A Matter of Conquest

"The idea of the American West was always more a matter of solitude and space and the balance between individualism and community than a matter of conquest." (Kent Jones)

It seems almost every cinephile I know has endorsed Jones' response to Quentin Tarantino's comments about John Ford. It's a well-written piece, and as a critical refutation of QT it's marvelous. But for me there was also a sticking point, and this problem is crystallized particularly in the above sentence. You can perhaps say that "the idea of the American West" indeed concerned solitude, etc. because you are concerned only with the stated ideology of white American men going West, of The Virginian and of the Rough Riders. But to relegate the issue of conquest to the sidelines seems a huge and wilful mistake. Try these on for size:

"The idea of the Spanish Inquisition was always more about the purification of the Catholic faith than a matter of social and religious oppression."

or

"The idea of Jim Crow laws were always more about respecting tradition and local proprieties than a matter of enforcing specifically racialized inequalities among the population." 

It's crucial not to ignore the link between "solitude and space and the balance between individualism and community" and the "matter of conquest." Jones addresses this, at least enough to indicate why he's bracketed off the conquest. "That the idea was built on the backs of indigenous Americans who were, in Ford’s own words, “cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and everything else,” was not exactly hidden from view, but relegated to the background of the story that the culture was telling itself through paintings and dime novels and traveling shows and, finally, movies—albeit never quite as comfortably as is now imagined." But my point isn't really to attack Kent Jones or to criticize his "implicit" politics or anything like that; I've no beef with him! I just want to tease out a thread in that sentence I've picked out to use as an epigraph. Because the ideas of solitude, space, individual/community, wide open spaces, new beginnings, and frontiers that the West connotes are difficult to separate from the conquest - including the massive labor of laying of railroad tracks across the country (the train was a major part of inaugurating a modern national space-time), but especially the destruction of many native civilizations, the mere husks of whose former selves were what white American settlers encountered in their Westward expansion.

What strikes me about John Ford's cinema is always how fragile and contingent "civilization" is, as if he doesn't even really believe in it outside the porch steps, the kitchen, the campfire (sites also of hospitality) ... and because of this I have felt that Ford (a man and filmmaker of his time with plenty of concomitant prejudices) nevertheless granted the same ontological basis for non-Europeans (or "people without history") as to the white settlers of America, whose manifest destiny - when mainlined - drove them insane, twisted them up, tore them also into husks of their former selves. This ontological basis for all people and cultures does not however translate into a political equality, as if Ford were trying to convey the message that all people suffer the same ways in the same amounts, as if to rationalize away native populations' decimation. The living's deeply felt memories of the dead commingle in the face of uncertain futures, without any destiny or guarantee. Just generations turning over, one to the next. And often whatever is built up is built upon lies.

 

 

 

 

 

* * * 

"Dead Man is one of the few westerns to see through the cheesy mythology that white people were the first North American settlers, but its approach is casual and poetic rather than preachy; the warm, comic friendship between Nobody and Blake, neither of whom entirely understands the other, is central to the film." (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Gun Nuts

America: whatta week, huh?

In 1990's Tremors, where a tiny Nevada community fights off a handful of giant subterrannean predator worms, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire play a pair of desert survivalists with a huge home arsenal. (They're not the film's protagonists, though.) Burt and Heather are a bit paranoid and kooky (at least this is how the others see them), but they're also essentially decent people. Another character references their "lifestyle" in a teasing manner, but it's neither intended nor perceived as a kind of eternal semiotic warfare against one's neighbors who happen to think differently. That is to say, Burt and Heather are capable of sitting around a table and having a conversation with their fellow citizens. And even the character who does talk about their lifestyle is Fred Ward's Earl: a beer-drinkin', shit-kickin' laborer who would in 21st century parlance be labeled "red state" through and through. But not when this film was made - a character like Earl could actually poke fun of a gun nut like Burt without there being some hugely divisive cultural enmity felt on either side. At a few points in the film, Burt and Heather's weapons are very useful for the whole group in battling the graboids. But they're never more necessary than other characters' tools or ingenuity. That is, the community is greater than the sum of its parts, and no particular part assumes synecdoche-like sovereignty. We can't "decode" a political endorsement from the role the gun nuts play.

I could not imagine a 2013 version of Tremors that did the same thing. Instead I can only envision some variation in which Burt and Heather's Second Amendment shrine ultimately guarantees the safety of the community (the conservative version) or instead fails and allows a platform for some force unrelated to firearms to prevail (the liberal version). Either way, the gun and the gun nut are figures to be "politicized" in a way that openly invites some kind of ethical-political-moral interpretation. (Cf. past rumblings on this blog about reversible or diffuse cinema.) It would be the kind of thing that would allow Slavoj Zizek to publish "think pieces" about how "the Left" needs to embrace more fully such ideas as powerful leadership, discipline, and purity.

* * *

... Believe it or not, I've actually seen all four Tremors films, and a significant chunk of the USA television series. But it's been a while, and I can't speak from memory as to how later developments with the character of Burt in the sequels end up anticipating (or not) 21st century gun control debates and the cultural politics thereof.

Spring Breeeeeak

"You dudes be talkin' so street / And that talk be soundin' tough / Until you gotta talk to me." (King Fantastic's "The Lost Art of Killing": not a song included in the film, sadly)

This post traces out a convoluted line of thought regarding Spring Breakers and middle grounds. As with so much on EL, it's public but it's written at least as much to help me work through things as it is to communicate ideas clearly. So follow through it at your own risk, but don't say you weren't warned!

Amy Klein writes, "I don’t buy this idea that Spring Breakers is good art simply because it holds a mirror up to the world we live in." I don't buy it either, but surely this isn't the only argument put forward by advocates of the film ... is it?

Here's another idea I don't buy, which is that every film, text, object (et cetera) has a single interpretation at its truest, depest core. I mean that idea that we can find and fix a meaning to the object by reading (into) it and finding its proper, ironclad, trans-historical significance. Perhaps some objects are designed to work in this way, and it is true that some reception contexts encourage analyzing texts this way. But I'm unconvinced this is the set which encompasses all cultural objects. Even the ones that are meant to work like this are positively helpless before the sweep of human history.

If we think that cultural objects, discussions about the politics of art very quickly lead nowhere. Let's say we have two people of roughly similar temperaments. One absolutely loves Spring Breakers and insists its bold, neon-sexy-thanatological trip takes us into a Bataillean inferno of excess. The other focuses primarily on the brute fact that the camera fixates on young female bodies, and attaches this exhilaration of excess to a story of these bikini-clad Disney princesses as a few of them slowly lead up to a triumphant showdown-massacre of black drug dealers. Too often, people fail to envision that both views might actually co-exist. There are deep puritanical forces that a Bataille-Reich "liberation" might do some good (I do not say an infallible good) in addressing. But at the same time the terms of such "liberation" are open to question. However, it is also possible that in transgressing, other features of cultural power imbalances often position these "transgressions" in ways that are also sexist, even misogynistic, or are at least more than capable of being interpreted that way.

And though I'm not the most inductive/empirical sort of thinker, you might figure when it comes to the politics of feminism or antiracism, for example, my general take is that we don't look to the intrinsic "core meaning" of the text to determine if something is racist or sexist, but instead we look to how its operating in the cultural sphere: are there, in actual fact, feminist or antiracist grievances being lodged against the object in question? Who benefits concretely from the dissemination of a particular object or a particular framing of that object?  (For instance, does an aesthete's l'art pour l'art defense make a film look "pure & true"? This is sort of what I poked at in parts of my Tree of Life commentary a while back, because I was unconvinced there was a stable, true patriarchal/sexist reading to the nature-grace dichotomy, but as much as I love Tree of Life I concede its very romantic modernism itself is an issue.) So instead what I think is worth examining, when it comes to the politics of an object, is the cluster of uses to which the object is put. In other words, Spring Breakers isn't necessarily anything in the final analysis, but we can discern trends in the ways it is received. On what grounds do its detractors or defenders insist the discussion be held?

So in this sense I may have some deeper philosophical disagreement with the perspective Amy Klein mobilizes, but I'm very much in accord with her skepticism toward a defense of Spring Breakers that would subordinate any political question to a depoliticized appreciation of the "rawness," the "exhilaration," the "weirdness" of Korine's vision. And the reason for this, of course, is because appreciation of vision itself depends upon politics. This is a tricky philosophical problem I'm still working out for myself, but while aesthetics and politics may be discrete conceptual spheres, in actual practice politics always grounds the conditions in which a particular kind of aesthetics - such as the appreciation of a genius vision or powerful experience - operates.

An object's meanings, then, arise contingently. They are often contradictory. They can co-exist. Walt Whitman wasn't the only entity in this world to contradict himself and contain multitudes, you see.

I think that Spring Breakers is a fascinating experience, and makes for a great unofficial Florida youth trilogy with Trans (Julian Goldberger) and Bully (Larry Clark). I would also say, however, that feminist objections with this film strike me as more or less on the mark. This is a heteronormative pornographic film; its pornography is both the root of its most brilliant formal strategies and its most obvious "structuring structure" yet it more than warrants feminist interrogation. The camera lens focuses upon supine forms, slow-motion gyrating women, a plethora of fluids (sweat, booze, blood, poolwater). I wouldn't call the film erotic, by which I mean that it doesn't work on an arousal-payoff dynamic [though it is sensuous] ... or rather, its formal arousal-payoff dynamic simply passes over the whole issue of sex [though image and dialogue-wise the film is saturated with the promise of sex] and moves directly toward death: the danger of death, the specter of punishment.

This disembodied floating neon-lit gaze is, critics have already noted, in fact not disembodied at all but representative of a straight male subjectivity which sees women as objects. The fact that the women who star in Spring Breakers "reclaim" some of this objectivity is not trivial, but it also isn't a trump card. We can't simply step outside of an entire world of unequal power relations through a localized process of seeing a few women (objects) "take up" their own objecthood. There can be empowerment in abjection and submission; one can feel empowered, emboldened, enlightened through taking on the object status. But this emancipatory operation is not the same as form or style invigorating the viewer (particularly if the viewer may be a liberal straight guy getting his kicks from bikini-clad women but also enjoying the "detachment" as sociopolitical alibi). It also isn't exactly the same as the kind of phenomenological liberation triggered by such beautiful, weird, lush, multi-textured experience as Spring Breakers might provide.

* * * 

So here are a few kinds of liberation at hand.

• Liberation through abjection, submission, or objecthood. The Disney princesses "own" their status as objectified Others; they inhabit and embody it consciously.
• Liberation through form or style: the phenomenological register.
• Liberation (or abdication) of puritanical moralism.

But at the same time, the film isn't liberated from everything. This negative premise is the "ground" from which the feminist criticisms of the movie proceed.

* * *

Contrary to the edicts of almost all official culture, it is possible for us to hold more than one idea in our head at once, and to see things from multiple angles. I can appreciate the convulsive, very generally druglike immersion in colors-beats-bodies . This is not simply a matter of "form versus content," however, because the form itself is part of what is called into question ...

Old Days

A dissonance of a premise and its treatment: a group of abolitionists in the 1850s, including roles by Van Heflin and Ward Bond, square off against Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan in Santa Fe Trail ('40). Unfortunately, Warner Brothers conspired to make it that the abolitionists were the villains, particularly Raymond Massey's looney zealot portrayal of John Brown. Flynn and Reagan play the heroes (lame). How fantastic it would be if one could remix this material to make John Brown and his supporters the protagonists ...

(Santa Fe Trail's nocturnal prophecy scene, however, is strikingly great: firelight flickers on a group of young officers as they laugh uneasily when a native woman tells them - through translator Olivia de Havilland - that they will soon be bitter enemies in a war that has already started. They just don't know it.)

(Forty Guns, Samuel Fuller, 1957)

Lately I've been revisiting some classic Hollywood work - things I haven't seen in years, or in a few cases just films I've never seen. Some expressive qualities seem to never grow old. Forty Guns seems now like such an obvious and direct antecedent to Jarmusch's Dead Man: Biroc's stark, clear cinematography like a model for Robby Müller's; a nice motley mix of characters; a tightrope walk between different versions of masculine behavior and the expectations of violence and loyalty these carry. (But where Fuller's film is fluid, quick, giving a crucially peopled version of the West, Jarmusch's is deliberate, meditative, and grounded upon a less anthropic view of landscape. Both are great movies in my opinion.)

(The Blue Angel, Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Scarlet Shake

Slightly Scarlet (Allan Dwan, 1956)

Functional/Parasitic Secrecy

"An example of ... function secrecy, was the British utilization of the intelligence gathered by cryptanalysts during World War II (Project Ultra). Since one of the most valuable assets in the war was the access to German communications made possible by cracking their ciphers, it was of extreme importance that the Nazis not know their code had been penetrated. To insure this, all information derived from Ultra intercepts was "discovered" - that is, overtly confirmed - by other means. If Ultra had located an important target for a bombing raid, for instance, the military made sure some reconnaissance planes would be sent there first to hide from the Germans the true source of the information.

"An instance of ... parasitic secrecy, may be found in the same war. The British espionage agency SIS, was, despite its legendary status, a largely inefficient organization mistrusted by the military. In order to guarantee their own survival, they monopolized access to the Ultra operation (conducted by GCCS, the Government Code and Cipher School) and presented the Ultra triumphs as their own successes. In the process of concealing this parasitism they squandered some of the Ultra material, created suspicions at GCCS against politicians and in general decreased the functionality of communications-interception and code-breaking as a whole."

(Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, pp. 186-187)

Semblance

 

"Nudity does not reveal the hidden; it is its absence" (Reassemblage, Trinh T. Minh-ha)

Film History, Bro 2: Historicize Harder

A well-meaning Netflix user offered this measured defense of an "old" movie: "One cannot review a 26 years old movie using today's standards." (The movie was Clint Eastwood's quite entertaining Eiger Sanction; guess it was written when Netflix was new.) Reviewing old art through contemporary standards? There are a few ways we can think our way through this question. In one sense, we are required to encounter old or culturally remote objects through the resistance of this timespace distance. But liking something (a painting, a movie) is never a "natural" thing either, as if innate and unalloyed, because people themselves are fundamentally always social and cultural. So yes: if you're a kid who's grown up with the media of the past 10-20 years, you might need to be initiated into the codes of a studio-era Hollywood movie or old TV or old books. (Sometimes you might not; as a child I needed little prompting to enjoy I Love Lucy or The Three Stooges.) It's fine sometimes to say: "We mustn't judge these other, new-old things by the same standards we are used to. There are other standards, and you might want to approach these things less judgmentally than you are at first inclined."

But then again one balks at this awful posture of charity. The appreciation of Welles, Ford, Renoir, Ozu, M, The Thin Man, Mae West, or Chaplin should take no qualifications - should it? We shouldn't be straitjacketed into saying, "Well it was good for its time," should we?

For its time ...

Perhaps it's best to avoid quasi-historicist special pleading where everything is judged by some standard of its time (the standard itself being always at least partly a presentist fiction). For one thing, it takes a fair bit of knowledge about another time or place even to intelligently address the issue of an object's achievement within that context. Instead, these qualifications are perhaps best as an ongoing heuristic operation. In the face of something we simply don't understand, we might posit a negative force - say to ourselves, "This is different, this pinches, ruffles, and crunches against my prior convictions. The actor does not move his body in a way consonant with filmic conventions I'm used to; the staging of these actors is artificial; the dialogue is too obvious or it takes too long for me to figure out what the damn point is; there isn't even any dialogue in this stupid art movie, why not?; and so on." We can say, "for its time" as a kind of place-holder for our own ignorance. Far be it from me to sound too much like an evangelical, but really many of us could do with a vow of intellectual humility on occasion.

To do this, of course, the spectator in question has to be open-minded, inquisitive, and curious.* This is what bothers me about the recent spate of presentist philistinism about old movies that we see on display here, here, and in parts here. It isn't, I don't think, because I worship the past at the expense of what's ahead. I even believe philistinism has its uses in politics and in rhetoric. But there's something uncritical about this criticality sometimes - bisecting two different senses of the word. Anyone can "be critical," dismiss an object, say it's not impressive, and write negative things. However, it's taxing to analyze, trace out some thoughts, and share what you've found.

(*This pokes at another issue, of course, The Spectator. The Spectator doesn't exist. There are only spectators and instances of spectatorship.)

Let's remember a dialogue exchange in Metropolitan. Tom denigrates Mansfield Park without having read it: "The context of the novel, and nearly everything that Jane Austen wrote looks ridiculous from today’s perspective."

Audrey's famous rejoinder: "Has it ever occurred to you that today looked at from Jane Austen's perspective would look even worse?" 

Because of Metropolitan's politics, this argument can be easily enlisted as a traditionalist backhand. Not wrongly, either. But things can be taken all manner of ways. I'd like to step back a pace and situate the comment as a matter of missing the forest and the trees. Myopia involving one's own comfort zone can be a crippling bias; under these circumstances people can think of objects from other times & places as intrusions. To put it another way, rebelling against classics can potentially miss the corporate-hegemony forest for cultural-vegetable trees. The operative word is potentially. Sometimes it's great to shake the canon up, to disregard it, to take aim at it in its institutionalized forms. But I don't always see this justified in every snarky, "emancipatory" dismissal of a canonical object. Sometimes it's one's own nostalgia that one is blindly advocating against a merely older and recognized nostalgia.

And I get it. I understand moods that might dissuade one from an art film, or from particular conventions in older movies. I also identify with certain Gen X/Y modes of consumption and discussion of movies. But at the same time, these are moods and modes - not permanent, not absolute, not universal. They're embodied in me, and have resulted from a lifetime of behaviors, as they are with everyone else. But isn't this a huge part of why culture is interesting? The argument isn't that everyone needs to copy my taste profile of nobrow eclecticism. The point is that all of us, if we're curious and honest people, forge more complex mental landscapes of something like "cinema" than any one picture of cinema can account for. Our criticism should try to respect that fact, and attend to it, and push us still out of all manners of complacency.

Film History, Bro

This is just some warm-up rambling to get the writerly neurons firing for my day's real work: feel free to disregard. On the topic of film history and film criticism ... here's one way to do it:

"But the idea of what a movie is didn’t really happen until about 1975.  Jaws is sort of the first movie.  And not just because it’s the first blockbuster. (We could go on and on about whether that ruined everything or whatever, but who cares.)  Jaws is sort of the first movie because it’s one of the first times a movie feels like a movie, like where things are happening and you care about them and it’s executed in an interesting and effective way.  The only two examples of this before 1975 are 12 Angry Men and Inherit the Wind, with Citizen Kane as an honorable mention.  Everything else before ‘75 pretty much sucks."

The author of those lines seems unwilling really to entertain what, to me, appears an obvious notion: this is an argument about nostalgia, his nostalgia, and his own personal configuration of what "a real movie" is. People like this invariably have very narrow ideas about what film/movies/cinema should be, and thank the gods the world is a more complex and pluralist place than their own imaginations.

I've seen plenty of movies "where things are happening and you care about them and it’s executed in an interesting and effective way" from before 1975. No need to dwell on this, however, as people who think like the author are not likely to have their minds changed by me; nor will I learn a single thing from them.

But allow me to make a mischievous connection, which is that a similar kind of narrowminded nostalgia sometimes haunts a classical cinephilia wherein the constitution of an interesting mise-en-scene becomes the sine qua non of good cinema. It is what makes it possible to smirk and say that The Tree of Life is a mess (or perhaps that Redacted isn't even worth considering because it's self-evidently unpolished), but that the late films of someone like Herbert Ross evince a beautiful and underrated classical sensibility. There is a satisfying provocation one can get with this attitude; I know well the little thrill you get when you shock an "art film" person by saying, meaning, and knowing that you are willing to back-up an opinion that some piece of Hollywood genre termite art is vastly superior to a disjointedly modernist masterpiece. "You think those obvious, sub-Godardian editing strategies can hold a candle to the subtle beauties of Irving Lerner's composition in space? Well you've got another thing coming ..."

Yet cinema also should surprise us in some ways, and not always in ways that we expect. That sounds redundant, but unfortunately it isn't - because some people are quite insistent about the terms on which they're willing to let themselves be surprised.

Ultimately, however, I would get very lonely if I were resigned to watching forever only a string of blockbuster movie-movies, or even if all I ever had to watch was films made in classical Hollywood continuity style. (The latter would last me much longer, of course.) So "the movies" (like Greg DeLiso wants them to be) or the worlds of contained mise-en-scene would sooner or later bore me into submission. I need experiences like Kentucker Audley's or Giuseppe Andrew's, like the Raoul Walsh pre-Codes, like the less-loved work of Zulawski, like the material of John or James Whitney, like Travis Wilkerson's An Injury to One, like Carmelo Bene's, like Jarman's, like Nina Menkes', like late Godard, like Kluge, like Andy Sidaris' goofily violent and sexist T&A-fests, like the Cinema of Transgression (even though I truthfully don't like it), like Chytilova's, like Zazie dans le metro (and so much Malle) but also A Thousand Clowns (a film I would have dismissed haughtily, aged 20), things that cause me to reconsider things and in the process make something new, deep, or simple ... I need all these things and more still that I don't even know because I want the cinema to match, reflect, expand, and condense the whole wide world.

Gather at the River

A picture for Damien, who would have understood its significance.

Polymorphous Perversity (Archer)

'85

Hey, here's another list ... top ten films from 1985.

The Blind Director (Alexander Kluge)

Chain Letters (Mark Rappaport)

Détective (Jean-Luc Godard)

Dreamchild (Gavin Millar)

Fandango (Kevin Reynolds)

Himatsuri (Mitsuo Yanagimachi)

Ran (Akira Kurosawa)

Steaming (Joseph Losey)

Treasure Island (Raúl Ruiz)

Vagabond (Agnès Varda)

Honorable mentions - After Hours (Scorsese), The Emerald Forest (Boorman), Rendez-vous (Téchiné), Police (Pialat), Heaven Help Us (Dinner), 'Je se vous salue, Marie' (Godard), Lost in America (Brooks).

Might have missed a few films, there are surely a few key ones I still haven't seen (two that spring to mind are Come and See and Return of the Living Dead), and I might make a few changes were I to revisit many of these, but otherwise ... here it is.

Scraps

The older I get, the more I value dispassion - not to supplant emotion, I mean, but I value it more for its own utility, to complement emotion.

*

Political denunciations of a cultural text that rest upon an interpretive stance of a stable text or subtext as a bound to failure on some level, even if just a philosophical one. Interpretation of meaning from the standpoint of form means that a political judgment in this vein is isomorphically similar to a formalist or hermeneutic one. But instead, I would argue, the possibility of any reading carries with it by necessity the possibilities of misreading, reading against, and reading alternatively. As a result ... political judgments that rest upon implied (and thus often unacknowledge) formalist grounds are specious and become ad hominem attacks only. Where then from here? Maybe the criticism of formal conditions of possibility (i.e., non ad hominem) or criticism of inductive/empirical trends.

*

I found Project X (Nima Nourazadeh, 2012) kind of exhilirating and funny, and though it was attacked (not wrongly) for its misogyny, it seems to me that it is at root no more misogynistic than 95% of Hollywood films - but is perhaps more forthright about it. I suppose some people have made defenses of Seth MacFarlane's Oscar routine from the position that it mocks this rampant misogyny through satire and grotesque, but I didn't see or pay attention to enough of the ceremony to have an opinion, really.

*

Commercial film sequels frequently stay largely in the same territory already laid out for them, but there's something elusive about what separates the diminishing returns variety (e.g., Taken 2, by many accounts also Expendables 2 though I didn't see that one) from the ones that remain comparatively fresh (e.g., the Transporter and Fast and Furious franchises).

Troublesome Property

 

Charles Burnett, 2003.

Is Bulleit So Rare?

The return of Walter Hill to the big screen is a cause for celebration in itself. Hill is a terrific filmmaker who has a large number of superb, probing genre films to his name: The Long Riders, The Warriors, Geronimo, Undisputed, Streets of Fire, and so on. Not all of his movies are masterpieces but the cinema would be a richer place if he made more feature films. I'm very much in his corner. But I don't think Bullet to the Head is a strong film at all - it's not poorly directed (Hill is too competent for that), but the overall conception is oppressively routine and this is not a case of a smuggler-auteur transcending the material and building something greater than the sum of its parts (as could be argued for Undisputed).

At the risk of beating a dead horse, or just picking at low-hanging fruit, I'm maddened by a recent dialogue between Armond White and Gregory Solman in praise of the movie. I don't really read White any more, but I do think that 10-12 years ago he was a quite decent critic who used his "contrarian" status much more judiciously than today. Now it's just a calling card which can get him writing gigs, I suspect, because his imperious manner and outrageous claims are parlayed into a brand, and help drive pageviews. (You might say that White updates the role of pop critic in our 9/11 context. We've forgotten how critics could examine morality through genre fun.)

I am also curious if anyone can establish for us that Gregory Solman is not, in fact, a long-standing pen name & alter ego for Armond White. Perhaps the two are critic-friends who've developed similar tastes over time - that's certainly a possibility. But given that they share a personal canon of great cinema, as well as similar styles of argumentation & critical reference, and they write for a lot of the same venues, and that White is known & seen around public screenings but Solman is seemingly even less photographed than Manohla Dargis, and is referred to almost exclusively by White (and rarely by other critics) ... well, you can see how suspicions arise in an idle mind. Maybe a bit like the possibility of Ray Carney writing some of his own fan mail - there are too many flattering imitations, too many phrases like the ones we see Solman put forth in this interview: "You convinced me!" or "As I know you know..."

Bullet to the Head is a story built upon cliche - if you like this, you can call it "myth" or perhaps "archetype," but at least be so honest as to acknowledge that 98% of these conventions draw upon other recent low budget action cinema, not The Searchers. Cliche and convention don't make a work bad (novelty is sometimes blindly overrated), but it's all in how they relate to one another and how they're expressed. For me, it's not as if the bonds of, say, Walter Hill's termitish authorial expression (as tied to his basic filmmaking competence) are absent so much as they are, in fact, too weak to overpower the essential moviemaking-by-committee feel of the material. At any rate, such action movie cliches on display here include escapes to fully equipped hideouts and climactic sequences set in abandoned warehouses full of machines and industrial detritus. Plus Stallone is his own man and we know this in part because he drinks an ultra-obscure bourbon, Bulleit, which he carries around to bars himself because nobody anywhere stocks Bulleit. That's right, Bulleit. Way obscure. And in Bullet to the Head. On the damn nose, screenwriters! (Or should we blame the money people?) Conveniently, Stallone's beautiful tattoo artist daughter (Sarah Shahi) also happens to recognize the names of local judges and politicians who pop up on a flash drive. Civics.

Another problem is the tired, unreconstructed partnership between the cop Sung Kang and the hitman Stallone. I'm shocked - shocked! - that the assassin-protagonist has his own moral code, or that the by-the-book detective must revise his highly legalistic standards toward violence and procedure.  Then, of course, there are the par-for-the-course identity politics jokes that thud their way into the dialogue. Anyone who thought that Gran Torino's race banter was completely unmotivated should use this to see how rote, how mechanical such attempts at "wit" can truly be. (At least the point in Gran Torino is that Eastwood is ridiculous at the same time as he's being offensive, and his racism is ultimately shown as culturally conditioned rather than a conditioning feature of the movie's very genericism: Wikipedia says that Joel Silver chose to cast Kang, an "ethnic" i.e. non-white actor, for wider audience appeal.) Kang is Asian, and it's funny to see old folks disregard national and ethnic differences among Asians! Stallone's old! The actors spout off lines as if they're going through the motions, but what's more, it almost seems as if the characters are just as tired hearing this bullshit come out.

So it alarms my delicate, pearl-clutching sensibilities to see a discussion that appears to be on the side of the angels (because Walter Hill is the man) but is not only in my opinion wrong (since I'd say Bullet to the Head is very squarely mediocre) but doesn't even bother to establish a basic competence as a critical argument in the film's favor. White feints in the direction of auteurist polemic, but his "case" is actually devoid of any argumentation at all. Part of the formula is to mention a similarity between Bullet to the Head and some other esteemed movie (a similarity general enough that it far exceeds the specificity of anyone's particular craft, and, well, probably applies to macho action movies in general). Then, you up the ante with an sweeping declarative statement that might appear like a conclusion from the preceding premises but isn't. No joke, this is how White starts his dialogue:

Stallone's performance as career hitman Jimmy Bobo reminded me of Charles Bronson's streetfighter in Hill's directorial debut Hard Times. The same grizzled features, the same masculine ethos. The plot of Bobo teaming up with policeman Taylor Kwan (Sung Kang) recalled Hill's buddy movie 48 HRS. Hill and Stallone's cinema histories are combined, the action genre is updated.

One could also point out that the cinema histories of any two collaborators are necessarily "combined" when they work together on the same movie, and that strictly speaking a genre is always "updated," even through bad or run-of-the-mill contributions. (Note how often White speaks of "advances" and "updates" and what "we've forgotten," without ever describing what he means by any of this: it's snake oil.) Really, a genre artist like Hill deserves much better (and by this I also mean more rigorous) treatment than White's hollow ode.

Hill knows how make a few words matter. He evokes personal ethics and sums up genre ethics.

Is the second sentence supposed to follow logically from the first? Does it simply add to it? How does one "sum up" genre ethics? Are we talking about an ethics of genre? Ethics through genre? Is it enough for a movie to merely "evoke" personal ethics? Most movies evoke personal ethics - the problem is that they stop timidly, lazily at such evocation.

Bullet is an exciting exploration of post-9/11 morality.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

The post-9/11 world where money and ethics collide?

Oh, for fuck's sake, part two.

The torture of Christian Slater scene feels Godardian ...

It feels odd to me that someone might make this statement with a straight face if one has actually seen Le petit soldat ... what a blatant and irresponsible disregard for form, politics, and philosophy.

Image of the Day

Shot Poorly

Every so often over the last month or two I have come across commensensical dismissals of the recent Les Miserables film as a crime against cinema - an objectively bad film, or at least, one that is objectively poorly shot or poorly framed.

But each time I see this argument I'm left scratching my head. I wonder what an objectively poor shot is supposed to look like. A viewer is entitled to such judgments, obviously, but shouldn't it be as a result of formal context rather than a lonesome little standard ripped out of a fictitious rulebook? Instead a lot of the grievances against Les Mis imply that there an objectively correct way to shoot musicals (in long shot!) and that Les Mis breaks this rule (because musicals musn't be filmed in close-up!). All this seems like utter nonsense to me, though. Even if there are solid practical reasons to frame a musical performance a certain way in general, there are always going to be legitimate reasons to at least attempt to frame it differently in a particular scene or a particular film. In the case of Les Mis, and Tom Hooper (not a great director - but, I quite like The Damned United) seems to have had at least an idea in his head when he was framing things. Most directors of prestige product are merely content to mimic the appearance of an idea, and instead cling to convention.

The dreaded close-ups which mark much of Les Mis, including the big scene which may win Anne Hathaway an Oscar, seemed fairly motivated to me. In conjunction with the insistently filthy make-up and costuming, on the most basic level these long take close-ups are a study in abjection. (Mind you, this is a prestige film abjection.) I would have to see the film again to be sure but I wonder if the off-center framing - surely in the "I Dreamed a Dream" number at least - isn't also directed toward a sense of longing or lack, so that shunting a face to one side of the frame in a number about aspirations is a simple (yet, for some, off-limits) decision. And the aesthetic trade-off to hearing better singers perform the role on stage is that here one gets the opportunity to see characters' faces up close and deliberately pathetic. The face on the frame is meant to express what the whole body and voice express in the more continuous timespace of the stage.

I'm not saying it's great or even good. I'm saying it's not awful and it's not pointless, and that the exaggeration about its mediocrity may have other, hidden motivations.

Lest you think I'm rallying to the film's defense as a superb achievement (like the esteemed Matt Zoller Seitz, who has bravely waved a banner for this movie), I'll disclose that I have no special affection for Les Miserables as a stage musical and I don't even think it's a particularly good film. I probably would not have seen it at all if I hadn't accompanied my wife. There are plenty of things to criticize about it, both as an adaptation of a "contemporary classic" stage musical and as a standalone work of cinema.

However, some of the glee with which this movie has been attacked (particularly the attacks from outside the fan community for the stage show) reminds me of venom directed at Mamma Mia, a film which was much more poorly received than Les Mis, but which (after two or three very grudging viewings) I eventually came to appreciate. Catering to the cinematic tastes of a decidedly unhip, largely female audiences is something many "discerning" viewers will not forgive or even try to understand - myself included, at times, I'm ashamed to say.

Movie 43

Along the same lines as Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, Peter Farrelly et al's Movie 43 foregrounds the commercial substrate of any particular movie project and in the narrative of a film about the creation of a film, parodies and lampoons Hollywood representational strategies and conventions. The first (and one of the funniest) segments has Hugh Jackman as a charming man on a blind date with Kate Winslet, who appears to be the only person who can see (or is bothered by) the pair of testicles hanging from his neck. As the sketch fizzles and ends, the clueless character (Dennis Quaid) who's been trying to pitch this scenario as part of an intelligent movie with heart that will be a box office hit responds, in earnest, that it's a metaphor! We let these small things get in the way of our happiness! This should clue us in to the film's M.O., and anyone who says the movie is gratuitously stupid, offensive, or tasteless has only indicated they haven't caught on to what the movie's doing. Basically every segment is a meta-exercise, a calculated exaggeration or displacement of some convention or another that seems absurd. But then you recognize its close structural similarity to a thousand movies you've already seen before which just did the same trick earnestly. Movie 43 is in many ways a hard film to love if you haven't seen so many commercial narrative films that you've grown tired of them, disappointed by them, yet still sort of love them. (Or you might love it if you dig jokes about shit, balls, and menstruation. I won't lie, I enjoy gross-out comedy too.) So, this is a shaggy dog kind of a project and it's not totally even or successful. It doesn't really cohere, and you certainly might expect it wouldn't, but at the same time it's probably best appreciated as an astringent gesture from a deceptively foolish perspective.

Viewing Opportunities (II)

Finally Got the News (Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman, Peter Gessner, Jim Morrison, John Louis Jr., in cooperation with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 1970) [h/t Nicole Brenez]

Wildcat at Mead (the October League, 1972)

The Cry of Jazz (Edward O. Bland, 1959)

Pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse (Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1957)

Viewing Opportunities

I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Caveh Zahedi, 1994)

 

In the Bathtub of the World (Caveh Zahedi, 2001)

The Psychotronic Man (Jack M. Sell, 1979)

Dialogue with a Woman Departed (Leo Hurwitz, 1981) [part one]

Argo

Ben Affleck's film is so many things, it wants to be so many things, that its adequate effectiveness as political thriller is overburdened by complications arising from its other genuflections to Hollywood modes. First, the "witty" dialogue. Sweet Jesus, I've grown to hate "witty" dialogue. Let me be clear: it is not wit I hate - instead it is the sort of strained . Not quite verbatim, here's an exchange. "History starts out as farce, and ends up as tragedy," says Alan Arkin at one point. "You have it backwards," corrects John Goodman. "Who said that?" "Marx." "Groucho Marx said that!?" The audience laughed on cue, but I just groaned. Another example: "Jimmy Carter said you were a great American." "A great American what?" "He didn't say." (Polite chuckles from the crowd.)  To me this plays like dialogue written by someone not in the interest of sculpting interesting characters or situations, or even of advancing the narrative efficiently, but instead seems like dialogue written by someone straining. But what do I know, since the theater was packed full of vocally appreciative viewers, and Ben Affleck won a Golden Globe. How many Golden Globes have I won?

Additionally, the question of family comes up. Earnest portrayals of broken families are totally in right now, so it's important to round out the character of Tony Mendez by showing his dedication to estranged wife & child. It's Hollywoodism, plain and simple, these conventional nods to things like family background, or the brief snippets we get of the "good Iranian." Yet this appears at odds with another touch (which I also didn't appreciate), namely Affleck's decision to craft so many of the images in imitation of news clippings - and in case you didn't understand how art directed this whole things was, with the hair & the mustache & the big glasses, the credits sequence clues you in by showing side-by-side comparisons of iconic images of Iran during the hostage crisis coincided with moments from the film. (How much better would Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky have been if it kept its own iconographic dalliances an "open secret," rather than repeating and explaining them all at the climax?) Argo seeks the closure and comfort of Hollywood convention while striving all the same for an imaginative, quasi-archival recreation. This, plus the constant attempts at smart and witty dialogue, conspire to bog down what is otherwise a competent suspense movie.

Of course I have not even touched upon the film's politics, except in a very broadly implicit way, but you can suspect that some of the problems I've outlined here transfer over, naturally ...

Year's End

I watch a lot of movies at home nowadays; I'm neither proud nor ashamed of this fact.  Time and budgetary constraints, to say nothing of the near-vanishing of the immersive commercial moviegoing experience, have disinclined me from going to the cinema as much as when I lived in New York.  Another part of what disappoints so often is how predictable, how tiny and tidy so much cinema has become.  (And in this instance I use cinema in its most expansive and inclusive sense.)  So many commercial genre films merely run through their motions, and if a steaming pile of horseshit like The Avengers has a half-dozen supposedly clever lines and a pop "auteur" at the helm, it gets lauded.  Even simple pleasures fall prey; the Step Up series (with which I have a love-hate relationship) shot out this year its worst, most bloodless, most hackneyed entry ... all in the guise of social and political protest!  Whatta sham, whatta shame.  I'm not even sure what made genre hits like The Raid: Redemption stand out to critics amidst the flourishing mini-appreciation of e.g. Isaac Florentine and DTV action cinema some of the bolder cinephiles have spearheaded.  (If you like action cinema, the oeuvre of Michael Jai White is ripe for examination.)  I was thankful to see The Grey - a commercial movie surely not without problems and limitations, but also a movie that appeared to actually investigate a few things, present a few ideas about the world, life, death, space, time, vision, conversation, regret, debts, labor.  Sometimes, under-the-radar Oscarbait pleases and surprises in a similar way: Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Michell) quickly reveals itself as a kind of Presidential Sister Wives of Downton Abbey, delving into human problems of secrecy and propriety, showing it knows what its demographic (really) wants quite shrewdly.  Let no person tell you prestige movies are less "exploitative" than low genre crap. 

When you see enough of anything, you either settle into comfortable patterns (and accept it, consciously or not), you get bored and move on (not because the film "in itself," whatever that may mean, is boring, but because you know its architecture too well already), or you continue to relate at an anxious and apprehensive arm's length.  Sadly this last is how I feel about so much new cinema.  I named my blog Elusive Lucidity because I was in search of something, and willing to look for it in many places.  This quality, or rather this shared non-quality, is what I want to see replicated, addressed, expanded upon in cinema.  The obvious question is why do I even bother - why don't I simply see what I want, and not give a damn about "the critical community" or "the zeitgeist."  Well, to some extent I do precisely this, but the fretful remainder exists because I'm an academic in the field of film & media studies, and even if something like The Dark Knight Rises or Zero Dark Thirty has no personal appeal to me, I'm often expected to have seen it by my friends, family,  peers, and most importantly my students - to whom I owe a responsibility so that I may best act as a guide and interlocutor from within the spectacle.

I figured I could include a list of favorites, though.  There are so many films I've still left to see if I want even the barest pretense of currency, including Dan Sallitt's The Unspeakable Act (a scandalous omission!), Robinson in Ruins (Keiller), A Burning Hot Summer (Garrel), the recent Hong Sang-soo efforts, Damsels in Distress (Stillman), Almayer's Folly (Akerman), Magic Mike (Soderbergh), Cosmopolis (Cronenberg), The Turin Horse (Tarr), Amour (Haneke), Tabu (Gomes), Barbara (Petzold), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan), and Holy Motors (Carax).  So take the below list with as many grains of salt as you'd like; I just figured I'd not wait too long to put up my customary "year's end" column, and this time I thought returning to a current top ten would be a pleasant way to hearken back to when I actually did keep such lists on a regular basis. 

Favorites of the year, in alphabetical order.

anders, Molussien (Nicolas Rey, 2012)
Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2011)
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)
The Grey (Joe Carnahan, 2011)
The Kid with a Bike (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2011)
Marriage Material (Joe Swanberg, 2012)
Open Five 2 (Kentucker Audley, 2012)
Safe (Boaz Yakin, 2012)
Scattered Junk (Timothy Morton, 2011)
Well Then There Now (Lewis Klahr, 2012)

There were various other releases I thought were good honorable mentions or just surprisingly decent next to very low expectations: The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, a clear example of the latter category); Mark Tween (Craig Keller, 2012); God Bless America (I'll watch anything directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, since Sleeping Dogs Lie is a really brilliant film, though this one is a bit much); The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield; reality TV content creeps into sociological diagnosis); Time and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim - though I've barely seen any of the Tim & Eric TV show); Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino; pleasurable but uneven and by no means should be assumed as "redemptive" ... my thoughts on Inglourious Basterds apply in large part to this one too); The Three Stooges (some fine gags in a lesser Farrelly brothers effort); also Haywire (Steven Soderbergh) had its elements of interest, and I'd be curious to see it again in a year or two; finally there was On Spec (David Phelps).

TV-wise, let me say too little by saying I'm also happy to defend the great pleasures of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (TLC), a show which explodes the stereotype of red state rednecks, and by extension troubles the categorical perceptions disseminated by the very mass media from which it springs.  Honey Boo Boo is a whipping boy du jour for an upper-middlebrow aesthetic as an example of ostensibly disastrous cultural decline, but in truth I think it is still better for my country than every program of "liberals" spouting off on MSNBC.  (Let us say nothing of Fox News.)  People who endlessly praise e.g. The Wire, a show I like very much, without pausing even once to consider its repertoire of highly conventionalized stock characters & situations, would do well to meditate just for one second about the implicit politics of race, class, and sexuality pulsing in the material on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.  For better, for worse, Alana is our Shirley Temple.

I don't say this last bit to provoke indignant reactions (I'm no Armond White) so much as to start an itch in the minds of people who maybe hadn't quite thought of things this way.

* * *

In the spirit of surprise, edification, reconsideration ...

... here are some older viewings of 2012 that weren't solely among the year's personal highlights, but which also shook me out of my shell, surprised me, puzzled me, even offered an aesthetic which connected to more than "mere" aesthetics: Fury (Fritz Lang - how had it taken me this long to get to this?), Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa - ditto), Szamanka (Andrzej Zulawski), Killer (Darezhan Omirbayev), Inventur (Zelimir Zilnik), Pretty Baby (Louis Malle), The Great Sadness of Zohara (Nina Menkes), The Pornographer (Bertrand Bonello), Brother (Aleksei Balabanov), Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme), The Idle Class (Charlie Chaplin), Severed Ways (Tony Stone), Khrustalyov, My Car! (Aleksei German), Outrage (Ida Lupino), Redacted (Brian De Palma).  Special, (dis)honorable mention to Giuseppe Andrews' Trailer Town (2003) ... what the hell was that!?  (Catching up recently on Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers just seemed ho-hum in comparison.)  At any rate it wasn't routine.

Add to these various classics whose revelations were more expected, if no less great - watching the odd Mizoguchi or Hawks I'd not yet watched - and that would be the bulk of my great cinema experience this past year.  Even if much, probably too much, was seen on small electronic screens.

A huge disappointment was finally getting around to the late, great Raul Ruiz's Klimt ('06) ... this is maybe the first and only time I've thought a movie by Ruiz fell completely flat.

* * *

Celluloid experience of the year: Tras-os-Montes (Antonio Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Portugal, 1976), a film of great substance, and also elusive in more ways than one.  I've written a few modest words on it which will appear on the Web in the near future.

"From the Top of Your Silly Head to the Soles of Your Dancing Feet"

Dynamite (Cecil B. DeMille, 1929)

The wedding ceremony, with the hammer blows of the gallows and an inmate's guitar-accompanied serenade, is jaw-dropping.  My favorite scene in an impressive work overall.

This film does feature one of my least favorite conventions of dramatic narrative.  In this case, Kay Johnson has promised her husband-by-technicality Hagon Derk (Charles Bickford) that she won't take her fast, fancy car out of the garage of his workingman's home.  (You see, she is expected to put a damper on her moneyed big city ways while living with him.)  But an emergency prompts her to break her promise for unselfish reasons.  When Dirk returns, he sees evidence of Cynthia's broken promise and immediately accosts her, leveling accusations that are hardly gallant. 

In movie-situations like these, it irks the hell out of me when the person wrongfully accused trips over himself not to get in a substantive word in his own defense.  Instead, even during ample silences, he stammers, stutters, offers lines like, "Well if you'd just gimme a chance..."  It's the sort of contrivance of speech and behavior I can accept in the context of Shakespearan drama, but it usually (usually!) rings very false in films.*  I'd hardly suggest movies should mimic anything so vague as "real life," but nonetheless it seems like such a lazy, convenient dramaturgical construction that juts out from almost any previously established code of verisimilitude that given film employs.  It's on the basis of narrative and dramaturgical form that I make this criticism; not on the basis of mimetic realism.  Rarely is it clear why the character in question should fail to blurt out the most salient information.  It's simply a convention for writers and directors that edges us closer to the climax. 

* I grant, of course, that such a contrivance will sometimes constructively signify an overly domineering vs. docile character. 

Administrivia

A year-end round-up is on the way - I'll probably roll it out in all its inadequate, uneven glory sometime in the next week. As I continue to write and research in a more academic capacity, I want to keep this space useful for something and I want it to be useful in a way that will accommodate my dry spells with posting as well as my busier periods. 

For instance ... Theoretical Bibliographies. These will be constantly in-progress bibliographies for questions in or around film & media theory - not just "theory" biblios, they are "theoretical" inasmuch as they might sketch out an area that doesn't seem fully formed; something speculative.

But I may also attempt one or two more regular series or columns throughout the year.  I've intended to do these before and they've usually dissipated.  But who knows what the year will bring.

Theoretical Bibliography: Figural Criticism

The following is intended to be a bibliography-in-progress for anyone interested in pursuing the line of inquiry concerning figural criticism of cinema, as popularized in at least some circles by the dedicated work of Nicole Brenez over the past two decades.  This is something I'll be cobbling together and updating in my spare time indefinitely, and I welcome comments and suggestions for the list (including non-English language sources).  Sources below are generally attached to English language texts and translations, perhaps with key untranslated texts mentioned as well.  On first pass ...

Dudley Andrew, "Figuration," Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford, 1984), pp. 157-171.

Erich Auerbach, "Figura," trans. Ralph Manheim, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (University of Minnesota, 1944/1984), pp. 11-71.

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 2003)

Béla Balász, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (1952) [link]

Nicole Brenez, De la figure en général et du corps en particulier: l'invention figurative au cinéma (Paris, Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1998)

• Nicole Brenez, "Come Into My Sleep," trans. Adrian Martin, RougeRouge (excerpt from the introduction to De la figure en général et du corps en particulier) [link]

Nicole Brenez, "The Ultimate Journey: Remarks on Contemporary Theory," trans. William D. Routt, Screening the Past (1997) [link] 

Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1981)

Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922) [link] 

Lucretius, On the Nature of the Things [link to one freely available translation]

Adrian Martin, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez (Punctum Books, 2012) [link]

• A video interview with Adrian Martin on his book, approximately an hour long. [link]

D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After New Media (Duke, 2001)

William D. Routt, "For Criticism," Screening the Past (2000) [link part 1] [link part 2]

... of course, Catherine Grant's [insert your own superlative here] Film Studies for Free has already compiled a list similar to this here (and I'll eventually include more of the links on my own list); one key difference is that my bibliography might extend more into non-electronic sources and philosophical genealogies for the consideration of figural theory & criticism.

Last Update: January 3, 2012.