Brenez and the Cinematic Image

Nicole Brenez, "The Ultimate Journey":

"Theoreticians, like cineastes, base a part of their meditation (written or filmed) on two common premises which [Vachel] Lindsay argued at the edge of cinema theory: the idea that film, because it does not imitate a referent but allows it to come forth from the real, can eventually provide the world; and the corollary that an image is not a plastic phantom but a dynamic principle endowed with the powers that demand to be deployed and reflected. From that spring the three axes of theorisation which seem to me to have been of major significance through this decade: work on the powers of the image, on the figurability of the subject, and on the thinkable relations between the cinematograph and history."

Trying to fully understand Brenez at her most abstract can be a real challenge, and only after years of reading her am I starting to feel comfortable appropriating a few of her ideas for myself. This paragraph I've read several times before, however, about what has moved her during a certain period of contemporary film theory (and its historical precendents), this time seemed like a real gold mine of an 'entry point' for a reader of her work. I'd like to unpack a few of the things she says as I understand them and explain why I find them productive.

TWO COMMON PREMISES

1) 'Film does not imitate a referent but allows it to come forth from the real and can eventually provide the world'
Many people talk about images as though they are fundamentally likenesses. (In his Iconology, this is how WJT Mitchell writes about it...) I would suggest that the image is its own clear 'action,' 'event,' 'happening,' 'being,' 'becoming,' whatever. The referents to which (some) images bear likenesses are "allowed to come forth" from the real by association with the imagistic enunciation, and it is this imaginative-psychic faculty (not simply representational correlation) that allows reality's profound connection to images. (The presentation of an image, perhaps, is not to create a noun but to perform a verb?) Images are the constant reverberant echo of their first moment of enunciation. To me, Brenez's call is one that recognizes that even utter non-likenesses are 'images,' which isn't to say that this is the one true denotation or connotation for the word, but that it is perhaps the most productive. Insofar as I am personally interested in the possibilities and properties of images, Rothko also gives us images. Ornamental tile mosaic: image. A letter or a pictogram: images. Furthermore, this conception might get us into a territory where the photographic possibilities of the cinema are not reproduced as essential properties of the cinema.

2) 'An image is not a plastic phantom but a dynamic principle endowed with powers that demand to be deployed and reflected'
The 'corollary' to the above--that images are not simply representations of the real (a 'plastic phantom' of it painted onto canvas, projected onto screen, printed onto page, digitally presented on a monitor...) but that they are actions ('dynamic principle') that call forth a complex set of individual and social effects in their real, material, historical presence ('powers that demand to be deployed and reflected').

THREE AXES OF THEORIZATION

a) powers of the image: what can an image do (to one or many viewers), what are the limits of what it is able to represent, what can it express, what can it embody and be? What are beauty and/or sublimity in an image? What are the effects, the consequences, of an image?

b) figurability of the subject: how does the subject manifest itself on-screen, in images? What is its philosophical genealogy? How does cinema 'configure' a subject--one who acts (Deleuzian classicism) or watches (Deleuzian modernism), a subject who represents a quality or quest (the conventionalized narrative character), a subject which edxists only in a social totality of individual-fragments (Renoir's Rules of the Game and Godard's Prénom: Carmen, pace Fredric Jameson), a subject without fictions but existent in the space between the plastic-projected film and a seat in the cinema (much avant-garde work; a component of Brechtian or otherwise direct forms of cinematic address: the Straubs, Rouch).

c) relations between the cinematograph and history: what are the material practices which make the cinematograph (as that generic instrument-name for moving image-making) what it is, what it has been? How do specific technologies and/or physical properties inhibit or encourage various practices (e.g., how might portability--thus mobility--affect what and how we film)? How do people see these images (not just 'movies,' but all manner of cinematic or semi-cinematic appearances)? How are people made to see some of these images? What roles do the images have in relating the past (and their own past) to the audiences of a present?

What is the ultimate significance of all this? Well for me, the idea that an image (and an image in time) is not simply a thing but very much an event, an action, opens up a whole new space to think about the films and videos I watch. One of the things I actually agreed with in David Bordwell's recently blog-discussed "Against Insight" article in Cinema-Scope is that there is indeed a severe limitation on the widespread idea that "there is a Zeitgeist, and films reflect it." Films also help produce the Zeitgeist, they act out minute strands of its flow through history, the image of (for example) a civilian war casualty isn't only a window onto real horror, a record, but a propulsion into some visual-informational sphere or another a piece of rhetoric--perhaps sometimes a very complex rhetoric. The same characteristics that can give images great, enjoyable freedoms are what can allow them be employed in a number of devious ways as propaganda, as lies. Images don't just "sit around," as soon as they exist they are pushed into employment in social reality. I'm feeling more and more strongly that to deal with images--and to deal with cinema--means dealing with its uses, effects, and consequences not because these things have "meaning" or that "content" is somehow more important than "form," but because no images exist without some kind of material entrenchment.

What I'm seeking--what I'm still striving to cultivate in myself--is a dynamic and balanced integration of various 'modes' of analysis , so that if I watch a DVD of a film, I can discuss the work as a rich text with an exegetical potential (a treatise), the film's historical place upon its time of release (its social function: an argument), my real-time engagement with the work (experience), and also the fact that I am watching this film on a digital reproduction (which is both argument & experience). Readers who find these issues interesting may want to read a previous entry I wrote on these issues at Argument, Treatise, Experience.

Out 1: Spectre

Unfortunately I can't offer the greatest report of Rivette's shorter and slightly less incredibly-rare version of Out 1, which enjoys three screenings this weekend at Anthology Film Archives. (As I start typing this, at tonight's showing the first of the reels--which run 40-50 minutes apiece according to Dan Sallitt's watch--should be winding down.) First things first: the print, while pretty worn, is hardly a travesty. It's pink, but watchable. What is a travesty is the fact that this film only has a single English-subtitled print known to exist.

I had gotten up a little early on Saturday morning (look at the post time for my 'Notes on Borowczyk'--that's when I started writing), and after a long day in miserable weather, and 9 or 10pm began to feel more like past midnight. Rivette's leisurely improvisational project just didn't get my best viewership, and though I don't know that I'd call the film a masterpiece, I'm quite certain that it's a worthy film whose worthiness I only partly grasped. (One could make a joke at Rivette's expense, maybe call his work boring and my giving it the benefit of a doubt authorial fanboyism, but let it be known that a few weeks ago I actually had to turn off my DVD of Cronenberg's Scanners--a film I like, and one with plenty of base "entertainment" value--with maybe 15 minutes left to go. Because I was similarly exhausted at an early hour. Seasonal allergies can do this to people!)

One of the most interesting things I came away with from the film was triggered by a comment that Dan made between reel changes about how Rivette and Rohmer both make a lot of films about characters trying to figure out some big truth. The major difference as I see it, however, is that Rohmer's characters are searching for what we might simplistically call a 'center,' a stable something that might dictate moral or ethical behavior. Rivette is interested in esoteric knowledge and its presence on the fringes of everyday life: he's both gnostic and skeptic (we might say he's skeptical by virtue first of his fascination with performance & improvisation, and his relative disinterest in "naturalism" or psychology) whereas Rohmer's approach speaks of his much more historically old-fashioned (i.e., conservative) ideas about society & truth. Where we go from there, testing and challenging and unpacking this observation/supposition, well, I'm not sure ... but I thought I'd throw it out there.

Mr. Clayfield, too bad you couldn't have been here to see the film. But we still have Noli me tangere to look forward to ...

Notes on Borowczyk

I have just not been watching very much or writing very much these past few weeks, but as I was going through files on my computer I came across some notes I wrote months back on two films by the late Walerian Borowczyk: La Marge (1976) and Blanche (1971). Here they are, mostly unaltered and unedited from when I wrote them. Beware that there are spoilers for La Marge, though it's not exactly a suspenseful film ...

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The generic erotic film can be transformed through distanciation techniques which foreground the artificiality of moralistic trappings. In La Marge the topos of the Sinful City finds itself abstracted and strained into something new.

In the opening scenes the viewer is given every indication that the protagonist, Sigimond Pons (Joe Dallesandro) is happy with his domestic life: a beautiful young wife and child in a country house. He gives to his wife various declarations of love in a handful of scenes, all appearing genuine enough. But business compels Sigimond to travel to Paris, and once there, he casually enters an affair with a prostitute, Diana (Sylvia Kristel). This unfaithful excursion is handled obliquely, with no character psychology or progression to cushion it, and as such the transition from marital fidelity to urban polyamory, from country to city, comes off as a rupture. This is our first clue that the film is doing something different, and valuable, with respect to the conventions and expectations of the erotic story structure. [ ... some general spoilers begin here and continue throughout the writing on La Marge! ... ] For later in the film, when news arrives of the deaths of both Sigimond's wife and his son, the moment is contemplative rather than mournful, lyrically matter-of-fact rather than tragic.

Thematically the city is a place of sin, lust, infidelity, mystery, commerce, even perversion: a familiar mix. But tonally--and I would argue textually--the city is simply an alternate location, and as such inspires alternate "needs" and "wants" than the country. The arbitrary production of desire that leads Dallesandro towards infidelity is an answer to the question produced by the social environment of the city; equally arbitrary, even nonsensical, the film suggests, is the moralistic punishment via loss of family that results in the story (i.e., the letters from the maid to Sigimond at film's end). In other words, the usual moralistic underpinnings which would 'punish' aren't given by Borowczyk the concomitant moralistic-psychologistic execution. This film tells a story about temptation and punishment, but its way of connecting the causal dots is one big skeptical shrug.

So this film takes the topos of the "sin city" and, through magnification, renders its underlying moralistic mechanism visible, palpable. There are two abrupt "nonsenses" which signify the critical (rather than generic) nature of the film: first Joe's excursion into infidelity, the other is the death of his family (punishment). Psychology, these treatments make no sense. Their generic requirement is pushed out into the open.

These are "nonsenses" because, in the first instance, the film elides clear character psychology (there is no gradual temptation, no rhetoric of the downfall of the country bumpkin); in the second instance, because the off-screen deaths come as a deus ex surprise rather than as a machinated progression. The deaths are treated (by the film's matter-of-factness, and in this way through Dallesandro, too) stoically rather than tragically: pondered rather than mourned.

By affecting this tone to the "sin city" trajectory, the film pulls back from the moralism and clings instead to the emotions instilled in the chain of events. La Marge captures something about the stupid, terrifying, ineffable, unfair, predictable structure of experiential life. This is also why it is so resolutely a physical film, so tied to the materiality of objects, bodies, furniture, rooms (and at least a cursory comparison to Bresson is anything but unwarranted). These are the things that stand out in the face of tragedy: the film is a lyrical reminder of that most obvious proposition of all, the immanence of the material world.

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Blanche is a narrative with a passive female at its center, but the mechanisms which ensure her passivity are precisely what the film examines, and they are stylized so as to deny any semblance of illusion as to their naturalism or necessity.

Every performance in the film is great because of the total lack of self-consciousness on the part of each player, though the actors are asked (or allowed) by Borowczyk to do very different things: the great old Michel Simon to bluster about a bit, to wear his age and indignity heavily on his shoulders; the divine Ligia Branice to reflect the broken glass of the narrative around her in her luminous white face and eyes; the two youths to be relatively stolid like Bressonian models.

An image of Blanche emerging naked from her bath is one of the first in the film, and it's a brief, casual flash that marks Borowczyk's aesthetic: he's very interested in glimpses, periphery, esoterica, transience--all that which gets pushed to the margins and washed over in the continuum of time and space. More on this later.

Boro's sense of space and editing is peculiar and highly individual (I'm not sure where he'd fit in Deleuze's taxonomy). He begins with a number of close-ups and closed-in framings, but ends up cutting (arhythmically?) to 'establishment shots' in which the story gets going. The composition for much of the story is flat, laid out like medieval tapestry. (Perhaps I should go into more detail about differences in space in medieval and renaissance space, and visual cultures in general? Mention Boro's use of period instruments? His love of aura and craftsmanship?) Borowczyk seems to love to cut on camera movement.

Blanche herself is a bit of a cipher, but the film enables us to see how and why this is so. Every attempt she makes to assert herself in some minor way (usually to protect a male whose suspected affections have aroused Simon's jealousy) is generally ignored. The film's stylization shows the utter theatricality of the men's treatment of Blanche, and whether it's dashingly chivalric or hideously patriarchal, it is rooted in the same source, the same drive towards idealization-possession of Blanche/women.

Onto the glimpses, or 'that which gets pushed to the margins of space and time.' Borowczyk is in many ways an Artisan in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Oh, not totally--he's not trying to turn his films into distinct and unique material works which have an aura. But he's trying to smuggle into this Age some of the values and objects which are from the time and place of auras. This is why Borowczyk is (can be) a supremely erotic filmmaker, not only a sensual one--because he understands the charge that can result from something rare, something denied, something swift, something precious; more than recreating a 'passing fancy,' he understands the appeal of one's fancy as it is in the passing. This is why there are so many quick but extravagant, lush, complex, shocking shots in Borowczyk's cinema. By articulating through film language this glimpse of something that cannot be ascertained easily, he is doing two things at once, one of which looks toward the past (because he is trying to capture and have resonate for the viewers something special, momentary, and unique, as objects and moments and people at one time were, and seemed, thus) and the other of which looks toward the future (because he is imagining things at least partly in a pre-capitalist mindset, which is to say a non-capitalist mindset: where something is not a commodity available to one who pays, but an experience that might touch and few and cannot be bought). Borowczyk is trying to remind us of the nature of the material and economic world, its very constructedness, by obliquely referring us to its alternatives, its precursors, and thus signifying its own limits.

I suppose it would be a great defiance of Borowczk's art if for example a "raincoat" viewer were to watch Blanche (or Love Rites, or La Marge ...) on video and pause or rewind during the erotic scenes. The moment is supposed to have passed; the glimpse is supposed to have been special.

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That's all I've got.

Miscellany

First off, I know I haven't been posting much lately (though when I do, it's incredibly long-winded). Spring allergies have just taken the life out of me, and though I've gotten over the worst of it--I think--I still don't have a whole lot of energy. I've felt very passive and vegetative lately--and this is not consonant with my new year's resolutions. I've watched almost no movies thus far in the month of April (though I have seen several episodes of The L Word on DVD ... maybe that will be a blog entry for the future).

I do have a question for my readers: let's say one keeps a blog, and one also publishes a piece of film writing. The sort of film writing that has footnotes. If one uses ideas one has already expressed in a blog entry, is there some protocol for citation? A prefatory note? Something? I'm finding that some things I blogged a while back have actually been useful for things I'm writing now, but I'm not entirely sure how to incorporate them ...

And, honestly, I have a second question for readers: has anyone read Mary Ann Doane's The Emergence of Cinematic Time? Any opinions?

Before the Looming End

I have tried very hard, several times, to write about Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Unfortunately I'm still not able to sculpt the highly emotional content of my relationship to them into something intelligible & usable for other people. I do have a certain amount of notes on these films; I do have material I can use. What I don't yet have is a writer's critical engagement (whether "critical distance" or "critical intimacy," pace some recent Sontag discussion). Consider this a 'coming attraction' for a long piece I will write ... eventually. Hopefully soon.

I will at least offer one pretty basic observation, the gist of which pleases me. At first, Celine is a romantic and perhaps even a mystical believer (she believes in love; she believes in reincarnation) and Jesse is a skeptic, a bit of a pessimist. By the second film, Celine is more world-weary, she comes across as the pragmatist and the agnostic; Jesse has softened into a romantic, himself. These aren't reversals of character: they remain "believable," they are evolutionary, developmental. But why the developments? Over the intervening nine years from their first meeting their daily mundane realities--their very personalities--have been marked by their profound subconscious yearnings into the ideal images each has of the other--which have no doubt manifested themselves in countless tantalizing dreams (cf. Waking Life).

P.S. If one goes here one can read an article on the two films by an esteemed reader of Elusive Lucidity (though that's of course the very least of his descriptors!) ...

Truth & Fiction

An Associated Press article, written by one Allen G. Breed, caught my eye. Read the first lines, which opine that the case "seems to fit the stereotypes so perfectly" (my emphasis). Two black women were paid to strip at a party for Duke's lacrosse team (mostly white), though one, the alleged rape victim, asserts that they thought they'd be dancing for a small group of people and did not expect forty men. The police have stated that medical evidence supports the woman's claim, not to mention broken fingernails, cash, and other belongings being found at the Duke University-owned house where the party and alleged rape took place. At least one eyewitness (the lacrosse team's next door neighbor) attests to at least a certain amount of conflict between the woman and the partiers, though his witness is only of verbal assaults. At any rate, this rape accusation seems quite credible even if a thorough investigation were hypothetically to disprove it. Despite this credibility, this AP article rhetorically dances about in trying to paint an objective picture of "conflict" in race and class in Durham, North Carolina.

The only "evidence" that Mr. Breed puts forth in this "dilemma" is assertions by the lacrosse team and members of the local population who support the team (mostly white, it appears). "It's so easy to see the incident ... in terms of powerlessness and privilege, town and gown, black and white. Many on campus and in the streets of this gritty working-class vertex of the famed Research Triangle are framing it just that way. But not everybody is comfortable with that." Obviously, I don't know what happened this night a few weeks ago, and if the accused are innocent I hope they're absolved. But what bothers me about this specific article (and not, say, three more balanced ones put out by the NYTimes--here, here, and here) is how heavily it stacks the deck against the black woman and the black community, as though they were on trial for being too resentful from their oppressed past, against their more privileged white neighbors--resentful enough, in the case of the accuser, to fabricate accusations. A black woman "sobs with impotent rage" when she reports racial slurs in her neighborhood; some people still refer to the University as "the plantation"--as though they're just unable to "let go" and are consequently oversensitive when white people might go just a tad too far.

Meanwhile, as I said, this article offers zero evidence that would bolster the case of Duke's lacrosse team. Only self-defense and cant from the team itself and those who sympathize with them. Nothing mentioned in their corner that would act as counterweight to the accuser's physical evidence of sexual assault and the evidence of at least some level of conflict at the party that night. The article tries to manufacture a tortured social and moral dilemma out of something that does not appear to be such. Certainly, we should not rush to judgment of the lacrosse players; but this is a journalistic case that goes well beyond the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty.' Allen G. Breed's bedrock assumption here is that it just seems too easy for this accusation to be credible. White privilege enacting sexual violence upon a member of a poor black population? It's just a little played-out, right? Of course--Roots did it better anyway! As though a woman's claim of rape victimhood were not subject to forensic investigation and juridical deliberation so much as narrative-aesthetic evaluation. "There's more than meets the eye," one white Durham local asserts in the article, though this elusive "more" stinks of a canard to me, based on what I've read. If there's more evidence that suggests this allegation really is a very complex one and that the lacrosse players may all be quite innocent, why don't articles actually mention this evidence? We have otherwise only assertions, and for now it seems that the word of privileged white college athletes is still worth at least as much as the word of a black woman and preliminary forensic evidence and eyewitness testimony. Or is it "too easy" to point that out?

Critiquing a fiction for presenting "too easy" a statement is one thing; dismissing or casting dubious aspersions on a real-life allegation because it, too, simply seems "too easy" is a sign of an ethical lapse on a societal scale. Why is it so difficult to believe that in 2006, privileged white male groupthink can still deal a vicious blow to a poor black woman? We can critique fiction, and art, for being "too easy" because we presumably can still maintain some moral clarity in real life. A film or novel that simply narrates an elementary historical injustice and asks us to feel upset about it should be insulting precisely because we already know this, and are already upset by it. And yet: apparently not all of us are so upset. Can I really allow myself the indignance I feel when so many of my fellow whites assume that racism is a thing of the past?

One reads the occasional article about the "CSI effect," whereby prosecutors are finding it more difficult to get convictions because TV-watching jurors want to be swayed by high-tech forensics. The mindset betrayed by this AP article seems to me to be related. We are subordinating material, historical reality to the aesthetic demands of our pop culture. Two relevant references from two of the twentieth century's great figures of literary theory come to mind here. Walter Benjamin, in his most famous essay, wrote that "[Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic." Meanwhile, Roland Barthes wrote (in what might be my favorite essay of his that I've read, "Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature") of accused murderer Gaston Dominici, who was defeated by a Justice that "took the mask of Realist literature"--according to Barthes, prosecutors spoke to give the provincial Dominici a "credible psychology" which "explained" his alleged actions, thus convicting him in what Barthes might have characterized as a dual act of jurisprudence and literary criticism.

If the alleged victim is, for some reason, lying or withholding information, then I hope she's revealed. If the lacrosse players are all basically telling the truth, I hope they make it out of this unscathed. But from where things stand, and from my perspective, some of the media are not giving this black woman a fair shake. Her victimhood or their innocence are the paramount issues; but what interests me further though is the media rhetoric that surrounds this situation and which may or may not correspond to actuality. I hope that further coverage doesn't come off like this AP article. Consider this my gesture of support (however feeble) for both of the black women's rights and their voices.

Finally: a few links - Justice 4 Two Sisters (blog) and Alas, a blog (round-up of links).

Ferrara Blog-a-Thon

Preface: Please excuse the fact that I don't currently have screen capture capability to more directly illustrate this and make this whole thing much, much easier...

1. Pre-Credit Sequence of Dangerous Game / Snake Eyes

Four fast tableaux. The first is a dinner scene which introduces our protagonist (Harvey Keitel) and his wife and child, though these relationships are not immediately confirmed in these shots, only suggested. There's small, tense talk about food. (It is the only tableau broken into two shots, as well.) Second scene is of Keitel and Nancy Ferrara as they finish having sex. Third scene boasts a dark and icy palette as Keitel stands in the boy's room while he sleeps. Fourth scene continues the bleak palette as Keitel walks out of the townhouse and down the street, coming towards the camera, until a cut to the credits.

Instantly we may wonder if Keitel's character, Eddie, is leaving to catch the plane alluded to in the first shot ("I hate plane food"). If so, why so late at night? Does he not live with this woman (Madlyn) and their son? These four quick scenes demonstrate the figural disintegration of the family unit, from the dinner table through the conjugal bed, the child's bed, to flight. From togetherness into solitary departure. Three people in a shot, then two, then again two (only one of whom is conscious and "present"), then one.

What motivates this cold prologue? It may establish the difficulty of togetherness and the pain of isolation (or perhaps the comfort of aloneness). It suggests in quick, subtle strokes (without trafficking in binarism) the tension between work and home, performance and sincerity. We have in under three minutes food, sex and sleep; we have figures sitting, laying, standing, walking; what we have is a microcosm, an ultra-concise Table of Contents for imagistic representation of human activity. The camera moves a little, slowly, discreetly, in each shot, arrogating a certain mobility for itself while never drawing attention.

2. A Case for Some Tendencies in Ferrara

In Abel Ferrara's work there's always a sense of our intellectual, sensuous, ethical grasp of things being splayed, fanned out, worked like an accordion and a piece of origami. One can say that Ferrara, in his treatment of concepts, fractures and opens them up--but not as part of a completist taxonomical project, instead a treatment comparable to Cubist approaches to visuality. What I mean by this is that when there is a problem, a conflict, an expression, a development in Ferrara's films, it tends to be presented to us so that we see from two or more incongruous "angles" at the same time, or in quick succession. For instance the first shots of Dangerous Game, wherein we see kindness & cruelty play out in simultaneous, co-existing lineages:

a) Would anyone else back me up in asserting that there's a strong hint of impatience in Keitel's cheese grating in the first second of the first shot? He holds it up ready to use for Nancy Ferrara even before she finishes dishing up her pasta. He goes through the motion of being kind, but it appears that there's the faintest slow passive-aggressive burn. But is it even a function of Keitel's character? Perhaps Abel Ferrara had simply already ordered a few too many retakes at that point, or had otherwise pissed off Keitel that evening. Is the impatience coming solely from Keitel's own acting as an expression of Eddie's character, or is it behavior bubbling up from Keitel's subconscious that he and Ferrara have used to help form Eddie?

b) Madlyn asks Eddie if he'll eat on his flight. "I hate plane food." So he's willing to be openly critical of food and assertive of his tastes, an echo of which informs his ostensibly jocular disgust at Madlyn's pasta. Though Eddie insists to Madlyn, 'Have a little faith in yourself,' he's saying it more for his own benefit, like Peter Falk ordering Gena Rowlands to 'Be yourself!' in A Woman Under the Influence. If Madlyn lacks a certain faith in her cooking (and in "herself") here, it's because she is familiar with the tension between Eddie's performance and his sincerity. Before Eddie feigns disgust at his wife's cooking, he tells her and their son, "This'll taste so good ... that I'm not gonna believe it" (a transparent patronization).

c) "It's delicious," he insists to her, before she offers her own (seemingly disingenuous, unconvinced) "thank you."

The most mysterious line in the film, or at least in this sequence, is one that I'm still not 100% sure I can make out correctly. It's in the third tableau, when Keitel leans in to his sleeping son and whispers, "Forget me kid--I'm your daddy." It would make more sense for him to say 'Don't forget me...' but no matter how many times I listen to this line, I can't really be sure that I hear even a faint, mumbled 'don't.' It'd be slightly enigmatic even in that circumstance (why would the child forget him?), but even more, why would Eddie Israel instruct his child to forget him while reminding him of his paternity? I've remained confused for as long as I've known this film ...

3. Unforced Formal Cohesion

Up until now I've talked mostly about character psychology and the implication of the viewer in this sophisticated web; but this isn't all that characterizes Ferrara. The first shot demonstrates an S-curve composition. Three figures at a table (and though I don't know that there is any especial Catholic significance for these early scenes, the number three is at least worth noting when it comes up in Ferrara). Eddie sits in the middle of the frame, flanked on our left by his son and our right by his wife. The dinner table is a dark, warm color (a mahogany finish), matched on screen-right by Nancy Ferrara's magenta sweater; the top of the frame (background of two symmetrical thin-curtained windows that flank a panelled wall) is conversely cool, gray-and-blue-and-white, and this is matched by both the shirts that Keitel and the boy are wearing. Within the composition of the first shot there is a yin-yang opposition of color-tones--but even this brief sense of 'balance' is disrupted once the film cuts to a medium-close-up of Madlyn (segment 1), and then begins a slow incremental left-then-right glide down to encompass both her and Eddie (seg 2), then for a moment only Eddie (seg 3), then Eddie and the son (seg 4), then back to Eddie alone (seg 5, echo of seg 3), then Eddie and Madlyn (seg 6, echo of seg 2), and again Madlyn (seg 7, echoe of seg 1). This is the overall structure of the shots to which I've attributed labels for the specific sub-images, but in actuality the camera movement isn't quite so mathematically clean--in-between segments 5 and 6 the camera follows Keitel's quick bodily shift and momentarily reverts to what we might call 'seg 5a,' an echo of 'seg 4,' so that we might also translate 'segs 4 -5a' as a symmetrical framing regiment of their own: 'subsegment 1,' 'subsegment 2,' and again 'subsegment 1.'

I don't want to get too positivist-formalist on my readers (it's not my style) but I wanted to use these labels simply to demonstrate first the underlying cohesion to Ferrara's image-organization (hence assigning these numbered segments with their own rhyme & reason), as well the provisional and aleatory excursions (my so-called 'segment 5a') that just as profoundly mark Ferrara's cinema. Just as the camera movement in this initial scene has been horizontal, so are the bold lines of composition in the next image (the bodies of Harvey Keitel and Nancy Ferrara simulating sex in missionary position). So the first tableau (second shot) had a graphic horizontality marked by the camera movement, the second by the pictorial composition, and the third, now, in the son's bedroom, by Keitel's bodily movement as he walks from screen-right to screen-left (the camera following him).

The fourth and final tableau ostensibly stands apart from the previous three shots and echoes the very first shot, again, in that (a) it doesn't emphasize a strong horizontal line in some form, and (b) it settles into a basically symmetrical image. This last is roughly true, not strictly true: this final shot of the passage begins with Keitel leaving the building and walking down the stairs to the sidewalk, going from screen-left to center to achieve the symmetry a few seconds after the shot actually begins. Ferrara then holds the camera on Keitel walking straight through on the sidewalk towards the camera. At the last moment, however, before he would presumably walk straight into the camera, he passes it on screen-right, thus inscribing upon this symmetrically-composed image a very gradual and indirect movement from screen-left to screen-right--a horizontal line through deep three-dimensional space (and so the characteristics of a static pictorial symmetry and a strong, graphic horizontality are joined like two axes). And a split-second "deviation" from a standardized image.

What I ultimately want to get at is that Ferrara's work demonstrates an attention to symmetry and clarity through time & space, but this is conjoined with--even sometimes disrupted by, though not so much in this early passage of Dangerous Game--a sense of "offness," unevenness, risk, development & progression, chance.

4. A Personal Imperative for Ferrara's Work

What interests me then about Ferrara has to do with the productive tensions--already quite present if not apparent in his cinema--between what we might drastically simplify as 'chaos' and 'order.' An extensive formal consideration & critique of a lot of postclassical cinema that I really admire (not only Ferrara, but Cassavetes, Pialat, Linklater, Miike, others) would seem to invite madness according to conventional wisdom for the simple fact that these films aren't 'clean' or 'efficient' or 'formalist' works in a basically classical idiom and simply defy what formal-analytical tools we have at this point--after all, nobody loves Ferrara's cinema for the shot compositions, right? Do they? And yet, and yet, we love these films for some reason, and to me there's something deeper, richer, and in some ways, even, more systematic than we may initially realize within our love. To call a section of cinema (subgenre, authorial oeuvre, whatever) 'messy' or 'unpredictable' is usually to overlook something fundamental in what caused you or others to group these given films together in the first place. And for Ferrara, who has made a living making films few people seem to like or pay money to see, there's an interesting sense of artistic valor & martyrdom. If Ferrara's ever "breaking rules," "crossing boundaries," "taking risks," then all the rules and boundaries, all the safe options, are there and present in his films, as part and parcel of their fabric, as much as the transgressions and chances, the messy unrehearsed incongruencies and the serendipitous congruencies. Ferrara isn't about making a mess but about carving a path, and even if we may have no faith for gods we may want to reserve some for artists like him, whose destinations might require long and winding routes.

Post-Script: Anyone who actually read all of this long and tortuous casual essay is a saint. Thanks so much if you made it through the end.

Food

I'm seriously contemplating starting a food blog, very likely group one. It would be nowhere near as good as some of my favorites (e.g., the hands-down unbeatable EatingAsia, the very useful NYCNosh, the stream-of-consciousness explosion of personality at The Girl Who Ate Everything). But it might still cover some great little-known restaurants, post a few excellent recipes. I have a few friends in "real life" with whom I might do this. But I wonder if it would be a good idea to get film bloggers, many of whom I know are at least part-chowhounds, to have a voice at this blog. I mean, I haven't really discussed this part with my friends, but would there be any interest in having a "film blogger" (or "arts & culture blogger") contingent at a group food blog? (Or, less regularly, the occasional guest blog entries?) How many readers here are big fans of food & drink, and how many among that group would be interested in a cinephile's pre- or post-screening Vietnamese as much as the screening itself?

Video Games

Sometimes I'm really interested in getting back into videogames--for one thing, it's another skill that will help when I have to "fit in with the guys," and for another, it's interesting to me as part of contemporary digital/visual culture. I think one of the next times I visit my parents I may grab one or two of my old systems and hook them up in my apartment. (Maybe I should even stock up on used games for my old NES and SNES consoles?)

My question for people who read this blog and play videogames is this ... if I were to save up and get a new system, what might present the easiest transition for someone like myself who (mostly) stopped gaming back when the first Playstation console was still pretty current? What system has games or technological capabilities that are, in your opinion, the most far-reaching and interesting? I'm not a technophile, and in fact I'm pretty bad at videogames, but I'm willing to learn, and have tried to do a little research on the current/upcoming systems already. And as far as Playstation 2 titles go, I'm very interested in the two games that Fumito Ueda has designed, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus (pictured below), which, as I understand it, are a little like "arthouse games" ... screenshots from them look fascinating:

The Draughtsman's Contract

1. The Baroque Is the Cross He Bears

The thing that bothers me about Peter Greenaway is not actually his work (of which I'm mostly ignorant) but the discourse--the rhetoric--which surrounds it. Recently reading some appreciative articles, interviews, and reviews about this filmmaker (I mean, artist) almost caused me to strain my eyes from rolling them so much. Writers do much hemming & hawing about how Greenaway "rejects" this or that conception of narrative in favor of 'sequence' (or 'spatiality'), that his films are singular challenges to cinema's (presumably previously essential) conventions of identification and empathy. Greenaway himself seems to buy into this image, even feeds it: apparently the cinema has run its course, the idea of cinema-as-storytelling has been discarded by Godard (but apparently not before...), and we're all starving for a truly radical departure--and innovation--in cinema.

What bothers me about all this running-off-at-the-mouth is that it poses as a high-cultural stance but it betrays a profound ignorance of the history of the cinema (and by extension the history of global twentieth century cultures, and the history of art). One suspects that Godard is about as radical and obscure a figure as Greenaway is acquainted with in the cinema: for him the avant-garde exists in painting, but apparently has only a few quick, scattershot appearances in the medium of film. But Greenaway is not the first nor the tenth to challenge the things he supposedly challenges; I doubt he's either the best or the tenth best to do it. (My temptation here is to imagine Ruiz dressed up as Annie Oakley singing to Greenaway, "Anything you can do I can do better...")

The cinema is full of films that "challenge narrativity" (from Cornell's Rose Hobart to Meyer's Supervixens) or ignore it altogether (from Garrel's Les Hautes solitudes to Sonbert's Carriage Trade). There are plenty of films that draw upon a rich cultural history of ideas to create conceptually sophisticated and deeply intellectual work with no compromises for the industry: the films of Harun Farocki, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Straubs, Derek Jarman, Robert Bresson, Glauber Rocha, Chris Marker. The ostensible profundity of Greenaway's conception of cinema comes, I think, from an awful "greatest hits" approach to cinema, whereby (1) it is conceived as essentially, basically, and ultimately a commercial machine used to the ends of die Kulturindustrie, and (2) those rare films which challenge this notion are always those films which have at least one foot squarely in it--because any cinema that isn't part of "the movies" is blissfully ignored by someone like Greenaway, who needs to uphold this image of a reactionary industry to stand in for the entirety of the medium so that he and a few other lone geniuses (Eisenstein, Lynch, Godard, Welles, Fellini) can do their allegedly progressive film-art on "symbol and metaphor." He will compare the development of music or painting over our period of modernity to that of cinema, and wonders why cinema comes up lacking--but that's because he isn't pitting the run-of-the-mill Hollywood hit of 1952 with a Norman Rockwell painting, and he isn't pitting de Kooning with, say, Brakhage. He's comparing the run-of-the-mill Hollywood film with the avant-garde coterie of the art world as though they are the representative equivalents of their given media.

I brought up this question of "truly challenging" work with regard to Cassavetes a while back. I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable with rhetoric that asserts that this or that film is something akin to cinema's zenith, its event horizon, its sublime poetic limit. I just don't understand why something can't be great, decidedly non-mainstream, and not incredibly challenging, automatically 'over the heads' of anyone who doesn't love it. Malick gets this treatment; Kubrick gets this treatment; Greenaway seems to bask in this treatment (going so far as to insist that Americans don't understand "metaphor and symbol," things like that). This is where, as far as extremism & dogma go, I do prefer Ray Carney's brand; at least Carney, in refusing to acknowledge or discuss 99% of "the movies" in a constructive way--the commerce, the industry products--in favor of reading the medium in terms of its artistic development [as he sees it], is drawing attention to films which the culture industry buries or ignores, and is in some sense resisting the predominant cultural impulse to discuss cinema exclusively in terms of multimillion dollar feature films. He's wrong and shortsighted on so many counts, but he's wrong for some admirable reasons. Greenaway identifies "the cinema" as "the movies" and this enables him to talk about the presumed failures of the medium and the glories of his own, radical cinema-based art. It's self-serving, and it perpetuates the logic of the marketplace despite Greenaway's intentions. Someone like Carney will point the way to some new & amazing films you may never have heard of; someone like Greenaway will point you only to their own films.

I could go on, and start picking apart Greenaway quotes for their inaccuracies or their oversights or their baldfaced lies, but I have to eventually get to the second part of my blog entry.

2. Rewriting the Contract

Several years ago I had my first, and until recently, only experience with Peter Greenaway's cinema: I tried to watch a video of The Draughtsman's Contract ('82). I hated it so much I turned it off. (This is a rare event: usually if I turn off a video of a film I haven't seen, it's because I'm interrupted by something more important, or perhaps I'm too tired and would rather give it a go the next day...) This has been the foundation for my antagonism toward Greenaway, or more accurately, toward the high-and-mighty rhetoric which surrounds his work. But like him or not he's something of a major figure of British cinema, and world cinema (whoops again, I mean "the art world"), and I've detected a few stray mentions of him on Matt's site that indicated he (and David Lowery) liked at least some of Greenaway's work. So I might as well see if my initial disdain continues to match my distaste for the rhetoric.

I have to report the confounding news that, upon a repeat effort with The Draughtsman's Contract, I believe I liked it. I've had a few days to think about why I liked it, and I'm still not entirely sure, but I do think I admire the film. Everything I wrote above still stands, but that's OK so long as I can be aware of contradictions in my own thought & practice here, and reconcile as many of them as I can.

So here we have a Baroque Blow-Up, and one that happens to deal with subjects that orbit my own range of interests: political intrigue (on a small scale), coded images and signs, the consideration of an historical 'visual regime.' But I imagine that a film with these attractive totems could still disinterest me, even repulse me; why did this film (on this viewing at least) win me over, bring me in? The tableau presentation, with its occasional flatness and frontality (or, extended into a long space, its 'High Renaissance' perspectivalism) was very admirable in its sheer forthrightness; what I mean by 'forthrightness' is that Greenaway seems to want to provide us with thought-provoking images, images upon which we reflect (and simply for their conceptual content), but he makes little effort to make the image itself attractive, 'enveloping,' intriguing to the emotions as well as the eye. If I can anthropomorphize a little here, they're the sort of images that, if you met them walking down the street, would intensely invite you to coffee and rigorous philosophical conversation rather than to alcoholic revelry and a roll in the hay. This sort of image-making has occurred in the work of several other filmmakers I've been interested in lately (including Derek Jarman--hmm, I wonder what Jarman and Greenaway thought of one another?) ... and of course each artist has his own variant: Jarman's cinema seems to be an intellectual conversation about the erotic & political qualities of rolling in the hay, for instance ... and anyway, to be clear, I'm not making good/bad binaries between which sort of anthropomorphic path is best ...

I do like Greenaway's willingness to make his late 17th century manor lived in without resorting to dystopic prurience (as in some 'edgy' historical films--like Philip Kaufman's execrable Quills). I like that the scenes are (yes) 'sequentialized' without a strong dramatic build-up (though I'm afraid I'm less blown away by this simple and quite palatable fact than Greenaway would presumably like for me to be...). But what else? Why else would I actually like this film, even if only moderately? Why exactly did I hate it so much before? Could it be that Greenaway is, in a limited way, right? That my younger self, much more attuned to the cinema as "the movies," was fundamentally challenged by his work? If that is the case--if--then wouldn't it mean that Greenaway is really only cinematically challenging for those who aren't already on his general level with regard to cultural capital? Who really is his audience, and if I decide to see the films and join with that projected audience, how do I fit into it?

A little wary still, I suspect I won't be able to figure these questions out until I've seen a few more of Greenaway's films. Any recommendations for second & third efforts?

Every Now and Then

Sometimes there are major films which escape the cinephile, major films by major directors (artists whom the cinephile loves), and for whatever reasons, you have to shrug and admit that you have not seen this by-all-accounts masterpiece. Perhaps, as in my case, you simply hold off for the big screen (and then, um, ineptly miss that big-screen chance when it comes to you), and on the few occasions when your resolve crumbles and you decide you'll watch it on DVD, you find that it's perennially checked-out at the video store. You put off seeing it because you're more and more embarrassed that you haven't seen it. Several friends count it as one of their very favorite films. And when in this particular case one buddy, Girish, is in town and mentions one such film as his all-time favorite, I knew the stars were aligned when my video store finally had the damned DVD in stock. I compromised by not waiting for a print to come back to New York, as I wanted, but here I took the first glimpse (and not to be a final one), and all circumstances considered nothing could possibly be improved, and I was offered more things than I can count ...

A Few Things

Injustice: Workingman's Death leaves NYC theaters after only a week, and I--who have wanted badly to see this film for months--missed it! I had counted on at least two weeks at the Cinema Village here, it seemed only customary for an interesting documentary ...

Reparation: At least I'll see some New York Underground Film Festival stuff this weekend. The new James Fotopoulos? Some Kluge? OK, we're go!

Point to Ponder: I can't claim to have read every section of Deleuze's Cinema books, but neither my memory nor the glossaries indicate that he ever mentioned Albert Kahn, who was a wealthy banker-philanthropist who had a project known as the Archives de la Planète. (In this it's obvious to be reminded of another figure from this time period, Aby Warburg, who fascinates me--the wealthy German art and cultural historian whose lifelong dream was to create a Mnemosyne Atlas [and Warburg's example was in turn a partial inspiration for the younger Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project].) At any rate, apparently this Archive is a treasure trove of unedited 'documentary' or 'actuality' material (film strips, autochromes) that Kahn and his employees/associates put together over several decades at the beginning of the twentieth century. I have not seen any of these films myself, of course--though they have been written about in English by film scholar Paula Amad (U of Iowa), Sam Rohdie, and Teresa Castro (I haven't read all these sources yet). What is interesting about Kahn, and the reason why I mention Deleuze, is that Kahn's intellectual mentor and friend was Henri Bergson, who of course is so important to Deleuze's work on cinema. Deleuze, as has been noted by a filmmaker whose work I first sampled not long ago, is a cinephile, he likes good cinema, which is why his books deal mainly with canonical figures and titles--but more than this, if Deleuze is a cinephile in the sense Moullet suggests, perhaps this explains why Deleuze can't be bothered to deal with a mere 'atlas' of footage, as Kahn has accumulated, since it isn't The Cinema, it isn't Griffith-De Mille-Gance, nor Renoir-Bresson-Tati, nor Ford-Hawks-Preminger, nor Mizoguchi-Kurosawa-Ozu, nor Cassavetes, nor Pialat, nor Syberberg.

That is to say, there may be a lot of 'Deleuzian' work to be done on orphan films, 'incomplete' films and fringe films of all kinds ... and the Vogel Call will eventually be complemented by the Deleuze Call.

Eight Arms and a Head (an Octopus), or, Nine Films

The Whitney Biennial had a great series of nine films on Saturday, programmed by one Chris Williams. One of the great discoveries was Jean Painlevé's Les Amours de la pieuvre (made with Geneviève Hamon in 1965). I had expected this to be a "lesser effort" from Painlevé, whose 1930s films L'Hippocampe and Hyas et stenoriques occupy vaunted if hazy positions in my memory. This 1965 thing must be a mere Cousteau sort of rip-off, certainly Painlevé had abandoned all efforts for the avant-garde by this time, right?

How wrong I was! This is at least as good as those '30s films I've seen. Gorgeous color, amazing scientific cinematography (including images of octopus embryos sped up 14,000x), Painlevé's inimitable fusion of clever low-key humor with almost reverent wonderment.

To me the program's quality had a pattern--the first four films were of increasing quality (or at least gave me increasing amounts of cinematic pleasure), and the next four films were a repetition of this trend, and the ninth film, suggesting a real pattern, was "merely OK" in comparison to the other films in the program, as were films #1 and #5. This ninth film was Morgan Fisher's Picture and Sound Rushes ('73), and to be honest, it seemed like an interesting work, but you see, the eighth film in the program (and surely the "head" in this film-program-octopus) was Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres fous ('55), the only film I'd actually seen prior to this program (well, I probably saw the Ivens before, too, but without checking my film logs I'm not 100% sure). And Les Maîtres fous doesn't get any easier the second time around: my body grew increasingly tense as each minute went by, my brain was defeated by a vision on Rouch's part that was just too overwhelming, which remained tantalizingly visible on the far side of my own intellectual powers.

The program began with Otto Mühl's Grimuid, a fine film, but if I never saw it again I don't know that I'd feel too much regret. (Given that the second part of Chris Williams' Whitney programming, in May, also begins with Grimuid, however, I'll probably be seeing it again soon enough!) Joris Ivens' Die Brug (The Bridge) followed--Ivens made my single favorite film of all time, A Tale of the Wind ('88), so absolutely anything by him is of interest to me. But his poetry (as opposed to the filmic appeal of his curiosity, his willingness to tinker with images and his desire to see and to learn) doesn't really develop into something special very early in his career, by my estimation--it comes in parts and passages, but my limited knowledge of the Ivens corpus doesn't reveal anything like Pour le mistral ('65) in his earlier, more montage-driven work. A good film, though.

Harun Farocki's Ein Bild (An Image), however, is a sort of film that I love--forthright but complex, clear if not exactly obvious. In what would make a nice companion piece to his Still Life ('89?), Farocki films a photo shoot for the German Playboy, and the resultant dialectic between flatness/artificiality and depth/reality is really interesting. The first shot of the film is indicative of the way Farocki draws a lot out of a few unforced gestures (his observant and "passive" kino-eye has few peers in the cinema--Kiarostami comes to mind). We see a shot of a studio, the back wall of which is painted to look like a beach and an open blue sea. A few men, who we shall see constructing a set for a photo shoot over the course of the next few minutes, walk through the gulf of space between the 'artificial' space of the painted sea and the point of the camera's lens, underscoring through their movement the divide between a presented image and an actual (or lived) space, something that Farocki riffs on for the next twenty or so minutes.

What can follow something like Farocki's dry, charming, potentially upsetting statement and not suffer for it? Well, we can always move into sublime flicker cinema, that is to say, Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer (1958-60). This was my first film by the renowned filmmaker--which I'm a little sheepish to admit, but very glad that I can finally have behind me. It's all about the frame, here, and the optical play between our gaze and the black-or-white screen, where intense pockets of activity start to form during the really strong flicker-passages, and what you "see" in the frame depends on where and how intensely you are looking.

So I figured the films couldn't keep getting better at this point, and David Lamelas' wry, interesting film A Study of Inner and Outer Space ('69) simply didn't grab me: I may be forgoing its merits, but in this ambitious film program, its role was really to let me catch my breath from Arnulf Rainer.

Ténériffe (Yves Allégret and Eli Lotar, 1932), number six on the program before we got to the octopi, the possessed, and finally Morgan Fisher, may or may not have been a better film, but I was ready to appreciate it more. I feel like I've seen an Allégret film or two in the past--did he do one of the Josephine Baker vehicles? Anyway, it's a poetic documentary (shown without subtitles). Nicole Brenez has mentioned Lotar as a 'martyr and/or sacrificial victim of the industrial cinema'; that's all I know about him. Time for research. And so, in a sense, this is one of the things that made this program worthwhile for me--I came and I got something substantial out of it, but with each step I take on the trail towards True Cinephilic Nirvana, I can only see that the end of the road is one step farther than I had previously imagined ...

Viva la Muerte

Several days after watching it on DVD, I still find it difficult to describe Fernando Arrabal's Viva la Muerte (1971), and how strangely and utterly moving I thought it was. [Note that clicking on the Arrabal link will take you to an introduction page where a little midi or wav file where the melody of Viva la Muerte's theme song plays...] A deeply, openly surrealist (wait, does the Panic Movement qualify as a large-s Surrealism?) and politicized film that recasts some of Arrabal's own autobiography (his father was an anti-Franco prisoner who escaped prison never to be heard from again...) in both literal and symbolic terms. Especially considering that this was his first film, Arrabal is remarkably adept at sliding down any number of axes--emotionally pitching his scenes as scathing Buñuellian anti-bourgeois tableaux one moment, and moving images of childhood memory the next; working with the flatness of an image almost like his own ciné-tract, or telling a sequence of childhood cruelty (visually composed "in the round"). Really interesting.

I don't know Jodorowsky's work, except some of (I think) The Holy Mountain. Time to try to fix that ...

On a completely unrelated note, those who habla español may want to check out Enfocarte, a Spanish online journal devoted to art, philosophy, culture, cinema, poetry, etc. I just discovered it the other day and though I haven't (tried to) make it through a full article, a quick perusal of the contents was intriguing ...

Quote of the Day

"The regular spectator before 1910 surely learnt to be more alert to the screen than the modern spectator, more on the look-out for the surprises of a booby-trapped surface. The commercial failure of Jacques Tati's hilarious masterpiece Playtime, whose images frequently share this primitive topographism, confirms that we have lost the habit of 'keeping our eyes open' in the cinema."

-- Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows (p. 155)

A Question Regarding Cassavetes

Who here finds his work challenging in the specific way that Ray Carney does? (If you need to be refreshed, just check out his website.) If you look at Stephen Bender's guest essay on the site, you'll see this about Faces:

"Yes, this film is one of the supreme masterworks of all of American cinema. It is absolutely essential. Yes, it is "difficult." Yes, it is "slow." But those standards are for enterainment. Cassavetes wants to take us out of our ordinary ways of viewing. He wants to deny us the escapism of "entertainment." That's the point. If you have trouble with this film--good! If you find it infuriating--good! If you find it not entertaining--good! It wants to get under your skin. It wants to shake you up."

Cassavetes' films are always tricky, uncontainable creatures--they are demanding, exhausting, rewarding in so many surprising ways. Yes. But never, not even as a teenager watching Shadows or Chinese Bookie, have I felt the urge to turn off the television or leave the theater. I've never felt initially that any of these were bad or incompetent or infuriating films that I had to "scale" like Brenez did with Stromboli; never been put off by their alleged "amateurishness." I never feel the need to justify Cassavetes' work to myself or others by contrasting it to "entertainment." Is it just me--is it the product of my self-conditioning that I'm not as put off by Cassavetes as someone who saw almost primarily postclassical Hollywood films would presumably be? Or are Carney and his advocates here pressing too hard on this point, not considering that not all people who watch Cassavetes are coming from the same allegedly Hollywood-sanitized place?

So the question I want to put forth to those who read this blog is, what kind of challenge does Cassavetes represent to you? Is it, for anyone, especially for anyone who loves these films, an affront to your system, each time you see a film of his, so much that you're tempted to stop watching, or to shout out in anger?

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The Imagistic Genealogy of the Chinese Bookie

Spending time the past few days on cult/exploitation DVD review sites (and the like) I've started to notice some very interesting resemblances among film stills. For seasoned cultists, associations and lineages probably come easily enough (like being able to say about a given musical scene, "Yeah, that's 1998 acid ambientcore from St. Louis, but all the interesting stuff in that scene was really over by late 1996 ..."). For yours truly, it's exciting to connect the dots between films, to look at a given film's aesthetic and try to determine it's simultaneously socio-cultural and imagistic origins--what films might we label a work's ancestors, its friends & neighbors? Its enemies?

It's not a matter of a mere concept, but a sense of concrete common palettes & tropes--like genres predicated on visuals & tones rather than mostly narratives & themes. (Obviously, genre works in both ways, so there's still going to be narrative & thematic overlap.)

What has intrigued me specifically is seeing what I guess I'd call a mostly NYC-based lineage that had a limb in the underground, the (s)exploitation/grindhouse film, the taut action/gore film, and the independent movement--all of which are marked by low budgets, of course. Starting in the 1960s (with Radley Metzger and things like The Dirty Girls, as well as with the New American Cinema & Andy Warhol), there become an interesting gray area wherein the highbrow serious art cinema and and the lowbrow sex-and-violence film met whenever both ends of the shoestring (budget) got tied together. A lot of cheap, disingenuously "artsy" (trippy, "elliptical") works were made for audiences around this time--Metzger for instance started out by acquiring, distributing, even re-editing European films (some of which were legitimate "art movies") into titillating features for the raincoat crowd. Doris Wishman got her start in this scene.

By the 1970s, more of the film were in color, and we start to get a more standardized palette for this loose family tree of films and "film styles." Along with all manner of flesh tones and perhaps neon lights, our dominant colors are reds, browns, black, and white. Our most familiar settings are apartments (such as one for a gangster's mistress; and quiet and still on the soundtrack) and NYC streets (loud and cacophonous), and in-between, bars and stripclubs. Common totems: the handgun, the glass of alcohol (be it wine or bourbon...), cigarettes, doors and stairways, breasts (of course), glaring lights (inside & out), and the image-concept of the film theater or the stage. The framing seems to have a particular commonality, as well: no swift, baroque movements and angles like in Italian gialli, and perhaps lacking even the energy of Russ Meyer or the Roger Corman stable: instead a straightforwardness in which the intensity of the images sometimes crystallizes into an overwhelming composition whose impact may go beyond the mere brief moments we see it on the screen (as Cassavetes & Ferrara, two who have done masterly work in this loose idiom, do with close-ups as well as with images of performers & strippers).

The navel of this universe is, of course, Times Square. Pre-Giuliani. And the great obituary of this place is Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant ('92) ...

Even films which exist largely outside of this aesthetic genus may still refer to it: Bette Gordon's Variety (1983) has a lead character who works at a Times Square porn theater box office; Travis Bickle of course takes Cybill Shepherd to a porno in Taxi Driver (1976) and of course has the bloody grindhouse shootout in the stairway and threshhold at the climax; Allan Moyle's dear-to-my-heart Times Square ('81) has its two underage heroines singing and dancing (clothed) in a strip club. This set of colors-objects-conventions more or less declined in the 1980s. If the 1960s saw the birth of a movement, and the 1980s its expiration, then its "peak" would presumably be the 1970s. Cue John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie ('76), an unassailable masterpiece. It's obvious enough to see, and to say, that Cassavetes "borrowed" or "worked within" generic elements. But what bears emphasis is how acutely Cassavetes captured some of the definite "look" of a scene, even if relocating it physically and diegetically to Los Angeles, in order to ground his material with something to play off of. He wasn't engaging in meta-games, but chose to really dig deep into the look and feel of his figures and his decor, his compositions. I tend to dislike the phrase "transcending the genre," for a number of reasons, one of which is that many films which elicit this claim are standing above the genre to begin with--but Cassavetes' film "transcends the genre" precisely because it works from the bottom "up," breaking out of the emotional, moral, or psychological formulations that the exploitation film, the action film, or even the standard (yes) independent art film would map out and follow.

At any rate, let me put forth my hypothesis--and stress finally that this is a hypothesis, not a "finding" or even really an assertion--through some images, several of which are from films I have never seen:

Stairways & Doorways (from One Side to Another):

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1) (2)

Deadly Weapons (Doris Wishman, 1973) (1)

Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979) (1)

Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981) (1)

Pasties & a G-String on Stage:

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1)

The Gore Gore Girls (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1972) (1) (2)

The Ultimate Degenerate (Michael Findlay, 1969) (1) (2)

Field of Red:

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1)

Deadly Weapons (1)

Driller Killer (1)

Blog-a-Thon: Code inconnu

I believe that this is my 100th blog entry (if, that is, you count my very first one, whose title and text are both "Just a test.") I could think of no more rewarding way of doing a hundredth post than partaking in one of these great blog-a-thons which have sprung up: one person's contribution to a larger community and dialogue.

Community and dialogue are precisely what are at stake--and in crisis--in Michael Haneke's Code inconnu (2000). Racial divisions, generational divisions, gulfs between lovers. An "EU" styled social portrait if there ever was one, Haneke hits what notes he can in his running time without affecting a frantic pace.

Code inconnu tells a multilayered story almost as though one were surfing through television channels. The vignettes cut from one to another without conventional dramatic roundedness. This is not aleatory, however--though Haneke's actors give the impression of naturalism, his cuts still often come at pointed moments (cf. Juliette Binoche's supermarket fight with her boyfriend, when the heated conversation resumes to the mundane). The difficulty in dealing with Haneke is that he is, I suspect, fully aware of the paths he takes, conventional or otherwise, and like Brian De Palma, his work is essentially essayistic even if its vessel is fiction. The question of whether or not Code inconnu is exhilirating, entertaining, moving--to me--almost evaporates because the foremost question is whether or not they engage the viewer productively, to draw out new and active participants in Haneke's research into the production of social dissonance.

I don't even know for certain how much I like this film. Overall, if I were a guest on Ebert's show, sure, I'd give it a thumbs up. But what does that really mean? That I enjoyed Haneke's deft weaving of narratives personal and social? That I enjoyed the progressiveness with which Haneke's conception depicted European diversity in our day and age? That I was pleased by my own ability to recognize and appreciate both the deft narrative and sociopolitical nuance? One of the valuable things about Code inconnu is that it seems to be aware of this question of valuation. The scenes culled from Binoche's film-within-a-film, which may be quite perplexing for the first-time viewer, bear out the problem of investing one's faith and interest in a scene before one knows its context. They represent an exercise (but only an exercise: in viewing a film there are no real risks) in judging too quickly, in formulating an opinion before we give of ourselves the patience to let something impart its own truths on us. By extension these scenes are, for me, commentaries on the question of one's relationship to the cinema itself, and though I have not found the answers that Haneke himself may want us to arrive at (if he has any), I suspect part of the resonance of the scenes, like this film, come in recognizing and fruitfully exploring the separation that can result between immediate experience & rational reflection.

(So, this is coming a little early for the blog-a-thon, but Matt's already put his two cents in, and even if I don't live in Australia myself, it's Monday somewhere. And more convenient for me ...)

Signs and Wonders: Ice

1. I spent time before a screening of Robert Kramer's Ice reading up on Jean Renoir in the library after work. One of the books I looked at was Leo Braudy's. Of the handful I perused, Durgnat's was the best.

2. Ice is such a fascinating film! I've waited long years to see his work screened. (To my knowledge I did miss one film of his, probably completely my fault, a year or two ago. I arrived in New York in 2001, a year after the city was the site of a big retrospective.) It would make a great, momentous double bill with Garrel's Les Amants réguliers. Escalation / deflation of the revolutionary drive. During one exhibition of the newsreels which the radical network makes to educate the people, the soundtrack contains people giving examples of false consciousness about their political situation (e.g., "I don't know anything, I'm not an expert," "I have to worry about my house and kids") and black leader is intercut with still photographs of individuals who we might presume are to have made each given statement. Later in the film, when one character (not a radical) is talking to another about how things aren't that bad, and no revolutionary changes are needed, the black leader re-appears, articulating her "false consciousness" through form even as Kramer allows this character to voice her concerns in a compelling and revealing way. This is ostensibly Kramer's concern: to connect the revolutionary imperative to human(ist) experience. At any rate, the IMDB lists Leo Braudy as one of the actors in the film. The Leo Braudy? Whose book on Renoir I had in my hands only an hour before seeing the film? Hmmm.

3. After the screening of Ice, I went to a small party. This party was held, I am almost certain, in one of the building complexes where they shot an extended sequence of Ice. I will have to do some research ... or try anyway. But it seemed pretty unmistakeable.

* Waiting for my subway ride home, about 1-ish, I saw a poor guy who was what I guess I'd call "henpeck drunk." Leaning against the wall he would bend over as if about to pass out, and kept bobbing up in a burst of resilient consciousness. All I could do is shake my head and say to myself, "Oh man, I've been there." And I'm glad I wasn't there last night.

** In case you can't read it in the image above, the words scrawled on this person's back in the still most often taken from Ice are: "Humanity won't be happy until the last bureaucrat is dissolved in the blood of the last capitalist."