Random and Informal Notes

- If one wants to see third-rate 1960s Preminger imitation, check out Richard Fleischer's The Boston Strangler (1968).

- Claire Denis' No Fear, No Die (1990) is a near-masterpiece that I wish I'd seen long ago. So effortlessly complex. Wow! So aside from this and Hellman's film, what other great cockfighting movies are there?

- Film scholarship I've read and liked lately: Paul Willemen (on Amos Gitai), Robert Ray (selections from How a Film Theory Got Lost), Nicole Brenez (on forms of questions in Godard from For Ever Godard). This is what I like and want to emulate well: rigorous but not programmatic, willing to propel itself forward, to go down tangents, but always on the heels of its query, never letting it or itself get lazy or predictable.

- If I could take a week off from the real world and just sit and watch 35mm prints in a private screening room, at the moment I'd be interested in looking at the oeuvres of Jack Arnold and Takashi Miike. Even if it was a full-time gig, I'd need more than a week, though, huh?

Genre Films

I've been thinking about some things currently debated a little on a_film_by. I wonder if there's something substantial and cohesive to be said about impersonal genre cinema, or to put it in more genealogically precise terms, a 'termite cinema' for today--and not one redeemed by auteur politics generally understood. There's no uphill battle insisting that the films of Romero or Mann or Cohen are authors of their own distinct cinema (well, OK, for Cohen there's a battle in some company). At any rate, defenses mounted for filmmakers like these are usually done in service of their collective oeuvres which bear a distinct personal stamp, stylistically and thematically, very much in the spirit of Sarris and 1950s Cahiers.

But what about John McTiernan, Renny Harlin, Paul W.S. Anderson, et al.? (I realize these are all 'masculinist' directors of action and sci-fi films: I don't want to give the impression though that this is the only kind of commercial/genre cinema where this kind of thing can happen.) Auteurism understood in a really broad, catholic sense can include filmmakers like these, but auteurism as the thing which most people now implicitly accept does not, because the films of these "authors" are quite often unsigned--someone like Anderson isn't, I suspect, so much the cine-writer of texts which are expressive of his vision as he is the modestly gifted enabler of films which are expressive purely or primarily unto themselves.

Where's the dividing line between the two types of commercial narrative cinema? I'm not entirely sure. Maybe there's not one. But recently as I've thought about this question it certainly feels like there is one. Resident Evil and Event Horizon don't seem quite like authorial expressions, but their expressivity is nonetheless there. I think of these as films which produce something extra, some kind of quality of vision that goes above and beyond (or beside) the requirements of the moneymaking apparatus. (Insofar as we can define 'excess,' I think there are basically two kinds, consumptive excess and productive excess. In commercial genre cinema, at least, he former tends toward reactionary-capitalist ideas because it accumulates experience and things into a massive, mountainous point [ > ]: to me this is Michael Bay's cinema. The latter tends toward breakages because it proliferates and comes undone [ < ]: perhaps this is Takashi Miike. I'll think more on how tenable this kind of distinction is, though.) There's a remainder or a dividend in these films that can't be fed into an easy equation of these films' material function as commercial products, but isn't easily understood as part of an authorial vision, either. Accidental interest? Maybe, maybe.

This artistically viable impersonal genre cinema (IGC for short?) has got to be one of the more neglected areas in film criticism. Where is our Manny Farber, the Manny Farber of this era and my generation, who will turn his or her attentive eyes and ears upon the messy, modest, occasionally thrilling joys of this kind of film? Doing so would involve seeing heaps of awful films, and practically no masterpieces, with a lot of attentive love in the process, so maybe it's an historian's task more than a proper critic's.

Docteur Chance (1997)

Dan Sallitt once made a statement (one whose sentiment I share 100%) to the effect that after seeing Esther Kahn there is a period in which other films seem inadequate; 'Why can't this film be more like Esther Kahn?' Is it a coincidence that maybe a week after I revisited Desplechin's film (on DVD this time) I should see another great film that I suspect will have the same temporary, ruinous effect on my movie-watching?

F.J. Ossang's Docteur Chance: France/Chile; 1997. I don't think this film was released in the United States; no reviews for it exist on the IMDB (where it has a ridiculous rating of '4.6' or something.) or MRQE. But it is on VHS and DVD, so see it! It stars mostly some actors I don't know, though Marisa Peredes and Joe Strummer (!) are among the more recognizable names in the cast. Set somewhere (everywhere?) in mostly desolate South American locations, we've got a slightly obscure tale of crime and intrigue--art forgery, guns, stolen cars, liquid currencies, a drug cartel. I can't say that I got everything that was happening plotwise. That will come with subsequent viewings, perhaps: I was intoxicated on the dark, lonely l'amour fou on display here, where Ossang has that touch for interiors that makes human dwellings look like insect tunnels, and exteriors that communicate naked, arid expansiveness. (And as if trapped by this life on the ground, the film's end is decidedly "uplifting.") History and geography collapse upon themselves, so that we feel we're watching elements of every decade of the twentieth century (and more than a single continent) adhere together. Who the hell is Elvire, the woman who plays the female lead, Ancetta? (She's great!) Why hasn't this film gained more of a cult following? Fans of Vigo, Feuillade, Ruiz, Hellman, Lynch, and Ferrara (among others) should love this movie ... or at least I would think so.

NYPL

OK, so I've wanted to do this for a few years, ever since Jaime started seeing cool stuff there, but now I will take advantage of the New York Public Library, including the Donnell Media Library's videos. For free. Just today I picked up two VHS tapes of films I had yet to find anywhere else: Walerian Borowczyk's Story of Sin (1975) and F.J. Ossang's Doctor Chance (1997). I've been trying to find the latter (without buying it online) for something like six years. The former, which I watched just a while ago with Megan, was a slight disappointment given that my expectations were so high. It's not as good as La Marge or Blanche. The NYPL have got more impressive things, too--Makavejev, Ripstein, Yevgeny Bauer. For free. Given that my future job status (meaning: pay status) is still frustratingly uncertain, the fact that these slightly-worn treasures are free is no small detail.

Idle Thought

I would hate to jinx myself, but I think that I'm about to enter a productive writing spell. Lately I've been enthralled by the work of Walerian Borowczyk and the issues it brings up, centrally or peripherally, including the history of Eastern European literature (I know almost nothing about it!), Surrealism, and a lot of the concerns brought up by Walter Benjamin.

A Few Comments on Surrealism

Part of me wonders if Surrealism (probably better: surrealism), broadly defined, is not the most laid-bare pulsation of modernity in art: the thing that sits most comfortably with all of the modern era's trappings (urbanization, psychoanalysis, work and capitalism, symbolism, advertising, religion, etc.). Of course I'm being deliberately shaky as far as what I'm referring to vis-a-vis Surrealism/surrealism. I generally do speak of the two in their distinctive senses, one a distinct historical movement (with mini-movements within it), the other a thread that moves through a lot of art. But can we open up that historical Surrealism and apply it to larger and more diverse things (i.e., bridge it with small-s surrealism)? Because what I ultimately would like to find more of is an art as well as a critical approach that takes into account the material content of modernity and postmodernity, but which still gets at those moments in which one has no presence of mind, to paraphrase Breton from Nadja. Psychoanalysis, strains of academic Marxism (Marxianism?), they don't quite seem satisfactory to me as far as scholarship goes.

Now here's a question: what happens when a Surrealist/surrealist vision and what we might call a postcolonialist vision collide? Surrealism, a movement at its peak relegated to a few cultural epicenters in Europe (as far as I know ... maybe I'm way off?), what might it have to say about the colonial tradition and the postcolonial existence of young nation-states and peoples? In short, can we reconcile something Surreal/surreal with our late capitalist globalized age? Because there are some surreal filmmakers across the globe whose provincial-mystical films say a lot about capitalism and contemporary life in often very oblique ways: Alain Guiraudie, Lisandro Alonso, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and others.

If none of this makes sense or sounds interesting to you, dear reader, I'm not surprised. These notes are mostly for my own process of edification.

Towards a New Subjectivity of New Subjectivies

I sometimes am taken with the notion that a lot of academic discourse--I'm talking about prose style and rhetorical strategies--is merely the analogue of marketing/proselytizing departments of other aspects of our society. 'New and exciting' academic work that 'crosses boundaries' often seems to follow the same formula : the emphasis in all cases is on vague terminology of novelty and 'sanctioned transgression,' where "central to our conception is a need to rethink and reimagine [insert object of rethinking and reimagining here]." Everything is so wound up on discovering and claiming new technologies/identities/hybridities/etc., or calling for a new politics of such-and-such, that no time is ever spent developing these new things to see if they work. I'm speaking in generalities, obviously, and as such am largely as open to the same criticisms I'm levelling myself. (But then again this is a blog entry, not a paper.) Certainly there are examples of really worthy academic work that fits the trappings I've outlined here. But I have read this kind of language in mission statements posted in the break rooms when I've worked at chain retail stores in the past; just this morning I saw a TV program on some untraditional Christian movements trying to think of a "new Christianity to answer for twenty-first century demands." And I'm just incredibly suspicious at how closely academia resembles corporate-commercial America as well as purple-state religious America. And all the while, how often (and how well) does any of this rad razzle-dazzle ever do anything?

I will never be as productive or as insightful as those whose intellectual labors I want to use as models for my own work. But I also hope that people might notice that I'm striving in those directions.

In two hours I will finally be seeing films by Christopher Maclaine ...

Indeed

From a letter Walter Benjamin wrote to Gerhard Scholem on May 23, 1917:

"I want everything that goes together lined up side by side. This is the only way I can work."

Yes.

I can't relate how often I've been extraordinarily (and defeatedly) reluctant to say anything of length about a given topic because I feel inadequate about my understanding of its contexts--a work of art within the artist's (or school's, or movement's) corpus, or within its historical and material world.

I'm trying desperately to remedy this and be more productive, and to go out on a limb once and a while without being sloppy about it.

(Have I also mentioned how much I despise ice cream trucks now that I've moved to Queens?)

Make Mine Miike

After catching up with The Happiness of the Katakuris I feel I have a good handle on Takashi Miike, and even if I suspect he's going to rarely make films I love, I've definitely come around from my position on him from, say, a year ago.

The way I see it, the horror of Audition is part and parcel with the glee of a film like Katakuris, in that Miike's cinema is essentially an affirmation of life: lived life, a sensuous process rather than a concept. And I think only someone intimately comfortable with depictions of death and abjection could pull off the affirmative ending of this genre-bender. I really need to revisit Audition now, but I wonder if a lot of its impact (and I don't deny it has a certain special impact, even if I didn't like the film when I saw it several years ago) has less to do with the avenues horror films usually take, and more with the sort of oblique Miikean closeness to the fragility and transience of happiness, to have one's "dream" attack one mercilessly. (To resurrect a line of thought from a little while back: in a way very different from Romero, Miike too seems to be a fine posthumanist, something echoed by the little girl's narration at the end of this film when she asserts without terror or grief that humans will sooner or later fall victim to natural selection.) In The Happiness of the Katakuris (as with Dead or Alive 2) the characters learn to live with their violent demons, both figurative and literal, and achieve a certain transcendence while negotiating their way through the imperfect, beautiful, demon-filled immanent world. The ambiguous appearances of heavenly existence (or non-existence?) in Katakuris and Dead or Alive 2 makes for an interesting path to go down, but I'm not well-versed enough in the spiritual philosophies that might influence and inspire Miike to comment much on this.

Turning Back Time

I sometimes wonder what I would have studied as an undergrad if I had to go back in time and could not pursue cinema studies or art history. I might have gone with the social sciences: anthropology or sociology. I may have done English, but then again, that seems so ... typical. Pass on that. If I definitely went to NYU and couldn't do film studies, I certainly would have wanted to end up in Gallatin to individualize my major.

But more and more I think that history would have been a wise choice. What era? Too many to choose from. What part of the world? Same thing. But to synthesize the tedious research into something big and meaningful, that's one kind of work I'd find rewarding, and there's a certain escapist pleasure to studying history that, of course, can be easily rooted back into serving and understanding the immanent, material world. Anyway if someone gave me a bunch of money and told me I had to somehow pursue graduate work in history, here would be broad areas I would consider:

1) Christian and Islamic Europe/North Africa/Near East, from roughly 1100-1650 (or from roughly high medieval to early modern era).

2) The cultures of the Indian Ocean. While taking a course on Islamic art I learned about this huge site of cultural cross-pollination, and I find it interesting. My first encounter with V.S. Naipaul some time ago, A Bend in the River, took place in this milieu, East Africa with an Indian narrator of Muslim merchant ancestry (albeit in a modern historical setting).

3) Japan up to the premodern era.

---

I'll definitely peter out before long, as I always do, but once more I've initiated a close, heavily-noted reading of Deleuze's Cinema 1. If I had money I'd buy Bergson's books (I've read substantial portions of Matter and Memory), knowledge of which would no doubt make the process a little easier. But each time I gain a slightly better understanding of Deleuze through oblique means, and I think I'm really inspired by some potential in his argument for what the movement-image is and does. Sorry to be terse about it here: more on that later, hopefully.

Ramblings

So, at my home videotheque, I am pondering hosting directorial retrospectives for myself. Seeing a lot of a single filmmaker's work in a short period of time has always been something that has intimidated me a little, as if I feel uncomfortable seeing these works out of all context but that of their maker's progression, which can concentrate and intensify some internal values, diluting and eliding some external ones. But I feel I should go ahead and "get it over with" when it comes to certain filmmakers, and see as much as I can (on video) of their work. I've avoided doing this already with some filmmakers whom I love because I've told myself to wait for 35mm ... but Tati and Mizoguchi (for example) make films that work wonders, still, on VHS and 19" television screens. Waiting out for the big experience is a bit masochistic, especially given that some of these filmmakers are for the most part unavailable, even, on DVD.

There remains an increasingly small handful of directors who by any fair "objective" assessment are major names whose work I've never seen (or never seen an entire film by). No need to embarrass myself and shock you readers by revealing these luminaries, and anyway in the next several weeks I'll likely have remedied this so I can say that I've seen at least one film by every director widely and highly regarded by American or Western cinephiles.

But that's the dilemma of renting movies, isn't it? It would all be easier if I had lived in a modest town with, say, a single rep house that managed to show one or two or five decent 16mm prints of older films from across the country and globe each week, in the evenings. (A fantasy, I know.) One of the reasons I've still not seen any number of classics (or "classics") is because I've tried to keep my finger on alternative pulses. I could have dutifully watched the major Oscar winners and such by the age of 16 or so, spent my last two years in high school seeing certain foreign and American independent commercial films, maybe a few avant-garde works, and left my college years to discovering the oddities, the B-films, the underground milestones, the unheralded masterpieces, etc., and seeing things like A Woman Under the Influence and My Darling Clementine in college as revisitations rather than late revelations. It's largely because I spent those "early" years taking chances (some paid off well) on films most cinephiles don't come to until later, if at all--things like Sogo Ishii's Angel Dust, Roy Del Ruth's The Little Giant, Frank Borzage's The Spanish Main, Nancy Savoca's True Love--and even then, usually only in passing.

Oh, well.

In preparing myself mentally for a hoped-for career in academia (read: daydreaming...) I've started to think regularly about what I want my 'beats' to be, and I simply can't feel totally comfortable with any formulation by director/country/era/theory. I suppose this amorphous flexibility is a good thing--it means I've a hungry appetite not to be quickly sated--but I'm also a bit panicked. When I go through my MA/PhD (assuming that I do ever go through with the process: it's not a guaranteed thing) I want to know my shit better than anyone's expectations of me would demand. And I don't want to lose valuable time for viewing, reading, discussing, and thinking on simply playing "catch-up" with the classics.

At any rate, tonight I will watch (it's a toss-up) either Takashi Miike's The Happiness of the Katakuris or Bertrand Tavernier's Let Joy Reign Supreme. This weekend will be a cinephiliac feast (albeit on all video formats: I'm impoverished as usual!), as well.

Monkey Shines (1988)

George A. Romero is American genre cinema's most thorough "posthumanist," the one most deeply and least conflictedly interested in showing the collapse of all social order and the survival of a very few. (Off the top of my head, the American mainstream hasn't offered a vision in the same bleak vein, save the last reel or so in A.I.) What interests Romero are not acting or plotting: he's a grand-vision artist, and happy to let his materials roam within the confines of budget and genre, so long as he can shape to his will the needed portrait of a series of philosophical crises. Sometimes he can "suffer" narratively, as a result. Day of the Dead and Monkey Shines both take quite a while to build up to the payoffs the genre requires (the zombie movie's first hour is dreadful). But the breakdown of state, community, even individual--in the Dead movies and in The Crazies--makes for a biting dismissal of these institutions' importance, and for our willingness to both depend on them and not be able to defend them.

Whereas in those contagion movies the most intelligent people are often the ones to die at the hands of stupidity, in Monkey Shines the intelligent people are confronted not with a pervasive collapse but with the burgeoning threat. (Had the characters failed in the film, Romero could have then made Night of the Monkeys, where the capuchin villain Ella engineers her monkey friends to violently overtake an unsuspecting public.) The impending and surprising threat of a more powerful Other is at the root of much Romero. The difference between his work and a lot of horror cinema is that he's practically neutral about the outcome. He's not particularly sentimental about most of his characters, and he doesn't play his thrills against the monstrosity of the villains so much as in the empathic threat against the heroes.

In short Romero is interested in dismantling the facades we've put up for ourselves: consider too the consequence of physical helplessness on the protagonist, an athlete. ("Ooh, ooh," chimes the budding psychoanalyst in the front of the classroom, "that's castration!")

I'm getting really intrigued to see how Land of Dead shapes up.

Back in Action

So I had to take a break from writing or updating the blog or website because I had to finish papers, graduate, move in with my girlfriend to a place in Astoria (that's in Queens for those uninitiated with NYC), and go for a few more weeks without Internet access. But now that the Web is available again I hope to get more writing online soon.

I'm in the middle of a handful of writing projects, we'll see which ones pan out into substantial and, probably more important, finished works. One of them would be a series of related essays that I'd put up on my website, maybe in .doc format. I don't know. But I'm also toying with a few other articles that I'd like to shop around ... if they ever get to the final stages.

Short Takes on a Few Directors

- Vittorio De Seta. MoMA retrospective in February. If his other films are as good as Bandits of Orgosolo and Almost a Man ... this will be a momentous "discovery" for American (or at least New York) cinephiles. Mark my words.

- Richard Fleischer. Only a little bit into my research and I've already got 1500 words on him (for the Film Journal's upcoming feature). The preliminary verbosity mostly comes from a discussion of auteur politics and theories that I'm trying to get a definitive opinion on.

- Chris Marker. He's not Ozu or Ford, so I don't think I can claim him as my "favorite" filmmaker ever. But it's quite possible that he's the most important one. I'll be writing a paper on his work this weekend. Something on the economy and discourse of images (hey, you in the back, don't roll your eyes!), and I haven't decided for sure if I want to most deeply examine his work on cinema (Vertigo in Sans soleil; Tarkovsky; Medvedkin) or his work on political events (Grin Without a Cat). More on that soon, probably.

- Tunde Kelani. Is Agogo Eewo (at BAM in a few weeks) worthwhile? Apparently it's a sequel (to a film I definitely have not seen).

- Rogério Sganzerla. I may get to finally see a film of his soon. Will definitely report back on that, if and when it works out.

Seijun Suzuki, et al.

I've been thinking a lot about Japanese genre films lately, in part because I have recently watched the first Takashi Miike film I've really liked (Dead or Alive 2: Birds--thanks Steve and Gabe, for the recommendation many months ago!), as well as a minor Seijun Suzuki effort, 1963's Kanto Wanderer, which is notable in my opinion almost totally for the climactic 10-15 minutes--absolutely heart-stopping colors, a sense of whimsy and spatial inventiveness, as if the aesthetic of Pistol Opera (a film I must revisit) were stuck, a bit muted, into the fabric of an otherwise innocuous genre film.

(By the way, does Kanto Wanderer technically count as a yakuza-eiga movie, is it an early example before the genre rigidified by the mid-1960s, or is it a variant? I know barely anything about this genre and am just curious.)

I have several viewing (not to mention reading) projects for this, my first post-graduation summer. One of them will be to explore further the works of Suzuki and Miike, not to mention Kinji Fukasaku's early stuff, and Koji Wakamatsu and Yasuzo Masamura, more Kitano, etc. (Actually one might say Japanese film in general. It's been a long time since I've seen anything by Mizoguchi, Oshima, or Kurosawa. I am keen to revisit a number of Ozu favorites. It'd be interesting to glimpse a few "pink films." You get the picture.) Those who read this and want to point me in the direction of really good lesser-known stuff in these veins that is accessible via video or maybe Japan Society screenings should feel free to do so. I'm interested.

Restaurants I Must Try in Queens

So ... this post isn't at all movie-related, but I'll be settling in Astoria post-graduation (and being on the G/R/V I'll be within 45 minutes of pretty much any theater I'd want to go to--and just a nice walk from AMMI). But I am so psyched about the food in NYC's best dining borough. Here are some must-try restaurants for me in Queens:

La Pollada de Laura (Peruvian)
Mombar (Egyptian)
Kebab Cafe (Middle Eastern - Lebanese? can't recall)
La Flor (mix/bakery)
Viko's (Mexican)
Pio Pio (Peruvian)
... and a particular Greek place whose name escapes me (out of the dozens in Astoria)

Also: frequent return visits to Tangra Masala and Sripraphai are in order. Bring the heat. Bring it.

I'll be back sooner or later with something substantial to post.

MoMA

So several months after its premiere, I finally went to the new MoMA space--the galleries, not for any movies. (Such a stereotypical cinephile, I guess.) I thought the new layout was OK; the periodic "openness" was cool but I also found the floor plans a bit confusing.

What did I learn?

Gilles Peress and Yayoi Kusama are contemporary photographers whose work I like, although I've just confirmed to myself again that I generally prefer photography from the first part of the twentieth century (Cartier-Bresson, Strand, Sheeler, Rodchenko, Stieglitz, etc.).

Marco Breuer: very interesting works up in one of the Painting & Sculpture galleries. Click here and scroll down for a little commentary that echoes my sentiments.

The first time I've been knocked off my feet (figuratively) by a Schiele: Portrait of Gerti Schiele, 1909.

The biggest impression made on me was Barnett Newman's work, which I found surprisingly and deeply affecting. (The paintings hung near Rothko works that just seemed inadequate by comparison.) I "felt" Newman's paintings in a way that I hadn't ever before, whether seeing them in person or reproduced in slides/plates. It's pointless to say it, but the paintings felt really ... honest.

And the big Monet Water Lilies was the most comforting thing to see.

(Is it clear that my interests--for this trip at least--were definitely geared towards photography and painting at the expense of sculpture, video--though Warhol screen tests were fascinating, architecture, or design?)

Cinephile Bonanza

I saw eleven films (a lot of them short films) and bought two film books yesterday and the day before. It was a feast. The rundown:

Ride the High Country: I kept thinking, 'What is organizing this film?' Didn't like it much, though McCrea and Scott are fine.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: The last canonical Ford Western (and close to the last Ford sound Western) I needed to see. I'd been waiting years for a chance to see it on 35mm, and the wait was worth it.

Light and World: Jordan Belson, didn't strike me as that impressive.

Joan of Arc: Piero Heliczer. I didn't think this was particularly good either, but its cast (Malanga, Warhol, I think also La Monte Young, et al) is enough for me to give it the benefit of a doubt. I'll give Heliczer more chances in the future.

NY, NY: Francis Thompson's high-energy kaleidoscopic vision of a New York day, using elements of Art Deco and Expressionism, with some sequences in which the cutting (and music) are Hitchcockian or Tashlinesque. Quite good.

Epileptic Seizure Comparison: I've waited to see this film for a long time, ever since Nicole Brenez (in Movie Mutations) cited it as a film 'for which one must become much stronger' or something to that effect. She's certainly right. But after Liberty Valance it's probably the most impressive and important film I saw these two days.

Threnody and Alaya and The Visitation: Nathaniel Dorsky. The Visitation is the first of Dorsky's two recent "devotional songs," the second of which was Threnody (finished last year). Alaya was wind and sand and film grain (pace Dorsky's own description). I thought that The Visitation was the most interesting (and most mysterious), but Threnody's colors were heart-stopping.

DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story: Can we say "complete opposite of Nathaniel Dorsky"?

The two books I got were the Martin/Rosenbaum edited Movie Mutations (about time I finally owned the book, right?) and Patricia Zimmerman's Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (on sale at Kim's).

Also, here is another reason why Olaf Möller is a hero of mine. (A dozen languages? I'm still struggling with French and Spanish, and making verrrry slow progress.) One of the reasons I regret not buying or subscribing to Film Comment anymore is Möller's current column (though I've been able to get permanent access to most of them online thru NYU), and also Kent Jones and various other contributors. But there's no excuse for my not having issues of Cinema-Scope sitting around. (Well OK, I do have some, but a good English-speaking cinephile should support this magazine and have all of them.) I'm going to run out and buy the current issue today, I think. Anyway, Möller gets a bad rap because of his didactic streak and his ease with esoterica. But for me he fulfills some of the most useful and important functions of a critic, that is, he contextualizes all that he writes on (because he sees and reads a lot), he highlights things that get almost no press (and which he thinks deserve it), and he's always overloading my list of films, filmmakers, and film books to catch up with. I've never heard of Japanese yakuza-movie director Makino Masahiro or Syrian documentary "master" Omar Amiralay, but that's because the J-genre isn't even close to a specialty of mine and I know almost nothing about documentary films from the Near/Middle East (although a Google search turns up at least as many hits in non-English languages as English--and the English ones at least all seem to treat Amiralay with respect similar to what Möller pays him). Anyway Amiralay has a film playing at Tribeca this year, as I find out here--guess I've got to get a ticket.

Snatched ...

So as I'm getting close to having seen all of Abel Ferrara's feature films, Body Snatchers ranks low in the oeuvre, but it's an interesting film nevertheless. The confluence of sensibilities doesn't serve the film--Dennis Paoli and Stuart Gordon (of Re-Animator fame), Nicholas St. John (stalwart screenwriter for early Ferrara), and Larry Cohen (B-level mad genius at large) don't necessarily cohere, and given that this project is a pretty schlocky "job of work" to begin with, even a monstrous talent like Ferrara can't resurrect it. So we've got a weird Frankenstein monster, cobbled together of varying parts, some of them more impressive than others, and appealing to various levels of viewer interest. Some spoilers below.

The Body (Of Course): This film is about the vulnerability of flesh. When a pod person is killed, the "horror" comes less from the fact that they decompose gruesomely than from the fact that they decompose so rapidly. The processes of decay are fast-forwarded. The Cronenbergian process in which one is "drained" into a pod person is a direct and palpable appeal to the sensation of nocturnal helplessness. These body snatchers are nightmares you don't know you have.

Family Matters: Here is also an adolescent fantasy about shunning one's family, and yet that fantasy is disavowed--she's only able to shun each family member successfully, guiltlessly when they have become pod people.

Military Intelligence?: The film's distrust of authority is a fractured, incomplete political stance that informs elements but not the whole of the narrative. Still, the horror is of a highly regimented society. Whereas Don Siegel's The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a parable of McCarthyism, this is a much vaguer expression of fear at a police state: residues of a Reagan America in which little "went wrong" like this on home soil.

The Tragically Ludicrous / The Ludicrously Tragic: When the little brother is thrown from the helicopter below he sounds the pod alarm (heard three times previously in the film) as he falls to his death. Here is a young child emitting a sirenlike scream, the diligent frenzied emission of concern for the colony's mission, as he plummets to his death. Who could react to this image with anything other than humor?

I'm presenting on New Rose Hotel in just a few days, and I'm terrified.

Cassavetes

Adrian Martin wrote an article called Diary for My Loves in which he detailed some of his lifetime "reel pleasures." These included genres (e.g., comedy of varieties both "profound" and "gagological"), filmmakers (e.g., Godard, Ruiz), and other categorizations (e.g., "1915-1936"). But first on his list was John Cassavetes, on whom he wrote the following few words: "I discovered Cassavetes 'late' - in my mid-twenties - and no experience of cinema before or since has even approached the profundity and force of this revelation. For me there are almost no words that can be spoken, even in the most deferential and intimate homage, about this angel: quite simply, I believe (with Thierry Jousse) that "it is through him that life entered the cinema"." I think this is a very appealing sentiment.

So it had been about five years since the last time I saw Cassavetes films, but in recent weeks I've been revisiting his work and seeing some of it for the first time. In the past few days I saw two films I should have seen long, long ago. Opening Night is a film of horror of discovering that part of oneself is always dangling desperately "behind" other parts of oneself; it's the only film I can think of that deserves to be mentioned in the same breathe as Esther Kahn for being not only so concerned with similar things, but also for being so good.

The other film, which I watched just last night (I had been so embarrassed at never having seen it that it made me put it off even longer), was A Woman Under the Influence. This is one of the very greatest films I've ever seen. The experience of engaging with Cassavetes again, in this film in particular, is too raw, too disorienting for me to even try to be eloquent. So I'll have to not really say much of anything right now, and hope that I can do better in the future, after time and future (re)viewings have sunken in.

... I also took another look at a little bit of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which I have always previously mentioned as my Cassavetes-of-choice, and it still looks incredibly impressive. If I didn't have many other things to take care of today, I would have sat down for the 2+ hours to watch the film again. It was hard enough as it was to pull myself away. Stunning work ...