Year's End

Normally I include some lists at year's end—a casual reflection of what I saw, and what captured my imagination. But this past year has been my weakest film-viewing go-round in several years, and it included an abnormally large proportion of (a) second or third viewings, and (b) 'humiliation' films that I probably should have seen before 2008 anyway. So I wouldn't be able to give a very fun list with regard to old films. And I barely saw anything worth noting among new releases. This is not a reflection upon the year in cinema; it says everything about my own life and schedule and the fact that the whole second half of this past year has been a cramped and hectic one where I gave up much ground on my cinephilic duties. I did really like Jia Zhang Ke's 24 City, which is a notch or two below his masterful Still Life, but still pretty impressive ... and I think it probably counts as my favorite of the small number of 2008 world premieres I've seen.

What I will do, however, is give a few words on a film that I've chosen from what I saw during each month of this calendar year. These are not necessarily the best or most interesting films I saw in each given month. They're only meant to to pique curiosity, direct attention to interesting films, or perhaps vent a little snark.

January - Dr. Caligari (Stephen Sayadian, 1989) - Surprisingly there's little of interest that Googling brings up on this cult director who has a captivating style all his own. I'd love to see his other films, whether erotic expressionist comedy cult fantasies (1980s) or all-out hardcore pornography (1990s).

February - Lo foo chut gang / Tiger on the Beat (Lau Kar-leung, 1988) - I watched this (on VHS) because I recognized the name of the veteran HK action director. What I remember is Chow Yun Fat cracking a dozen raw eggs into a big glass and then cheerily downing the whole thing. There are also scenes of cops in their underwear out in the streets.














March - Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978) - I saw this sitting beautiful and inviting film with very esteemed company at BAM: an unforgettable culmination to an excellent weekend.

April - Fast Workers (Tod Browning, 1933) - The theme of this minor Browning, a non-horror film, is that "the lady is a tramp." All ladies, really. Still: the movie cuts hard and fast and I continue to remember the unusual tactility of the way it depicts high rise construction.

May - Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007) - 2001: An American Apparel Odyssey.

June - The Frighteners (Peter Jackson, 1996) - A fairly good and solid, though maligned and forgotten, SFX genre film. I had not long before read Michel Chion (on sound and on, well, 2001) ... and something about Chion's way of analyzing films seeped into my head as I watched this and for a few hours I was convinced I would write something substantial about all the interesting little things this modest movie does.

July - When Willie Comes Marching Home (John Ford, 1950) - Olaf Möller has the best word on this: "whoaaaaaaaaaa." It's not top-drawer Ford but his well material is the stuff to make other directors envious.

August - Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008) - In the same month that I fell in love with Anna Faris' amazing performances, what good fortune to have found a comedic run to rival Smiley Face. Penelope Cruz completely owns this movie, which I think is dismal for the aggregative running time without her presence. But when she's on the screen ... "jeen-yoos"!

September - Pictures at an Exhibition (Chris Marker, 2008?) - If you watch this and/or if you read Borges' "The Library of Babel" and feel moved to tears, then you are a kindred spirit. There is something simultaneously sad and tempting about the unfolding of information into infinity, spreading out across time and the cosmos, and the fact that we can contemplate going down those rabbit holes ...

October - W. (Oliver Stone, 2008) - The most pointless movie of the year? I couldn't say but I suspect it's in the running.

November - Trop tôt, trop tard (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1981) - The NYC cinephiles—and beyond!—made it out to this "standing room only" screening of a very bad 16mm print of the Straubs' demanding but also hypnotic and beautiful film.












December - Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984) - For years I have put off seeing this film because I told myself I'd watch it on the big screen. After a number of missed chances, however, I finally bit the bullet and got a DVD. I have liked Leone films a lot before but this is a different level altogether: one of the very greatest movies ever made. With the exception of the casting choice of Elizabeth McGovern (which to me strikes a solitary and unnecessary dissonant chord in the whole giant opus) this is a blemish-free tour-de-force moving forward on all fronts.

I am not certain that I can think of another film that so completely marries classicism with modernism; cinema's dueling inheritances of literature, drama, painting, photography, and (hmmm) probably also the chalky residues of 20th century philosophy of mind; ironic skepticism with spectral, heartbreaking romanticism (in this its peer is Kubrick's best film, Barry Lyndon). I confidently felt this film would be a true achievement at the moment I realized Leone was going to let the phone keep ringing. This is a facility with symbol and metaphor that reclaims them for the cinema. That is, all the rich holdings that lit., painting, etc. have bequeathed to cinema simultaneously have acted as weights and shackles—to the point where it becomes somewhat embarrassing to even speak of metaphor or symbol because that channels back into the pre-cinematic prison house. In its handling of time, its evocation of memory, its transcience across space, the phone is resolutely "cinematic." At the same time there is absolutely no point in praising the employment of that ringing phone if one does not understand what it does, what it means. As far as I know there is a dearth of critical, analytical work devoted to exploring the frontier-space next to conventional and philistine wisdom in this endeavor. There are those who would believe it's all a matter of "form supports story or theme" (a sterile, boring, and wrong premise); and the alternative would invest itself into meaning without recourse to a pre-arranged system or to the invited stigma of "formalism."

(If I am not making much sense it is because I have not yet finished clarifying my thoughts!)

In 2009, I think & hope, EL will shake things up in its own humble nook of the film blogosphere by presenting some counter-arguments, some re-evaluations, and some cross-disciplinary reflections on the medium, the other media, and the world. For the sake of the readers of this blog, all of you whom I appreciate very much, I will do my best to make these further investigations interesting, provocative, informative, enjoyable, and fruitful.

Happy New Year!

Signs

Moving image art can ponder the indexical bearing of the human on a material/imagistic edifice; it can take it as a theme or a problem. The hand on the screen cannot communicate with a screen, but the screen itself communicates with the owners of the hand: can become a gun, figuratively speaking, and can rob you of your leisure and all that it's worth as surely as it can nurture with a gift, kissing you. (Godard understands this fact.)

Statistics

"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
—Apocryphal quote frequently attributed to Stalin.

A question posed by both Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Tavernier's Le Juge et l'assassin (1976): how to reconcile the law of the land which condemns murder when the society that is built upon, and enforces, such laws requires same in much larger numbers than any one individual can achieve?

What other films treat this topic?

RIP, Robert Mulligan

An excellent director whose understanding of the medium was fluid, inventive, well-applied. His work didn't have a recognizable style except to those interested in looking. As Dave Kehr pointed out, it has a lot to do with the subjective point-of-view. He was also an early chronicler of the young Reese Witherspoon's forearms, in The Man in the Moon. I wrote a few words about two Mulligan films here, in 2005.

(Blogging to resume this week ...)

Image of the Day

More Christmases

More graffiti on the Four Christmases subway poster at my stop. "This Christmas ... think long and hard about Reese Witherspoon's forearms." "This Christmas disappear into the world between Vince Vaughn's thigh meat." "Obama 08."

Checkpoint

A couple more weeks and things will start easing up. (I will get around to discussions left unpursued, as well.) In the meantime, here's a clip:

Stepping Stone

"The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognised and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. History has already provided this organism, and it is the political party—the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total. In the modern world, only those historico-political actions which are immediate and imminent, characterised by the necessity for lightning speed, can be incarnated mythically by a concrete individual. Such speed can only be made necessary by a great and imminent danger, a great danger which precisely fans passion and fanaticism suddenly to a white heat, and annihilates the critical sense and the corrosive irony which are able to destroy the "charismatic" character of the condottiere (as happened in the Boulanger adventure). But an improvised action of such a kind, by its very nature, cannot have a long-term and organic character. It will in almost all cases be appropriate to restoration and reorganisation, but not to the founding of new States or new national and social structures (as was at issue in Machiavelli's Prince, in which the theme of restoration was merely a rhetorical element, linked to the literary concept of an Italy descended from Rome and destined to restore the order and the power of Rome). It will be defensive rather than capable of original creation. Its underlying assumption will be that a collective will, already in existence, has become nerveless and dispersed, has suffered a collapse which is dangerous and threatening but not definitive and catastrophic, and that it is necessary to reconcentrate and reinforce it—rather than that a new collective will must be created from scratch, to be directed towards goals which are concrete and rational, but whose concreteness and rationality have not yet been put to the critical test by a real and universally known historical experience."

—from Gramsci, trans. Hoare & Nowell-Smith, "The Modern Prince."

More will follow as I find time for it.

Mirror and Vortex

I saw this poster graffiti for the upcoming (romantic?) comedy Four Christmases this morning in the subway. I had to whip out my cellphone and take a few pictures.

"Don't you want to walk into the mirror?"

"I'm alone in this vortex."

See. I didn't know the song until I googled the lines. I like it much more thinking of these as random lines some jokester marked on their own.

People Get Ready

So do we now refer to ourselves as the United States of Anti-America? The United States of Arugula? For eight years I patiently waited for my moment of schadenfreude as the right-wingers who talked about mandates and country first would simply have to face up to a demographic "pwning." Like with the losers at the end of Revenge of the Nerds, it becomes apparent ultimately that there are more of us than there are of you.

Obama's name is the sign under which popular sentiment has crystallized, and in exercising agencies we must use these signs as they come to us. Long planning to vote for Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, stumping for McKinney to numerous friends and acquaintances, I nevertheless wavered near the end. I admit with some reluctance that I am not a robot, I bend and change. I do not believe Obama is our political messiah. Yet, the energy and sense of community around his candidacy were there in addition to the regular establishment partisanship I can't stomach. I ended up casting my vote for Obama/Biden on the Working Families line because I realized that during the day, it would be around Obama that speculation and aspiration would cohere. People were talking about him in the bodega where I got coffee before voting. (Queens went 75% Obama, last I looked, which actually made it the most McCain-friendly borough after Staten Island.) The point is not him, he is the focal point projected by us. But in recognizing this fact it is vital that we do not establish a program of mere narcissism, which is what Palin offered her base. ("She's like us, she's normal like us!") Obama could offer something very similar to his supporters, and this we must avoid. We have to acknowledge the nature of our symbolic actions and movements. Obama will be a respectable president only if we ensure that he is one. I think his election is one step, an important landmark step of significant symbolic value and potentially significant policy value. But we must ensure our direction. Obama will almost definitely be a miserable president if we continue to cede him, ever more profoundly, to the owners of capital and the disseminators of images. He's already within their clutches. The only reason Americans do, and can, feel like we exercise any efficacy at all is simply because his ascendant star (so to speak) had not been completely preordained and overdetermined before even arriving on the scene. The fact that people worry about his inexperience is precisely why we can extend a measure of hope.

And I do not use that last word liberally.

I always enjoy reading Ran Prieur, who frequently comes up with angles I hadn't quite considered. Still, he's lamenting what he interprets as the "dodged bullet" nature of the election, which should have been a progressive landslide but wasn't. I, on the other hand, wonder if Prieur is being untrue to some of his more deeply-held principles—such as that change is best when it comes gradually. We should not invest too much in the feel-good symbolic value of this election, not unless we're just party hacks. Which is why we should not be too disappointed if the landslide (including more of that sweet, sweet schadenfreude) didn't come. If we're being serious, this should be the first part of a long-haul sort of move, and Obama will be succeeded by more progressive candidates, and federal government will find as a competitor more and more serious popular/grassroots threats to its power insofar as it is aligned with national and transnational corporate interests.

"Now the wave has crashed, breaking the back of the modern Republican Party in the process."

Let it break! We will figure out where to house the refugees of George W. Bush.

According to Thomas Friedman, the breaking of the modern Republican Party is more along the lines of being the long end to the Civil War. I know, I know—picking on Friedman is like shooting fish in a barrel. No serious person takes him seriously. He thinks that the election of Barack Obama is proof that, finally, "the American Civil War [has] ended." Unable to conceive of history outside of these sixth-grade storybook terms, Friedman dutifully hews to the liberal-capitalist party line, where the Civil War was "about" slavery, and the march of progress and the Union. But because the Southern states have dragged their feet with regard to Union "progress," with Jim Crow, segregation, and all that, the Civil War (i.e., "racism") has still had hot embers up until 11pm EST last night. What's offensive is that he says this: "the Civil War could never truly be said to have ended until America’s white majority actually elected an African-American as president." Come on, Friedman! Give it a few more generations, and America's white majority may no longer even exist. We wouldn't be so incredibly central to the project of his beloved white liberal history. Do you all hear this? White folks did this, they ended the War Between the States, they finally put a closing chapter on the long novel of racial strife that has divided our great nation. Sojourner Truth didn't do it. Martin Luther King, Jr., didn't do it. Malcolm X surely didn't do it. It didn't take black people. It didn't take Barack Obama, even, really. It took white people electing a black man to let us know that the (trumpets please!) Civil War is finally over.

Stellar. We white folks ultimately elected a black person, even though the majority of us voted for his white opponent. I would be happier, and more surprised, if the news stories about Obama's historic victory were not explained in terms of what it means for white people and what great things we've finally done. If there is a job for the intellectual class over the next few years, it will be in exposing, correcting, and focusing the way our history is being written and peddled to us before our very eyes. How we understand popular or progressive history, especially, is how we understand our own history. This is too important to let textbooks, newspapers, movies tell it to us first. Their way. We will insist on ours.

At any rate ... now another stage begins. The other party's back is broken, and we the electorate should make the Democrats aware that we could do the same to them if they do not heed us. Now should be when the gloves come off.

Eat, Sleep, Breathe, Write, Etc.

I wish I could exercise my right to be lazy. I'm currently undergoing the busiest period I've ever had in my life. So ... I wanted to jot down a few words to indicate something about my relative absence. (Especially now that, I see below, Alex has demanded new material.) This may also explain, if not excuse, why I may be out-of-touch for long periods of time. Things like sleep, blog writing, and blog reading have had to take a backseat. Movies themselves have had to take a backseat, although this past week or two have seen a slight bump in the film-watching department: yesterday, my first glimpses of Jean-Daniel Pollet's work outside of Paris vu par... (Pourvu quo'on ait l'ivresse and L'Amour c'est gai, l'amour c'est triste), and also recently some Aki Kaurismäki (Girish once cited him as his most repeated-viewing-friendly director), some more Anna Faris, some Rossellini (side note: by coincidence, this was posted on my birthday!). At any rate, EL was created as a public notebook for me to jot down whatever I'm thinking, especially when it's superfluous to more official intellectual requirements, but I just don't have the necessary amount of time/energy/attention to provide adequately for this notebook at the moment. I'm not calling a hiatus or sabbatical because I want the freedom to post a blog entry or two if I get the time and the urge. But if little shows up ... know that it's just Life yanking me along.

Despite the hectic schedule, one must always eat, so let me say a few words about two excellent restaurants in my beloved borough that I had dinner at this past weekend. Mombar is an Egyptian place on Steinway; I have wanted to go here since I moved to the borough in 2005. My fiancée and I—yes, I've also gotten myself betrothed this season—went here on Halloween, as we decided not to celebrate the holiday this year on account of being generally exhausted. It made for one of the emptier restaurant experiences I've had on a Friday night in New York: there was one couple already in the restaurant when we arrived, they left, and a second couple came in as we were finishing up. Given how good the food was, however, this had to have been a fluke because of Halloween. We ordered a spinach & chickpea appetizer (delicious, garlicky), a "Sahara mix" appetizer dish (pita chips with things like hummus + green apple slice on top), a mombar entree (spiced sausage in sauce), and the lamb tajeen. The kitchen gave us a complimentary order of Egyptian fried bread. Himalayan Yak is a recently re-opened Nepali/Tibetan/Indian joint on Roosevelt. We ordered ~9 dishes for 6 people, my favorite of which was the sizzling lamb. But there were also a few fantastic potato-based veg dishes, a solid boar leg appetizer, some quite good steamed beef momos (though Tangra Masala's are still my favorite ever). Should you venture into Jackson Heights and wonder if this place is BYOB, we found out the hard way that it is not, but the management were nice and allowed us to drink our shiraz anyway.

As an addendum, there is Poodam's, which is in my immediate neighborhood and which I ate from for probably the sixth time recently. For years this corner was notorious because it hosted a string of horrible Thai restaurants. (I had the worst Thai food I've ever had there once.) But the current incarnation is a fairly solid establishment, and for this I am thankful. (Though I wanted to move to Queens largely because of the food options, the neighborhood in which actually I live is unfortunately skimpy on good restaurants, especially since Le Sans souci closed.) If you happen to go there, I would recommend sticking to their Isaan specialties and the appetizers. Don't bother with curries or their chicken dishes, which are an improvement on what I tried at the same location previously, but still merely average. Anything with duck, pork, sausage, or seafood, any kind of "salad," or the chive dumplings ... those seem to be the smart choices. OK.

More will come to EL at some point in the next month or two, but I can't say how frequently. And finally: let's enjoy these elections tomorrow ...

Quote of the Day

“Did not workers previously resort at once to sabotage and set fire to factories?—To induce men to reconcile their interests peacefully without involving the legal system, there is, in the end, apart from all virtues, one effective motive that often enough puts into the most reluctant hands pure instead of violent means: it is the fear of mutual disadvantages that threaten to arise from violent confrontation, whatever the outcome might be. Such motives are clearly visible in countless cases of conflict of interests between private persons. It is different when classes and nations are in conflict, since the higher orders that threaten to overwhelm equally victor and vanquished are hidden from the feelings of most, and from the intelligence of almost all.”

—Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” (p. 245 in SW1).

Your Audience Is One

Superfluous plus: maybe in the wake of this financial crisis people in Hollywood will begin to remember the poor, and to deal with the everyday fact of difference. Hollywood can do "Derelicte," really earnestly too, but it can't really deal with the poor. (If and when transnational media corporations produce works that, for whatever reason, once again engage these issues, I hope Andy Rector will start to trace this progression at Kino-Slang, regardless even of the films' aesthetic worth.)

This is a point I have made a lot, but: one of the interesting things about teen movies in the 1980s vs. their late 1990s counterparts is that the former are generally much more class-conscious. Still "Hollywood," plenty of wish fulfillment and obfuscation, sure, but they acknowledge certain disparities in the way communities are separated, how individuals are thereby classified and subjected to different social options. These disparities are plasticized out of existence in (most) recent teen films. Have you seen Step Up? 10 Things I Hate About You? These are films where the outsider/underdog is never really poor. They are coded as bohemian instead or, more precisely, bobo. I kind of enjoyed The Devil Wears Prada, but Anne Hathaway's living a life of relative privilege, albeit stressful privilege, in that movie, and would not be able to afford her apartment with a live-in cook boyfriend—if I recall—unless there was some serious trust fund support. Why can't there be more studio films with cramped, imperfect apartments!? Or—God forbid—living conditions that require one to interact and compromise with their neighbors. A striking feature of The Karate Kid is that little Danny Russo meets people right away in his surroundings. Most importantly, Mr. Miyagi. Hollywood fantasy, especially today, it seems to me, is about being able to live without interference from neighbors, without being in a situation where one is forced to negotiate space, noise, bills, chores, commutes. I haven't analyzed large bodies of films to be sure of it; it's simply an impression of aggregate generalities. It's a potential shortcoming of mainstream American film that corresponds to the giant, malicious bubble under which so many of us here have lived for some years.

When 'Hollywood' (which is not run by the poor) can more honestly represent workers, mass media entertainment will: we can all claim in the theater that "I Got a Name" once again.

Truth: on a blog that I read which hosts sociopolitical opinions decidedly different than my own, a commenter recently commended Sarah Palin, in the VP debate—which I mostly didn't watch, and clearly didn't need to—for using the phrase "working class" rather than "middle class." I, too, cringe at the meaningless ubiquity of this phrase in the political media spectacle: middle class, which is peddled to represent the self-respecting aspirations of the working poor as well as the self-deprecating pretensions of the rich. So why is it that fringe rightist-libertarians are cheering on La Maverick when they would surely froth at the mouth if Obama or Biden were to speak in such terms (inciting "class warfare" no doubt)? As if the Republican or Democratic establishments would every honestly care about the majority ...

Continuing on.



As I posted on Girish's blog recently, I am a big fan of Times Square (Allan Moyle, 1981), and I am a big fan of this scene in particular, which energizes a seriously fantastic and obscure pop tune with a remarkable bit of performance/filmmaking. From seconds 0:18 to 0:55 in this clip, the camera pans from left to right, starting with the character Nicky (Robin Johnson) and moving across the floor—over the owner/manager, waitstaff, patrons, multiracial, spanning in age from adolescence until middle years, none of them exactly privileged—to the spot in the curtains from which Pammy (Trini Alvarado) will emerge. Cut to the original angle of Nicky for a moment, then an over-the-shoulder medium of shot of her, from her height, giving us a long-shot view of poor Pammy's "striptease" debut. This final shot literalizes the communality and desire implicit in the long tracking shot, which in its own way and context echoes our hero M. Lange (only lacking his armed figure to bring us, in cold righteous murderous rage, to absolution). In the absence of this Langean absolution—i.e., retaliation against our oppressors—we have a moment of supreme ecstacy, arrived at slowly, once the body armor has been let down. "In this material world run on injustice and terror, where "popular" is confused with "industrial," any cultural expression that does not hurl an angry cry or wail a song of mad love (often one and the same) merely collaborates in the regulation and preservation of this world." (Nicole Brenez, Abel Ferrara, trans. Adrian Martin.) Listen to the "na-na-na-na-na-na" part, where Johnson's throaty cackle mixes with Alvarado's progressive confidence. The stage routine began with disembodied laughs on the soundtrack, but it arrives in an orgasmic affirmation of communal pleasure.

In the mainstream cinema this is a commodity more precious than gold, and it is doled out in dust and leaf form most of the time; rarely do we witness it really.

In a few minutes of a mostly-forgotten teen film we have a passage that can sit in dialogue with Renoir, Prévert, Makavejev, Reich. I'm not saying it's great cinema in the same sense that Peter Kubelka is great cinema. But it's a rich and wonderful accomplishment of some genuine kind.

If we listen to this song from the film we witness something fascinating and, also, rare. (Cf. this bell hooks quote.) This is a politicized identification across groups, a communal act of siding with the underclasses and all the "lower" categories of people in the social sphere. "Your daughter is one."

He'll Be Missed

He could eat fifty eggs.

The Man from Craigslist

Reply to: hous-42346111340733@craigslist.org

Date: 1934

Beautiful flat for sale. Generic but roomy. Money hidden in briefcase, a few English touches. In winter one must wipe the windows clean to see out of them. Decorate it as you will. Call and ask for Georges.

• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 13473234512

Dear M. Simenon,

The flat has worked out very well. I have taken to heart your blessing to treat the flat as I wish. You have left me a simple set of rules, a list of things done and not done, and a gripping progression for every minute that I have been there. (Though, at times, when I relate it to my friends, I admit they sometimes find it obscure.) Some of my dear ones have come to live with me in this flat, and I have had a fine tall Englishwoman in with me too. Once or twice I have found it necessary to play the Hungarian drinking games of old: interminable balancing acts set, deadpan, to music. It has been much fun. Your flat, though simple, allows me to roam all over. In fact, sometimes, I think that I have experienced your flat in a way quite different from how you experienced it or intended others to experience it. But it is my way and you seem liberal enough about the prospects. I have broken down a few walls and ignored a few of the main hallways for my purposes. But one walks free and heavy here and I like it.

Yours,
Béla

Waiting Game

Please forgive my scarcity; I'm busy working on extra-lucrative "hot genes," or reasonable facsimiles thereof. I'm not gone, nor have I run out of ideas for EL at the moment. Only very occupied with other things.

Seriously

One of the interesting things about the late Positif film critic Robert Benayoun's film Serious About Pleasure (1975) is how seamlessly it appears to (a) channel the modernist sound-image shenanigans of Daisies, Tati, maybe even Rivette and Resnais, and/or (b) bring to full bloom entrenched comedy "plastics" in the mode of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis. The two approaches meet in the middle, they kiss and fall in love, they hang out in this little modest, and modestly meta, comedy—which is no doubt comparable to Bertrand Blier's Les Valseuses in terms of a French ménage à trois, but as I haven't seen that film, I won't be doing the one comparing.

"Jerry, deciding at the outset that every gag has, of course, been used at least once before, decides to make us guess what his gags are going to be."

—Benayoun, "Jerry Lewis: Man of the Year" (Positif, March 1963)

The Firing Squad

More standard-issue words on form, politics, and cinephilia.

The first thing I noticed about Jon Jost's Sure Fire ('90) was the speech, which captures the way (some) people talk in that deep, desert, mountainous American West—something like a cross between the Midwest and a generalized Southern accent. This is the speech of long stretches of highway and mountains, of desolate rest stops, lonely big sky country. (It's the speech of the sort of fellow I imagine Emmylou Harris & Willie Nelson sing about in one of the saddest songs ever, "One Paper Kid"—or, come to think of it, the people in Mikel Rouse's new music opera Failing Kansas.) The camera doesn't show us the characters in a frontal medium shot or close-up for some time; in fact Jost shies away from close-ups and frontal shots quite a bit in this film. I would not stress the case too far, but maybe there is something to be said for a film which emphasizes environment, custom, ritual in dealing with a weirdly, pathetically charismatic hero. The great Tom Blair exerts a lot of raw personal force in a character to whom nobody who pays attention does so because they wish to.

Monologues become positively Faulknerian, and are rendered mournful not only through the content of the dialogue and the speech tones, but also through the spatial relations between characters. Blair sits and instructs his character's wife at length about what she's to do back home while he's away on business: she doesn't listen. The wives speak amidst the ruins. The scene where Tom Blair's son gets his first gun is a masterpiece of surprise & volume. And so on. I'll try to get some screencaps put up here sometime.

The quality of light in this film bathes a lot of the shots—albeit ones I saw on an old VHS—in almost startling white: the air is complicit in the drama, takes it to another world. Subsisting mostly on a diet of standard, and recent, commercial cinema in recent weeks (buoyed along only by dear Anna Faris) I was clobbered in a way comparable to that when you see a true masterpiece, or when you are very young as a cinephile and only just begin to seek out the "different" stuff, revelling in the ineffable and deep novelty of cinema that scoots around outside the comfort zone that has been established for you.

* * *

Above: an image from Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract (1958)

Cinephilia is constantly (mis)understood as a pathology, but in many of the objects of cinephilia itself we see the artistic treatment of this problem. Murder by Contract's is a dehumanized hero (a compelling cipher, unlike the psychologized hero of Lerner's Studs Lonigan). The affirmation of will at the expense of life, as well as the attendant allure of such devotion (i.e., for some people) is the very material of this film, and it is not alone. The hero in Murder is well-regulated by time, appointment, duty; immune to vagaries of appetite—sexual or gastronomic. But he's not above his environment, and his code is shaped by something external to it: we could have a fun parlor game speculating about whether it's his Id, his upbringing, his class position ...

I penned that write-up of Studs Lonigan almost two years ago, and still haven't seen a third Lerner film (but I did revisit Murder by Contract).

And check out the two dissolves:

Without doing a bit of research I was positive that Martin Scorsese knew Murder by Contract well and modeled some of Taxi Driver on that film. (Even if you haven't seen Lerner's film I'll bet you thought the same thing when you saw these screengrabs above!) A single bit of googling reveals as much. It goes to show how maybe the source material of classical cinema has been frequently manipulated, misconstrued. Scorsese is sometimes thought of as a politically centrist or right-leaning filmmaker (for the Catholic content, his choice of protagonists, and/or his support of Elia Kazan, perhaps). But if he's good enough for David Ehrenstein, I'm willing to give the world's most cinephilically fascinating fast-talker the benefit of the doubt. The first step in diagnosing the politics of the film school brat generation, the 'New Hollywood' of the MPAA era's beginnings, might be to trace out not only what their films said and how they related to their moment (what Shampoo says about the Nixon era & gender roles, etc.) but also which cues the filmmakers themselves took from their famously self-aware knowledge of the cinema that preceded them.

Image of the Day

Some Words

My observation of the Spanish War and the rape of the Philippines led me to consider the character of our minor adventures in Samoa and Hawaii; and there I found the same record of chicanery and fraud, implemented by violence. In both instances the United States had acquired possession through revolutions made to order by its official agents. Then I went on to take stock of our continental adventures in the same line. I knew what imperialism meant in former times, what its springs of action were, and what its customary modes of procedure were. My classical studies had thoroughly acquainted me with these phenomena of the old days around the Mediterranean, and I had as yet seen nothing to suggest any essential difference between modern imperialism and the imperialism which I had studied and understood. Thus I was able to read between the lines of standard American historical writing, even such as was dished up for the young in our educational institutions. It was clear to me that our acquisition of Texas was a matter of sheer brigandage, and that force and fraud played approximately equal parts in our acquisition of California. I carried on my survey of American imperialism through the Mexican War, our systematic extermination of the Indians, and so on back into the colonial period; and I emerged with the conviction that at least on this one item of imperialism, our political history from first to last was utterly disgraceful.

—Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, pp. 103-104.

Hence, it should be noted that a conqueror, after seizing power, must decide about all the injuries he needs to commit, and do all of them at once, so as not to have to inflict punishments every day. Thus he will be able, by his restraint, to reassure men and win them over by benefitting them. Anyone who does not act in this way, either because he is timid or because he lacks judgement, will always be forced to stand with sword in hand. He will never be able to rely upon his subjects, for they can never feel safe with him, because of the injuried that continue to be inflicted. For injuries should be done all together so that, because they are tasted less, they will cause less resentment; benefits should be given out one by one, so that they will be savoured more. And above all a ruler must live with his subjects in such a way that no unexpected events, whether favourable or unfavourable, will make him change course. For when difficult times put you under pressure you will not have enough time to take harsh measures, and any benefits that you confer will not help you, because they will be considered to be done unwillingly, and so you will receive no credit for them.

—Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. Russell Price)

The Immigrant

Palin

I doubt I'm the first to say this. My fear about Sarah Palin, from looking at news and from commentary left and right, is not about '08, but about '12. I'm confident that McCain will lose handily in November, but the set-up for Palin now may be for Republicans what the '04 set-up was for Obama and the Democrats. And just like Obama will energize a lot of people outside the party and the older electorate, so will Palin—provided she performs well tonight at the convention. Media-savvy populism in the spectacular age: they're slowly and surely catching onto "grassroots" in ever more insidious ways.

Palin is analogous to Obama in the relationship she bears to her party: not fiercely partisan (as in occupying an established faction) so much as a wave overtaking rotted beachfront property. Same beach, same water, same stuff: yet different. She may be as easy to underestimate as Obama was; and, like him, she is probably just honest, independent, and fresh enough to capture the attention of a tectonically-shifted party base. Don't mistake me: in calling Palin honest, etc., I don't for a second hope to see her in power or the policies she'd propose enacted. If certain rumors are to be believed, she is a cutthroat politician, a very bright and crafty stateswoman (just like Obama is sharp, very sharp). But—I would propose—darlings like Obama and Palin remind viewers/voters of people they've known and admired in real life, to a greater extent than the more massaged images of Biden, the Clintons, the Bushes, McCain, Romney (he's almost like a relic: in an age of comedy & caricature his corporate-religious Aryan perfection sets up jokes well before the late night shows get to him). People still believe in the image but their hunger for "realism" is exerting gravitational pull. Perhaps we're coming full circle from the famed TV election of Kennedy versus Nixon.

The real-real people in national politics (McKinney, Kucinich, Paul) remain on the fringes. The system isn't broken, it works only too well. We're just misinformed as to what it's supposed to do ...

More Faris

Just Friends is a surprisingly bitter movie. Not that it's attitude towards its characters is particularly contemptuous (the Mom, perhaps) but that it's spurred along by deep-seated resentment. As a result the film is a bit all-over the place: part Farrellyesque body comedy, part teen movie sentimentalism, part small town winter wonderland romp (cf. Groundhog Day, Trapped in Paradise, Home for the Holidays). Regarding the seething emotions that justify the entire story, it should come as no surprise that the director was the same guy who "covered" Les Liaisons dangereuses.

The story goes that Ryan Reynolds was a sensitive fat kid in high school, in love with his oblivious, slightly aloof best friend (Amy Smart). He leaves his Central Jersey hometown in shame, and ten year's later he's a slim, charming, vapid ladies' man with a high-paying job in show biz. He's meant to court a manic, untalented, hot young pop star (a slightly exaggerated Avril Lavigne/Ashlee Simpson type) so that she agrees to sign her next record with his company. En route to a romantic Parisian weekend at her insistence, the plain is forced to land in Trenton ... over Christmas ... and Reynolds will visit his hometown for the first time since he graduated from high school. You see where all this ends up going. You probably can figure out 95% of the plot and 75% of the gags simply from this description. (Hint: Chris Klein has a role, too, and he also went from being "not hot" in high school to "hot" in his late 20s.) How tacked-on are the emotional progressions of all the characters, though? Normally in movies like this, which press the sentimental romance button at appropriate times (as this one does), there's at least an attempt to finesse out some kind of an emotional arc. Not here. The only appropriate word to describe the "emotional core" of the bond described to us between Reynolds' protagonist and Smart's object of affection is clusterfuck.

* * *

So why did I really watch this movie? Anna Faris! She doesn't reach the same heights as she does in Smiley Face, but as in The Hot Chick she has a "scene-stealing" presence. (In fact, in The Hot Chick Faris herself plays the "best friend" with romantic inclinations toward her BFF.) Here she plays none other than the pop star Samantha. What makes the performance so rewarding is that she acts as though she were in a movie and she's constantly flummoxed by the fact that the plot is always moving away from her. Her little tics, her movements, her schizophrenic consciousness blurted out from moment to moment. I mean, Faris is making Samantha act this way, as part of the character who knows and acts as if she were in a movie or tv show. It's a level of meta that the rest of the film doesn't really approach.

Scratch Sheet

Right away in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) swindles a valuable four-volume edition of Don Quixote from the collection of a stroke-silenced patriarch. He deals with the book collector's greedy heirs, who wouldn't know what he's talking about when he references the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili but are wowed by his estimation of their father's library's value. The tack Polanski takes here is that of the unbeliever changing money in the temple: literature and the occult have their prices, and their predators and prey. The truth of a thing? Beside the point.

A thought: Johnny Depp and Robert Downey, Jr. are Hollywood's two best fortysomething male stars. (Sean Penn gets mentioned for this sort of honor a lot, but he doesn't really "act" these days, does he? In the normally even-keel Clint Eastwood's most frenetic and frenzied film (that I've seen), Mystic River, Penn spews out his lines too much like tortured poetry. I couldn't take it.) If Depp is indeed to play the Riddler in the next Batman movie, I may actually have to see it—though it's bound to be even worse than the painfully mediocre Dark Knight.

Nolan's Batman films are not very interesting to me, though the embrace he's received from most onlookers suggests he's found his element, so maybe I should just shut my mouth. (The indie filmmakers who debuted in the 1990s have shown that their inexpensive calling cards deservedly land them what they've wanted to do deep down all along: make expensive, accessible pop art. Still, I'm inclined to think that veteran Sam Raimi is doing a better job than Nolan, Singer, et al.) The most interesting Batman scenes Nolan made were the first half-hour (ish) of Batman Begins, which I perversely enjoyed for its almost mistakenly open militaristic-fascistic inclinations. Of course then the film goes back into the safe, muddled waters of the spectacular mainstream, and its follow-up The Dark Knight hardly deviates from this lucrative comfort zone. ("Ambiguity" is the hoped-for interpretation plastered like a salve over the film's deliberately muddled status quo politics, methinks.)

(Speaking of Downey and of superhero films, I still have yet to see Iron Man...)

Back to The Ninth Gate—a good, basic, "termitish" movie. What's not to like? In the blockbuster age it is refreshing when a mainstream film (about rare book collections and the occult, no less) keeps its claims modest, makes no huge gestures by the end. Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, suggests this is a fault. I don't think it is; I like these mainstream genre films that gently stir up huge questions but don't presume to provide summary philosophical answers. The film tickles you, but doesn't scratch the itch: you must look elsewhere, outside the film, to continue the thread. I watched this film years ago, and took another look at it (in about thirteen segments) on YouTube, where I've enjoyed watching several contemporary Hollywood movies over the last few weeks. (Call it a "new media research project" with a team of one.) There's a difference between the ambiguity of a film that is all over the place, over-reaching itself and its own sense of importance, and the ambiguity of a film that never presumes its own high value, that plays its hand close the chest.

Note on a Face

Anna Faris' work in Gregg Araki's pot comedy Smiley Face is a hilarious catalogue of contortions and facial non sequiturs. She lets her eyes get big and her face a little wild, the chin rounding down the gullet with a pouty lip. When you look at, say, Megan Fox in Transformers, no matter what the physical demands of the scene her flawless face remains in the mode of a Calvin Klein ad. Not Faris! With gusto she moves around awkwardly. (Anyone who gets as much a kick as I did out of her rolling "escape" from her car in the parking garage is a kindred spirit.) Is there any other young comedic actress whose tiny movements of facial muscles comprise such a large part of the attraction of the image? The hunch of her back, the tyrannosaurus arms: this unfortunate stoner in Smiley Face had me in stitches.

Will report back if I go through more of the work of La Faris and it proves noteworthy.

Final Image

"Often, at the end of a movie, filmmakers feel the need for some takes of the sky, a landscape, empty streets, and so on. There is no movement in those shots, and the directors could simply film still photographs. But the eye discovers this immediately, because even if there is no movement (in either the subject or the camera) the presence of movement always appears in any filmed image. This play of mobility and fixity is a dwelling-place of involuntary signs."

—Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema

The last image of a film that comes to mind most readily when thinking about this excerpt is that of João César Monteiro’s Vai-e-Vem, where our hero's eye (and heart?) stop.

Image of the Day

Manny Farber, 1917-2008

This one hurts. When Raymond Durgnat died, for instance, I was still just discovering his work. But Farber's Negative Space was re-issued around the same time that my cinephilia really started to kick into high gear, and perhaps no single collection of film criticism & reviews has been more important to me. I have more to say on this, but it won't be ready tonight or even this week. A few words, though, from the man himself:

The virtues of action films expand as the pictures take on the outer appearance of junk jewelry. The underground's greatest mishaps have occurred in art-infected projects where there is unlimited cash, studio freedom, an expansive story, message, heart, and a lot of prestige to be gained. Their flattest, most sentimental works are incidentally the only ones that have attained the almond-paste-flavored eminence of the Museum of Modern Art's film library, i.e., GI Joe, Public Enemy. Both Hawks and Wellman, who made these overweighted mistakes, are like basketball's corner man: their best shooting is done from the deepest, worst angle. With material that is hopelessly worn out and childish (Only Angels Have Wings), the underground director becomes beautifully graphic and modestly human in his flexible detailing. When the material is like drab concrete, these directors become great on-the-spot inventors, using their curiously niggling, reaming style for adding background detail (Walsh); suave grace (Hawks); crawling, mechanized tension (Mann); veiled gravity (Wellman); svelte semicaricature (John Farrow); modern Gothic vehemence (Phil Karlson); and dark, modish vaudeville (Robert Aldrich).

—"Underground Films," 1957

It's easy to "dissolve boundaries" between the "false dichotomies" of "high and low." But Farber understood that truly dissolving boundaries doesn't mean consuming anything and everything with abandon (anyone can do that with ease, and The System prefers you to do it that way) but rather approaching art with a set of practices, time-tested, to make sense of certain configurations of the cultural terrain. Farber's main interest, of course, was neither in being a "cultural critic" nor in connecting his formal analyses to deep sociohistorical currents. Nevertheless his criticism is amenable to these projects I think.

I'm pretty sure I've blogged this before, but: here are his deliberately small-scale "best films" of 1951 (a year-end list I've always liked precisely for its colorful and tenacious resistance to received wisdom): Little Big Horn (Charles Marquis Warren), Fixed Bayonets (Fuller), His Kind of Woman (John Farrow), The Thing from Another World (Hawks/Nyby), The Prowler ("Joe Losey"), The People Against O'Hara (John Sturges), The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise), The Man Who Cheated Himself (Felix E. Feist), Appointment with Danger (Lewis Allen—in his piece, Farber or the editor incorrectly cites this as Background to Danger, which is a Raoul Walsh-helmed Bogart film from 1943), and the honorable mentions: The Tall Target, Against the Gun, No Highway in the Sky, Happiest Days of Your Life (a truly hilarious British boarding school film! -ZC), Rawhide, Excuse My Dust, The Enforcer, Force of Arms, The Wooden Horse, Night Into Morning, Payment on Demand, Cry Danger, and (Farber can't remember the title, but it's) A Hound for Trouble. I've only seen a handful (and not yet the Fuller). Anyone seen them all?

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

New Yorkers: see it! You've a few more days! If this vital film generated in the media even a tenth of the impassioned discussion and rapt attention that The Dark Knight has received, I'd feel optimistic about a lot of things. John Gianvito has delivered a very simple, resonant film, pared down—but he has also done something quite fascinating with the direct sound, and produced a commentary on humans' place in the natural world that, in today's Hollywood releases, only Terrence Malick can even engage with on equal terms. (Danny Kasman here; of course Andy Rector and David James are big fans.)

(P.S. I'll be gone, mostly at least, from the Internets from Wednesday to Wednesday.)

Food Politics

I think it's pretty apparent that agribusiness is a massive problem, that processes like pasteurization and homogeneization (which had localized benefits, sure) are proving detrimental in the long run, that starving nations exporting food is a problem, and so on. Global food politics, on the very largest and the very smallest scales, are fucked up.

But let's not talk about all that. Let's in fact assume, overall, that no deep changes need be made to our assumptions or our thinking. There's no reason we can't have baskets of fresh tomatoes every day of the year, we still need "realistic" and "economically feasible" competitive prices for our staples, let's not have relationships with or proximity to the animals we eat, let's continue to think of calories as nuisances, that refined sugar and processed foods are just fine, etc.

So instead let's talk about bobo organic consumers, the types who go to the $30/entree Slow Food-endorsed restaurants in their bohemian chic neighborhoods, the ones who won't let Junior eat sugar or red meat, the ones who love "ethnic cuisine" and are likely vegan, vegetarian, macrobiotic, or in any case finicky. (They won't sit down and eat a Big Mac, fercryinoutloud.) They like yoga or pilates and vote Democrat or Green though they also probably have a lot of money if they can afford all that organic, locally-grown produce. So from here on out let's filter all discussion of food politics (and opposition to the many harms and shortcomings of food industries) through the opinions and experiences of this small privileged subset of food consumers. Let's telescope onto the entirety of food politics the concerns, the opinions—and also the foibles, the shortsightedness!—of this class of people.

Let's basically discuss generic opposition to the giant problems in the food we eat, how we grow it and process it and ship it, how we relate to it, in terms of these trendy foodie bobos.

The Good Liberal and "the Left"

Howard Hampton recently in Film Comment (on May '68 and cinema), like Stephanie Zacharek in the NYTimes on Godard (and the new Brody biography), puts in a torrent of barbs and jabs against "the Left," which is, naturally, painted as self-absorbed, dreamily unrealistic, artistically bankrupt, and responsible for horrific occurrences in China and Cambodia. A reader wrote in to Film Comment responding critically to the conservative tenor of Hampton's piece. The author responded himself with some fine, fine advice about what was earth-shakingly wrong about "the Left," and what "it needs to do" if it's going to be a force for social change to which people might warm up. (More on that point shortly.) The tropes for this kind of rhetoric are readily apparent and are taken loosely from Susan Sontag's description of the CP-controlled Soviet sphere of influence ("fascism with a human face") as well as Bush-supporter Tom Wolfe's "radical chic" epithet. Few things seem to arouse the ire of liberal American intellectuals as much as radical leftism—perhaps "Islamofascism." If the US government and its corporate benefactors-beneficiaries dislike something, all they have to do is insist that it is a thinly veiled form of fascism. As a result, decent, well-educated Democrats will be sure to hurl contempt, disdain, and sarcasm at such forces with much more tenacity than they will at, say, actual fascists and contemporary descendents.

In his response to Allen Keating-Moore's letter, Hampton lays down the law:

"Let's be clear: a revolution is not a beatific movie in which pretty actors shoot blanks; it's not a garden party of philosophy seminar or some poetic-romantic affirmation of Idealistic Youth. We're talking about an armed insurrection aimed at overthrowing the state, a ruthless struggle where terror, death, and coercion are the order of the day."

Yes, indeed, let us be clear. If we are not clear, it would seem that Hampton is of the camp who feels that terror, death, and coercion are not the order of the day under the state and the system we currently have.

No violence.

No terror.

No ruthlessness.

No coercion.

The heartrending, irrational justifications of the Good Liberal go like this: because there is relatively little violence, terror, or direct and perceived coercion in the life of a middle-class American, there must be relatively little violence, terror, and coercion in the entire order that enables this life. And (this is a quite obvious assumption of Hampton's) because hordes of middle-class Americans are not signing up for "the Left," it is unthinkable that the popular masses in any part of the globe could ever align themselves with "it," could ever express themselves through "it," could ever feel like "it" was something pluralistic and non-dogmatic that they might "want to join." For some people, "the Left" is not a club that must make itself attractive to prospective members. The fact that pockets of privileged Westerners have, in modern times, been naïve in their support of some leftist movements (or what they [mis]understood to be genuinely popular insurrectionary struggles against oppressors) is no reason to disparage "the Left" in its entirety or to whitewash the crimes of an order which is destroying our planet and immiserating most of our species.

"If the Left today really wants to get serious about being a force for change instead of a calcified form of political Scientology, it's going to have to outgrow its reflexive nostalgia for murderous absolutism, its superheroic fantasies of revolution-by-artistic-proxy, its smug propensity for not only making but valorizing the same mistakes, and do a better job of imagining a pluralistic, non-dogmatic society that ordinary people might conceivably want to join--one good place to start looking could be Alain Tanner's 1976 film Jonah—Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000."

Tanner's film is an impressive one, no doubt. Full of good cheer, good times, a progressivism amidst loved ones and comrades. But the question remains—just which "Left" are we talking about? That's a rhetorical question of course, because the mainstream liberal intelligentsia only seems to allow this one monolithic image. Oh indeed: Which left?

The smug tree-huggers?













Those who are "nostalgic" for murderous absolutism?













Those who doubt the benevolence of the market economy?









Those dandies who mistake art for action?










The dogmatic anti-pluralists?









Shouldn't we be thankful for the upholders of liberty—the liberty to live under capitalism?









The Good Liberal is conditioned not to conceive of a "revolution" outside of certain boundaries, certain regulations. The Good Liberal is conditioned to think of "the radical Left" as embodying all the same coercive and authoritarian structures that most self-identified leftists in history have fought against. The Good Liberal worries about poverty and social justice, but nevertheless aligns himself with the state and corporate forces which do everything in their power to disrupt, fragment, and fashion popular social movements—many of which designate themselves as being on the Left, some of which designate themselves as (yes) communist, socialist, or anarchist—against their own domination, exploitation, and hegemonic conscription.

I would wager that Hampton, like Zacharek, like many (probably) liberal people, dislike George W. Bush, believe his administration and the Republican Congress and the Supreme Court have made a real mess of things. I would wager that Hampton would have no beef if, asked right now, his feelings on the Chipko women, the slaves who fought back, the Chartists and union-organizers of the 19th century, even the Communards. But in their times and places they have been the demonized pipe dreamers, the utopian rabble-rousers and trouble-makers. So I would offer a firm congenial reminder to those who would, could be the allies of "the Left." In forming and maintaining an image of "the Left," of communist revolution, of popular struggle, the Good Liberal must ask himself whose interests he serves by perpetuating this image he criticizes.

If this question is not asked, history will ensure that the Good Liberals of today end up as merely the Goncourts of globalization.

(NB1: I've referred to the Good Liberal with masculine pronouns near the end of my post consciously and with reason.)

(NB2: On the same page of FC where Hampton's letter-response is printed, there is an ad for the Criterion re-release of Pasolini's Salò. Let us remember that it is not simply a "shocking masterpiece" but a deeply political film.)