This and That

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

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

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Dame Maggie sure seems immortal, sometimes.

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

Random Gripe

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

Scribbles

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

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


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

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

More to follow in this vein later ...

Pixar Thoughts

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

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

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

De Toth in the Landscape of Dreyer

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

The Living and the Dead

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

Nail Clippers

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

Both Sides Now

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

Recently Seen

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

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

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

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

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

"I Buy Forever"

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

Cheers.

Image of the Day

Railway Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

Track Projections (Raya Martin, 2007)

Humanoids

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

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

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

Quote of the Day

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

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

The Riddle of Steel

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

Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)

It's Only Tashlin

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

"Are Video Games Art?"

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

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

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

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

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

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Image of the Day

The Lights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image of the Day

Realization

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

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

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

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

To the End of TV

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

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

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

Apologies

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

The Lawless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Image of the Day

(for Ignatiy)

While We Work (2)

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

While We Work

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

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

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

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

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

History and the Meme

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

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

Shoot 'Em Up (Notes)

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

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

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

White Swan

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

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

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

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

Contemptible Behavior

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

Colonies

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

Image of the Day

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

GCS

L'Enfant secret

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

Image of the Day

A Couple Strays

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


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

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