry, is that they're able to go ahead and be what most products in the culture industry are far too timid to be - a little lopsided, a bit risky in terms of narrative formula, willing to take their time in parts (this is an aspect of modernist aesthetics I wholeheartedly encourage). This all exists in addition to, and in conjunction with, the often annoying conventionalisms and predictable affectations the films possess. I'd love to see a kid who's not "cute," a landscape that's not "breathtaking" ...

De Toth in the Landscape of Dreyer

2011-06-01T20:11:00.000-04:00

A minor crime film helmed by Andre De Toth (but even those are always worthwhile) from 1957, Hidden Fear is a US-Danish co-production. Periodically the scenery (urban or natural) shakes up the familiar blackmail/procedural narrative. The films of De Toth comprise what should be one of the prime exhibits for auteurist cinephile analysis - working mainly in the crime and Western genres, never amassing a great deal of recognizable power, the director seemed to gravitate toward similar premises and plotlines. This isn't so much a matter of creative authority as it is, more likely, workaday affinities. It was what he was good at, what he earned a proven track record in. In the mode of production he was working in, De Toth would not have been able to "birth" a top-down relation to his material, in the same way that (say) Hitchcock was able to establish his presence with the far-reaching authority over his content around the same time period. Nevertheless, again and again, De Toth's movies feature world-weary characters in a network of distrust, lightning-fast betrayals, and haunted memories. Important actions happen quickly, startlingly (like when a heavy pulls a gun or the hero pummels a mug), but the narratives themselves never feel rushed: think of the long spaces finely suggested by the waiting in Last of the Comanches and Day of the Outlaw.

The Living and the Dead

2011-06-01T19:12:00.001-04:00

"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." (Karl Marx)
"[Tradition] is the democracy of the dead." (G.K. Chesterton)
"I don't fuck everything that's dead!" (Sandra, played by Molly Parker, in Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed, 1996)
"You're going to die screaming ... and I'm going to watch." (Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight [Renny Harlin, 1996])

Nail Clippers

2011-05-29T10:46:00.000-04:00

It's probably best to preface any pithy commentary on Jean-Claude Carrière's The Nail Clippers with a link to David Cairns' own pitch-perfect (and pithy) write-up on the same, a few years back. What I like about this film, in addition to the obvious pleasures of its Phantom of Liberty-style, vignette surrealism, is the spareness of space - the soundtrack picking up the emptiness behind a closet door or an empty drawer.

Both Sides Now

2011-05-29T10:42:00.001-04:00

“Hawks' films have shown a remarkable consistency (which is also a tedious monotony) throughout his long career, with the paradoxical result that though his films are full of American cliché they are also identifiable as the work of an auteur. He has all the insidious convenience of typicality; his individuality is in his flawless typicality. In his perfection, there is, undoubtedly, an authentic sophistication – if that implies that he has made decisions about the importance of human moods and meanings. Yet, if sophistication means humanity, variety and subtlety, then his films are generally simpler and more facile than their nearest comparisons. Thus his Scarface is simpler than Wellman's Public Enemy, his A Girl in Every Port is a sardonic counterpoint to Tay Garnett's Her Man, his 'satires' are innocuous compared to Wellman's A Star Is Born, his Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is eclipsed by Wilder's Some Like It Hot. But if 'sophistication' means a sardonic attitude to humanity, a deadpan humour which, under the pretext of toughly controlling emotion, also all but denies it, then the very limitations of his films enable these tensions to emerge more sharply.” (Durgnat, Films & Feelings, p. 82)

Recently Seen

2011-05-16T00:33:00.002-04:00

The Shadow Box (Paul Newman, 1980) - The videotape material seems a little undercooked, simply "there," when it could have been developed into something with more thematic/aesthetic resonance, à la Egoyan. But an intriguing enough effort, because it tries to do a lot with a little - noticeably finite actors and sets, a little stagebound, but it looks like someone was at least paying attention to the colors of props and costumes, for example. (Thanks to M. for supplying me with a copy a few years back ...)

Blues in the Night (Anatole Litvak, 1941) - Depression-era bonhomie along with a pair of shots that encapsulate an entire century of white commercial popularization of black music in America.

From Paris with Love (Pierre Morel, 2010) - These days Travolta, like Jimmy Fallon, needs roles that allow one to laugh at him in order to stay bearable onscreen. From there, a film that uses him well will build off of the humor of the premise itself, like From Paris with Love does - making Travolta a brash hick with a scarf way too fashionable for his station. The film, like Taken, has a million things wrong with it ... but the EuropaCorp formula is depressingly efficient at hitting certain pleasure buttons. I cannot lie. Still, as much as I love the Transporter movies (and District B13) I wonder if the EuropaCorp stable has an artiste, making masterpieces - like MilkyWay has main man Johnnie To producing superb film after superb film (whether modest or grand in scale). Luc Besson, whose work I do find fairly enjoyable and somewhat interesting, doesn't cut it by comparison. Anyone else? I'm all ears since I've basically mentioned at least half of the EuropaCorp films I've even seen ...

Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) - My ambiguous feelings toward this film can, in many ways, be summed up in how the cinematography captures the actors' blemishes and imperfections. I appreciate the impulse to bare the body - not in terms of nudity, but rather as a matter of the body as a "machine" that excretes, sweats, wrinkles, etc. But the idea seems to go nowhere; it's not motivated by aesthetics, nor politics (god forbid an amalgam of both). Really this just summarizes my disappointment with the vast majority of the whole Apatow school of comedy. It's not that I don't value the abstract goals - "deep" gross-out comedy - it's that Apatow (whether he's a writer, director, or producer) seems to mostly get behind projects that just pale in comparison to the Real Thing ...

The Harvest (David Marconi, 1992) - I saw this mentioned by a facebook friend a while back (h/t NDC), and out of curiosity I checked it out. The 1990s were a really rich time for a particular type of cinema that almost nobody talks about - low-budget films that may be "independent" or "genre" or a little of both, that may have enjoyed a stronger life on cable than in theaters. The qualities of The Harvest include its slightly ingenious plot construction, which is intelligent - there's more New Rose Hotel here (inviting the mindfuck, thematizing it, developing it) than there is Vanilla Sky (taming it, killing it, burying and disavowing it).

"I Buy Forever"

2011-05-10T09:28:00.000-04:00

I took another look at the great film Docteur Chance (F.J. Ossang, 1997) the other day, for the first time in a few years. This time I felt the urge to read it - very faintly - as an allegory of capitalism. Here: the re-emergence of certain techniques of 1920s French avant-narrative, filtered through punk, and emplotted within a story about living with copious resources ... all on the precipice of its own destruction. There's even a scene where Angstel goes to the docks, the substrate, the big boxes (yes, those big boxes Noel Burch and Allan Sekula made their movie about, which I've yet to see). "No future," like the Sex Pistols say.

Cheers.

Image of the Day

2011-05-06T10:44:00.002-04:00

Railway Journey

2011-04-18T09:31:00.000-04:00

"the limitations of the camera itself are also used innovatively, Martin is using a hi-8 consumer camera that has a built in auto-iris, the camera struggles to expose high contrast images, between strong highlights et deep shadows causing the iris to open et close continuously. Martin uses this restriction creatively, he renders the pulsing dilations et contractions of the iris as a rhythm, a heartbeat, but it also has a blinking quality, like a sleepy eye, slowly opening et closing, the intervals getting longer, slower, heavier, before finally remaining closed. ... Martin significantly rotates his continually moving/train-tracking images, reorienting the horizontal nature of the landscape/horizon so that it becomes vertical. in doing so he makes the images flow upwards, as if they are streaming out of a film projector." (m.d'd!) (apologies for inconsistent coloration in this quote - a blogger bug, I think)

"The nineteenth century's preoccupation with the conquest and mastery of space and time had found its most general expression in the concept of circulation,which was central to the scientistic social notions of the epoch." (Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey)

"Responding to the journal’s publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s newly published photographic motion studies, Marey writes: “I was dreaming of a kind of photographic gun, seizing and portraying the bird in an attitude, or, better still, a series of attitudes, displaying the successive different motions of the wings…” The technique Marey has in mind, of course, is the “proto-cinematic” technique he would come to call chronophotography: the depiction of movement in successive instantaneous photographs. What he was dreaming of amounts to the ability to shoot a bird, not to kill it but to capture its living, vision-confounding motion and convert it into legible, fixed image sequences. The passing into obsolescence of older meanings of “flicker” thus marks a contemporaneous shift in the way movement and time could be viewed. Since the bird’s incomprehensible flying movements have become reducible to a number of arrested instants, its body ceases to move. Once it had been seized over and over, cinema proved it could bring the bird back to life, so to speak, by spinning the image sequence back into motion." (René Thoreau Bruckner, in a brilliant essay)

"There are good reasons to use transportation as a foil to our symbolic model of communication. For most of human history, any definition of communication that separates symbolic action from movement is nothing more than an anachronism. Writers interested in the history of the idea of communication have often noted the associational connections between transportation and communication that held sway until late in the nineteenth century. As both [James] Carey and John Durham Peters point out, in previous moments, communication meant - among other things - transportation, movement, connection, and linkage. "Steam communication" was travel by train, and a door could form a "communication" between a house and the outdoors. At some point in the nineteenth century, the words "intercourse" and "communication" also traded connotation with one another. ... Even our central terms for symbolic action gesture toward a concept of communication as a subspecies of movement. "Metaphor" comes from the Greek for "to transfer" or "to carry." "The word metaphoros ... is written on all the moving vans in Greece," writes Bruno Latour." (Jonathan Sterne)

Raya Martin's short film Track Projections intrigues because it draws out a rhetorical connection to film - and to filmed time/space - even while it was shot on video. The bulk of the film consists of sideways "tracking shots" from a train window, and their abstract, running verticality recalls a Brakhage. (In the more pictorially recognizable passages, it's like early Brakhage, but at times it resembles the later hand-painted works. But I've all ready spent too much time comparing this film to Brakhage.) The blinking & flickering, which the first author quoted above has noted, suggests the effect of a celluloid flicker though we may not see it projected on film.

This is not to say that Track Projections masquerades as a film or that it erases the distinctions between film and video technology - instead it's a feature of the film's rhetoric, it gestures toward film, and to a whole technology of segmented, standardized movement, celluloid strips & train tracks, and not just the "illusion" of photography carried over into chronophotography, but also the "illusion" of continual time, produced through the fragmentation effect of individual frames (seen, or unseen, as flicker). For Martin, perhaps, these illusions are in fact allusions, part of the repertoire of techniques to incorporate or evoke ...

Track Projections (Raya Martin, 2007)

Humanoids

2011-04-13T18:45:00.000-04:00

The story goes that Creation of the Humanoids (1962) was Warhol's favorite film. If Warhol himself had teamed up with Alain Robbe-Grillet to film a SF screenplay by a bright, nerdish 18-year-old, they might still not have dreamed up something quite so fierce or so stolid, so marble-slab-cool (but filled with bright colors). The beauties of this film come from both being ambitious but also not at all trying to court any real standards of modernism (i.e., modernist critical taste) in nevertheless producing a quasi-modernist end product.

It "manages to be both ridiculous and sublime, often simultaneously, in its view of what it means to be a human being." (Peter Nellhaus)

"To be a Warholian film means to be concerned with boredom and automation. And for a film to be concerned with boredom and automation means not just that the film addresses boredom and automation as themes, but that it engages with or reveals boredom and automation in presenting itself to the viewer and through this process, 'the meaning goes away.' As a Warholian film, The Creation of the Humanoids is, then, not just a film that represents an evacuation of meaning, but one that performs it." (Chris Fujiwara)

Quote of the Day

2011-04-08T10:45:00.002-04:00

"In 1961 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recruited Charles Hitch of the think-tank RAND Corporation as his assistant secretary and undertook to streamline the Department of Defense through the use of systems analysis. Before long, the defense personnel and methods filtered out of the Pentagon and into the civilian parts of government, not only on the federal level but on the state and municipal level as well. In 1964, California governor Pat Brown called upon that state's aerospace corporations to use the new methods to study such problems as transportation, waste management, poverty, crime, as well as unemployment among California's aerospace engineers, and the systems analysts responded enthusiastically to the call, confident that with their computers and space-age techniques they could solve any mere earth-bound problem. Convinced of the superiority of their formal methods over the "conventional" approaches of more experienced and knowledgeable specialists - and, as critic Ida Hoos noted, mistaking their ignorance for objectivity - the systems analysts appropriated all of reality as their legitimate domain, the social world as well as the physical world. Perhaps no one epitomized this new breed better than Jay Forrester, the electrical engineer who is credited with developing the magnetic core memory for the high-speed digital computer. Forrester moved on to pioneer the new field of "systems dynamics," which he applied, successively, to industrial, urban, national, and, finally, global "systems." "The great uncertainty with mental models is the inability to anticipate the consequences of interactions between parts of a system," Forrester explained. "This uncertainty is totally eliminated in computer models." Whether the "system" is an industrial process, a manufacturing plant, a city, or an entire planet, its operations are ultimately reducible to a set of "rate equations" which become "the statements of system policy." "Desirable modes of behavior" are made possible, Forrester insisted, "only if we have a good understanding of the system dynamics and are willing to endure the self-discipline and pressures that must accompany the desirable mode.""

(David F. Noble, Forces of Production, p. 55)

The Riddle of Steel

2011-04-08T01:06:00.000-04:00

By Night with Torch and Spear (Joseph Cornell, 1942)

Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)

It's Only Tashlin

2011-04-07T11:06:00.000-04:00

It's well-known that Frank Tashlin's career started in cartoons. This beginning is often thought (not wrongly) to have affected the way he treated his live-action images as plastic, pliable, either immaterial or too material. The more I see or revisit Tashlin the more impressed I am at the ways in which the content and feel of his films actively engages with the borders and institutionalized ancillaries of (certain definitions of) cinema - animation, television, advertising, performance ...

"Are Video Games Art?"

2011-04-07T10:45:00.000-04:00

I keep seeing this debate - not only in the film & media blogosphere, but in that too. Are video games art? On occasion the defenses of video game art read like uninspired recuperation. Perhaps even more off-putting are pronouncements from those who would wish to be cultural conservators. "Video games can not be art, because art is ..."

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Aesthetics is so fragmented and bracketed off in "our culture" that the aesthetic experience itself becomes secondary (at best). The age of the spectacle is highly aestheticized, no doubt, and aesthetic considerations have cleared out political questions. ... Strangely enough, when it comes to activities and objects meant for leisure, one confronts a range of false moves. For instance, if one has taste, one is supposed to honor the aesthetic object. This is on the basis of its aesthetics alone, presumably. Whether it's a Fritz Lang film from 1953, or Rembrandt painting, or Heian scroll. Its pleasure is the pleasure of enlightenment, improvement, distinction. The valorized aesthetic object may bravely emerge from & struggle against something so ghastly as a material, commercial context (ripping free of it like a Little Engine That Could). But it is never to be equated with same. In fact the visible traces of efficiency amidst shoestring means is a sign of pride, a sign that some creator has "made do" despite limitations. But this is not, actually, aesthetic appreciation. It is in fact the aestheticization of the material contexts from which an object comes.

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Stephen Dwoskin once wrote - and I'm sure I've already quoted this half a dozen times on this blog - that in a period when so many were torturing themselves with the question, "What is cinema?", Raymond Durgnat would, figuratively speaking, just show up at the movie house and say, "This is!" I admire the impulse. A major part of why I admire it is because it does not presume to know.

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The answer to the question, "Are video games art?" will either remain a deadlock, or the object of video games as art will be recuperated and become common sense to later generations. But I cannot side with the group who assume the position of aesthetic guardians, contra video games, for the main reason that they seem to possess knowledge of what art - Art? - is and thus can proceed deductively. Neither, though, am I convinced by the "logic" that states that anything that people enjoy must be acknowledged as art lest the naysayer be elitist. (This too, if more implicitly, presumes that art - Art? - has a stable definition which can be known ... and its necessary & sufficient conditions can be met through inductive means of popularity and widespread pleasure.)

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I don't even play video games. But I would be most satisfied if this debate were kicked out of the house and people started devoting the same energy to questions like, What's happening in these video games? What do they provide?

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Image of the Day

2011-03-28T09:26:00.002-04:00

The Lights

2011-03-25T16:32:00.001-04:00

The flicker of a moving image has long and diffuse history. Occasionally it has been put to use as an aesthetic effect or even a weapon - as the deliberately exaggerated by-product of early cinema's non-standardized frame rates. A feature of the historical deployment of the flicker effect has been its implicit reliance on the editing of frames - different colors, white/black, 24fps. As a result, because of the 3:2 pulldown, it's difficult for video versions to approximate the precise effects of Arnulf Rainer or The Flicker or N:O:T:H:I:N:G. Less specific to the material of celluloid, however, may be the aesthetic suggestion of the blurring of lines between image and formlessness, or between image and pure light / pure dark. Colors or light bleed into an image, aestheticize it despite "identification" or "story" by pulling it outside those realms and denaturing it.

Some of the rare images in Paul Sharits' flicker work depict violent or sexual acts. Sharits' films, and techniques, were not meant purely for their powers of provocation, however. He indicated on numerous occasions his desire to use cinema to enhance consciousness.

"In his flicker films, Sharits disrupts this process. He replaces the consecutive phases of action with solidly colored or black or white frames . The effect is literally dazzling . The viewer sees often violent bursts of light whose color and intensity are functions of the speed at which the colored frames and the complementary colors of spontaneously induced afterimages change. The oscillating colors not only foreground the pulsing light beam, they also reflexively remind the viewer of the physical limits of the frame and of the surface on which films are projected." (Stuart Leibman)

For Leibman's description of effects to make sense, of course, so much depends on this "viewer" glazed with modernist theory before the white screen. But perhaps we can talk about the impulse to produce such effects. What directs audiovisual creators to devise and deploy the flicker effect? In one respect it might be a push towards a total, consuming aesthetic vision. For Sharits, a mandala to "end war"; for today's pop artists, the mock-sublimity of an expression too big to fail (or too big for execution, craft, to even matter).

"Want you to see everything," sings Rihanna in "All of the Lights," the Kanye West track released a few months back. Enlisting the vocals of a whole slew of pop singers (Elton John, Alicia Keys, La Roux, etc., etc.), the track is a bit monstrous in size, slightly indeterminate in direction. This isn't simply a wall of sound, it's a wall of celebrity persona. The video, by Hype Williams, uses numerous bright flicker effects that destabilize the images (if they ever were stable) from any purely "functional" role, like telling a story, or creating a mood through mise-en-scene alone. The images flirt with pure color, they appear to filter into and out of one another, they heighten the sense of color within some of the shots. So many flashing lights - actually that phrase is, of course, the title of another Kanye West song. Probably someone better versed in Kanye Studies than me could say how deep this trope runs ...

... I think this is particularly fascinating for a guy like Kanye West - the tropes of education that run throughout his work, "can't tell me nothing," even the way Taylor Swift called him "an innocent." West: yet to be informed, yet to be instructed, yet to be enlightened. Weighed down by the necessity of enlightenment, West associates these themes in his lyrics - pain or trauma, with education and illumination. "Cop lights / flash lights / spot lights / strobe lights / street lights."

"In 1945 a Western force greater than electricity descended on the Japanese arkheion. The atomic assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States unleashed the heat and light of atoms, which threatened not only the Japanese archive but the "mansion called literature," the literary archive. It threatened to destroy the trace, to destroy even the shadows." Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), p. 25 (for Adrian)

(Still from Radiohead's video for "House of Cards," made without cameras.)

Previously on ... in 2009 ... (Light 1) (Light 2) (Light 3) (Light 4) (Light 5)

Image of the Day

2011-03-25T09:27:00.000-04:00

Realization

2011-03-23T10:01:00.001-04:00

A problem in thinking about taste hierarchies is the impulse for the reformed elitist to wish to embrace the low, popular, mass, vulgar, etc., and yet - in the process of vocal exculpation - recuperate these objects for the high. Specifically, the low objects are (re)integrated into a kind of high grammar. One of the privileged instances of this is the heroic mythos of the Cahiers du cinéma critics, who "realized" that Hitchcock and Hawks could be spoken of like Racine or Shakespeare.

They realized it. Apologies for the very poor Derrida imitation, but let me suggest that my deliberate use of this word (to realize) is meant to convey something of the double meaning that is buried in this mythology of taste. The evident meaning of this "realization" is a recognition and subsequent acknowledgment. But what it actually entails is the making real of a value judgment. The Cahiers critics put these ideas into circulation.

The recuperation of the popular artist for high tradition (Shakespeare is the ultimate example) is, itself, an "always already" excavated gambit for anyone who wishes to defend the legitimacy of a particular, relatively contemporary piece of popular culture. "Dude, you don't think Two and a Half Men has a particular type of genius? You dismiss it just because tons of people watch it? Well look, Shakespeare was popular, too." Substitute Harry Potter or any number of objects for Two and a Half Men. The logic at work here is that, time and again, prevalent elitist tastes have been shown to have "wrongly" dismissed or at least unfairly pigeonholed popular works of their era. We see it over and over again. Shakespeare, Hitchcock, Guiding Light. "It's an objective pattern, don't blame me if I'm a little further ahead of the curve than you are. It's history ... but as logical and predictable as a science experiment!"

I don't propose that a rigid, reductive high-middle-low scale is any better than this operation. For my part, do bring on Bourdieu, and while you're at it bring on White Chicks. (Coherence and reason are great things when discussing particularities. But I neither require nor desire my own tastes to be subordinated to the laws of coherence or logic.) But I do think this rhetoric of realization has survived too long as a truism, a crutch, a replacement for thought, and a lazy & unearned badge worn to denote anti-elitism. And it's always convenient to pose as an anti-elitist in terms of cultural tastes when you exist in the heart of capitalism. The signification of tastes is indeed a political question, but perhaps more politically pressing is when that question comes to eclipse any & all others as the only political question.

To the End of TV

2011-03-23T09:06:00.000-04:00

In the dismally undercooked film Legion (Scott Charles Stewart, 2010), the coming apocalypse is in one instance signified by an emergency broadcast signal on an old TV. "This is not a test," it reads. It's got to be a test, concludes one character. No - but if the emergency was real, wouldn't there be instructions for us? asks another. Perhaps. The film indicates at one point that, in parts elsewhere, crypto-government forces are reaching critical mass to fight the god-zombies.

In this film, God can shut off TV transmission, send a storm of billions of flies, but cannot send a bomb into a roadside gas station. (The roadside gas station out in the desert: from Detour, Ace in the Hole, Red Dawn, the first two Terminator movies, the Tremors franchise, etc.) If you've read Meaghan Morris' "Banality in Cultural Studies" (here) you may recall her anecdote of a television newsflash in Sydney about how "something has happened" in Darwin - or to Darwin. But, initially, the startling thing was that no information had come from Darwin. The city, which it turned out was hit by a cyclone, had stopped communication, and this was the certain marker of disaster. "This was not catastrophe on TV - like the Challenger sequence - but a catastrophe of and for TV."

The television set is a portal to the electro-ether that soothes a nation. TV transmission operates like antennae of the social imaginary. When it - it, not any particular TV set - malfunctions, one may conclude that the shit has hit the fan.

Apologies

2011-03-18T09:29:00.000-04:00

... for extremely light posting lately. I've been a busy fellow. Expect a few posts to crop up before the month is over, though.

The Lawless

2011-02-15T17:29:00.003-05:00

If you have not read Andy Rector's beautiful, compelling reflections from a few years back on Joseph Losey's The Lawless, you should do so. (This work is available to stream on Netflix now, at least in the US. It's not very long, and it is very good.) Losey's film is in many ways similar to the roughly contemporaneous Ace in the Hole (also set out West, in the sticks), but while it is less ambitious than Wilder's excellent film, The Lawless seems deeper and more cohesively critical in some ways. I will springboard from Andy's comments into some of my own notes.

-The rigorous framing of the police who are only rhetorically good; they let real brutality and distortion happen always.

A representational strategy the film employs: most of its cops are presumably "decent folk," and The Lawless depicts them early on as being a number of reasonable individuals with a bad apple or two in the bunch. Intriguingly, this representation mirrors the function of the police themselves in the social body depicted, i.e., superficially benign (and indeed perhaps benign almost to a man), but systematically complicit with the mob lawlessness which seeks to enact revenge upon Paul (Lalo Rios) - an imperfect kid caught in a bind. The effect of this is a beautiful, subtle perversion of the general model, which valorizes individualism and thus individualized action, causation, culpability, etc. The Lawless grants as much but contextualizes it - "just doing my job."

-The cut from Lalo Rios taking a shower outdoors to the white privileged kid taking a shower in a comfortable bathroom.

We see the latter character first in silhouette, I believe. Paul though is silhouetted later in the film, at the police station, after they've taken his fingerprints at a desk - and in the same shot, courtesy of shadows on the wall, we see his mug shot being taken.

-The father of the privileged kid as well-meaning only insofar as his wallet goes (shoring up the system in the process)

Though I do think the film positions his behavior as sincere - perhaps he's a so-called "liberal communist" avant la lettre? The shoring up of the system is not laid at the feet of his supposed character fault, but rather at the incongruity of his liberalism toward a good cause when it fails to link up with the proper destructive/reconstructive mechanisms against the system. Again and again, The Lawless outlines individualism's dead ends - despite all manner of faith & good works ...

-The long (dare I day Straubian) pan across the quarry where Rios is being hunting for something he didn't do - beginning on the back of the farmers head and going in the opposite direction from the idealistic newspaper man trying to find Rios before the police do - a dialectic shot if there ever was one.

I am constantly impressed again with the flexibility and strength of classical Hollywood cinema - the malleability of its codes and the way that these codes could be applied to ends highly antithetical to what is generally presumed to be Hollywood's product. (This presumption may be correct in everything except its range across the films themselves.)

-The newspaper man's gestus. Ciment says he's a positivist Capra hero who realizes he is wrong. His stopping to admire the smell of burning leaves in October (representing nostalgia for small town America) in contrast with marred human relations all around him.

And again, I would stress here that the film does not dwell on the individualist wrongness of this "positivist Capra hero" (an apt description). Burning leaves in October - an uncontroversial existence? - these aren't illicit desires in themselves. It is the use of these desires in a context which renders them as a screen against more pressing, ultimately damaging concerns which The Lawless criticizes.

-The very Brechtian gesture of the match that the newspaper man lights for the callous and sensational newspaper woman's cigarette as she dictates lies to her paper, saying that Rios had no "remorse" in his eyes, all she could see was "cruelty". This gesture of the newspaper-man's is in contradiction to his moral position in the scene prior. The lighting of the match is an action showing that the newspaper man has not put into action his consciousness of complicity (which the film is so good at laying bare,media/career wise) and it's like the opposite of the fish-wrapping scene in NOT RECONCILED (Straub) where Schrella REFUSES to dine with a still-fascist democrat by having his lunch wrapped up and leaving.

Yes, this is a brilliant scene - in part for how low-key it is, demonstrating something about Larry's "character psychology" but also of political consciousness in general, the way it is so quickly effaced or repurposed into uselessness in the face of social niceties. Though we do live in an age when manners seem to matter far too little, their convenience as an occasional shield to political (i.e., politicized) interpersonal confrontation is still to prevalent a function.

-Gail Russell's strong moral/political-bearing character. Such a character is not unconventional to Hollywood films of the time but hers stands out in performance and absolute clarity of the political lines she demarcates. Russell's actual personal/professional life during the shooting of LAWLESS is even more devastating, and constitutes a story worth looking into

She's amazing in the film. Her character does fall into a certain line of anglicized Hollywood tradition - a romantic interest; pale eyes - but she's still a superb character, and her existence is notable for the perhaps shocking (shocking!) presumption that there were women who were politically active, knowledgeable, committed, etc. (Not simply "won over" because their boyfriends blazed a trail.)

Know that THE LAWLESS is a film directed by a man who studied Fritz Lang and worked with Bertolt Brecht. Know that an argument could be made for it as a Marxist film, made within Hollywood, and after the HUAC purges no less (courage). That its screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (sometimes credited as Geoffrey Homes) was "greylisted" and yet fought for his blacklisted comrades. Somehow Losey went on to make several more politically advanced films within Hollywood, THE PROWLER and a remake of M among them. And know that you must track it down...

... and tracking it down, thanks to Netflix, is very easy. Just as it was possible - not easy, but possible - make films like The Lawless in classical Hollywood, the system allows for the regurgitation of yesterday's politically critical products. (The Lawless is less an A-list film than V for Vendetta or Children of Men, but its politics are far better.)

With THE LAWLESS's politics as a film intact, through his account we can already see some irreversible degradations that went on in industrial Hollywood. If THE LAWLESS is a product of a group of people who represent something that has been lost in the US today (Losey, springing from the same lively and progressive artistic/cultural atmosphere as Orson Welles that once existed in Winconsin early in the 20th century; and Daniel Mainwaring, springing from an honest journalistic tradition, now almost completely gone, where it remains it is ghettoized), and who in all sincerity tried to expose the rottenness of certain aspects of America, we mustn't forget that THE LAWLESS was still a product.

Yes, and what sad state of affairs has befallen latter-day Wisconsin? Exeunt.

Image of the Day

2011-02-15T17:26:00.003-05:00

(for Ignatiy)

While We Work (2)

2011-02-09T20:26:00.000-05:00

An extra note here, to help clarify things. (When I'm as obscure & perhaps obtuse as in my previous entry, it's mainly because this is where I first sketch out some of my ideas. I've not refined them for myself, let alone for you, hence the rambling sentences and unclear thought.) This evening I got home and ate a snack, and Rudy was on TV. I watched the last ~20 minutes. This too is a film that basks in working class comforts, nostalgia for old days - home and factory job and nice town. (Riding the bench for Notre Dame can be a boyhood dream.) And it struck me then, a rephrasing of the phenomenon that I was trying to hint at before: this particular brand of working class nostalgia, which is not new, is possibly shifting its tenor, in new films or new viewings of old films, from being nostalgic to being faintly utopian. (Even if the films themselves are not politically or thematically utopian.) This is to say, we see reflected along the edges of filmic fiction the conditions of precarity which make this fantasy of an older working class life & culture (complete with its various other baggage, like nostalgia for whiteness in some cases) appear not simply as a lost origin, but as a sociopolitical arrangement which now looks pretty damn fine ... and unattainable. This is a way of experiencing, in the background, the demise of even the imperfections of a welfare state as now beyond our grasp. Maybe.

While We Work

2011-02-08T20:13:00.000-05:00

Two movies from a couple years ago that I've watched in recent weeks - one a big arthouse hit by a major filmmaker, another a film that probably few readers of EL outside of Brazil will have seen. They are Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum (her greatest achievement since Beau travail?) and Carlos Reichenbach's mesmerizing, perhaps slightly frustrating Falsa Loura (Fake Blonde). I want to say something about how both of these films imagine small communities and their daily existence, sculpted out of jobs which can ultimately be "left at work" (indeed it's the personal which enters the labor space), where one can have a satisfying life without having to worry too greatly about a paycheck or career path. Both films indicate on numerous occasions that their characters are not rich - they must make choices as to how to spend their discretionary income - but the fact of their discretionary income is established at the outset. (Not in the way that Hollywood routinely generates plenty of discretionary income for its characters. Class is not at all an absent feature of the situations here. Commercial films frequently cannot represent the working class except through caricature as a "working class," with accents, unfashionable clothes, etc. Art cinema, particularly outside the US, is more privileged in this respect.) Coincidentally, concerts appear in both films as a leisure activity. In 35 Shots of Rum they don't make it to the concert, but they can relax in a bar after-hours, and then there's a wonderful music scene anyway.

I do not wish to give the impression that these films are utopian fantasies. They are hardly that. I would not want, even by inadvertent suggestion, to rob them of their sociopolitical criticisms. But what compels me to mention these films together, here, now, is still something indirect and marginal - yet pervasive - in their total construction. These are works whose projection of a certain type of existence under labor starts to dematerialize, giving rise to the strange blurring of nostalgic longing and waged mundanity.

No one reading this needs to be reminded of "flexible" labor - probably because a lot of people who read are themselves quite subjected to these shifts in a global marketplace, living on the rapidly disintegrating precipice of an imperialist center's "information economy." Genteel impoverishment awaits so many of us that it hasn't already claimed. And it surely may be tempting to imagine one's own variant on an honest day's work - mediated of course by nation, race, gender, age, etc. Get home from a relatively safe, stable, union-protected factory job and relax over dinner with a shot & a beer? Be able to relate to co-workers because you know that you share a strength in numbers which structurally balances against management? (Having been a former union member, before going back to school full-time, this isn't always the feeling membership inspires, these days! Here and there the whole project's being gutted, just gutted.) However nostalgic, masculinist, etc. any particular image of a decent worker's life might be, the fact of the image - rather than the image - is what's at stake, along the edges, of films like 35 Shots of Rum and Falsa Loura.

This is to say: the promise of a merely decent, moderately stable welfare state safety net is itself experienced as a comfort - almost a luxury! - in these films. And both present foreboding hints of life after this labor - in 35 Shots of Rum, a retired worker commits suicide because he cannot figure out what to do with himself. And the charming Rosane Mulholland's character in Falsa Loura, Silmara, comes to a sad, disillusioning, chilling realization in her own story - as a consequence of a weekend gig taken to earn supplemental cash. There are two levels at work here, as I see it. One, these basic and hard-won privileges for the lives of laborers are eroding. Two, perhaps some of us have nevertheless come to experience this negotiation as a womb rather than as a prison, and now that we're being let out, the precarity is terrifying. Neither of these developments at all constitute news. Obviously. What is interesting is how they are registering in recent cinema, as emotional and social canvas, even in films whose nominal focus may not be labor relations or precarity. The workplace is in the film, around it, but not its main point ... and yet it's absolutely the point, when seen from another perspective.

I haven't seen The Company Men (that thing with Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner, et al.) but I imagine this too participates in this kind of newly recognized desire to return to a working class cocoon. In older films I feel like the iconographic counterpart was the home & village versus the sprawling, internationalizing tendency. (Preminger's The Cardinal, a fairly excellent film with a dismal ending, embodies this tension really well.) Now, there's no frontier to which we information workers in the imperial centers are told to guide our productive energies ... we are left with just a shrug, and a What's next?

History and the Meme

2011-02-04T19:53:00.000-05:00

Just what is it that makes today's salads so different, so appealing? (Look here.)

When I encountered this web page a little earlier, my first actual thought - aside from the initial reaction of "oh cool, this is funny" - was how close this amusing collection was to history. And also how far. On one hand we have an intriguing foray into the history of images - if not necessarily the history of form, then the history of gestures and positions, which provide material for history of forms anyway. (Maybe take a look at this.) (There is never truly a "purely graphical" comprehension of visual work; all understanding is in constant conversation with the porosity of forms and what they're attached to.) But at the same time, we lack the history: though we can guess where these images of happy women eating salad come from, and we might be close to the mark, without the writing we do not know how these images were situated. The meme is, in effect, harmless, toothless - because we cannot make real connections to the publications (print or digital) where they've been disseminated, to tie them to the obvious discourses of (feminine) health and (feminine) body images. This is criticism which undercuts critique, in a sense: the instance where the laughing is finally squared solely upon these women in these pictures, with only a shadowy hint of "society" putting them there, so that one does not draw out information - one assumes one is "in on the joke," but gods forbid one uses boring old information to clarify a problem.

Shoot 'Em Up (Notes)

2011-02-02T14:43:00.000-05:00

"We'll paint the town the color of pomegranates," says a character in Khyber Patrol (!), in one of the most interesting points of this mediocre 1954 adventure movie. Another interesting feature is the introduction of automatic weaponry into the fold, as British lancers stave off evil, greedy tribesmen. The machine gun in period pieces sometimes serves an iconic - or iconoclastic - function, cuing the arrival of a new and brutal regime. Gangsters and outlaws and imperialists, merciless men, use this sort of weapon. Filmmakers (like, say, Peckinpah) use it as a signal that a particular type of mythic perspective - and not just characters/bodies - is biting the dust. [In John McTiernan's Predator, the almost total ineffectiveness of the machine gun against the Predator is a similar move: upping the ante. Because we already know, in part from prior movies, that the machine gun is one helluva leveller.]

If the firing squad was a form of execution that at least feinted toward civility - because it was difficult or impossible to tell which of a group of men fired the lethal bullet - the machine gun invests not only the guilt of execution but the civility into the functioning of the machine. As has been discussed elsewhere, by others like Virilio, the mechanics of traditional filmmaking (chronophotography) are tied to technological developments in weaponry. Who's guilty for taking 24 frames per second? No one: a single photograph may be a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. Et cetera.

Films - typically action movies, mobster movies, films about greed - invoke Sun Tzu's The Art of War. It gets name-dropped in The Sopranos, in Wall Street (by Gordon Gekko), and in, yes, the dialogue in The Art of War (directed by Christian Duguay, a film in the vein of generic De Palma but heavily diluted: like a middling Snake Eyes). The text is usually handled in a shallow, talismanic way - mere orientalist exoticism repurposed, slightly, as a symbol for cut-to-the-chase strategics. A thinking man's manual, but certainly a man's manual. Vicious, Hobbesian state-of-nature stuff. Having never read The Art of War except in idle excerpt, here and there, I make no claims as to what it actually is or could actually serve as.

White Swan

2011-01-25T09:53:00.000-05:00

"Empire alone can create and sustain whiteness, despite the common fantasy of its self-sufficiency. The Black Swan must be mastered and absorbed to save whiteness from enervation and sterility. (As Odile in the poster, the heroine’s genuine essential whiteness is in question; having absorbed the whiteness-creating blackness of Lily, the Prima Donna is red-eyed like an albino and thickly painted white.) The bourgeois culture industry has deconstructed only to reconstruct as indestructible because ideal; it has discursively destabilized with “gynesis” the hierarchies of white supremacist patriarchy only to reaffirm them, killed them to give them the eternal life of spectres. Spectacle’s layerings – able to create the illusion of that DeManian “infinite” irony through a kind of seductive hypnosis – assist in the re-establishment of debunked mythology deploying a levelling operation whose main move is to place reality under an erasure it cannot re-emerge from entirely." (Qlipoth)

People can't seem to agree on the basic properties of Black Swan, probably nominated for a bunch of Oscars by now. [Some general spoilers follow here.] Is it camp? (If so, what kind?) Are the laughs this movie draws intentional or symptomatic? What about people who take the quasi-high romantic markers seriously? Black Swan is what I'd call a "diffuse" film - a deliberately multi-layered construction. In the work's complexity one is invited to bask in the codified indeterminacy of the entire affair. It's like "art" (multi-faceted, mercurial, rich, impossible to pin down), and yet not. This film contains so many diverse elements in terms of plot, theme, and style ... the result isn't a new thing with a new structure, but a clever theme park ride through various codifications of genre or symbolism, and various registers. A night out on the town? It's like Gossip Girl. High-pressure dance practice? It's like Center Stage. Frightful blurrings of fantasy and reality? It's like Repulsion. This sort of contained "surfing" can make for really interesting cinema (see here). All art cannibalizes and repurposes previous cultural content; plenty of great art deliberately courts ambiguity. I wonder here about the meta-orientation of this particular expression of ambiguity.

One generic ingredient in the Black Swan stew is the horror film - suspenseful editing strategies, the intense soundtrack, the overbearing generational conflict between mother and daughter (and absent father), horrific and animalistic CGI, and horror of one's own body and its involuntary changes - changes one both anxiously awaits and dreads. (A thought that crossed my mind, but which I haven't hashed out in conversation with anyone yet: Black Swan is a film about sublimated menstruation anxiety made from a male point of view.) Horror, Richard Dyer writes in White, "is a cultural space that makes bearable for whites the exploration of the association of whiteness with death."

The horror trope of vampirism for instance - white, ghastly, consuming - is so menacing, Dyer goes on, that it is often represented by whites who are not coded or accepted as completely white (Jews, Southeastern Europeans, creoles). Unsettlingly coincidental, then, that in this film's setting of a markedly moneyed, white subculture it is Portman and Kunis (both Jewish) who embody the emergent presence of this passionate, dionysian, destructive, selfish, unchaste thing, the black swan. The "deaths" of these two characters in the film signify the pyrrhic victory of a newly tempered whiteness, which has been threatened & pushed to its limit by that evil blackness.

Contemptible Behavior

2011-01-24T20:27:00.000-05:00

First person: "I really like [artist x]/[artwork y]." Second person, without waiting or digging for elaboration, conversation, etc.: "Really? Wow, I just lost so much respect for you." I disdain this general pattern of behavior (and I also disdain it whenever I notice something like it in my own actions). Taste, inasmuch as it acts as a meaningful social bond as well as lubricant, should never be confined to a checklist of proper likes/dislikes. This otherwise transforms culture into a mathematical game, hemmed in on all sides by the finitude of combinations. What could be more boring, more deadening than this? And, more, what could slot more neatly into a bureaucratic, niche-marketed society?

Colonies

2011-01-20T11:20:00.000-05:00

"The colonial does not exist, because it is not up to the European in the colonies to remain a colonial, even if he had so intended. Whether he expressly wishes it or not, he is received as a privileged person by the institutions, customs, and people. From the time he lands or is born, he finds himself in a factual position which is common to all Europeans living in a colony, a position which turns him into a colonizer. But it is not really at this level that the fundamental ethical problem of the colonizer exists; the problem of involvement of his freedom and thus of his responsibility. He could not, of course, have sought a colonial experience, but as soon as the venture is begun, it is not up to him to refuse its conditions. If he was born in the colonies of parents who are colonizers themselves, or if, at the time of his decision, he really was not aware of the true meaning of colonization, he could find himself subject to those conditions, independent of any previous choice." (Memmi)

Image of the Day

2011-01-16T14:35:00.001-05:00

The above shot, from Apichatpong Weerasethakul's early film Thirdworld, reminds me of something one would find in Ozu's Ohayo/Good Morning.

GCS

2011-01-09T19:01:00.000-05:00

L'Enfant secret

2011-01-07T22:55:00.000-05:00

A shot through tree leaves in Garrel's amazing L'Enfant secret is one of the most startling and wondrous images I've seen in a film in a long time. In fact much of L'Enfant secret proceeds along these lines: pouncing upon a viewer in small, enigmatic doses. Innovation is overrated, but I still appreciate the artful gesture that takes me by surprise ...

Image of the Day

2011-01-06T10:18:00.002-05:00

A Couple Strays

2011-01-03T16:01:00.000-05:00

(Took another look at The Thin Man recently - wonderful!)

Skin. Viewers of the future will set their eyes upon the degraded remains of cheap 1960s espionage playboy movies (like Maroc 7, dir. Gerry O'Hara, 1967) and wonder at the skin of the actors, which the sun and smoke have dried out. I was curious if any of the late stars of this little movie might have battled skin cancer. A cursory search didn't reveal anything. The history of tanned skin (caucasian, obviously, as this is the normative skin color range of Hollywood) precedes any given filmic event, interacts with the history of Hollywood style & glamor, and subtly infuses many color films and yet is difficult to pin down as something specifically aesthetic or technological or social. We could rightly say it's "cultural" but this is simply to assign a nomination that is as diffuse and mercurial as the object ...

Medium specificity. The other night I dreamt that I was in a big, well-attended movie house, with stadium seating. Screening was a delightful avant-pop animation that took iconic images of Audrey Hepburn (particularly Breakfast at Tiffany's) and "reworked" them. I felt very much at home in this crowded theater, and had spread in front of me several remote controls. Obviously, these controls could be used to pause the movie, rewind it, or adjust the volume - as though I were in my own living room, sitting in front of the TV. But it subsequently dawned on me that the policy of this theater was to allow no remote controls. It wouldn't be fair to all the other patrons if you just paused the big screen at your leisure! I felt panic. Then someone else in the theater must have had a remote control, and must have tried to use it on the big screen, because patrons around him started to yell out, "Hey! Remote! Remote!" As the authoritarian ushers walked down the aisle to accost the offender, I was at a loss as to where I could hide the array of remotes before me. Why did I even bring them? What gadgets did they belong to? If I pretend they aren't there, can I trust the people around me not to see them, not to rat me out? I awoke, bewildered. That was a very strange dream.

Year's End

2010-12-31T16:07:00.001-05:00

(or - no lists here, exactly ...)

These days as before there is a deep gulf between "Hollywood" and myself. Still, the screen on the other side of that gulf is constantly present. I can turn my back for a time but there it remains to be seen. So I've started to cultivate my relationship with this creature on the other side, my neighbor. I think I saw more multiplex releases in 2010 than I have in a decade. This number - not remarkably high - is significant in the context of my own viewing habits so I'll write a little about the implications.

I understood what I was in for as I entered the theater for Piranha 3D, Kick-Ass, or The Expendables. I took what pleasures I could from them. But even some of the more ambitious films that I managed to see (and admire), such as The Social Network, failed to move, unsettle, or surprise me on profound levels. Maybe it's just because James Gray didn't make a movie this past year. Looking back over Hollywood's hospice-bound body of late, the self-consciously "classical" glories of something like We Own the Night seem more and more precious, although the youth of today have decided that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the masterpiece of tomorrow. And I'm not trying to pick on Scott Pilgrim. I admit I didn't like the film much, but I've other targets in mind should I go hunting.

I also don't need to treat something like Inception as a whipping-boy here, because a number of my readers doubtless share my apathy towards the film, and those who might love it won't be dissuaded by me. Suffice it to serve as an example, though, that might clarify the difference between two types of conceptually-driven genre films. Compare it to Tony Scott's Unstoppable, which presents almost nothing we haven't seen before. In fact almost everything in Unstoppable is to be found in prior Tony Scott films.

All the same, I have to come to truly appreciate the unscrubbed textures of Scott's recent movies, which by comparison to similarly "high genre" Hollywood films seem to be rooted to some idea or image of actual places, actual times and histories and political situations. I don't claim that Man on Fire is a serious or realistic take on "the situation in Mexico," or that Unstoppable and The Taking of Pelham 123 have powerful statements to make on labor and bureaucracy in rural Pennsylvania or New York City. Obviously not. But Scott's movies energetically play with differences between reality or actuality and fantasies of their representation. It is no coincidence that in the Scott corpus over the last 10-15 years, the control room, command center, and editing suite are figured into the narratives (literally & metaphorically). These movies explicitly address desires to control (perhaps impossible), to see and to locate and to know. They efficiently, sometimes imaginatively narrate ways that people experience and deal with the co-presence of mediated sounds, images, and information. Some years from now I imagine that, if you compare a film like Inception to a film like Unstoppable, the latter will yield up much richer insights into our young century, our spectacular condition. The myths at root will prove more pliable, more durable, more ingeniously worked into the texture of the object.

That said, my favorite recent films were generally not from Hollywood, nor from clear-cut genres - unless one counts the "art film" as a genre, which is a fair proposition. As much as parts of Step Up 3D dazzled me, and though Johnnie To's Vengeance was wonderful in a minor way (compared to Exiled, which is wonderful in a major way), the treasures among the recent films I've seen in 2010 seem a bit old hat, in the sense that they're mainly art films from Europe and Asia, generally directed by established male directors, which primarily wowed (or caused controversy) on the festival circuit before finding commercial distribution ... if at all. Still, even among these strong films by Haneke, Denis, et al., there were two especially that stood out and unsettled me, surprised me in the best ways.

New films of the year:

Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard) and Butterflies Have No Memories (Lav Diaz)

Technically Diaz's film is from 2009 on the world scene, and I only saw the shorter version as part of the omnibus with (good) films by Hong & Kawase. But I'm counting it as new enough for my purposes. I could continue with a small list of "honorable mentions" and a much longer list of notable films I haven't seen, but why bother? (OK, I should note that I have not yet seen Certified Copy.) Most films I saw this year were older ones. And since cinema in any given year always includes that which has come before it, existing still with it, I'll go ahead and pick the two stand-outs in this category as well.

Old viewings of the year:

Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941) and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder, 1970)

Both of these films exist, for me, in a rarefied pocket of film - or art - that is delicate, subtle, and fundamentally decent. The films of Ozu and perhaps Mizoguchi exist in this sphere (and so now Shimizu, also); certain key ones by Lubitsch and Ford; a few others - what ultimately draws me to these movies is how seamlessly I experience their many pleasures as moral axioms.

And on a final note: over 2011, Elusive Lucidity will try more often to cover work along the lines Kramer-Jacobs-Jost-Wilkerson-Gianvito. I know a lot of political commentary, and political engagement with our audiovisual culture, has fallen a bit by the wayside on EL, but I think this has been the necessary consequence of letting mental batteries recharge ...

Happy New Year!

Some Came Running (2)

2010-12-23T11:38:00.000-05:00

If in the twenty-first century we were to try to shoehorn Some Came Running into the famous Comolli-Narboni classification system, what category might we place it in? What are the indicators that this film is fundamentally of its system ... or critical of it on level of form ... or perhaps critical of it on the level of "content," but even more skeptical in terms of its formal coherence? I am unconvinced that we can ascribe fixed political significance to a work of art without any audience, engaging with and using the text. But this is the sort of question that nags for a reason. It presumes some kind of intentionality, or at least consequence, for the object in question. When the dust of film history finally settles - in a few centuries or in a few years - the second nature of classical Hollywood's foundational status will be a very alien thing indeed. How would one explain to the children of the 24th century the differences between Tashlin and Taurog, between Phil Karlson and Felix E. Feist, between Sinatra and Vince Edwards, between even MGM and Monogram? Sure, the evidence of Hawks is on the screen. But one must be primed to receive that evidence. (The task could be greater - I imagine contemporary art, after the collapse of civilization, will be utterly incomprehensible to even the most tireless of Mad Maxian Vasaris.)

The broader legacy of Cahiers criticism - which is not necessarily the best possible legacy of its best work - entails a set of stances and polemics. The positional of this criticism has frequently outshone the substance of the Cahiers' positions themselves - which is why, when people these days tend to talk about "auteurs" one is inclined to hear comments like, "The auteur is the ultimate producer of meaning in a film - and I do/don't agree with that." (If I "don't," it's because "film is a collaborative art form.") Thought gets replaced with a few protocols of taste and expression on the part of the critical viewer. I would be happier, myself, if one were to redirect the line of questioning to something like, What questions in this body of cinema may we draw out? (I am a firm believer that the brow height of one's object of analysis is almost completely irrelevant. The worth of the question one asks is paramount.) Because if the broad legacy of Cahiers criticism, and/or of formalist or auteurist criticism, is to find and appreciate "recognizable styles," what gets lost is the historical particularity of the dominant, classical Hollywood cinema. The slightly hermetic, circular quality of this reaction - industry versus style, a rehashing of art versus commerce - somewhere gets forgotten in a ditch. The particularity of Hollywood rose to the level of universal application, so much so that film aesthetics and history are almost always discussed in constant relation to industry. (Not always in an explicit way, certainly not always in a politicized way ... but there you have it.)

After the classical Hollywood cinema is long gone from the memory of those living, and exists only as it has been handed down (mutating) from generation to generation of viewers, what will be the point of picking out a recognizable style from this body of cinema, which will look fairly coherent against the contrasts of wider audiovisual media culture? The whole of cinema will present a very different way of apprehending a "figure" (a style, a film, an author - an object to which we direct our concentration) and "ground" (the cinema, the society, etc.). For the mid-century auteurists the inevitability of Hollywood cinema constituted its "ground," and this is how the entire polemic of authorial styles and "men of cinema" came to be negotiated at that particular moment - in France and in anglophone contexts. But the cult of distinctive style, when ripped from the context of a culture and an industry and a tradition that helps produce it, quickly dissipates as a critical methodology. If Vincente Minnelli is worth talking about - and he is! - it is not because his films ("his" films?) exhibit abstracted aesthetic merit independent of their context. It is because his name and the work to which it is appended connects a number of threads in a vast network. These threads of distinction under his very nomination (as author-figure) also connect to innumerable other names, protocols, and groupings. And Some Came Running, to return to the example at hand, presents a series of sensual and intellectual passages, movements through eye and ear and mind which morph through different layers of "text," in and out of the "text," with considerable dexterity and richness. I would not say it's an inexhaustible film, but it would take many more than my two viewings for me to get a sense of when it could be exhausted.

Dana Polan proposes that "widescreen composition serves as a signal of Dave's inability to open up to others, to let emotional engagement with other people into his life, and to even notice such people from within the protective space he has built up around himself." The substance of this composition is - as Joe McElhaney has it - a balance between decor and actor.

If one looks at a lot of shots from Some Came Running, one sees the actors frequently cut off by objects (occasional bit part actors) in the foreground. These objects are not obtrusive; the formal technique is not meant to be ostentatious in the way that might induce "distance" or "parametric style." It stands in contrast to many films with big, multi-talented stars, where musical numbers or other show pieces might have the effect of a dramatic "blue screen," i.e., the star's the thing and we have a very explicit figure/ground distinction. I think that Some Came Running's style of blocking and framing prompts one to contextualize the performances differently. In a film full of characters with big personalities, and a few big stars, constantly embedding their bodies in weighty space helps to keep the film from seeming, well, "vehicular." That is, the charismatic nodes of Sinatra-Dave, Martin-Bama, and also Maclaine-Ginny are maintained within the body of the melodrama. While a viewer may be very keenly aware of the Rat Pack metatext here, the form works to finesse (not ignore) that sort of energy.

Upon the film's release, critic Richard Coe of the Washington Post criticized it for having "three vivid personality extensions, but not, I think, real acting." It could be that the leads in this film do not offer "real acting" - and big movie stars have rarely ever offered this according to whichever conventions of "real acting" are en vogue - the best to be hoped for is usually more along the lines of a meaningful, rich, complex, audacious, or otherwise bold utilization of a star's image by the larger film itself. Make the interplay between star and character like a mobius strip. Consequently, regardless of how much or how little one might know about a star's "star text," the film itself - in this case Some Came Running - is highly readable as a study of expansive personalities. The star excess that surrounds the film is implied by the narrative and the mise-en-scene as well. But these latter don't "express" the star excess so much as work simultaneous to it, and with it, and with each other. There is no beginning to this film (unless one means the running time), no origin or basis; its text is porous, a house with more thresholds than we can see from any one vantage point.

Some Came Running

2010-12-20T12:31:00.000-05:00

Some spoilers follow. A man of letters returns to his hometown because his buddies sent him thataway on a bus while he slept off a crazy night in Chicago. Some Came Running balances between a number of transitions in American history. Sinatra's Dave Hirsh is a former writer and an Army veteran - upon arriving at the hotel he lovingly takes Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, out of his duffel bag. One of his love interests, Gwen, is a schoolteacher.

(Great male writers in worn editions. It would have been a fine joke if Minnelli or someone had included a James Jones in there.)

A connotative, ghostly thread running through this plane is that of the postwar boom in higher education: the GI bill, intellectual self-improvement a la Mortimer Adler, manly literary concerns - these last are mirrored by the "frigidity" of Gwen, whose participation in the world of mind & letters seems to negate her ability to retain a healthy sexual autonomy, according to the logic of the world portrayed. Gwen can only be depicted as a woman who "wants it" (and wants the man), but can't "admit it." This sexist balancing act also echoes in a movie I half-watched last night, Delmer Daves' 1959 A Summer Place (both films feature Arthur Kennedy in an unlikable role), where a comparatively healthy middle-class stance on sexuality as voiced through Richard Egan's character, is counterbalanced by the monstrous sexual puritanism of Constance Ford's. In Some Came Running, male characters constantly express disappointment with the women they've decided cannot meet their standards, and so must "choose" - between the Maclaines and the Hyers.

(Sinatra visually paired with the mobile Greyhound logo; Maclaine's character Ginny is just as rootless and mobile as Dave, but because she doesn't - can't - have recourse to a rational, educated, critical mind, her rootlessness is a demerit in the long-term. She's a "pig," as Dean Martin's Bama would call her.)

This promise of male achievement - re-asserting baseline authority in the home in the post-WWII years, but also maintaining the virtue (or value) of mobility, self-propulsion - is met with crisis from the moment of its first expression. A generation of higher ed students received an experience at colleges which they have then wished could be sustained and replicated, as a number of older cultural conservators indicated after the radicalization & subsequent "taming" of the University - these conservators with their dismissals of cultural studies, postmodernism, relativism, and so on. (It's not that these critics in tweed have no good points; it's that their critique is also completely predicated on an unrepeatable time and place, rather than bearing a sustainable, timeless universality.) Some Came Running reflects a rootedness to this period in US intellectual & public life. This was a period of grown men given access to college life and college education, reading great writers, receiving great ideas. The problem with this is that men become dissatisfied with the idea of marriage as well. And yet, because men and women are not socially equal counterparts in this situation, the male dissatisfaction with marriage is expressed as a re-articulation of dominance, and a new set of complexes to work through. The man expresses himself as complete in this paradigm, whereas women are divided a priori into types, never fully complete in comparison to the man. If she were, she would be intimidating - a competitor rather than a partner. A story like Some Came Running evades any reality of strong-minded, sexually independent, educated women ... either this is because the entire premise is sexist from the outset, or because the film deliberately addresses this imbalance and places it in a larger cultural dialogue of respectability versus garishness, and the socially-sexist privileges accorded to men, primarily, in negotiating that dialogue. (I think both are true, and overlap in ways that make this movie so fascinating.)

So, as both explicit theme and as symptom, Some Came Running moves through a particular historical matrix of mobility (both class & geography), normative gender roles, and the powers & pleasures afforded by sanctioned knowledge. The socially visible battleground of these markers of social, human difference is respectability (at the top: bohemians versus upstanding citizens). The less visible arena is sex: when Dawn spies her philandering father in the dark (and the father & secretary turn the lights out in the jewelry shop as they're about to leave), or when Dave and Gwen consummate their ultra-brief courtship ...

(Once sex becomes the central, explicit focus of the scene, the lights dim dramatically, "unrealistically.")

"Dave, you have a very exciting talent." Dave, like Bama, can flee from intimacy at any moment, because they experience themselves as complete and have the imprimatur of rational judgment on their side. The women, who may have the faculties but no sanction, must therefore express their own dissatisfaction only as symptoms of their perceived lack or shortcoming. Thus, Gwen is frigid, uptight, unloving; Ginny is sweet, good-natured, pathetic, but ultimately incapable of mounting a defense against Dave's machinations. The film makes this imbalance between the men and the women palpable. Though the script doesn't verbalize this judgment explicitly, I have a hard time thinking that anyone could come away from Some Came Running feeling deeply disconcerted with the state of things. Not every person is likely to come away with the same class/gender critique I have scribbled out here. But there is a whole system of wrongdoing here, nonetheless, and I think it's a recognizable dimension of the film. (Pedro Costa: "For me, the primary function of cinema is to make us feel that something isn't right.")

(Bright lights, high stimulation, low class: Dave Hirsh isn't a happy camper, despite the unmitigated selflessness of Gwen's love, which he treats like the carnival itself - fun, cheap, utilitarian.)

A common application of cross-cutting in commercial movies is to show a father or husband racing to "save" his special lady. The climax of Some Came Running uses a similar principle. (It's a wonderful scene for its crowd control. That looks & feels like an organic crowd!) I have not read Jones' novel but I hear that Dave gets it at the end. In Some Came Running, the excessive sentimentality of Ginny's intervention somehow brings to the foreground everything that "isn't right" in this world being depicted. Minnelli corrals the actors brilliantly in this sequence: the acting styles converge with character positions seamlessly. (Sinatra - too cool, detached, dissatisfied; Martin - also detached, but in a different way, driving his car through a crowd of pedestrians; young Maclaine - trying so hard, excessive self-diminution; the mobster from Chicago - all frantic, focused, quiet intensity, the physical embodiment of the dangerous, mobile male, looking to enact his will for no other gain than the satisfaction of enacting it.) Ginny-in-white turns her back to protect her new husband, falling "helplessly" into his arms after the shots are fired (she propels herself, she throws herself, she is herself propelled by the bullets) ... the first time I saw this film it felt painfully abrupt. Too much, too fast, too unfair. It's beautifully controlled and in pacing works in great counterpoint to the leisurely tone of much of the preceding movie. This kind of pathos seems mawkish, telegraphed, yet utterly effective, and entirely in keeping with the logical progression of the film's themes and plotlines. Suffice it to say that Some Came Running operates on multiple levels.

Of course I make all these suggestions without having done any research, without referencing other writers, without having fleshed out any of the implications of my comments to see where they might work - or fail - as an explanatory set of patterns. This is the difference between scholarship and between the speculative, first-draft criticism I'm sketching out here. One aims in either case to start making connections.

A Million Little Ruptures

2010-12-19T23:25:00.001-05:00

In Leap Year (a lite treacly touristic rom-com - I didn't finish watching but I imagine it's one of the worst movies of recent years), Amy Adams and Matthew Goode walk up a hill to a castle. The modulation from moment to moment is based upon emotions that are arrived at, and then left behind, easily. That is, quickly. An entire aesthetic of both editing and performance revolves around the quick and, sometimes, deft "sampling" of emotional cues. My sense (and it's fine if it feels a bit too Frankfurt School on first glance) is that this is because the context of emotion is usually left wholly unexamined in mainstream film & TV. Only a false sense of "contained" emotion is to be respected. Emotions do not build upon each other; they do not have texture - the audiovisual, gestural archive of emotional cues is large enough at this moment to be drawn upon without elaboration, without narrative. We already see what a pouting lip means, what a raised eyebrow might mean, what a threatening posture entails ...the biggest aesthetic threat to competent film & TV acting is that people often hit these cues thoughtlessly and yet treat them as a register of "knowing" performance. This is a problem even in good examples. Party Down, my favorite TV comedy of the last several years, spreads itself thin when it indulges in the aesthetics of the awkward stare - a tired gesture, especially, after this past decade. The moment when something embarrassing or strange or gauche happens, the camera holds its gaze upon a character or two - stand-ins for the smart viewer - who give the same old face, the sort of face that JLG & JPG might have analyzed in A Letter to Adam Scott, were it to have been made. (Adam Scott - an actor I do like! - was also apparently in Leap Year, but I didn't watch long enough to get to him.) I must admit that I love a lot of stuff that partakes in this kind of gestural shorthand (like Party Down, like Ricky Gervais' shows) but I await the next development in the "smart mainstream," one that will hopefully exhibit some distance from the over-worked arsenal of faces, gestures, and picture frames.

Pratt

2010-12-18T10:34:00.000-05:00

One of the least bearable "types" in US film acting is what I'd call the Jack Black stock. I think I've only found pleasure once in the performances of Mr. Black himself - in Shallow Hal, where all of his bad qualities as a type are brought out explicitly in the narrative and directed against him (and then, in truly Farrelly fashion, embraced in a sincere, sentimental humanism that is still light years ahead of most of the Hollywood game). When you see the style deployed by the guy in this beer commercial, don't you want to wretch? (Maybe you also want a cold one; that's understandable.) This is all unfortunate for yours truly because I do enjoy dumb, puerile comedies.

But bad things can often be fertile ground for good things. Out of the whole Jack Black phenomenon - if it can be called that - there has emerged Chris Pratt's turn as Andy Dwyer in Parks and Recreation (NBC). He plays a rock-n-roll man-child - immature and affectedly casual. The acting requires time to work, to notice the levels at which Pratt is performing Dwyer's own performance. Pratt's Andy is a remarkable comic portrayal of the Jack Black "type," but given fuller dimension - one needs a script to spell out confusion, guilt, or pathos for Black. With Pratt, it's already built up in his eyes and in his body. He stiffens & puffs up - like a child imitating an adult - when he's rewarded with authority or responsibility. He can only pretend maturity in most cases. This arrested development is played for laughs in any individual moment, but taken cumulatively it becomes touching.

(Plus, Pratt is Anna Faris' beau. That is one fine comedic couple.)

So Long, Blake Edwards

2010-12-16T15:48:00.000-05:00

Thank you for all the funny, sad, beautiful dreams you gave us.

Sans noblesse

2010-12-16T10:41:00.000-05:00

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like a relatively recent development in US culture - or perhaps it's the culture of the Facebook nation? - to wear the label of "snob" lightly now. If one makes distinctions of quality between things in a set, one is invited to smirkingly excuse one's snobbery. If you love fine wines, you say are a "wine snob." If you like art films or critically acclaimed movies, you are a "film snob." I saw a commercial a while back in which a guy who likes brand names identifies himself as a "clothes snob." You can be a pancake snob, bottled water snob, pho snob, design snob, or a music snob. The appellation tends to address the products one consumes. That is, you can be a snob about the sorts of things you can also "like" on Facebook. This common meme is about tastes more than a concrete sense of class position, income, etc. A snob is not anymore an uptight, haughty, profit-seeking yuppy, but that yuppy can be a snob if he prefers to drink only the finest wines, in Reidel glasses. It is as though the distinguishing feature of the snob is no longer that he feels that those who diverge from his tastes and practices are inferior as persons, or that he pretends refinement & connoisseurship to gain in status, but merely that he seeks and trusts in his ability to make evaluative distinctions.

Film Socialisme

2010-12-15T10:12:00.000-05:00

The socialism of the film is the undermining of the idea of property, beginning with that of artworks... There shouldn't be any property over artworks. Beaumarchais only wanted to enjoy a portion of the receipts from Le Mariage du Figaro. He might say, "I'm the one who wrote Figaro." But I don't think he would have said, "Figaro is mine." This feeling of property over artworks came later on. (JLG, h/t Craig Keller)

A film that also could have been titled Babel, the relations humans bear to one another here is juxtaposed with the relations that animals (parrots, owls, cats...) might hold for people, the implacability of the animal's gaze, the enigma of sentience. Ultimately this is a problem for the way a society organizes itself because one must deal ultimately with the impossibility of knowing another, or at least, some other, and nevertheless getting on with such indeterminacy. The first part of the film takes place on a cruise ship - a possible figural allusion to statelessness (1) (2), and to the crucial distinction that might be placed in thinking about society vs. the state (brought up explicitly at one point in the film, 3). Godard understands, though, commitment to a state; if one's concern is something like justice, the mass ties of law-geography-commerce-emotion-media that comprise a state are not to be labeled as always and in all situations any one thing. A difficulty emerges in refusing to think outside of the paradigm of the nation-state as the limit of all sociopolitical organization - the nation-state, the market, and nothing else ...

"If this ultimate determination were a truth valid for every society, the relationship between the determination and the conditions making it possible would not develop through a contingent historical articulation, but would constitute an a priori necessity. It is important to note that the problem under discussion is not that the economy should have its conditions of existence. This is a tautology, for if something exists, it is because given conditions render its existence possible. The problem is that if the 'economy' is determinant in the last instance for every type of society, it must be defined independently of any specific type of society; and the conditions of existence would be that of assuring the existence and determining role of the economy - in other words, they would be an internal moment of the economy as such; the difference would not be constitutive." (Laclau & Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd ed., p. 98)

A film that could also have been titled JLG/JLG pt. 2, which reminded me in parts of Joris Ivens' masterpiece A Tale of the Wind, a sweeping and yet modest retrospective on long threads of problems which have concerned a filmmaker. Problems which butt up against each other, frequently - problems of aesthetic representation which sometimes appear to be antagonistic to problems of class struggle or other struggles. If the promise of wealth redistribution is a fog that permeates contests over social justice, the "other struggles" may clear away such fog by all manner of lights, in the process of their own manhunts alerting those who would wish to flee.

"The unsatisfactory term 'new social movements' groups together a series of highly diverse struggles: urban, ecological, anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, feminist, anti-racist, ethnic, regional or that of sexual minorities. The common denominator of all of them would be their differentiation from workers' struggles, considered as 'class' struggles. It is pointless to insist upon the problematic nature of this latter notion: it amalgamates a series of very different struggles at the level of the relations of production, which are set apart from the 'new antagonisms' for reasons that display all too clearly the persistence of a discourse founded upon the privileged status of 'classes.' What interests us about these new social movements, then, is not the idea of arbitrarily grouping them into a category opposed to that of class, but the novel role they play in articulating that rapid diffusion of social conflictuality to more and more numerous relations which is characteristic today of advanced industrial societies." (Laclau & Mouffe, pp. 159-160)

Basic, simple film analysis ... which can of course be brilliant ... proceeds from the supposition that an immediately intelligible text yields mysteries upon close inspection which can then be insightfully resolved - or at least proposed - upon even closer inspection. Thus His Girl Friday becomes a text ( -> His Girl Friday' ) which becomes once again a work of art ( -> His Girl Friday" ). But why must this model of film analysis apply in every instance, that is, why must a film - every film, each film, every time, each time - subject itself to the demand that it yield its first set of secrets, relations, themes, immediately? I can think of logical reasons why a person might prefer movies that telegraph their meaning so that we can presume to know their basic meaning by the time of the first reel change, and definitely by roll of the end credits. But I can think of no logical reason why this must become the standard by which all films everywhere should be judged, especially when the film itself - with its overlapping sounds and texts, its richness of allusion, its diversity of visual registers - seems to indicate to us that, no, it is not that type of movie. It invites certain forms of confusion, and it invites repeat viewings. This is not something new for Godard and yet it still bothers people, even those who (one would think) would at least be bright enough to have learned their lesson already. And yet one reads the texts that comprise the (mainly) thoughtless reception Film Socialisme has received, and the mind boggles.

"Text on screen is the degree zero of disembodied voice." (Roland-François Lack, "Sa voix," For Ever Godard)

If not through the portal of immediate intelligibility, into depth, how might one construct a case for the worth of Film Socialisme? One might talk about pleasure. (A lot of film critics and pretenders to film criticism have acquired puritanical positions with regards to pleasure, so that it must be integrated wholly into a coherent narrative, or at least made "edifying," in order to receive its reward of praise.) There are a lot of sounds and images of great beauty in Film Socialisme, and may be an incentive to repeat viewing - even skimming, if we acknowledge the fact that so many people are seeing this work on digital files? - so that one can gradually arrive at a more cohesive of what's happening, the way one might with Benjamin's Arcades Project. One might talk about surface: Film Socialisme is like a web of allusions, connections, contrasts, not "deep" at all in many common, critical senses of the word (for there is no psychological profundity here, as the director himself openly acknowledged). Its depth, as such, projects into history - trying to sketch some roots for "what is there" (an empty auditorium for a lecture by Alain Badiou, dance floors on a cruise ship, a blonde kid wearing a Soviet Union t-shirt, a YouTube video of talkative cats). Godard's "material" is outward, not inward. This is not to say that there's no text here, but I suspect one will find mainly only frustration if one tries to locate a skeleton key for "why Godard did that / made that incomprehensible / doesn't just say what he means" inside the text itself. The structure is like a lattice: intricate criss-cross patterns whose nodal points are recognizable, but whose overall gist is not comprehensible unless one also notes that which is visible beyond the lattice, between it. One fills it in. One might even use Film Socialisme, though it offends some sensibilities to think that a non-instructional film might be utilized for anything other than a night of relaxation. (Yes, yes, it also offends some other sensibilities that a film might indeed be used for a night of relaxation.) But perhaps to see what happens one must know how to look. The pleasurable work begins ...

"If I had to plead in a court of law against charges of filching images for my films, I'd hire two lawyers, with two different systems. The one would defend the right of quotation, which barely exists for the cinema. In literature, you can quote extensively. In the Miller [Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller, 1976 - JML] by Norman Mailer, there's 80% Henry Miller, and 20% Norman Mailer. In the sciences, no scientist pays a fee to use a formula established by a conference. That's quotation, and cinema doesn't allow it. I read Marie Darrieussecq's book, Rapport de police [Rapport de police, accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction / Police Report: Accusations of Plagiarism and Other Modes of Surveillance in Fiction, 2010], and I thought it was very good, because she went into a historical inquiry of this issue. The right of the author - it's really not possible. An author has no right. I have no right. I have only duties. And then in my film, there's another type of "loan" - not quotations, but just excerpts. Like a shot, when a blood-sample gets taken for analysis. That would be the defense of my second lawyer. He'd defend, for example, my use of the shots of the trapeze artists that come from Les Plages d'Agnès. This shot isn't a quotation - I'm not quoting Agnès Varda's film: I'm benefiting from her work. I'm taking an excerpt, which I'm incorporating somewhere else, where it takes on another meaning: in this case, symbolizing peace between Israel and Palestine. I didn't pay for that shot. But if Agnès asked me for money, I figure it would be for a reasonable price. Which is to say, a price in proportion with the economy of the film, the number of spectators that it reaches..." (Godard, ibid.)

"I will have to make rather extensive use of quotations. Never, I believe, to lend authority to a particular argument but only to show fully of what stuff this adventure and I are made. Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs. Allusions, without quotation marks, to other texts known to be very famous, as in classical Chinese poetry, Shakespeare, or Lautréamont, should be reserved for times richer in minds capable of recognizing the original phrase and the distance its new application has introduced." (Guy Debord, Panegyric)

Typewriter

2010-11-30T18:29:00.000-05:00

Frequently as I write, I wish that I had a typewriter to work with. This is not for reasons of tactility or antiquarianism, though I acknowledge these pleasures have their place. I want a typewriter because of the cobbled-together habits of my composition & editing style, which are an incoherent - though I imagine not unusual - volleying of typing and handwriting. Both methods of getting word down boast their own kinds of speed.

See Something, Say Something

2010-11-22T20:01:00.001-05:00

"Animal nature, or sexual exuberance, is that which prevents us from being reduced to mere things. Human nature, on the contrary, geared to specific ends in work, tends to make things of us at the expense of our sexual exuberance." (Georges Bataille, Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood)

“In Western metaphysics, the spoken or sung word has more authority than the written word. Voice accords presence – a myth that remains compelling, even though we are supposed to know better: we believe that no one can steal a voice, that no two voices are exactly alike, that finding a voice will set a body free, and that anyone can sing. This conviction that having a voice means having an identity is a cultural myth, just as sex is human nature but also a myth. … Voice is a system equal to sexuality – as punishing, as pleasure-giving; as elective, and ineluctable.” (Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, p. 155)

"A valid meaning is here attached to the word sovereignty, just as to the term entity. Both do not at all imply that a political entity must necessarily determine every aspect of a person's life or that a centralized system should destroy every other organization or corporation. It may be that economic considerations can be stronger than anything desired by a government which is ostensibly indifferent toward economics. Likewise, religious convictions can easily determine the politics of an allegedly neutral state. What always matters is only the possibility of conflict." (Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, p. 39)

In the above video we see the effects of recent policy - surely a "reasonable" search, no? - whereby the entire game is based upon the semblance of security. The state doesn't even try anymore, because it doesn't need to. This particular quiet outrage, via TSA, is just the latest in the governance of human beings - and those who would defend might say that perhaps some people are just too uptight about their bodies. And indeed there are a lot of people, men mainly, whose opposition to having their bodies scanned or testicles fondled is expressed in decidedly queer-unfriendly way. But my own response to this is, Why do we immediately place the onus onto the citizen to accommodate policy? "Oh, Citizen, you're just too repressed! Don't be so hung up on bodily privacy!" This, to me, is specious on the same order as US mimicry of feminist discourse to "justify" the bombing of Afghanistan. Of course, the state can do whatever it can get away with, but it is worth attending to the outcry, even if it appears to be mired in politics of the body and of sexual feelings (including feelings of revulsion), and even if it is sometimes articulated along Tea Party lines. To speak out, though, requires reclaiming a certain sense of the voice, and thus requires establishing a certain (public) baseline for one's own physicality, and for one's own sexuality ...

Image of the Day

2010-11-20T10:13:00.000-05:00

DS

2010-11-20T00:42:00.000-05:00

Notes toward non-appreciation of Takashi Miike's Detective Story (2007) ...

I had the opportunity recently to look at a film I didn't much like, by a director (with a cult following) that I do much like, and wanted to clarify a few things for myself and in the process maybe some of you can also extract something of use. The source of the problem or schematic I'm working through here is in my own personal history of being once a romantic-formalist but also (I think?) expanding well beyond these strictures. But it's also a matter of tackling a problem with some practical utility, at least for the cinephile, like myself, who nerdishly logs what he sees and tries to at least vaguely have some mental placement of its overall worth. In the past, for reasons of temperament, I adhered to a very "humble" approach to seeing films by filmmakers I liked. If I didn't appreciate the film, I consciously considered that the problem might reside in myself. (This has something to do, I think, with the Catholicism attached to a lot of early auteurist criticism, and my own Catholic history - playing the devotional role of the penitent viewer is an important part of this, and something that is really crucial for understanding a lot of this thing, "auteurism." It's also why I balk violently at a lot of snap judgment-style criticism, and never warmed to Pauline Kael.) This spectatorial humility on my part was not total - I was not afraid to dislike films, even films I felt I was supposed to like. I was simply caught in a trap of my own making: how to trust myself when I found numerous kinds of pleasure in giving - or feeling as though I gave - trust in the object before me, the film of the other, an(other) film of the auteur? To me it was a profoundly ethical matter, even if it wasn't a profoundly well-thought one. And of course it required a prior, and sometimes implicit, judgment beforehand as to which films really deserved this humility and which films didn't.

But lost in all of this is the richness and importance of the gray area. The middle grounds - which can be middlebrow, or middling achievements, or compromises, or contradictions, or any number of things. The ability to see on multiple registers, to see how a film's aesthetic and its politics operate on several levels (not always distinct), and in countless contexts. Sometimes when one thinks one is seeing clearly, it's not the big or true picture one is glimpsing - but the isolated image of a parlor game.

So a few sketchy comments, which are ultimately for myself, but which I share in case you feel they can be for you, as well.

... the connoisseur's eye frequently doesn't care about "genre" and in fact has perfect contempt for a genre project, though sometimes this is dressed up as faux-proletarian respect for a job of work. Who cares that Phil Karlson made B-movies, Kansas City Confidential is wonderful and evinces an aesthetic sense that goes far beyond - and will exceed - all such pesky questions as material, industrial context. It is nice to know that a B-movie is (was) a B-movie, that a cathedral is (was) a product of oppressive religious collusion with state and money, that a Renaissance painting existed in an art market and had patrons ... but these don't tell us anything about the inner meaning of the work.

... though discussing the inner meaning of the work is often a way of drawing facile boundaries in order not to do the more intellectually and (yes, perhaps) aesthetically strenuous job of dealing with the outer life of the work as well.

... and in the vacuum of an auteur's career, or a film movement, justifications come easily when one limits all possible connections down to a few registers (those of the author's own work, or a particular stratification of film culture, or - possibly - something vague called "Zeigeist").

... if one is a romantic-formalist and an auteurist, can one draw the line - practically speaking - between the auteur's consideration of his or her industrial context, and make distinctions as to those who did what they had to do in bad conditions, and those who simply let themselves go to seed, having already felt the acclaim - or given up the ghost? (If yes: If not through "auteurism," then how does the auteurist evaluate the conditions in which the auteur works?) To me, Carloss James Chamberlin's article in Senses of Cinema on Nicholas Ray and Bitter Victory is a superb example of a film that considers the performative - and this is also to say the industrial and political - dimensions of a filmmaker's authorship.

... the sleekness of some later Miike may pose the question (and I haven't considered the work diligently enough to have a real answer, myself) that he himself is simply festering in a gussied-up version of his prior, perhaps grittier work. In such a context, even if one is only partly sympathetic to such a judgment of the work, it's sometimes more difficult to be "won over" by formal patterns or stylistic signatures, flourishes. For instance, in Detective Story, the palette of gore and the wardrobe connection to Kazuya Nakayama's red-white shirt. In this kind of context the execution - i.e. the performance of authorship - seems more rote than risked. This is also why, during the middle of the past decade, I found myself dissatisfied watching certain art films by directors I loved, because I was no longer struck by their invention or their freshness, but instead was impressed by their sense of aesthetic safety. Elliptical art films on the festival circuit (whether good, bad, or in-between) tend to simply deliver to their viewers precisely what they want, whereas E. Elias Merhige's Suspect Zero is at least taking a few chances, even if it's not a great film ...

... innovation is, of course, highly overrated. I'm happy to let the next buzzword in aesthetics be something like "sustainability," borrowed from Whole Foods style Green politics. It's also bad but at least it would bring some new questions to the table that would push aside shopworn modernism (i.e., oftentimes, Enlightenment-Fordism) or fan-centered pleasure-center target practice ... which seem to be the two dominant ways of talking about such things.

... at a certain point I asked myself how small the proportion of "successes" Miike makes would have to be in order for me to no longer consider myself an admirer of his work in general. I imagine, though, that it could get pretty low. I was converted from a skeptical position with regard to Miike, and so it's hard to de-evangelize oneself.

Image of the Day

2010-11-18T20:38:00.002-05:00

Scribbles

2010-11-15T21:19:00.001-05:00

Small things I've seen recently & appreciated - a lot of these are repeat viewings -

the moment in Friday when Ice Cube opens the cabinet to find some Cap'n Crunch cereal, and lets out a "yeeah" (see it in the first few seconds here). The vocalization seems poised between the scripted and the unmotivated, between the performance of a private moment and the performance for a camera and a crew.
the spit fight in Fist of Fury 1991 between Stephen Chow and a thief (see it here). In Zoolander 2 I hope they augment any further breakdance fighting with spit-fighting.
Yuen Wah's (the landlord's) hair in Kung Fu Hustle.
all of David O'Reilly's amazing Please Say Something (watch all 10 minutes here) - I didn't know any of his animation before a peer screened this one recently.
Eric Balfour punching up a rubbery alien in Skyline - a surreally low-tech moment in a slickly dismal movie that pilfers - without humor, without wit - from various other alien/sf films like The Matrix and District 9.
the scene when Audrey Hepburn first peers into George Peppard's apartment from the fire escape in Breakfast at Tiffany's, gazing on his passive, sleeping, unclothed body while Patricia Neal leaves cash on the table. "I understand completely," she tells him soon after.

We Live in a Demography

2010-11-15T08:15:00.001-05:00

(Link.) Strange that a lot of the Republicans' favorite shows are still reasonably popular with Democrats (only three of them earning double digit scores from the quiche-eaters, and two of those are high two digit scores), whereas a lot of the Democrats' favorites are quite negligible to the Nascar tastes - the first five or six shows get middling two-digit scores from Republicans, and are followed by a number of other double digit scores. According to the survey this breakdown of favorites may be because "Republicans like winners" and self-loathing Democrats are drawn to damaged goods.

My impression is that a significant element separating these two lists is irony, which the Democrat list has in spades: either shows that utilize irony, or double-voicedness, in pretty upfront ways (Mad Men, Parks and Recreation) or whose popularity among a cognoscenti involves ironic detachment (the Kardashians, SVU). Let me reveal what is already obvious about my own tastes and observe that the one red list program of which I've actually seen a substantial number of episodes, Lie to Me, is in fact a procedural utterly unironic about its use of "science," of techniques. This fairly entertaining drama is about a consulting firm which specializes in deception detection - they locate and uncover lies by studying universal, inescapable body language and micro-expressions! Hired in each episode by government agencies, private individuals, or companies, the plots (of course) tend to twist in such a way as to show that the obvious liar is either not lying - or only covering up an even more insidious scandal. It's a ludicrous business model we see at work here, where time and again Tim Roth & Co. wind up exposing their own clients. To appreciate this show, and even to stay sane while watching an entire season of it (like I have) means establishing some basic relation to its ridiculousness. Either one overlooks it because the pleasure of seeing science & technique successfully, wittily implemented is sufficient, or one savors the friction. Some shows can accommodate this friction, others seem to need the irony (like Parks & Rec).

Not sure we're speaking about a golden age of irony, exactly, but, Henri Lefebvre says: "The great ironist appears in periods of disturbance, turmoil and uncertainty, when the people around him are absorbed in extremely large issues, when the future hangs on important decisions, when immense interests are at stake and men of action are unreservedly committed to the struggle. This is when the ironist withdraws within himself, though only temporarily. It is his way of taking stock and recouping his strength. Back out again in the public domain, he questions whether those involved really know why they are gambling with their lives, their happiness or lack of it, not to mention the happiness of unhappiness of other people. Do they actually know they are gambling? Do they know what the stakes really are? For the ironist the actions, projects, representations and men which confront him are like constellations where distances are more visible than the brilliant points they separate; these spaces he fills with darkness. The tasks in hand, even the most valid ones, are not enough to satisfy him. He scans the horizon and tries to weigh up the present. He is the first to perceive the limits of the interests involved and the chances the tactics in operation have of success (while the people who have conceived them feel obliged to believe in them unreservedly, and never to lose face in front of their supporters)." (from "On Ironic, Maieutic, and History," Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore)

It could be that the symbolic struggle at work in a chart like the one above is whether or not some of these products deserve irony or are simply granted it via the wish fulfillment and privilege of an educated elite (as a means of consumerist distinction). And/or it could be that the great red-blue distinction itself - instead of calling for an earnest "purple America" rebuke - needs more ironizing.

The Facebook Movie

2010-11-09T22:17:00.001-05:00

The Social Network is a little like nesting dolls, or so I thought at first - but this doesn't seem right because I can't be certain as to which particular film-layer masks or is masked the others. Is it a Sorkin film? Is it Fincher's? (Columbia is the author for all legal purposes.) Less a bunch of nesting dolls, then, and more like a multi-faceted set of optical illusions. What, also, is this movie about? "Human connection," Facebook specifically, the rise of a network more generically, a Will Hunting story minus the uplift, Harvard & Silicon Valley social life? (An aside - Harvard's Kirkland House is presided over by Tom Conley, a great critic and scholar of cinema.) In this respect, one can hardly pinpoint an origin to David Fincher but one can say, perhaps, that this is the kind of story - narrative resolution inconsequential, diffuse social reference & meaning - with which Fincher has spent the last decade thriving.

The American Television

2010-11-08T10:05:00.000-05:00

(with apologies to Andrew Sarris)

This past weekend I came upon a 1959 letter circulated among interested parties, which concerned the hiring of directors for the second season of The Twilight Zone, giving an intriguing breakdown of potential helmers. Some excerpts, with format changes and elisions ...

Justus Addiss
Walter Doniger
Robert Florey
Christian Nyby
Montgomery Pittman
Richard Sale
Robert Stevens

(I include Mr. Florey's name because I know he is much admired in many quarters; I am dead set against him because I believe he gives actors no help whatsoever.)

...

Here's a list of men of whom I've heard very good reports and whom we should consider

Robert Altman
Jack Arnold
Douglas Heyes
Phil Karlson
Richard Wilson
Jack Smight

There are several young men, many raised in the Matinee Theatre school, whom I think have done very good work. They seem to be especially notable for injecting a great deal of life and vivacity into their films:

Walter Grauman
Jeffrey Hayden
Lamont Johnson
David O. McDearmon
Boris Sagal

...

There are several men still active, who, over a long period of years, have established a reputation as men of great style:

Lazlo Benedek
John Brahm
Arthur Ripley
Harry Horner
James Neilson

Bernard Girard
John Peyser

(The last two names are young men and less dependable then the others; under the discipline by which they do their best work, they are perhaps better than the others.)

Should we do it as a comedy, it might be well to consider the following successful directors:

Rod Amateau
Hy Averback
Richard Kinon
Oscar Rudolph

* * *

A letter like this shows that they qualitatively grouped directors in the industry, too (and lines between the film and television industry at this point were blurring), albeit not with the same kinds of categories as Mr. Sarris and those who've come after - but definitely according to the characteristics of a director's work (like vivacity) or an established track record in a genre. It all points to the complexity of artistic input and collaboration that can go into producing some big audiovisual affair. There are enthusiasts of the moving image who take special pleasure from, say, the John Brahm-directed episodes of The Twilight Zone (or Gerd Oswald in The Outer Limits), regardless of who wrote that episode's script. I say this not to devolve into the awful parlor game / pissing contest that asks (as though there's an answer), "who is the real author of this object?" ... only to point out the lines which establish an aesthetic, from the viewer's perspective, are unstable and also capable of keying in to official discourse marginally or obliquely, posing unanticipated questions and finding answers neither proffered nor hidden by "the text." And there seems to be some industrial and historical precedent for this ...

* * *

Season two of The Twilight Zone, episode list with directors.

"The King Will Not Return" (Buzz Kulik), "The Man in the Bottle" (Don Medford), "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" (Douglas Heyes), "A Thing About Machines" (David O. McDearmon), "The Howling Man" (Douglas Heyes), "Eye of the Beholder" (Douglas Heyes), "Nick of Time" (Richard L. Bare), "The Lateness of the Hour" (Jack Smight), "The Trouble with Templeton" (Buzz Kulik), "A Most Unusual Camera" (John Rich), "The Night of the Meek" (Jack Smight), "Dust" (Douglas Heyes), "Back There" (David O. McDearmon), "The Whole Truth" (James Sheldon), "The Invaders" (Douglas Heyes), "A Penny for Your Thoughts" (James Sheldon), "Twenty-two" (Jack Smight), "The Odyssey of Flight 33" (Justus Addiss), "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" (John Brahm), "Static" (Buzz Kulik), "The Prime Mover" (Richard L. Bare), "Long Distance Call" (James Sheldon), "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" (Buzz Kulik), "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" (Justus Addiss), "The Silence" (Boris Sagal), "Shadow Play" (John Brahm), "The Mind and the Matter" (Buzz Kulik), "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" (Montgomery Pittman), and "The Obsolete Man" (Elliot Silverstein).

Image of the Day

2010-11-04T09:54:00.000-04:00

Lady in Purple

2010-10-31T22:40:00.002-04:00

Well, before I eventually get around to Some Came Running, here's another Minnelli title - but for the immediate purposes of this post I'm wondering about the story of the lady in purple? She's attending the ballet, I believe, in the first shot, and attending the final performance of the big musical show in the second shot. Society theater maven?

Demon Lover Diary

2010-10-30T10:37:00.000-04:00

Along with some comedic moments, I think the best moment in Joel DeMott's documentary about a schlock horror movie shoot in the 1970s Midwest, Demon Lover Diary, is when DeMott's voiceover narration matches with footage of the schlock director's children playing in the backyard. As she muses over the irrationality of the enterprise (the director has faked a sick leave from work to make the movie, putting all of his finances into it, banking on the chance that the film will make it big on the Midwest circuit - Detroit, Lansing, Toledo, etc.), the kids are having a grand time playing with a big box, knocking it over, jumping in and out of it. The asychronicity between sound and image (long take, unpretty childhood wistfulness) makes for a really rich but subtle comment on the crazy play (but - as adults - tortured, worried play) of trying to make commercial movies as amateurs ...

Cinephile Notes

2010-10-28T21:54:00.000-04:00

Revisiting Citizen Kane recently (on 35mm!), I felt once again - and for the first time with this film - a tremendous freedom. A sense of liberation can flood over you when, at a certain point, you are "over" a canonical text, I think. But "canonical" is not quite the right word here, it's not precisely what I mean. Perhaps my referent is better described as an object which bears some authority - real because imagined - over oneself. The dissipation of this particular kind of authoritarian aura all of the sudden makes the heavy light; that which has before shackled, now frees. In recent years, and each for particular reasons, I have also had similarly liberating experiences with The Searchers and In the Mood for Love - films I first went into feeling the urge to love, films I wanted to love but for some reason couldn't, films by directors whose other works I cherished, and films whose sheer stature thus only made my failure seem more difficult ... films that took several re-viewings over the years to find peace with. One leaves behind any idea of what one should like - and this "should" operates on a lot of different registers, some intensely personal, some purely social.

Rare is the aficionado of "cinema art" who isn't also a certain kind of performer, enunciating taste in the proper way. (But at the same time, rare too is the person who is aware of this performance - pointing it out - who isn't himself just a bad, reductive imitator of some ideas found in Bourdieu.) A performer of good taste in cinema, for instance, will likely hail Citizen Kane but then usually take the slightest opportunity to point out that Welles' later work is even better, richer, or more fascinating.

I should repeat, for clarity's sake, that I am not referring strictly to the mere opinion that Welles' late work is great, but to the practiced enunciation upon proper cues to inform others about this opinion you hold. I'm hardly suggesting that only "elitist film snobs" do this, either - in fact, anyone invested in film is going to do this in her own way. It's a way for people who love films to connect, and to find other people who love films in compatible ways. Some people are jerks about it, regardless of their brow height, whereas some people are really amiable, regardless of theirs.

How can we talk about the fact of this performative dimension of cinephilia without just flattening it into joke about bad faith and film snobbery? In terms of scholarship and the field of film & media studies, which I'm aware is not where a large number of my readers reside (or have any sympathy for), I would say that I want to see the discussion of art cinema, and of "elite" cinephilia, given the same respectful and nuanced treatment that other subcultures and fan cultures have sometimes been given. For while a love of austere art cinema & experimental work (Straub-Huillet, or Phil Solomon, or Bela Tarr) may have a certain claim to high status in its objecthood, this work neither confers much real status on devotees, if any, nor does it correspond to the taste cultures of a political economic ruling class. Being highbrow, rigorous, or visibly "discriminating" in your tastes won't get you much at all in the way of dates, employment, respect, or party invitations. In the academic world, 'art cinema' and its followers could be well-served by a good faith investigation by (gasp) cultural studies folks. I think there are some indications of the trend already.

In any event. Citizen Kane is so ubiquitously celebrated that it's almost a latent, potentially underappreciated film again ... not in general, but amongst the cognoscenti. (It served as a whipping boy, for instance, for Joel David's wonderful Sight & Sound list.) The temptation to attack, disrupt, subvert, or ignore "the canon" is sometimes so powerful that it gives greater structuring power to the canon than it might realize. Kane stands in for all that is "yes, but..." about filmic greatness - "yes, it's great, but..."

The key, I suppose, is to find a way to respect what follows that but... while also remaining radically open to that which we are conditioned (by our own individual taste cultures) to respond to as stale. It's in continually also interrogating our implicit and explicit distastes that our tastes will find some robustness ...

See Something

2010-10-27T02:04:00.000-04:00

I.

Composition in depth has, for our a/v century at least, still a lot of murky areas. In the 1980s in a paper on space in Renoir, Stephen Tifft proposed that the "earliest directors had simply photographed theatrical spectacles from a fixed, central position, as though the spectator had secured a good orchestra seat. Chafing at the documentary indignity of such rootedness, some directors began to rebel against these limitations by making the shot the basic unit of film language, and exploiting editing to move from one shot to another, one visual perspective to another, thus allowing the spectator to enter into its narrative space with a flexibility and vividness unparalleled in the theatre." The exhilarating possibilities of moving through space with the camera are commonly tied to a network of sumptuous directors and cinematographers. Strange, though (... oh but perhaps not so strange, really ...) how the anti-illusionistic practices of modernism and space in cinema often emphasized a lack of shadows, a return to something creators and/or spectators thought of as surface, pure surface. Think of the bold, big primary colors in Godard. Isn't there an anecdote about Hitchcock regarding his fascination with the shadowless white walls in the backgrounds in some Antonioni? Is shadow associated with depth and thus with illusion, and is this why the bright colors and hard lines of so much mid-to-late-century modernist cinema avoided such shadows whenever bourgeois space was to be dismantled? What of Gorki's kingdom of shadows, where its shadows are only a pretender to the throne?

Perhaps the bourgeoisie owned the shadows as well as Enlightenment. Only so much left for a Maoist to work with. Perhaps the only real(ist) shadows are those of the strictly literal emulsion; no represented shadows count ... no lines on the faces of Humphrey Bogart or Chishu Ryu, no depths into which we can be so gauche as to pretend to enter.

At the same time, if I'm truthful ... thank the gods for something like Grandrieux's Sombre. Shadow is so important to the history of cinema that critics created a genre out of it (film noir), ex post facto, but I wonder somewhat idly if there has been even less work dedicated to truly exploring shadow and its possibilities than color. (Even when people discuss composition in depth, and deep focus, the through line seems to be on designated clear spaces, lit spaces, perceptible spaces.) The suggestibility of the obscure and the deliberately obscured is a wonderful sort of frontier ...

II.

"Shadow, then, is in the first instance a local, relative deficiency in the quantity of light meeting a surface, and objective. And in the second instance it is a local, relative variation in the quantity of light reflected from the surface to the eye. There are three distinct kinds of deficiency, and they emerge clearly in a sixteenth-century diagram drawn after Leonardo da Vinci (fig. 2) ..."

"The role of shadow as an object of perception, then, is bound to be regarded sometimes through issues of good or bad: help or hindrance? Or better, perhaps, since shadows are a fact, which properties carry information, which are artefacts of the visual act, which are stable and which fickle, which are used in perception and which are ignored - in fact, how to shadows work, not just in the physical but in our minds? It is noticeable that answers have varied widely according to people's projects and historical epistemes." (Quotes from the late Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment)

III.

Maybe we sometimes talk about high-key and low-key as though these phrases in themselves conveyed much of significance to ourselves & to other people. What's a lexicon to convey the three kinds of shadow demonstrated by Leonardo, the shadow of the underside of the nose, the shadow of the upper lip (corresponding to coverage by the nose), the shadow of the angled feature as opposed to that which meets the light straight on?

IV.

"25. In the cinema we can sometimes see the events in the film as if they lay behind the screen and it were transparent, rather like a pane of glass. The glass would be taking the colour away from things and allowing only white, grey and black to come through. (Here we are not doing physics, we are regarding white and black as colours just like green and red). - We might thus think that we are here imagining a pane of glass that could be called white and transparent. And yet we are not tempted to call it that: so does the analogy with, e.g., a transparent green pane break down somewhere?" (Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, trans. McAlister & Schättle).

V.

Things to continue to keep in mind: the extended (implied?) depth of the emulsion or the stock or the format / the depth of the profilmic space / the vast range of negotiations and indeterminacy to be found in shadow spaces.

Bad Object

2010-10-22T19:02:00.001-04:00

Q: I don’t want to digress too much, but have you seen Mad Men?

A: The quick answer is, for the first time this Sunday. I’m not a television fan. Television doesn’t have a strong visual presence. I’ve only seen one episode, so I don’t want to pontificate on it, but I can immediately see the influence of Douglas Sirk, a filmmaker from the 1950s, in the color schemes. Usually television is pretty boring to look at. And this is definitely rather interesting.

(a recent Tom Gunning interview)

* * *

How do we define a strong visual presence? Is it a feature of the light projected through celluloid emulsion vs. that emitting from the cathode ray tube, LCD, or plasma screen? It would seem like this would be a workable basis on which to differentiate between two different media, 'cinema' and 'television' (if we can even call them media, or consider them as categorically comparable types of media). But that doesn't seem to be what Gunning gets at in his comment above, because he allows that Mad Men "is definitely rather interesting" to look at. (It is quality television, art directed into submission and shot on a one camera setup.) So it can't boil down to a question of technology. Maybe it is practice? Television, more concerned in its own technological genealogy with voice and sound than cinema necessarily is (due to the history of broadcasting and its ancestral ties to radio), has less impetus than film to produce a good picture on that tiny, low-res little screen it has.

Yet ... most audiences of yesterday and today seem to care little about pictorial composition, mise-en-scene, editing patterns, etc., in films themselves (in other words they are not connoisseurs of form). Most of Hollywood's history, despite its domination of box offices much the world over, had only limited reason to attend to visual invention, richness, playfulness, structure, and so on in the way that cinephiles attend to such dimensions. When the film industry, in contradistinction to cinema, tried some new things, some of these were indeed visual (like widescreen aspect ratios), but some were obviously not (e.g., experiments with smell). And they were all, fundamentally, gimmicks, even if great films were sometimes made that used these gimmicks.

But I'm not convinced that cinema has appreciably greater cause to produce what I'll shorthand as "visual wealth" than television does. After all, when Gunning says that television is usually "pretty boring to look at," couldn't he apply the same standards & judgment to most films? From the perspective of the connoisseur's eye, I would say, most films are definitely also "pretty boring to look at." (Either that or we are to be consumed with the passion of photogenie, and presume that virtually all films are at least somewhat interesting to look at ... in which case, aren't television programs, too!?) And let's please return to the question of comparing these two media - we should define what we might mean when we say "television" and "film." Is television all that is sent out on the channels that reach our sets? (So, it can include films, albeit in televisual/video form?) Does "television" refer to fiction programming produced for exhibition on TV? Does television refer to all programming produced on TV ... or for video formats? Is it TV when it's mainly extra web content for a television show, downloaded to a smart phone and watched there? Is "cinema" film, i.e., a film strip? Is cinema the artful production of (audio)visual appearances of motion? Is The Blair Witch Project cinema and Mad Men television, and do we know this because this is how they are primarily distributed or exhibited to us?

I Love Lucy was shot on film, Michael Mann's recent stuff shot on video...

The Artist at Work

2010-10-22T09:35:00.001-04:00

Tape

2010-10-22T08:53:00.002-04:00

Bells Are Ringing

2010-10-15T12:32:00.000-04:00

A film that deserves more discussion: Vincente Minnelli's some-kind-of-wonderful Bells Are Ringing (1960). Part of a squeaky (but ever-so-slightly naughty), brightly colored pocket of late '50s/early '60s Hollywood (think of Doris Day in Pillow Talk or Please Don't Eat the Daisies), the theme is communication. Telephones, answering services, urban anonymity and its talking cure ("Hello!"), code (Beethoven's 10th), name-dropping, typewriting, an entire host of ways to get through to someone end up contriving greater difficulties & subtleties in actually doing just that. It's not an original topic, but it's handled with some spark here. I love the moment when Judy Holliday dances the chacha - so as not to forget it - in her red dress before she meets her fella (Dean Martin) for a party, a fine & simple flourish between director and star. The basement apartment that Susanswerphone calls home is a cousin to the apartment in My Sister Eileen ('55), if I recall.

But what am I writing? There's someone who already said things better ...

"Telephony suggests telepathy. When Ella goes to visit Jeff for the first time, it just so happens that he wants coffee and a sandwich to help him kick his alcohol habit, and it just so happens that she’s got both in her bag. A nice piece of womanly white-magic, and all rationally explained because it’s her own lunch, which she daren’t admit, partly because she’s pretending to be chic Melisande. Communication by feeding—the mother, the housewife— in a placidly unpointed antithesis to the swish blind-date dinner. To explain how she can anticipate Jeff’s wishes, Ella has to pretend to be telepathic and psychic, which is the ideal type of communication (indeed, frighteningly so). And telepathy finds its converse in—is it a duet, is it a pair of synchronized solos, and what’s the difference?—"Better than a dream," dreaming and telepathy being a natural pair of intrapsychic opposites." (Raymond Durgnat, transcribed here.)

Video of the Day

2010-10-05T21:10:00.000-04:00

Unlived-In

2010-10-03T22:09:00.000-04:00

The most appallingly/appealingly artificial aspect of TLC's Sister-Wives isn't so much as the polished gooberism of the husband (more an image of a 'Hollywood polygamist' than Bill Paxton would ever be allowed to be), but the strangely antiseptic nature of the house in which this family "lives" ... mostly white walls, everything spare and strategically placed, a flimsy illusion of a family home ...

Tunnels

2010-09-14T19:31:00.000-04:00

Has anyone ever written anything about the visual-spatial-narrative conventions of tunnels and doorways in sf spaceships? (Not just in spaceships - futuristic subterranean lairs and submarine vessels also work.) I'm thinking here, perhaps not completely accurately, of the Alien franchise, Event Horizon, Resident Evil, Sunshine, the rather good Pandorum (Christian Alvart, 2009), Leviathan, Supernova ... one's running from the villain/monster, trying desperately to beat the imminent closing of a portal, or trying desperately to close portals to cut off the v/m. The convention is about as rote as the fireball or explosion outrun by our heroes; I wonder though if there have been unsung developments or experiments in the form and substance of this particular kind of tunnel-portal chase ...

[Similar networks of tropes in these kinds of films - the mutated future of humanity in yesterday's lost ships; insanity and reckoning with the finitude of the cosmos (see also Contact). Also, the question of esoteric knowledge, e.g., a character knowing Latin in Event Horizon, and another decoding Russian in Leviathan.]

Gaga

2010-09-14T19:07:00.005-04:00

In interviews here and abroad, I have constantly denounced America's fetish for small female noses, a phenomenon that may be fairly recent in origin. It seems to belong to the Betty Crocker period following World War II, when domesticity was a primary value and when ethnics wanted to assimilate and become just as bland as the ruling, Protestant country-club class.

Diana Vreeland, one of the great, stentorian dragon ladies of the century, had a granite profile and a will of steel. Who is a better role model for young women today -- Fashion Empress Vreeland or NOW's sanctimonious Patricia Ireland, with her blankly decorous, WASP features and breathy little treacly voice? Vreeland, with her soaring imagination and theatrical flair, was a survivor of those two splendid decades after the passage of suffrage when female power ran the gamut from Martha Graham to Joan Crawford.

While growing up, I was inundated with detestably perky, button-nosed blondes like Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee, who seemed like sticky, walking marshmallows. (As an adult, I learned to appreciate the talents of all three women.) Barbra Streisand's arrival on the scene in the early 1960s was revolutionary: That aggressive beak of a nose, which she refused to change, was the prow of the battleship of the New Woman, whose feisty spirit preceded the feminist organizations that are falsely credited with all the energy, aspirations and achievements of my generation.

My opinion is that a strong woman should have a strong nose. Look at Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Maria Callas, Joan Baez, Betty Friedan, Monica Vitti, Raquel Welch, Princess Diana, Sandra Bernhard, Niki Taylor. Now look at Meg Ryan -- no, don't! Thank God for Heroin Chic, after the Meg Ryan era of Saccharine Snippiness.

I'm concerned about young girls having nose jobs too early and getting stuck for life with unfixably juvenile features. Even Cher, who had a fabulous, haughty profile, succumbed to the social pressure and dully evened her nose out at midlife. Downtown Julie Brown is another fashion victim: She was very striking when first on MTV after emigrating from England but then immediately bobbed her nose. Now Courtney Love has done the same thing and reportedly has had to be dissuaded from a second operation -- the Michael Jackson Surgical Addiction Syndrome.

Actresses are very short-sighted when they over-reduce their noses to get cutesy, ingénue roles. Michele Lee and Connie Sellecca are good examples of handsome women whose forceful, ethnic features have matured dramatically but who are stuck with the teeny-bopper pug noses that won them early popularity. The great roles for adult actresses -- Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Strindberg's Miss Julie -- require strong, assertive noses.

As an Italian-American, my premises are usually Mediterranean. I've always loved the aquiline Roman nose of senators and generals, as well as the sharp Greek nose, extending evenly without a break from the brow, that one sees on ancient statues of the Olympian gods. It's interesting that you mention Gillian Anderson, since strangers often tell my partner, Alison Maddex, that she resembles Anderson's Scully. All the women I've been involved with in a major way have had strong noses; it seems to be one of my romantic motifs.

Until women in the television and film industry come to their senses and stop mutilating their noses, America will be stuck with this bunny-rabbit model of womanhood -- harmless, appealing and hopelessly fluffy. The Woman Who Would Be President knows better: Gov. Christine Todd Whitman may take that Duke of Wellington profile right into the Oval Office. (Paglia)

* * *

* * *

Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over… (Paglia)

* * *

Lady Gaga - who, I think, makes some wonderful pop songs - is "of her age" in a way that the poor provocateur Camille Paglia may not "get" inasmuch as Gaga's whole schtick involves the anticipation of their complex, contradictory, and perhaps overemphasized interpretations (as with reversible films). Aside from the best hooks in contemporary pop music that I know, outside of the New Pornographers & La Roux (not that I'm an expert or even a good pretender to such a thing), Gaga's music and her personality are interesting in that they are aware of the "think pieces" that are to have been written about her. It's not that she's not shallow, or still a mere product of the spectacle, but she's so in a way that deserves a certain amount of credit ...

Right to Left

2010-09-10T13:20:00.004-04:00

From a Tiny Little Bird

2010-09-04T02:19:00.001-04:00

Believe Your Eyes

2010-09-03T10:23:00.000-04:00

"There has never been so much talk about 'the power of the image' since it has ceased to have any. The overwhelming majority of 'images' which have currency on television nowadays are less those which might possess any intrinsic strength than those which represent power and which 'work' for it as 'brand images' work for a company. It is strange that we have needed a war in order to re-discover that the image was also ever a lure (Lacan was interested in animal mimicry, in the eyelets on the peacock's tail and their grotesque manner of 'giving the eye'). A lure meant as a decoy, to divert attention and gain time. Advertising, for example, is less about inculcating selling reflexes than about indicating the power of paying a lot for a space with the sole purpose of no one else occupying it." (Serge Daney, from Cinema-in-Transit)

The old, "naive" realist-belief in an image, or of an image, still resides in the gray area where one isn't sure of what is being faked, or of what might happen: bills & coins flushed down the toilet in The Seventh Continent, footage of pets being (possibly) tortured, moments in which we cannot discern between an actor's emotions and a character's - not simply that we are unable to, but that there is even no hope of an abstract distinction. Fear in the eyes. This takes a certain liberality or magnificence on the part of the filmmaker; it is the artistic counterpart to advertising's own implicit indicating of "the power of paying a lot for a space."

The circus ring, and the caravan of trailers & tents, provide a set of metaphors for cinema to remark upon its own assemblage of attractions - bad films set in or around a circus can be unbearable, unless they're bizarrely, grotesquely fascinating (like with the Joan Crawford vehicle Berserk!); notable films of course like Lola Montes and I Clowns pop up from time to time; and then there's Rivette's 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup, which reserves its footage of in-the-ring performance itself for these dizzying, terrifying moments of uncertainty. (Plus, Sergio Castellito with a suitcase full of plates provides one of the bigger laughs I've had at the movies in weeks.) Rivette is the master of the slow burn, I think because he is also its most dedicated, humble student.

Vicious

2010-08-31T23:12:00.001-04:00

"To transform oneself into a corpse, a martyr, or something formless and repellent is not a matter of expiating a collective evil but recalling its existence. These simulated remains do not aim to be hidden bodies (that would amount to making them all over again) but instead manifest as best they can the moral infection that propagates itself beginning with the moment of the Nazi death camps." (Brenez on Ferrara, p. 152)

In White Hunter Black Heart Clint Eastwood, who essentially plays John Huston, in a minor way tries to exorcise the demons or zombies of Nazism through a bit of black humor (see); again and again World War II, and the Holocaust, offer themselves or are offered up as the central pivot against which the cinema measures itself. Recently I took another look at a different postwar Huston - not The African Queen - but Key Largo, which is my favorite of the early Hustons by some margin. (Not that I have quite seen all of them.) A postwar ex-major without home or career finds his way down to the Florida Keys to see the widow of his old buddy & her invalid father-in-law. Their hotel is commandeered by Edward G. Robinson, whose villainous 1930s Hollywood legacy welcomes itself to the home of a certain stance of postwar realism (location shooting and/or its simulacrum, and relatively respectful/liberal "local color").

Heidegger, 1949: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same thing as the blockade and starvation of the countryside, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." (See also Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command.)

(Back) across 110th St ...

... down to the Bowery, and beyond.

And then:

If you compare early sleazy genre films by Ferrara to comparable projects, like the queasily-entertaining Vice Squad (dir. Gary Sherman, 1982), you may see where the differences between the good & the great inhere. Ferrara cuts to the root of an image, a sound, or a desire, like a notable poet is supposed to cut to the root of a sound or a word; his films are intriguing because they rise above being only symptomatic in a rich or sophisticated or enjoyable way. (Though in some contexts, in some conversations, I might well defend these latter kinds of films, too.) Ferrara takes us to a source, to the place where the stream might be redirected, even if only - for now - in our imaginations.

"I don't know why you do it, Walsh. You'll never change the streets." (Princess in Vice Squad)

Image of the Day

2010-08-28T10:00:00.000-04:00