Occupied & Liberated

Some recent film viewing on 'occupation' and 'liberation' in some sense or another. Eddie Romero's Filipino-American low-budget action film The Ravagers (1965) is a run-of-the-mill work, but has a little interest. The romantic content, such as it is, comes between a white American woman (Bronwyn Fitzsimmons) and a Filipino man (Fernando Poe, Jr.), instead of with John Saxon as I personally would have been led to believe. So I am curious the extent to which Filipino films (although Romero was always insistent on his films being American productions, wasn't he?) would depict these sorts of interracial attractions (in The Ravagers it's all very tame, and nothing conclusive is shown). Was it a mark of progressive thinking to cross racial/ethnic/national boundaries? A mark of wishful thinking on the part of Filipinos towards a dominant American culture? (The Americans are the good guys here, of course: it's a WWII narrative with Japanese soldiers occupying a convent.) Maybe it was simply par for the course? Or maybe something entirely different?

There's a shot near the end of the film when three Filipino/American soldiers (among them Poe and Saxon) stand on a beach, and they're framed so that Poe is in the background, but he's also in the middle of the frame, and I realized that there was a simultaneous focus in the shot, with Saxon's commanding figure holding forth a certain sense of authority on the left edge of the frame, while Poe's body is the balance point, and the locus for the subtextual romance. I don't want to get too "postcolonial lit crit" on everyone, but for a single shot, there's a two-pronged meaning that's sociopolitically fascinating. We've got an iteration of white American 'big brotherism' as well as a certain gesture towards Third World autonomy (i.e., "they" get "their own" protagonist, uncastrated, civilized, appealing). The final shot of the film is an eerily ambiguous one wherein the sillhouettes of Poe and Fitzsimmons stand on the beach, several yards between them, staring at each other. There's a big question mark as to what their attraction means, and as to what it might mean. It was worth watching this whole mediocre (yet not bad) film for these final fascinating moments.

A different kind of occupation than that of Japanese imperialists and American liberators is the one that factory workers practice in the "narrative" of Godard & Gorin's amazing Tout va bien (1972). After having toiled outside the realm of Dziga Vertov agitation (oh, these films that I will finally see, albeit in diluted forms--more on that soon!), Godard had his "comeback" of sorts, although of course it didn't work well with audiences. What I like so very much about this film is how directly Godard & Gorin tackle the question of living politically, as I guess I'd phrase it. What does one do in the event of a strike but watch, try to learn some things? Having been personally, if not seriously, affected by two strikes recently (the NYU graduate teaching strike and the New York transit workers' strike) I've seen how vilely management and the media can attack workers--"selfish thugs" is a label somehow fairly attached to a worker putting his or her ass on the line, but never bandied about against the likes of Metro Transit Authority's upper echelons! So in Tout va bien, Yves Montand and Jane Fonda simply sit and watch and talk a little bit about what's going on around them--the bickering workers and their grievances, the caricature of a manager, the pettiness in gargantuan struggles (and vice versa). J. Hoberman's Criterion essay says that it's about celebrity, and the politicization of celebrity, but I think it's more about the transformation of consciousness from formlessness to political purpose, which is why Godard and Gorin make a point, in the end, of stressing that films show problems being solved one at a time, but in reality, there are a lot of struggles--major and minor, sexual, domestic, careerist--that one must negotiate in order to make any progress. I guess there's a pretty simple moral lesson towards which Tout va bien culimates, but it's at least a lesson about possibilities, sustainable and practical growth, which I find both comforting and motivating.

The fact that I'm not bemoaning this film's "datedness" or its tired communist ethos suggests, however, that I'm really out of lockstep, and out on a limb. Still, these are where my sympathies reside, and what can I really do about it ... ?

If readers may not want to get behind me on Tout va bien, let me push another slightly obscure leftist classic (unless of course you're really into leftist classics, in which case it's not obscure!), Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's It Happened Here (1966). This superb film is a fiction, shot in a highly 'documentary' key, which shows a Britain overtaken by the Nazis in World War II, and largely "laying down" in order to keep law and order. (Though more low-key, I think it's even better than Renoir's This Land Is Mine, and Brownlow & Mollo have the luxury of hindsight, which gives the film a meditative intellectual resonance we can't expect Renoir's firestorm to have had.) One character in the film, with "partisan" sympathies, gives a great little speech to the effect of, 'The awful thing about fascism is that you must be a little fascist to fight it. There's a little bit in all of us, and it's easy to bring out. It must be guarded against vigilantly, it's a disease of the mind.' Brownlow & Mollo--who are truly excellent filmmakers, this and Winstanley cement their names in British cinema history--make some of the most effective political cinema I know. Their images are spare, the photography as clean as the budget will allow (and the attention to "period details" in the production design appears meticulous); the acting is enviably "artless." The editing tends to produce a rhythm, a serene forward march which Brownlow & Mollo, as storytellers, match stride for stride with the movements of the characters. (The protagonist, a nurse, goes through a gray area, in sympathy, between Nazis and partisans.)

What's so sad--and I really was deeply moved by this film which engages in no histrionics, no pathos--is how matter-of-factly it depicts everything, so that we understand the desperation occurring in the actions onscreen, even if the characters don't. It Happened Here shows people, under the direct and dangerous threat of fascism, caving in to the conformism Tout va bien agitates its viewers to fight against.

Music: Gal Costa

Many weeks back a reader of this blog asked if I would be willing to do a write-up on favorite albums, personally meaningful ones. (Who was this reader? Well, if the name 'St-Germain' means anything to you, you're one of the lucky ones who know [of] the person who was quite probably the keenest cinephile of my generation. He's pulled a Terrence Malick in the world of film criticism, though!) I've been sitting on this request for some time now, thinking of which albums I would choose, and what I'd write about them. I can, and will, talk about the music's personal meaning to me, but I'd like to take a stab at the music itself, too. The problem is, it's very difficult to do this, as I am not the most musically inclined person in the world ... so if you choose to read this entry, and others like it, please be patient with me!

Gal Costa's Índia (Philips, 1973) is the first album of Brazilian music that I have "discovered" of my own accord. I sought it out online, downloaded the album, loved it, and got rid of that burned CD to buy the actual thing. I'd had recommendations before--globetrotting cinephile of Brazilian extraction Gabe Klinger once generously handed off to me a mix CD of Tropicália classics, a co-worker recommended to me Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges' album Clube da Esquina, and hey, I've also seen Carlos Diegues' famous, mildly entertaining and highly musical films (including, twice, Quilombo with its indispensible music by the man who is today the coolest Minister of Culture ever). You get the picture. But while this exposure is probably respectable for the average American, it still leaves me quite clueless with respect to the formal, historical, and sociopolitical currents that shaped and were shaped by Brazilian popular music of the 1960s and 1970s. So the following thoughts are going to come necessarily from the mouth of someone who not only understands only about 5-10% of what Costa is singing (my reading comprehension of Portuguese is a little higher so at least I could track down lyrics if I tried...) but wouldn't even know how to place it into a larger context if I could understand the words.

My favorite track is "Milho Verde" and it exemplifies a lot of what I love about this album--a certain musical idea (a phrase, a tone of voice) is pulled and stretched in a folk/popular composition that veers in a lot of directions, quite unlike a 'verse-verse-chorus' of much popular Euro-North American music at the time. I wish more catchy pop songs would do precisely this: float around for three minutes, introduce a new rhythm or some altered facet of tone or timbre late into the song, and maybe repeat this process once or twice more. The song becomes more like a journey or a meditation--an experience--than a compact message. The percussive syncopation (at least I think this qualifies as syncopation--recall I don't know what I'm talking about!) that underscores Costa's ecstatic, sweet-voiced delivery makes for something stimulating to both the hips and the head. As with many of the tracks (like "Relance") Costa picks out a quick musical phrase and voices it repeatedly, letting the processes of repetition and gradual/drastic changes provide the drama of the piece.

So what I essentially love about this album is the beauty of Costa's voice used in conjunction, and sometimes counterpoint, with the catchy but still sometimes 'prickly' beats and progressions over which she sings. I would love to hear what else I'm missing, what I'm making too big a deal out of (for I'm certain that I'm picking up on things and praising them in the same way a film rookie would praise an old noir for being "dark"!). And more Brazilian music recommendations are always welcome ...

Year's End

I've been something less than consistent in keeping up with email and the Internet over the past week or more. But I hope to get back into the swing of things fully a few days into January. This blog entry will be my obligatory best-of-the-year rundown. Since I didn't really see many 2005 releases (almost all of those that I did see were DVD viewings at my family's place during the last two holiday breaks), I definitely cannot offer a "top ten of 2005." However, I saw something approaching 350 films this year (including shorts and repeat viewings, but I didn't pad the list with either!), there were plenty of older works to enjoy and savor.

Film of the Year - A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974). I watched this alone, late at night, on DVD. Cassavetes is the supreme welder of the appearance of "documentary truth" with the cinematic potential offered by the performative-plastic.

Masterpieces - Know that this is not quite a complete list; I'm sure I skipped over a few when I ran through my film log; first viewings only - On Top of the Whale: A Film About Survival (Raúl Ruiz, 1982); My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946); Les Maîtres fous (Jean Rouch, 1955); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962); Epileptic Seizure Comparison (Paul Sharits, 1976 - mentioned in the Liberty Valance link as well); Ugetsu monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953); A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956); An American Romance (King Vidor, 1944); The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972); Black Ice (Stan Brakhage, 1994 - only on DVD, but this is the only film of Brakhage's I've seen just on DVD and suspected I still was "getting it"); The End (Christopher Maclaine, 1953 - but really all of Maclaine's film work, probably an oeuvre of four films second only to Vigo's); Docteur Chance (F.J. Ossang, 1997); Le Voyage à travers l'impossible (Georges Méliès, 1904); The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton, 1928); Carriage Trade (Warren Sonbert, 1973); The Loyal 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1941-42); The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960); The Long Gray Line (John Ford, 1955). The majority of these are major films by pantheon filmmakers, so no surprises here, except perhaps a few like Maclaine or Ossang.

Special mention goes to Dieter Roth's overwhelming installation Solo Scenes (1997-98), which isn't cinema, exactly. A great, great work anyway.

And of course, these were only the masterpieces amidst a whole ocean of exceptionally worthy films I saw, from which I'll mention five standouts:

Dark Horses - five near masterpieces (at least!) whose status took me at least a little by surprise - Bandits of Orgosolo (Vittorio De Seta, 1961); Winstanley (Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, 1975); Blanche (Walerian Borowczyk, 1971); Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936); Street Angel (Yuan Muzhi, 1937).

And this represents only a fraction of my filmic passions over the last year. What about Donovan's Reef (Ford, 1963)? Coffin Joe? Edward Yang's The Terrorizer (1986)? Artavazd Peleshian? A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971)? The bizarre mindfuck Three Crowns of the Sailor (Ruiz, 1983)? Cassavetes' Love Streams (albeit on pan-and-scan video--I forgot about the BAM screening a few weeks ago until it was too late!)? Strike! by Eisenstein? Naruse? Guru Dutt? Kawashima Yuzo's Not Long After Leaving Shinegawa (1957)? I could go on ...

But that was the best of my year in film-viewing.

Cinephile Business: Key Texts

(Be forewarned: I had some weird formatting issues with this entry, maybe because I saved it as a draft several times, so there may be strange text colors or line breaks that I can't figure out how to fix.)

Inspired by conversation at Esoteric Rabbit, I wanted to put down an annotated list of really important cinephilic documents for me. That is, I want to mention the works that have had a major effect on me which are about--explicitly or heavily implicitly--the practice of cinephilia itself, and the related fields of film scholarship & criticism. This could be a really interminable blog entry, but I'll genuinely try not to make it too long.

The first thing to understand is the presence of critical figures whose entire bodies of work have made them exemplars in some way or another. This means that I can mention a few "big" or personally meaningful articles but really must point to their entire "aura," and more than single articles or books or essays, I'm going to discuss people, writers. Reading a lot of their work, cutting a swath across their publications, is probably the best way to get a sense of where I'm coming from. (Sorry, Girish, that this can't be more concise and accessible! I did try to make it a list of single texts with commentary, but just kept getting carried away, in draft after draft.)

So: Jonathan Rosenbaum was a huge formative one around the time of my cinephilia's birth (as opposed to my broader enthusiasm for film or movies--'98-'99 as opposed to '95). That means: the reviews (Dead Man, Small Soldiers/Saving Private Ryan, Eyes Wide Shut, and Taste of Cherry especially) and the polemical essays which accompanied his treasure trove lists (especially the '96-'99 lists and perhaps most especially his Alternate 100 Best American Films).

After this, there were other figures connected to Movie Mutations (perhaps the central text on cinephilia, and I mean its general importance for me, not necessarily the degree of its alignment with my own feelings on the subject). Adrian Martin and Nicole Brenez are the two whose work I have latched onto the most (though let me stress that Alex Horwath & Kent Jones are hardly unimportant to me!).

Overall what I respond to is the passion and commitment with which they energetically tackle areas that mainstream movie culture would have us believe are high-and-mighty, esoteric and arcane, and barred so that non-specialists cannot enter. Witness the freedom in Adrian's first letter, when he says the early 1980s (when he would be roughly my age as I write this now!) brought him treasures from Marker, Wenders, Godard, Ruiz, et al.:

Suddenly here were the films playing right outside the maps of 70s' theory: free, lyrical, tender, poetic films, but also tough, savage, cruel, perverse, sometimes violent films; films that were open diagrams, unashamed to link up raw fragments of human (or humanist) experience with the most severe or expansive kinds of experiments with form. These discoveries got drawn into a rich historical loop, too: suddenly I and my friends were seeing afresh the films of Jean Vigo, Humphrey Jennings, and especially that unique pre-nouvelle vague figure, Jean Rouch.

Or Brenez's anecdotes about the Daney student whose tears she had to erase (over lemonades) after Daney said that the cinema would die; or the itinerary about her young cinephile-friends ("They get up in the morning (around noon), watch films over breakfast (on video) ..."). I don't have the same cinema-all-day life as these latter cinephile youths, but I want to share in that same intensity of focus, that same deep profession of love for film (and video).

Perhaps even more, from Brenez's letter, is her articulations of her own practice (I'll return to this in a subsequent post), such as when she writes about her work on Lon Chaney, and asserts, "[H]ow can one explain that the tools of psychoanalysis, such as castration and incorporation, do not encompass the inventions of Lon Chaney, but rather that Chaney opens a new field in matters of understanding the body?" Or the glee and sense of community she projects when (in her letter in the second Movie Mutations relay) she talks about the rebirth and proliferation of Epsteinian avant-garde cinema in France.

The past two years especially have seen some remarkable developments, I think--or maybe I've just been paying attention to them, finally. For one thing, there has been the rise to some prominence in English-language cinephile culture the work of Olaf Möller, who has been a blessed gadfly and indeed also a sort of singular (and contradictory?) combination of bulimic-skeptic with a self-appointed missionary role. (See Matt's Esoteric Rabbit entry linked above if this doesn't make sense!) A lot of the heroes of the Movie Mutations-crowd, like Hou, Kiarostami, and Denis, have become ensconced in contemporary canons of many critics and cinephiles, quite the opposite of the uphill battle Rosenbaum and others had to fight in the 1990s. I like the fact that Möller, in his Olaf's World columns for Film Comment, in his Books Around column for Cinema-Scope, in his Senses of Cinema top ten lists, and in a recent mother-of-an-essay he wrote for a Serbian magazine, is doing everything he can to keep cinephilia from being complacent, from growing ossified--it's a sign, and a truly exemplary one for me, to never let us wax lazy and sluggish in our own practices. Ultimately, what this essential-for-me triumvirate of Möller, Martin, and Brenez emphasize is that cinephilia is alive above all things, active and reactive to the world around it--socially, politically, ethically, historically, aesthetically, everything.

When Quintín writes his Anorexic's Case Against Uchida Tomo, and sets himself against a lot of practices I support, but this is one of the key recent texts on cinephilia because it draws some lines in the sand, delineating the emphases certain camps hold, without really devolving into an us-them battle mentality. As a friend suggested, it's a sign of Quintín's intelligence (and integrity, I'd add) that he acknowledges at his article's end that he may well be wrong.

Also recently, as I've already written about here, Andrew Grossman's very long essays and articles have been indispensible. The first part of his essay on Tsui Hark, which deals little with Tsui Hark, is amazing. And his long essay, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Ho Meng-hua," is superb and, like his other Bright Lights essays, productively questions a lot of accepted critical, academic, and cinephilic practices.

OK, I'm getting way too long-winded here, so let me just unceremoniously wrap this up with a few more names and texts: Nicole Brenez's "Ultimate Journey" essay and her "Vogel Call," and Tag Gallagher on auteurism, Adrian's report on the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival, and Robert B. Ray's book How a Film Theory Got Lost (which I must admit I don't own). These are some of the most meaningful texts to me on (or at least tangentially about) cinephilia itself. I'd be happy to elaborate or add more choices in the comments ...

The Long Gray Line (1955)

Just a few quick thoughts. This is probably the first bona fide masterpiece I've watched since The Cloud-Capped Star. I'm not giving away huge spoilers but if you'd rather see the movie first before hearing certain plot points, please see the movie ASAP! It's worth it ...

The moment when Marty (Power) & Mary (O'Hara) first meet is amazing. His marriage proposal to her, later in the film, is equally amazing. It was while watching this that I realized the extent to which John Ford's direction of actors is so deliberately his own. The proposal takes place on a porch bench. Up until this scene in the film O'Hara hasn't spoken a word, steadfastly so. Marty decides he's going to give her one last shot, he wants only two words from her: "Yes or no." (You can guess what she says out of the blue.) Ford has his actors sit straight, staring ahead and not really looking at each other, instead looking in the direction of the camera, eyes wide. They only turn to each other when their animated fury and passion insist on it. It's a moment like this--a moment when the turning of the earth is felt in the lives of the characters--where Ford always has them look off, gaze away from the substance of the illusory material life the film-narrative represents, and gaze into the suggestive unknown in the camera's offspace. The same effect is given in Ford's work within the frame when characters gaze at signs of dead loved ones, whether it's Nathan Brittles at his wife's grave in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or where Spencer Tracy's character looks at (I think) his late wife's portrait in the hallway.

The night when Marty & Mary's son is born and the (much later) Christmas night when West Point cadets crowd Marty's home are linked by the same song, which takes on multi-faceted resonance due to the circumstances around each social celebration, where loneliness is the acutely felt elephant in the room.

Maureen O'Hara is immortal, in case you didn't know. She counts as one of those cinema axioms, I'd say. There's a scene where the cadets are rushing off and she tries happily to swat one on the behind, and basically misses, and it's in the graceful arc of her swing, as well as the camera nonchalantly capturing her failure to really connect, that we get a glimpse of what Serge Daney might have referred to as the quickness of Ford's camera, where the blink of an eye brings you the world in a Fordian frame, but it's over before you can feel and realize it simultaneously. Which is why time crushes all, and why for Ford life in all its vibracy is still dwarfed by death.

John Ford ... Forever?

I feel about John Ford something like the way Armond White feels about Steven Spielberg, although hopefully I can be a bit more flexible in my thinking. If someone has a looming directorial presence writ large--larger in magnitude than anyone else--over their psychic geography of Hollywood, I suspect the choice of that presence says a lot about the person's view of Hollywood cinema (and its most positive potential) in general. For more people than any other figure, this single presence is doubtless Hitchcock, which is why there is so much written about him--and because Hitchcock deals with elements that happen to be ripe for analysis at the tools readily available for the academic and critical fields, he's had his lease on the pantheon slot renewed several times over.

This isn't quite the case with Ford, whose body of work is no more or less complex than Hitchcock's, but whose body of work is also hard to dissect and make sense of through the tools given us in film studies and film criticism from structuralism, from psychoanalysis, from "genre studies" and "star studies." Ford doesn't navigate these paths as much as Hitchcock. He does deal a lot with race, gender, and ethnicity. But the fact that his films constantly present culturally conservative stereotypes of such things--and sometimes, quite arguably, do so uncritically--tends to stifle analysis in depth of these elements, as scholars skim the surface of the work in order to decide how to best condemn Ford for his racist complicity or celebrate him for his heartfelt tolerance. Even so, as it stands Ford is still a great mystery to us, or at least he should be if we're paying close attention to his work.

In a film like The Long Gray Line--a masterpiece that left me humbled--we can see the huge swaths of material left unexamined if we limit our analysis (and our evaluation) to the matrix of race/class/gender, Mulveyan voyeurship, and bourgeois aesthetics. A textured ode to military life (and by extension, as most such odes are, to governmental military policy and abstract concepts like patriotism, sacrifice, and duty), The Long Gray Line, a "true story," focuses on the 50-year-career of an Irish immigrant who comes to West Point and spends his life there as an enlisted man and instructor (played by Tyrone Power). He sees his cadets grow up, learns some die in both World Wars, and along the way he marries a fine Irish immigrant girl herself (played by--who else!?--Maureen O'Hara). It could well be a recruitment film, especially story alone, but the important thing to keep in mind is that in the experience of a Ford film--for me at least, and for many others, I know--one doesn't take away any new or renewed faith in the often-conservative institutions and ideologies he depicts. One takes away, instead, an understanding of the working of these systems, the dynamics of them that have an impact on the characters' (and thus our) inner lives. This is something like the Straub-recognized "objectivity" they bestow upon their hero Ford, which I always hear about. Likewise one feels the effects of time, sees in it the spectral visage of our dead loved ones, our cherished outmoded traditions. Ford's cinema is a profound reminder of the eternal and preordained victory of unbeing, and the absoluteness of existence's transience.

Time and again Ford presents us above all with the private or social rituals people perform while they await collective death. (Though this collective death is often not the diegetic subject of the storylines, it is the implicit and palpable "untranscendable horizon" of the artworks.) The passage of time is crueler in Ford's work than anyone else's I can call to mind. The barely-retained veneer that Ford's reputation has as something of a sentimentalist (whose alleged sentimentalism we might excuse due to his "aesthetic greatness" and/or "historical importance") is misguided, I think. A lot of filmmakers who deal with death, pain, transgression, violence are in fact great celebrators of life and vitality: Imamura, Miike, Buñuel, others. Not to put too Eurocentric a spin on all this, but for shorthand we might say that these are the figures whose Nietzschean "fullness of pessimism" makes their cup runneth over. They throw into sharper relief their main concerns by concentrating on its constant negation. (A fleeting quote I remember reading or hearing somewhere: 'Pain lets you know you're alive.') Inversely Ford's parades and picnics, dances and broguish pub tussles, all work in counterpoint to their imminent destruction, their eventual total loss to unbeing itself, relieved only finitely by memories (individual and social) in the minds of the characters who inhabit Ford's world. Which is why Ford's traditions, and his institutions & ideologies that are in fact conservative to our progressive, enlightened laserbeam eyesight, speak not of complicity with the System, but as testament to its recurring processes of construction and destruction through the march of time.

And so when the System--when institutions of patriarchy or what have you--come in, through Ford's work, it is as an object of people rather than nature, progressively enough. And empathy and sympathy for the characters in these films (who in The Long Gray Line follow with human pathos the strict, traditional militarism of West Point) do not equate to our mutual complicity with their agendas, because it is Ford who so singularly lays bare the workings of all such agendas.

I Almost Knocked Down Henry Kissinger

No joke.

I heard about it first this afternoon at the Dosa Guy--some big function to be held at NYU's law school across the street tonight. A former Mexican president, the current Colombian president, and Henry Kissinger were to be among the attendees.

So after staying late at work I was in a hurry to get to the subway. Walking fast along West 4th St. in front of the law school I was ready to zip behind three fellows as they exited a car to head into the law school. One of them stopped and gestured to his companion behind him to return to the car for something. Because he stopped, my trajectory and his trajectory were to have met if I didn't slow down. I awkwardly slammed on the foot-brakes a pace or two in front of him.

It was after I stopped that I realized this damn-tourist-who-didn't-know-how-to-walk was none other than former Secretary of State and Nixon lackey Henry Kissinger. After a moment I walked on, stunned and incredulous.

Did I do the right thing by stopping my stride?

Critics I Like: Jit Phokaew

Unfortunately the (English-language) material available by Jit Phokaew of Bangkok is limited: from what I can find, it consists entirely of one short piece on Bulle Ogier and a bunch of lists (usually with commentary) for Senses of Cinema. So go there, do a search on him, and find what thou wilt.

What I have found is a cinephile with a truly devotional relationship to the cinema in all its forms. He celebrates Rivette, Duras, and a number of independent films I've often never heard of from all corners of the globe (and his favorite director is registered in his all-time list as Derek Jarman) and yet mentions his favorite developments in some recent subgenre or national cinema (Argentine films; or: "Genre films that I liked very much this year include So Close (Corey Yuen, 2002) and Naked Weapon (Ching Siu-tung, 2002) in the female-action genre...").

Thus he's made something of an art of list-making, concocting "20 favorites" or so with pithy commentary that shows he keeps his fingers on many pulses. One of the most tantalizing titles he mentions: Birth of the Seanema (Sasithorn Ariyavicha, 2004): "This is my favorite Thai film ever. I think Sasithorn deserves to be ranked alongside Maya Deren, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman, and Su Friedrich as one of the most talented and uncompromising female filmmakers."

(By the way, I'm only erring on the side of caution, due to the preponderance among websurfing cinephiles, by referring to Jit Phokaew as a male--I don't know anything about Thai names and perhaps this Critic I Like is a woman?)

I Think I Must See These Films

While I should have been focusing more attention on Christmas shopping this weekend, I gleefully pawed my way through super-cheap East Asian DVDs at a store a block up the Bowery from Lai Ying. Only now do I see and regret some more of the vast fields I have left untilled! As a teenager I would rent the occasional Wu Tang dubbed VHS, and I quite liked Tsui Hark (of the handful I saw, The Blade above all), and I otherwise just sort of skimmed the thinnest layer of the most well-known cult/genre/exploitation/alternative commercial cinemas of the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. But I certainly didn't learn it, in part because I was--and still am--not really able to identify with the cultish brands of videophilia that mark those fantastic magazines like Video Watchdog and Asian Cult Movies.

Now I want to be a fellow traveler in these circles.

So, high on the agenda for viewing sometime in the first months of 2006 are Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters, and Yokai Monsters: Along with Ghosts. Just as I must also see Miike's newest (released in Japan this summer) The Great Yokai War, inspired by films like these. (I feel bad that I missed Izo, but it was showing at the IFC some months back, and that place is not getting my money. But I guess I will shell out $6 or $16 for a DVD if I don't find it to rent at TLA.) What to do with these films, which have no reputation in Western mainstream or intellectual film culture, which will not help me advance myself as a critic or a scholar (unless I decide that kaiju-films and related areas are part of my "turf")? Why see them, let alone spend time thinking about them before I even get to see them? I've never gone so far into myself as a cinephile to forget that life is short and seeing that scarce print of a Lubitsch silent (or something) is not the worst thing that can happen. At the same time, part of really being a cinephile involves re-incorporating yourself and your cinephilia back into that "real world," that external world for which the lights don't dim, and to be good at that--to justify it beyond being a coach potato with good taste in entertainment--one needs some focus, some faith, some intensity, a certain degree of purpose and vision.

Good examples and some of the answers can be found in a matrix between Olaf Möller, Adrian Martin, and Nicole Brenez, among many others. With the latter two we have the quote from Adrian that Matt Clayfield reprinted in a comment on this blog, and of course Brenez's amazing counterintuitive proposition that the most important films are the ones we don't even know or see. Möller, a madman and a fine cinephile-critic (well anyone who reads this blog knows my opinion of him), always comes up with words of wisdom of his own, which come from his own experience but to other people about the relationship between film, cinephilia, and the world. I'm still coming to terms with it, but there's something big he's getting at here in his article on Farocki and the Filmkritik stable, which speaks to the way I'm dealing with films these days:

Ultimately there is, after all, a “ghostly apparition”. In Imaginäre Architektur (Imaginary Architecture, Germany 1994), Bitomsky uses multiple exposures in an attempt to bring into view various gazes in houses designed by Scharoun. It remains only an attempt, and Bitomsky thematises his “failure”. However, these multiple exposures become spectral images, shots of what we can't see and yet is there, never really tangible, a phantom without circumstantial evidence hence powerfully suggestive.

Living with films, a little the way one lives with music, a little the way it looks in 3 American LPs: looking at the world from a balcony, listening to Van Morrison, who is describing the way things are, then seeing it so.

It's easy to do that with the Filmkritik films, as a cinephile. A good many have videocassettes with films by Farocki, Bitomsky, Bühler and/or Thome right at the front in the video cabinet, clearly visible, clearly accessible; when they come home at night, alone, yet again, depending on how dark the mood they're in, they take a look at Highway 40 West – Reise in Amerika, at Kinostadt Paris (Film City Paris), or Leben – BRD. Thome, especially Berlin Chamissoplatz (W. Germany 1980), Das Mikroskop (The Microscope, W. Germany 1987), Der Philosoph (The Philosopher, W. Germany 1988) and Liebe auf den ersten Blick (Love at first sight, Germany 1991), is rather dangerous in such hours of bleak despondency. One holds these films dear, and with them the self-portraits of their auteurs, and their surrounds.

And I think I must see these films, also.

Cine-Reflections

Some thoughts of a clouded mind trying to reach that which is the title of this blog.

I write lately about my experiences with, and baby steps toward knowledge about, Indian films in basically a same way a little kid will show you a new coloring book: it's an undiluted (perhaps unwisely so) expression of satisfaction and happiness at the accumulation of something new and fascinating. (The Soviet experiences seem less new to me, since I already knew some of the films and the history and the mythology.) Call it the joy of learning. I wonder if many people who read this blog (or is that phrase "many people" oxymoronic here) actually care about these experiences. In the end, who will both see Roja and read this blog except for a tiny handful of people, at best? And I do not expect it to happen, either. For myself, I have not bothered to see e.g. A History of Violence, a recent hot topic for film-and-culture bloggers. (And on top of this I quite like Cronenberg. As for other hot topics in recent months, I won't see these Showtime horror films in the very near future. Or Brokeback Mountain. I did see No Direction Home, but basically declined comment on that one.) So in a way I must content myself with the very aloneness of my voice. I do sometimes mumble quietly to myself when I walk down the street alone, lost in thought, and I promise I'm not crazy.

At my friend's apartment last night I raided his small but good collection of Indian DVDs (some Raj Kapoor titles, Mughal-e-Azam, Guide, some others). He was telling me that part of the experience of seeing these Bollywood films, in the age before DVD especially, involved getting awful dubs and bootlegs from the store and watching them. And I said, "That's also what I'm interested in! Because it's not only seeing how films are intended to be seen, but also experiencing the alternate ways in which they are often seen." Or, when I asked him about Gujarati films, which is the language of his parents and grandparents, he mentioned how awful they tended to be (but I say that a whole new world of mediocrity and awfulness is somethign to experience!). This is important not because it's big business, which it is (and which is why I'm spending little money on it), but because it's a widespread cultural experience. Something like a billion people watch South Asian cinema: can any cinephile with interest in the world at large feel content passing over this rich tradition? I didn't feel like I could, at any rate.

For several years (in college) I tried with limited success to wring out a valuable theory of (tacitly American) commercial cinema, which mainly meant skimming mainstream and genre work which had redemptive auteurist value. Some months ago I started to give the whole question a rest, and resultantly it feels as though I've experienced a touch of unexpected zen. I was not going for a comfortable formula that would let me wallow in Hollywood's funhouse guiltlessly, nor for its opposite, a blanket condemnation of the commercial cinema for being an "enemy of art." (So much great art has been produced throughout history and geography in cultures we'd call quite hostile to "art.") I wanted a viable and complex way of approaching mainstream films and all those films that rest "beneath" it on the cultural radar.

The point, which I didn't see before, is not to base my experience and comprehension of these works in my pleasure, i.e., in my feeling of how a "great" or "interesting" or "bad" commercial/genre film worked. The point is instead to base my pleasure in how these films work, both as formal objects and cultural entities. And this is something I've written about here before, a sense of 'rhetoric' in which the form and material of an artwork is profoundly and intimately tied to larger, external, extra-textual realities and positions. And I can only speak of my own experience here, and haven't figured out yet how to best bridge a gap between myself and someone who will disagree with me. But, to try to clarify things on this end, I want to say that before, I would see an avowedly commercial film (let's say, one of these recent and oddball Spielberg films, like Catch Me If You Can). I liked this film quite a bit, and having liked it, would try to justify it as a great latter-day auteurist expression from this complicated entertainer. (At the time, I was a big proponent of Spielberg and especially a proponent of his weird string of films from A.I. to, well, Catch Me If You Can. Don't ask me where I stand on Spielberg now, because I can't even tell you myself.) I don't think I was wrong to try to justify the film--I think I was missing the opportunity for more productive thought. I didn't ask myself why I liked the film, only what I liked about it. I didn't ask myself why the film was addressing me in the way it did, only what was "good" and internally coherent about its address. In this way I found myself in curious boats with other supporters of the film who "got it" (or so we told ourselves), looking at my other friends adrift across the waves in the anti-Catch Me boat. I was trying to understand better how those of us in my boat felt in our mutual bond, when I should have devoted at least as much energy to throwing a rope over to the other boat. (This metaphor is awful, I know, but it's what I have to work with at the moment.) Concensus needn't be the goal, only meaningful communication and understanding.

Fast-forward to Thanksgiving break when I see War of the Worlds on DVD and think it's dreadful. But I no longer consider myself part of a film culture political war pro- or anti-Spielberg. I'm not interested in trying to force my enjoyment or lack of it, my erudition or lack of it, on anyone else. What I want is to try to find middle grounds between myself and the rest of the world (which is unlike me) and who has an opinion on this film. I don't want my discussion of this film, or even my private thought of this film, to end with, to be rooted in, "It sucks." (Likewise, I don't really want discussion of films I've seen lately and love to be rooted in, "It rocks"--even for that towering achievement, The Cloud-Capped Star.) To decide whether it's right to be endlessly annoyed or tearfully moved by a moment like oft-screaming Dakota Fanning's quiet "Are we dead?" is beyond the point. In this case I may be endlessly annoyed, but I know what it's like to be tearfully moved in a Spielberg film that other people feel endlessly annoyed about. (Just today a co-worker asked my opinion of A.I., which I adore, before largely dismissing it himself.) So I recognize my annoyance, affirm that I'm no more special than any other member in this species, and try to get at the realities and factual roots of this film's existence so that subjective opinion is the vibrant texture of a discussion among people, and not the (flimsy) foundation of our own little floating man-islands.

How do we do this? That's what I'm still pathetically trying to figure out. Perhaps I'm behind the curve but I feel finally like I'm on the right track for wanting to try to do this and not for bickering (within, no doubt, a corporate- and consumerist-approved philosophical matrix) about the merits of "the movies." Cue stirring score, serve popcorn, and roll the Oscar clip. Because I've realized that, the all-powerful market entrenched in place, I hate its merits, and I hate "the movies."

A Few More Points

1. I had never noticed this before, or if I had I'd forgotten it, but Olaf Möller had submitted his favorite films to Senses of Cinema two years ago. An interesting list, with some films I love (like The Thin Red Line or A Touch of Zen) and some films I haven't seen but should have (like The Best Years of Our Lives or This Sporting Life) and some films I just wish I could see (like Operai, contadini and Thomas l'imposteur). And if it's ostensibly his #1 film ever, then now I really, really need to go back and see Kagemusha, a film I remember liking but can't actually remember. I saw it when I was maybe 16. (If you're reading this, Mr. Contreras, perhaps I'll do a double bill of Kagemusha/Throne of Blood.)

2. Chinese films! I've seen only two of the old ones at MoMA so far. Sun Yu's Daybreak ('33), the first I've seen by the director, was decent. Rather simple and straightforward elements, but I appreciated them as mildly abstracted or stylized storytelling rather than 'well-rounded' drama. (Hmph, three dimensions are for bourgeois pigs anyway!) The ending is morbid and fascinating. I was really glad to see Red Heroine (Yimin Wen, '29); the film itself wasn't that impressive, but it was fantastic to see such an early example of the wu xia film. I also recently caught up with Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu ('01) which I liked but didn't flip over. It's a sensitive and nicely realized love story. Now I need to see Kwan's Rouge. Sammo Hung's The Moon Warriors ('93), honestly, exceeded my expectations. I couldn't discern anything special really but this is one of those films, like a good Charles Marquis Warren-directed Western (or maybe a minor De Toth like Thunder Over the Hills or The Stranger Wore a Gun), that simply makes the best case for the existence (and expense) of "generic" entertainment. We (the royal "we" at any rate) are willing to forgive it any number of minor inanities because it possesses no larger crippling stupidity. It's economical, tight storytelling, devoid of pomp and circumstance (except when a little of it might prove pleasurable), eschewing too much button-pushing or audience-corralling, simply letting its images flow one after another in a narrative progression, with a nice simple pattern of threads that may come together or taper off as they will.

3. Fellow New Yorkers: Did the Two Boots Pizza on Bleecker St. go downhill, or has it always sucked and I just never noticed it, or am I just unlucky? Over the past 6-12 months I've been there maybe three times, and each time I've left feeling like I wasted money. Today was the worst instance. (And to think that I passed up a bahn mi sandwich in Chinatown because "Two Boots is closer and I haven't been there in a while.") But the two or three times I'd had Two Boots before this recent period I've always thought it was excellent, and it always seemed fresher.

A Few Points

1. A good blog I just discovered, relevant to one of my chosen objects of study - http://parallelcinema.blogspot.com/ - basically just information and pictures on given Indian movies that don't seem to follow the "six songs, three dances" template.

2. Some filmmakers whose work I wish I could see: Shinsuke Ogawa, Arthur Omar, Mani Kaul, Carmelo Bene, Don Askarian, Mario O'Hara.

3. I hate how some New York Public Library VHS tapes are in fine condition, and others are shitty, and there's no way to tell or even reasonably guess which are which.

4. What's your favorite Russ Meyer film? I've seen maybe four, and like Supervixens and Cherry, Harry & Raquel equally--both solid efforts. Neither quite "list-worthy."

Ethnic, Social, and Political Tension in Cinema

Mani Ratnam's Roja (1992) is quite something; in its first hour especially, before the controversial political content really comes into play, it's virtually a masterpiece of popular cinema (simple, accessible, engaging, and itself engaged, spontaneous, vivid, organic, neither stupid nor lazily formulaic). But while I really liked the film overall I am troubled by its jingoism, where Hindu nationalism trumps ridiculously (but no doubt "humanely") sketched Muslim Kashmiri militant villains. It's political-dramatic resolution is akin to Rocky IV's climactic victory speech, where Sylvester Stallone preaches to a hardass Soviet audience (who were won over by his underdog Uncle Sam can-do spirit) that "If I can change ... and if you can change ... maybe we all can change!" Cheers all around. But what exactly is the point of these easy salves in which all it takes for sociopolitical tension to subside is for "our" good guys and "their" not-quite-bad guys to go through a (masochistically?) painful ordeal and come out ready to gasp their way through a chorus of "We Are the World"? It's almost like these types of entertainment are tiny exorcism-attempts for an embattled collective psyche. (And their real world effect is one of the placebo variety. Or sedative.)

Then there's the preachy Peasants in Distress (1994, pictured above), which features two brief kung fu scenes and a bizarre travelogue-ish coda. Authored by His Majesty Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, its about jealousy and romance among Khmer rebel fighters and two peasants they encounter in the jungle. In it, handsome humanitarian rebel Cheyrith picks up cute peasant-girl Nit. But fellow rebel, and rival officer, Mân, a mean bastard and a genuine civilian-despising militant, doesn't like it, and sees to it that the romance is "tragically short-lived," as the video box copy puts it. (He even twirls his handgun after using it.)

I have no idea who or what this film was actually made for--Western audiences eager to see fictionalizations of problems that the UN has tried to address? Sufficiently un-humanitarian Cambodians? So I'm not really sure how it should be judged; it's an off-the-radar film for me, and I watched it for precisely that reason. Even so, I can't see how justified the film's moralizing is. Once again, we've got political differences--including unsavory political convictions and actions--reduced to character flaws. These sorts of films tell us that people who kill civilians for a cause are either deluded or bad people with any number of vices (smoking, arrogance, alcoholism...). Olaf Möller once icily identified this problem, in which films turn real political problems and disagreements into fiction fodder and personal psychology. (I don't have on hand the issue of Film Comment--at least I think it's in FC--where he wrote it, so no exact quote or citation at the moment.)

One can see this mentality on display in something like The Interpreter, too, Sydney Pollack's recent entertainment that's (kind of) smart and (kind of) has a conscience. For no good reason I can see, Sean Penn's character (and oh does Sean Penn love playing these tortured types) is dealing with his own tough personal tragedy that forms a "strong emotional bond" between himself and Nicole Kidman (a white African who used to be a rugged freedom fighter before she started to "believe in what the UN was doing," got the titular job there, and moved herself into one amazing and tastefully-decorated New York apartment). Penn's character's personal loss is, at least on some level, equated with Nicole Kidman's personal experience of huge social loss and strife. Even if Pollack & Co.'s intentions are good, I tend to view this sort of storytelling as demeaning telescopy of psychological issues onto social ones, and a reduction of sociopolitical realities ...

But that's all I've got for now. Take this as untempered venting rather than a "thesis."

Also, how do people who read this blog like the inclusion of jpegs? Is it good, bad, a nice occasional inclusion?

Strike! (1924)

With shame I admit that I'd never seen this film in its entirety before, and still only saw it on one of those Kino VHS tapes manufacted over a decade ago. Nevertheless I really admired this one, largely for the ingenuity of its strung-along images: the montage isn't only pounding proletariat-versus-capitalist messages (though that, of course, too), it's constantly productive of exciting graphic compositions--lines and curves, contrasts, fierce imagistic switches in each cut. Eisenstein does here in a somewhat comic, maximalist mode what Dovzhenko does lyrically in Arsenal.

Malleswari (2004) / Devdas (1955)

Two Indian films today, one, Malleswari, a Telugu-language musical starring Venkatesh and Katrina Kaif, the other, Devdas, a 1950s classic directed by Bimal Roy, who was the cameraman of P.C. Barua's 1935 version[s] of the tale (there were productions in two different languages that year, I believe Barua was behind both of them).

Malleswari is, as far as I can tell, a piece of mildly charming total hackwork, which is exactly what I wanted to see. I think it counts as the first nondescript, unspectacular, virtually reputation-free Indian film I've ever seen. It's not even listed in the IMDB. (Somebody correct me if this is an inaccurate characterization!) What I thought was interesting about the film was the dichotomy between its leads. Kaif is not so much a mystery: everyone seems to agree that the Indian film industry favors light-skinned women who tend to also look fairly European. From what I've read this bias has long had a place in South Asian cinema. Kaif is an Anglo-Indian who apparently can't speak Hindi (let alone, I presume, Telugu) well enough to voice her own lines (gleaned from Amardeep Singh): she's a beautiful woman and not necessarily much more. But Venkatesh! He's got no American equivalent that comes to mind, and novice that I am, I'm puzzled at what elements of his star status and image are generic and which ones are peculiar to him. Is he considered good-looking? (The film makes jokes about his ugliness. But clearly he's not that bad-looking, just something less striking than say Shahrukh Khan.) Are many male stars in Indian popular cinema required to break out Jackie Chan moves on demand?

(And what differences in star conventions are there between regional/language centers of commercial filmmaking, if any?)

No doubt as I see more I'll be able to answer some of my own questions.

Devdas is anything but a disposable work of popular cinema, though it too was made squarely within the confines of the commercial drama/song/dance film. I sort of wish that I had seen Guru Dutt's Kaagaz Ke Phool, which strongly and deliberately echoes the Devdas tale, after this one. But Roy's film is a strong effort, cleanly directed, with its narrative trajectory coursing at a steady and irreversible pace towards its tragic end. In this film, too, I find the leads intriguing. Dilip Kumar, a major introductory force in naturalistic or somewhat "methodic" acting in Indian classical cinema, has a nice, intriguing face that feels to me like it can express a lot of emotion but not so much a clear and direct emotion. Perhaps it's only the role he's playing, as the film is about unrealized emotions, unattained satisfactions, and deferred love. The ending is a torrent of emotion that's been simmering underneath for the preceding two and a half hours; Kaagaz Ke Phool, by contrast, seems to let the energy of its own sad ending come in the difference between its dizzying dramatic heights and its quietist denouement.

(I've tried posting some images here to see if I know the first thing about how to use Blogger's "extra" features. Hope they work OK.)

On the Agenda

The past two weeks or so have been educational ones concentrating mostly on Soviet and Indian cinema. And these will be the areas I'll continue to 'crash course' myself in through December, I think.

1) For Soviet films, I plan to catch up with the remainder of canonical and semi-canonical works I haven't seen (e.g., Mother) from the first two decades, and then move into the Soviet fantasies, children's films, epics, sci-fi films, 'Easterns,' and all-around entertainments for a while. I am also toying with the idea--yes, it's tentative, mind you--about writing on the different employments (graphically and maybe even philosophically) of very similar landscapes (grasslands, plains, hills) in a lot of Russian films, as well as in, for example, Jansco and Malick. Thus far I have some notes and am gathering illustrative stills from the Web; I'll update with progress on the project if anyone is interested. At the very least I suppose I can make a blog entry about it in the end.

2) I've been thinking about the best approach for Indian film, and will try to concentrate on pre-1970s cinema first, with a few more recent examples to get a taste of different regional flavors and contemporary trends. After I see a nice handful (or the closest available) from Bimal Roy, Satyajit Ray (whom I still barely know!), Ghatak, Dutt, Kapoor, etc., then I'll move on to more of the New Cinema. It seems like the New York Public Library's Donnell branch actually has a fine selection of VHS tapes and DVDs of various languages; it also seems that there are people who rent these films constantly, because (like HK/Chinese films) the available titles at each of my visits can change drastically.

3) I'll make stabs at the Film Forum Hitchcock retrospective, and I'll see Fred Kelemen's Krisana at Anthology, but I really want to focus my celluloid viewing in December on MoMA, which is showing some 1920s-30s Chinese films and continuing their Japanese series.

These won't be the only things I'll blog about, but for the next several weeks I want to make them major components, and try to write with some regularity (if also with brevity, sometimes) about what I see. I'm doing this largely as an exercise in self-discipline, which I sorely lack. I need to make myself truly focus on these reading/viewing projects. At the very least it'll be good preparation for grad school.

Edit - Postscript - I just wanted to say, with regard to these projects I'm so bad at following through on ... there have been several things I've expressed flashes of intense interest about on this blog in the past, but which appear to have disappeared. Not so in many cases--they've simply turned into longer-term, slow-simmer projects. Surrealism for example is still a frequent series of questions & concepts I think about, but feel that I need to spend a long time directing my antennae to the Surrealism/surrealism of individual works of art before I can really say anything productive about it as a movement. The specter of Walter Benjamin always hovers, as do a number of film critics and philosophers, over so much of what I think and write. John Ford? Still working out thoughts on him and doing viewing "research." Silent cinema, avant-garde film traditions, impersonal genre work, Abel Ferrara, Japanese cinema? Ditto. Slow-cooked meals are often the best ones, I tell myself, and I hope my knowledge and written work in the end will reflect this assertion.

Critics I Like: James Cheney

James Cheney is a member of the Mobius Home Video Forum, which maybe my favorite online discussion site of which I am not a member. (The moderators never responded when I applied, and I'm pretty sure I applied the correct way.) There are a lot of good, intelligent people in this forum, with bloodshot eyes, no doubt, from seeing so many Chor Yuen and Antonio Margheriti films and videos. But Mr. Cheney, whose writing and name I've never seen attached to anything else on the web, is probably the individual amidst this fine company whose posts I've personally found most enjoyable, informative, and insightful. He posts mainly in the 'Arthouse, World & Hollywood Cinema' forum, I believe.

I'll provide a few excerpts from posts he's made, since MHVF doesn't seem to allow direct links to threads or posts, and I hope I'm not doing anything wrong here, since MHVF's archives are open for public viewing. Unfortunately, in the little .doc where I occasionally post some of Cheney's "keepers," I haven't kept track of what threads any of them have been in. Nevertheless:

On White Nights (Visconti, '57): "Kubrick and Fellini must have been enviously fascinated by what Visconti did here. He created a whole city, or parts of one, for a stage set, a night time noir-town of canals and bridges, neon signs flashing in the fog and snow, streets, buildings, entire neighborhoods ... or the illusion of such with the fog, snow and darkness functioning as "smoke and mirrors" to foster the illusion while reinforcing the unreality of a vivid dream. That's just the mood the Dostoevskij story called for in the first place. His drama was one of midnight sun perambulations, the adventures of a sleepwalker. You can't really translate night that looks like daylight to film, and Visconti substitutes this very successful equivalent concept instead.

On The Wings of Eagles (Ford, '57): "Like much of late Ford, there runs alongside the uncosmeticized, realistic approach a vein of weirdly vivid and disturbing sentimen, Ford's old sentimental repertoire gone slightly awry ont he subjects of patriotism and duty and family love and the superior family love of comrades in arms, [sic] It's almost as if Scotty of VERTIGO were shooting this film. I was often in awe of the cinematic mastery and deep honesty when watching this, but I sensed a tortured psyche coming through less mediated than before, deep disappointments and terrors displaced directly onto the screen and then overcompensated for by maudlin lurches into 'Wonderful Life' wish fulfillment, so dreamlike as to seem a troubled sleeper's fugue into happier fantasy, which only makes the underlying nightmarish grimness throb all the more painfully. (Don't want to exaggerate the unintentional Expressionism, but I swear it's palpable)

On Roger Corman: "For more cutting loose AND good direction, look no further than ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE, which typifies much that's best about the director. He has smart material to work with, a great cast (Jason Robards as Al Capone, young George Segal, Ralph Meeker, Bruce Dern), a burlesquing attitude that sits somewhere between gangster movie-parody-nostalgia and anarchic sixties-style satire; there's a lot of flair, a surprisingly sophisticated Brechtian or 'postmodernist' brand of dramatic distancing (for one thing, there's that great 'Walter Winchell' or 'Jack Webb' voice-over (by Paul Frees) telling us the eventual fates of all the characters before we've even properly met them), an exuberant and faintly dangerous "New Hollywood" attitude, plus it moves very fast and smoothly between raunchy screwball farce and blood drenched massacre without batting and eyelash. Corman's seemingly picked up some tricks from Italian Spaghetti Artists like Leone, but he's got a jump on the then-planned ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA project by well over a decade, and his quick take on the topic made up for in timeless and freshness what it may have lost out in the deepdish ruminating department, or the finesse (though, I repeat, it's remarkably sophisticated as 'art house genre cinema.' Corman knows this territory as well, and in much the same ways, as a theorist of same like critic (and Antonioni scenarist) Peter Wollen.) Corman's "Last Thirties Gangster Movie" was the first out of the gate of many, and remains among the very best."

The above tends to crystallize Cheney's writing at its most run-on sentence happy (though who am I to criticize when it comes to this?), but when winding sentences are this saturated with well-informed passion and allusion, maybe they're not bad after all. It's one of the reasons why I visit MHVF.

[By the way, MHVF member Brian Camp may be the person behind this list of Amazon.com reviews. There's a lot of manga and anime, so it's a little ways of my own beaten path, but quite interesting nonetheless.]

Bollywood Mania?

So at least three stores on a single stretch of 30th Ave near my home sell South Asian videos; today I walked into the one that looked the most promising, and came out with used DVDs of Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975) and Devdas (Bimal Roy, 1955), the former having been recently enjoyed viewing, the latter a blind buy but not an uneducated one. I was also looking at a few Raj Kapoor films that I passed up--I didn't have much cash to expend today.

On thing peturbed me early on. As I walked into the store, I immediately asked the attendent in the tiny shop if he had Hindi and/or Bengali films with English subtitles. No doubt a bit surprised at seeing a white guy and his white girlfriend in his store, he sputtered back something to the effect of, "No Bengali, just Hindi. All of them having English subtitles." Fair enough. So I started looking, and he asked what kinds of things I wanted. "Well, I'm not really sure, I'm just looking for now. Classical films, I guess." "You mean black-and-white? Here is Barsaat, this is classic." "OK. Oh, do you have Awaara?" "Hmm. I'll look." Etc. I saw a DVD spine that read 'Ghatak' and I pulled it out. "That's action film," the clerk tells me. "You want action film?"

"No, not really. I just saw the name, and I'm looking for films by a director with this last name, Ghatak." It was at this point that I realized the clerk's English wasn't very good, because it was very difficult for me to explain that, no, I wasn't looking for action films. It doesn't help that I'm stupid and not thinking on my toes, that Ghatak made Bengali films and that the clerk said right off the bat that he doesn't have anything Bengali. (There's a place two blocks away that does advertise both Bengali and Hindi stuff, but when we looked in the store window that appeared to have almost entirely music, few movies. I didn't go in.)

And so I'm realizing how difficult some of this subcontinental cinematic exploration might be, because the monolithic Indian cinema we tend to think of in hip "multicultural" white America is no monolith at all, and really diving into the stuff of the subcontinent means sampling things and tracking down titles in several different languages of production. I have no idea where to find anything in the Tamil-language cinema, or Punjabi, for starters, except online. This makes things tough, because part of me doesn't want to resort to ordering everything online. For better or for worse I want to cling to the idea that hunting through the films of other cultures necessitates a certain personal investment in those cultures' communities, particularly the communities here who share my home in New York. Being into South Asian cinema because you saw Ghost World, then Lagaan, and then started renting a lot of Bollywood DVDs from Kim's Video isn't likely to work as a lasting foundation for real cultural contact. It's a trend, like East Asia has provided many trends to American viewers in the know, for decades now. (My antipathy towards trends comes partly from the fact that I am so hopelessly inept at them.) I kind of want to be the awkward white guy harassing bored Indian store clerks to find the particular masala movie I'm looking for. I want to discuss with friends of mine how their culture, and how their parents, see these movies, and think of these movies. Otherwise any amount of multiculturalism is really just variety for a white person's--this white person's--cultural capital, and not real dedication to learning about something new, something different.

Maybe my recent interest in South Asian cinema will fade after a few more titles and a little more reading under my belt, because it's just a phase; or perhaps it will morph into a more manageable slow burn, like my spark for silent film caused earlier this summer by reading Paolo Cherchi Usai. Really I'm talking about Bollywood and the cinemas around it as a way of getting at the central point, which is that cinephilia need not be about only amassing knowledge and experience for oneself, but stretching oneself to meet other people's knowledge and experience.

Critics I Like: Carloss James Chamberlin

Carloss James Chamberlin writes only for Senses of Cinema as far as I know, and I didn't really pay attention to his work overall until earlier this year, I think. I remember reading and not much liking the piece he wrote on Mystic River, but now I see that I was put off more by the colloquial tone, and confrontational attitude towards Kael and Rosenbaum (not that I mind that with Kael), than the actual thought content of the piece. He's written very perceptively only both of Clint's recent films, the two that I actually don't like that much. (Oh, I do like Million Dollar Baby, reservedly--but it's problems are so heavy that I kind of feel that I don't like it.)

More than these well-considered defenses of Eastwood, however, CJC has a distinctive taste. (One of my favorite parts of breaking into the "thought" of a new-to-me critic or cinephile is discovering his or her unique tastes, and the more prickly and unpredictable, but sensible, they seem, the better. Web-surfing cinephiles have all had their pleasant alarm at seeing Dan Sallitt's idiosyncratic favorites, I'm sure. When I first glimpsed some of those lists back in 2001, I was blown away.) Chamberlin has written also The Ister (one of my most regretfully missed films in recent years), Varda's Le Bonheur, Fassbinder's Despair, Wenders' Lisbon Story, and the Slamdance film festival.

Here is a Great Directors entry on that most taste-divisive of French liberal humanist filmmakers, Bertrand Tavernier, and a contribution to a Spielberg symposium that counts among the best write-ups on Spielberg I've read. The latter displays superbly one of the things I enjoy in Chamberlin's criticism--a willingness to break things down without breaking them down into black-and-white, good-or-bad binaries, and a feeling for language that gives birth to such categories as 'Angel Eyes,' 'Blondies,' and 'Tucos.'

Ritwik Ghatak

Additional recent viewing was Ritwik Ghatak's mind-blowing The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), which is as amazing as people say. Raymond Bellour has what looks like a pretty amazing "close reading" here at Rouge, where he "accompanies" the film. (I've read only the first fifth or so.) And Moinak Biswas has an article on Ghatak in the same issue. (Speaking of Rouge, when will the next update be!?)

Ghatak has a sensibility that startled me, but I was put in mind of Mizoguchi a bit. Both of these filmmakers have a way of bridging broad sociological insight (e.g., characters exploit other characters out of poverty, hunger, greed, etc.) with sharp psychological resonance. They make social webs palpable with their articulations of individualized nodes; inversely they place individual feelings into deeply social contexts. You always have, or come to have, a decent idea of why characters act in certain ways, or why certain events take place, but you don't necessarily feel abstracted from the action.

Conan Crisis

I must not have watched my DVD of Conan the Barbarian before, only the bonus features. I was in for a big shock.

Many of you may know my affection for this film, which extends from childhood and has more or less held up. I make no claims that Schwarzenegger & Co. are fine actors (in fact the majority of the actors with major characters weren't even "actors first"--bodybuilder, NFL star, Fosse dancer, etc.). There is a lot of undeniably goofy material here, and its execution is often stilted to say the least. (Then again, in ten or twenty years let's all look at those cinematic Tolkien masterpieces and see how goofy they seem to us then...) But it's good fun, and it has the virtue of its brilliant climactic scenes which transform this object of good fun into something with a measure of profundity. I kid you not.

The final scene of the film (if you haven't seen it and don't want to know, read no further!) is effectively a coda that depicts our musclebound hero at the mountain fortress of Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), where he fulfills his lifelong goal by butchering the villain who murdered his family and village decades ago, and forced Conan into slavery as a child. As Thulsa Doom speaks thunderously to the gathered crowd of cult followers at the foot of his lair, torches blazing in the night, Conan appears from behind (he's come from inside the lair itself) with the hilt and broken blade of his father's making. (One of Doom's lieutenants took the sword Conan's family makes at the film's opening: though it's not underlined by dialogue or even close-up shots, the mildly observant viewer will notice that Conan, in defeating the lieutenant in battle and breaking his sword, in fact breaks the very same sword his father crafted, which he takes up again as his weapon of choice.) Decapitating Thulsa Doom (an echo of TD's decapitation of Conan's mother) he flings his head down on the steps before the cultists, then tosses down the broken sword. The cultists slowly disseminate, distinguishing their torches, and the editing has Conan simply sitting around in the empty night, making his way down the fortress steps. In a final Herculean effort he throws another torch up onto the fortress entrance, where it catches fire. Thulsa Doom's power is destroyed; his palace burns in a long shot of a desolate night. End of the film, except for a still shot of Conan sitting on a throne, with Mako's voice intoning vaguely about the immediate and long term aftermath. ("So King Osric's daughter was returned to her father, and Conan and his companions went West ..." etc.)

This scene is dark, sad, spartan, and bitterly lonely. It's, by miles, the best bit of filmmaking in the entire movie. What makes it so important, and what gives Conan the Barbarian the majority of its very real philosophical heft, is that in its process surges up deeply buried subtexts to the surface. It's one of the biggest "what now?"s in the history of the cinema. We've just fewed the negation of everything the film's mythos (and, truth be told, John Milius' Weltanschauung) would appear to uphold--the power of gods and fathers, the nobility of quest, the purpose of storytelling itself. Milius lets tip his Straussian hand and for this haunting coda we see a completely unexpected depth and honesty wherein all of the myths of this film are exposed precisely as myths. Conan has fulfilled narrative expectations for revenge; he has sated his psychological drive; he has murdered his symbolic father who had (as Thulsa Doom points out) subsequently given Conan's life all meaning. And it's so powerful precisely because it is unexpected--this film does not lead you to believe, for its preceding two hours, that there is much going on philosophically in it. And for those first two hours, there isn't. But, as I said, subtext bursts through into immediate, immanent text and theme, which makes for an unforeseen and genuinely unsettling experience, rather than an intended and coded unsettling experience.

But. In the "restored" sequence at the end of the film, we see footage of the Princess ("King Osric's daughter"), who was the one presumably who led Conan back into Thulsa Doom's fortress (she was one of his followers), and with whom Conan wordlessly "shares" his unnamed existential moment.

In addition to effecting the color palette (the princess' pale skin tones and purple clothing) and drastically rupturing (and harming) the editing rhythm of the scene for those accustomed to its original cut, the insertion of the Princess does two things that partly ruin the power and meaning of the ending as it was cut for so long: 1) it destroys the sense of solitude and inscribed reflection that we/Conan have, and 2) it reinforces the existence of the continuing plot, making the scene pedestrian rather than ethereal.

I was seriously disturbed after seeing this yesterday.

Action Films

A brief observation after watching Ringo Lam's City on Fire (which has been on my to-see list for years): a film like this, and a lot of HK action cinema, naturally locates much of its action in the space of the city. American action films from the past few decades have a big tendency to locate their action in jungles, deserts, remote islands, etc (think of a number of Schwarzenegger or Stallone vehicles, or even things like American Ninja 2, if you've even seen or heard of it). Even those American films that do take place in cities (like the Die Hard series) seem more remote from the daily life of the city than that depicted in HK cinema. City of Fire has a robbery in a jewelry office that looks like a real office; when the robbers escape there are street vendors outside the financial building who flee to safety; the camera is always catching the actors moving among other people in the action scenes, whereas in Hollywood conventions the people we're meant to follow are very often foregrounded against blurry backgrounds of crowd commotion.

I don't know how well this observation would pan out if I gave it extended comparative study, but it seems to broadly break down this way.

When John Woo came to America, his films tended to be shot in open spaces and even largely in remote locations. Tsui Hark's Van Damme vehicles are both urban-centered, though, aren't they? I wonder how the two cultures/industries' spatial senses (and consequential impacts on storytelling) meshed and clashed in the big HK talent drain of the 1990s.

Critics I Like: Andrew Grossman

I wanted to put out a brief series of blog entries highlighting the work of critics, scholars, or journalists whose work I have come to really like and which I think deserves a lot more attention than it probably gets. The other criterion is that I want to name writers with whom I've had no (or practically no) personal interaction.

The first entry is my most recent "discovery," an individual by the name of Andrew Grossman who writes largely--if by no means exclusively--on Asian and queer cinemas. He has a long list of articles available here at Bright Lights Film Journal, which I have been going through slowly over the past few days. These often dauntingly long works allude to films from all time periods and countries with ease, drawing many diverse connections without forcing them. In his "Bleeding Realism Dry" (on part 2 of part 1 ... yes, it is long!), he writes this amazing paragraph that I'll reproduce in part as exemplary:

"At the risk of errant foolishness, I attempted a nationalized semiotics of squibbing: what will the squibs of each country's films tell me? Japanese squibs seem like giant, excavating chunks - do Japanese bleed the volcanic holes of their own insularity? In Rajiv Rai's Tridev (1989), each bullet hole seems to serve a thick tikka masala. In the Mexican Western, the cheap, earthy holes seem tilled not freshly by hot lead but messily with their faulty hoe of agrarian reform. And what of the pattern? Will it be the linear swath of the machinegun, or the plaid intrusions of the shotgun blast?"

In this superb article on Tsui Hark and the Hollywoodization/1997-isation of HK cinema, Grossman writes of his futile personal attempts to find refuge from evil Hollywood corporatism (even if it be hypocritically in the evil HK commercial cinema):

"Give me some very bad yet undistributed Russian films and I will sit through them more readily than American films I can rent down the street, just to make a point. And I would do so for years--forever, in fact, until I die."

What makes statements like the above so moving (to me), and not "merely" contrarian, is that Grossman does not fall back on any stances by reflex. (Well, almost--his tastes are predisposed against "the art film" in a lot of its manifestations, so when he mentions Denis' Beau travail or the Dardennes' Rosetta or Hou's Flowers of Shanghai, or when he damns Cassavetes with the faintest of faint praise, he tends to inscribe foul intentions upon these sorts of artworks: they're constantly referred to as "self-satisfied," "self-impressed," "self-important." It gets tiresome to this admirer of these figures!) By far, however, Grossman tirelessly thinks through all of his propositions, and does not ever let himself play the unaware roles of voiceless victim, know-it-all tastemaker, or ethical paragon. At the risk of merely sounding like Diane Keaton in Manhattan, I'd say he has a fine awareness of the rhetorical implications of negative capability; he's aware of the paradoxes, contradictions, and binds he gets himself into, and rather then "celebrating" them in postmodern fashion, he appears accepting of his great political/ontological standstill, hoping perhaps to have said something interesting in the process. (I don't know if that's how Grossman would characterize himself but this is the sense I get thus far, anyway.) And above all what marks Grossman's writing is that he, like the other critics I will want to mention in the near future, imparts to me a genuine feeling that he has--even if only in a limited way--rethought cinema from ground zero, and is willing to risk the demise a few cherished assumptions in order to see the cinema (and the world) a little more clearly, that much more correctly in their full depth, breadth, and complexity.

Two more articles Grossman wrote for Senses of Cinema:

"The Belated Auteurism of Johnnie To" and an entry on Fay Tincher in a 'Cinema and the Female Star' symposium.