On 3-hour films, plus random comments

Last weekend, for three days in a row, I watched films that hovered around the 3-hour mark. The first, Les Amants réguliers (Garrel, 2005) was quite good though I had some minor reservations. The second, The Cardinal (Preminger, 1963--on DVD) was a near-masterpiece though I thought it fell into very problematic territory (dramatically & politically) in its final minutes. The third, The Return of the King (Jackson, 2003--also on DVD, original cut) has a lot that can be said about it, and unless it's intelligent and well-stated, probably is a lot more than it deserves to have said about it. I make no claims that my thoughts will be intelligent and well-stated, but that's why I'm putting them in a blog entry and not in an article.

I was struck at the differences in Les Amants and The Cardinal for how they clarified each other's organizational strategies. Both are unified by a distinctive aesthetic: highly 'textural' and intimate, immediate scenes splayed out over 175 minutes in the Garrel, versus a leisurely-paced but highly purposeful narrative progression, brushed in bold (but masterly, and often subtle) strokes ... for 175 minutes ... in the Preminger. But the aesthetic, not to mention thematic & philosophical, unity of the former work only comes about when viewed a posteriori, and dialectically, I think. There is no conventionally satisfying progression, simply a flow whose essence changes drastically (but not suddenly) in the early May scenes and those right after, and which changes (more subtly still) in the early post-May scenes and late post-May scenes. It's all about tone and texture really, and the power of tiny nuances on grand scales. The Cardinal doesn't seem to operate on this same wavelength, and instead offers an Olympian-scaled 'regular' narrative. The interplay between past and present, so important in both films, is more explicit in Preminger's; this is largely because of its sense of iconographic ingenuity. A moment like the one where young Romy Schneider, about to meet her young American priest (whose profane yearnings might cause him to leave the priesthood for her), sees her object of affection (Tom Tryon in the title role) in a cafe--only he rises to his feet, mercilessly, wearing his collar for the first time in two years. Preminger knows how to hit all those big, smashing, orchestral notes with perfect balance: the past would never be such a looming and physical monstrosity in the Garrel film (at least not this particular one). This is because The Cardinal, like almost all Hollywood narrative (great, awful, or in between) is not dialectical, and not opaque. One doesn't hold in one's head the contrasting experiential flows between 'the past' (at one point in a film) and 'the present' (at another point), as with Les Amants réguliers, and deduce the greater meanings and aspects of the work from the interplay. The interplay is there, and obviated, in something like The Cardinal.

As for the third installment in the Tolkien trilogy: some background. I never saw the second film, and I saw the first one in theaters, remember kind of liking it, but don't really recall the film at all. I read half of Tolkien's opus when I was younger (I couldn't get past that notorious "middle section of The Two Towers"). From the ages of, roughly, 9 to 13, however, I was a big fan of sword-and-sorcery novels, usually the mass market, commercial stuff. When I realized that open enchantment with elves and swords might prevent me from having girlfriends or sitting with cool kids at lunch, I torpedoed the hobby ... if not quite the affection. To this day, I have an uneasy fascination with tales of myth & valor that involve magic and derivative names of kingdoms. 'Uneasy' because if I ever revisit it--flipping through old paperbacks of mine, for instance--I find that I hate the stuff as much as I love it, and am as annoyed as I am riveted. (I actually feel a little bit of the same way with some of the more literary figures in the SF&F fields: the work of people like China Miéville or Gene Wolfe or Jack Vance, which I've sampled lately, has proven disappointing even when I like it quite a bit.) All this is to say that I have a more complicated personal relationship to that much-scorned area of "fantasy" than to other areas of 'junk' fiction.

What is interesting is how Peter Jackson's adaptations, as expansive and epic as they may be or seem to audiences, are pretty severe abridgements of Tolkien's work. Jackson is not a filmmaker without talent (the one film of his I've seen that doesn't have hobbits is Heavenly Creatures, and I liked that one a lot--probably would like it still if I saw it today). So the enormous Battle at Pelennor Fields (its buildup and aftermath included), which takes up something like two hours, is fine narrative filmmaking, with strong pacing and rhythm. I enjoyed it, I felt that "sense of wonder" that we're no doubt meant to feel, and so on. But what I didn't like about the film has a lot in common with why and how Jackson has "abridged" Tolkien. Not this film's specific elisions because, as I said, I haven't even read the third part of The Lord of the Rings. But the ethos which justifies the choices Jackson made as to how to tell this story in his way. There are some things which might boil down to taste: the pristine, New Age-y compositions that mar a lot of the film (especially beginning and end) might appear unspeakably beautiful to someone else, I suppose--on par with Terrence Malick. OK. But there is a certain infusion of modern "attitude" to the film that undercuts the timelessness which has been so unhonorably ladled upon this 'epic masterpiece.' For instance, the scene in which Eowyn kills the Witch-King, who was to not to die by any man's hand. "I am no man!" she says with relish as she kills him. Tolkien's original text, which I looked over to compare, presents a very different event (I wish I had it here to quote). She says something along the lines of, 'No living man am I. You look upon a woman. [And more.]' And the violence of this moment is presented clumsily, almost luckily. Eowyn "stands up" to the Witch-King in Tolkien's text with great fear, which is poignant, whereas she is a badass and a strong role model for young viewers (tm) in the film, which is thrilling.

I am not a believer that a film adaptation should hew to the text, nor do I think that we should be making films which replicate Tolkien's retrograde gender politics. But Jackson's effort smacks of tokenism to me. Here is this film trilogy, with slightly beefed up roles for its grand total of three female characters, which basically doesn't 'alter' Tolkien or really 'update' him--it doesn't even present him in such a way that we could "read against the presumed grain" as I think we can with Milius' Conan. It simply puts Tolkien through a processor for today's audience, translating all that can be kept into the form of a product to reach the hearts and wallets of millions.

There are readers of this blog who like these films a lot, I'm sure. And I'm not dismissing them--I don't think they're horrible films whatever my reservations. But I also cannot for the life of me understand their massive appeal. I don't think they're magical, I don't think they're "finally the real deal." They seem very much like products of their time for the global market, constructed with all the CGI loveliness & darkness that money can buy, with romance and comic relief inserted according to today's conventions amidst a 'danger/safety/danger/safety' narrative--one which was of course taken from Tolkien, but which again goes to serve a sensationalist mentality. What might I be missing that speaks in the films' favor? Or have I been to lenient on the films as it is?

OK, as if this wasn't already the longest post I've probably ever written, I have a few random notes and gripes. In the space of a week NYC will have two different Kiju Yoshida (aka Yoshishige Yoshida) films playing--Love Affair at Akitsu Spa and A Story Written with Water. Finally! In both cases I will have to miss them, the former because I will be staying in Martha's Vineyard next weekend, the latter because I have a ticket for Hong's Tale of Cinema that afternoon. Damn it. Also, I thought of another father/daughter duo in which case I might cherish the daughter's work more--Asia Argento. I've only seen a few Dario films, and only one by Asia, but cult canons bedamned, I'd rather see Scarlet Diva again than, say, Suspiria. Asia Argento is one of my favorite people in the cinema.

Les Habitants (1970); on close analysis

By Artavazd Pelechian, if you haven't been reading earlier posts.

An impressive work, insofar as you can tell from an .avi file. About nine minutes long, it's divided into three sections in which the soundtrack and images essentially articulate beautiful things, then horror & chaos, then beauty again. Shots of animals doing animal things, basically--in groups or solo. It's the sort of film that repays close attention and repeating viewing, I think.

I've always liked the idea of spending a lot of time with a single film, watching it all the way through over and over, breaking it into chunks, replaying passages, comparing passages to other films, etc. I need to push myself into impeccable knowledge of certain films. There are several films I'm thinking about delving deep into and writing about, but I probably shouldn't name them because I'd just jinx myself. I've been bad at getting things finished--I've done a fair amount of writing on a handful of films (a few American ones come to mind: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Before Sunrise + Before Sunset; New Rose Hotel) but can't seem to rein them into anything coherent and useful for other people. At any rate I also want desperately to get away from American narratives (by adding variety if not necessarily abandoning them); too much of what I've written the past year or so revolves around them.

Next time I write an entry I will try to make it something substantial and interesting, and not the enormously self-indulgent rambling I've provided lately.

On the Internets

So I see that Ryan Wu has thus accompanied his link to my page: "Lend him some dough so he can catch the latest auteurist obscurities." I realize I have now whined enough about my financial instability to have made it my calling card.

But Ryan's nice to link to my page--it's getting less and less kosher to keep up a cheesily designed Geocities site. By year's end I think I'll have a cheesily designed domain of my own. (Seriously. I've been working on very basic layouts. The biggest problem is that I get tired of the same old font. Georgia, Trebuchet, Arial, they all look bad to me after I use them for a month.)

UbuWeb, so I discover, came back online recently after a hiatus, although I understand that they had to take down some of the stuff they had up merely a week or two ago (?) for legal reasons. Still, they have a lot of stuff up--I've only rummaged through the film section since they've been back up, having downloaded exclusively MP3's from them in the past--and among them is an .avi of Les Habitants (1970) by Artavazd Pelechian. Ask and ye shall recieve, eh?

Favorite Films of 1971

No reason for this, really. I'm just waiting for my lentils to finish cooking and have nothing else to do in particular at this moment. I picked a fairly random year.

1. Summer of ‘42 (Robert Mulligan, USA)
2. The Devils (Ken Russell, UK)
3. Blanche (Walerian Borowczwyk, France)
4. Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, USA)
5. Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, France)
6. He Who Waits for a Deadman’s Shoes Shall Die Barefoot (João César Monteiro, Portugal)
7. A New Leaf (Elaine May, USA)
8. How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Brazil)
9. WR—Mysteries of the Organism (Dušan Makavejev, Yugoslavia)
10. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, USA)
11. Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, USA)

Numbers 1 and 4 are very sentimental, extraordinarily beautiful commercial films. 2 and 3--unrelenting historical reconstructions. 5 and 6--slightly inscrutable statements from often misunderstood, underappreciated individuals. One was still fresh in his "late" period, the other just beginning his cine-odyssey. 7 through 11--portraits in how we've lived our lives, yesterday and today, and perhaps how satisfying the tiniest freedoms can be in the face of much, much futility.

There are some films I haven't seen yet, obviously, and some that I'm just not crazy about.

Honorable Mentions (unordered): Minnie and Moskowitz (John Cassavetes, USA); A Gunfight (Lamont Johnson, USA); Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song (Melvin van Peebles, USA); Play Misty for Me (Clint Eastwood, USA); Wild Rovers (Blake Edwards, USA); El Coraje del pueblo(Jorge Sanjinés, Bolivia)

Five Points in Search of a Theme

1. Raúl Ruiz is one of the most mind-boggling, frustrating artists ever. I'm a big fan--don't get the wrong impression--but one can't be a lazy fan of his work, that's for sure. His Poetics of Cinema, for those who haven't had the frustrating pleasure of reading it, is immensely and breezily erudite. It's along the lines of, 'In order to illustrate my Narrative Principle of Anti-Causality and its appearance in those old movie serials directed by Ford Beebe, I will have to go back to the 4th century BC Chinese text on architecture ...' That's parody rather than a summary or a verbatim quote, of course. But you get the picture of the way Ruiz playfully jumps from one context to another, pulling his arguments and running his reasoning through all of them one after another. It must be the sort of book which time and experience "open up." At least I hope it is. Frustrating Ruiz exhibit #2: Life Is a Dream. I tried watching it on video. I was fascinated, but defeated, very early in the film. Had to turn off the tape. (In my defense, I was exhausted at the time.) I'll go back and start the experience anew, but this is hardly the first Ruiz film I've had to struggle with before seeing fully through.

2. I find that I can group all of my really strong urges to spend money can be grouped into four categories: cinema (rentals, DVDs, screening tickets), music (CDs more than concerts), food (restaurants, groceries, alcohol), and books (all kinds!). Each week it seems like I'm obsessed with going and getting a bunch of one group or another. Lately I've been somewhat disciplined about not getting things, and probably deserve a pat on the back from myself. It will be what allows me to see some of these Japanese films this season.

3. Here are albums that I have been listening to and thinking about a lot lately: Love Cry (Albert Ayler), Hypnotic Underground (Ghost), New Skin for the Old Ceremony (Leonard Cohen), Aida (Derek Bailey), Now Is the Hour (Charlie Haden Quartet West), Fight Test EP (Flaming Lips -- but really only for the first two songs), The Stolen Stars: Anaphorian Dance Drama (Kraig Grady).

4. John Ford's Donovan's Reef is too beautiful for words. But, a few words anyway: what other examples of classical Hollywood cinema can we come up with that deal with the resolution of dramatic tension so subtly, so tacitly, as this one does?

5. I have to go do laundry now.

Roth, Bus, Humanity

An exhausting trip to MoMA today, mostly because of three singular and very absorbing experiences in a row. First, I stumbled upon the Dieter Roth installation Solo Scenes (1997-8), which consists of a whole lot of televisions playing DVDs of footage Roth took of himself as he worked in his studio, slept, thought, read, ate, showered, talked on the phone, etc. I was absolutely stunned and don't know why except that I can mumble something to myself that sounds vaguely and inadequately humanist. (I missed the MoMA Roth retrospective last year, so my knowledge of his highly diverse output was sketchy enough to begin with.)

Then there was Hiroshi Shimizu's gently insistent Arigato-san (Mr. Thank You), followed by Sadao Yamanaka's pessimistic, gorgeous Humanity and Paper Balloons. These are films which help pad out the view of classical Japanese cinema, what it can be and do, existing somewhere off the dimensional field created by Kurosawa/Ozu/Mizoguchi--which can be oppressive, even if you love all three of those filmmakers.

I'd like to talk about any or all of these in some detail, but I feel incredibly spent, suffering from a slight strain of active viewing (coupled with a hint of Stendhal syndrome), and can't find the words for each experience. My high recommendations to the two films and the installation ...

Argument, Treatise, Experience

Recent discussion on a_film_by has prompted me to sketch out some more ideas I have about film & politics (not the YahooGroup), but since they aren’t immediately applicable to the questions asked in the relevant thread, and since I developed a few of these ideas earlier here anyway, I figured I’d post the thoughts here. Most people who read this blog peek at a_film_by, and those who don’t always can if they want to since the archives are public. I said a little while back that a film is an argument, a treatise, and an experience all at once. This is a nice little aphorism perhaps but what does it mean? I promise I wasn’t saying it simply because it sounded nice.

By 'argument' I mean that a film as a product (commercial or otherwise) in a flow of exchanges of images, concepts, representations, experiences, etc. in the real world--that is, when we attack the Nazi ideology expressed and embodied in Triumph of the Will, we are directing our opinion at the film as an argument. (I’ve never seen Triumph of the Will, myself.) This is also what academics talk about as 'ideology,' that is, even those films which are apolitical or neutral on a given point are still necessarily embedded within a large number of cultural battles & progressions, deciding what to say and what to remain silent on ... no film can ever engage everything at once, and none ever will until scientists figure out a way to correct the sad fact that Bruce Conner and Chris Marker never had a love child (who would grow up to make films of course). These are films as material objects, limited things hurled and battered about in an apparently unlimited world.

But a film is also a self-explanatory 'treatise,' that is, precisely the opposite of an argument, in that we can take it out of time and history and actual space, and dissect and analyze it. This doesn’t happen in that crazy, unlimited, real world but in fact occurs at an intimate setting, a psychological one or something near it, between one viewer and one film (or even one moment) perhaps, wherein the film comprises its own outer limits. Here there are innumberable methods toward analyzing (in part because they are innumberable ways for films to organize themselves). This is what, say, Fred Camper talks about when he says that Triumph of the Will is great, I believe—the internal cohesion of form in the film’s own limits, as recognized by an observer.

A film is also finally an ‘experience,’ and this is a hazier category for me, but a necessary one because it is how the former two categories relate to each other. It’s the most difficult thing to describe to oneself, let alone communicate to another, I think. Let me try to illustrate the dilemma I’m getting at by way of example. I am a great fan of John Milius’ work, or at least what I’ve seen of it. (I’m preparing myself for a big letdown when I finally catch Red Dawn.) Not only is Milius the man a rabid paleocon (hardly as dangerous as the right-wingers in power, but as far as the NRA goes the man has serious political baggage). And then there are the gray areas—his gender politics are neanderthal, but then again he tends to have independent, strong, well-formed female characters, and then again they’re always relegated to supporting roles. What I feel ultimately ‘allows’ me to like Milius’ work is how they operate not simply formally but experientially. To me a Milius film may be all about nostalgia, the sad void left when the myth of patriarchy is exposed (a Straussian sentiment at least in part), the heroic male and his heroic quest, etc. But the entry point into these movies does not normalize this for the viewer. One doesn’t need to be enamored of (or critical of) the same things Milius is, or his characters are, to feel something expressive. Whereas, on the other hand, the Mel Gibson vehicle stuff (The Patriot, We Were Soldiers) tends to operate on principles in which one must be complicit with the ideology in order to feel the proper, intended emotions—for instance, one must think highly of Sam Elliott barking deadpan orders to his troops amidst enemy fire, or of Mel Gibson and the boys praying before going to battle. In comparison, When it comes to steel and swords, violence, conquest, patriarchy, and religion in Conan the Barbarian, the film moves toward a profound ambivalence. The Gibsonian film works to hit your buttons for ideological complicity (and some degree of conformity), while Milius’ sort of film asks only that one feel empathy or sympathy for its characters and situations, and in turn makes no effort to corral us into a tacit acceptance of anything else. In this case it almost comes down to the pedestrian matters of good and bad storytelling, although in today’s reviewing climate my preferences must seem irredeemably backward. But more than that, the Miliusian film seems ‘open’ and contains the space for one to profitably read against its presumed grain, whereas reading against the grain (which is never presumed, always crystal clear) in a Gibsonian film is necessarily a violent act.

I think ultimately this principle is illustrated empirically. When I was 12, Braveheart was the film that ignited my passion for “the movies.” And I have loved Conan the Barbarian since childhood. The former doesn’t hold up very well in my opinion, while the latter has only appeared more vital as years go by.

A lazy night of film theory and French avant-garde

I have spent the evening thus far sipping one leftover glass of wine, casually revisiting Radiohead's Kid A (which I think grows more beautiful every few months I pull it from my shelves), and reading film theory. If I can't be a grad student yet, dammit, I'll take a stab at its most pleasurable aspects.

The readings for tonight were Noël Burch's article on avant-garde and primitive cinema (particularly its first half), and Dominique Noguez on French avant-garde cinema in an early issue of Millennium Film Journal (second time I've read it). Burch's work is absolutely fascinating, rigorous but expansive in the way I identified before with the likes of Willemen and Brenez--I should go through and give his books a serious read as they deserve. Too many classics of film theory to catch up with, and which I can't believe we weren't required to read in my time as an NYU student. (Amos Vogel's Film and a Subversive Art comes back into print in two weeks, as well. Another one that's no doubt essential.) At any rate, reading Noguez, I'm very excited to one day see some of these works. I'm kicking myself for letting the Lettrist films go by when they showed at Anthology a while ago. (Come to think of it, I'm kicking myself for letting tonight's MoMA screening of Dick Higgins' The Flaming City pass by, too. Forgot about that. I should be in the theater right now! Damn. I think it's playing once more this weekend though.) The figure who seems to come up a lot is Patrick Bokanowski. Noguez mentions him in connection to both "contemporary" (i.e., 1970s) strains of French avant-garde cinema. Brenez mentions him. Super-dense and -allusive Middle Eastern theorist Jalal Toufic once dedicated an article (in the journal Discourse, I believe) to Bokanowski.

Have I mentioned before on this blog how great Bokanowski's L'Ange (which I've only seen on the ReVoir video) is? About five absolutely riveting segments which seem impossibly timeless, incredibly fluent with the film medium. An explosion of spilled milk that (as in Tarkovsky) is full of ineffable suggestive meaning. A fencer. A woman trapped in a room beset by attackers. A stairway. It's such a bizarre, singular experience. I can't do it justice on one viewing. I look forward to visiting his early short films on video at the NYPL.

Avant-gardes and new cinema

By way of Matthew Clayfield, today I came across the academic blog Digital Poetics, where there was this fascinating recent entry: The Abstract and the Real. This post does something rare and very valuable in both scholarship and online commentary--finding an obscure connection between images, thus throwing the question on the table as to whether this is a 'Zeigeist burp' (a phrase that, after applying it elsewhere, I realize I liked and may have coined) or perhaps a hidden authorial continuity. Who knew that The Ring was so connected to Man Ray's cinema (or maybe the press packet gave this fact a small proud bullet, who knows!?).

I'm not very well versed in digital cinema or interactive/online contributions to the expanding borders of the moving image, although I would like to be, and "support" or "endorse" research and theory on this front. I think that the appropriation of avant-garde techniques, hashed out especially in the comments to the blog entry, are an important 'dulling' factor for a lot of avant-garde cinema. (However: I saw Un Chien andalou probably ten times in NYU classes, and the sliced eye never ceased to draw gasps.) That said, I think that not all avant-garde elements have been appropriated--only those which can lend a hand to the selling of a product (to put it cynically and crudely) are appropriated. What about patience, and looooong slooow chunks of time which encourage contemplation, which insist that we don't pull a nugget of information out of an image or a cut, but instead exist with these things? I don't believe Michael Snow has been "appropriated" in any significant way. What about painstaking recreation which squarely emphasizes some kind of truth content over dramatics--as in the work of the Straubs, but also Francesco Rosi? It seems to me not that the avant-garde gets neutralized but that it gets recontextualized, so to be "truly" cutting edge, formally, yes, one must always try something new. But some effects are not amenable to a commercialist/capitalist ethos and aesthetics, and will not be taken up by it at all. So the avant-garde will--or can--always retain its resonance.

* * *

I am pretty certain I saw Armond White perusing the sale shelves of the Donnell Library today.

September 04 2005 (miscellany)

Warren Sonbert's Carriage Trade sets forth the same kind of feeling that Joris Ivens' A Tale of the Wind does, in part, and which a film like Baraka wishes it could do: to formulate a vision of global living wherein an artist and a viewer glimpses connections among contrasts, and vice versa, and wherein the view of the Earth and its component-inhabitants (sentient, mineral, and otherwise) makes for an achingly beautiful and overwhelming experience. Aesthetically Sonbert strikes me as a middle ground between Brakhage and Dorsky--on first viewing, at any rate. One older man at the screening was incredibly upset that his companion brought him to the film, though I can't exactly figure out what the problem was: either they had seen Carriage Trade once before, or he couldn't believe it had no sound, or he didn't like the fact that it was an avant-garde film. (The mutterings veered variously into any of these objections.) Anyway, the guy vocalized his distaste several times throughout the first 10-15 minutes, stayed quiet but for the occasional sigh, and then left for the final 15-20 minutes after announcing his intention to do so. Jeebus.

In other news: I am totally psyched to splurge one day soon on Japanese avant-psych-folk-experimental music. Now playing is Nagisa Ni Te's pretty Feel. It was part of a controlled spending spree which also scored me (among a few other things) Raúl Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema. Can't wait to finally read it ...

Thoughts on Progressive Criticism & Film

Big thanks to Paul Fileri for drawing my attention to The French Cinema Book (eds. Temple and Witt), in which there is a fantastic article by Nicole Brenez on 'Forms' from 1960 to 2004. I had, for some inexplicable reason, judged the book by its cover and presumed it was a cheesy undergrad textbook which would no doubt fall prey to the very master narratives of French cinema that it explicitly tries to problematize. But I'm glad to know now how worthy a book it is, or appears to be on a cursory look-through.

Something I cherish about Brenez's writing, her critical and philosophical stance, is that her intense air of commitment finds itself channeled through various and unpredictable circuits. As she outlines early in her article, there are a handful of avant-garde work: the 'figurative' (Bresson, Hanoun, Pialat, et al.), the socially and politically engaged (she mentions here René Vautier), and the purely formally inventive (or the 'useless' as, she says, Jonas Mekas puts it). For Brenez, all of these very different (and yet not always distinct!) formations of cinema can lead in the desired direction, namely, for her (and for myself as well), a resoundingly critical investigation of our real, capitalist world and a productive expression of freedom and beauty.

One of the symptoms of proclaimed progressivism with regard to the arts is a mind-numbing settling into critical cliches, formulas, quotas--it's almost as if one is bitterly frightened at the prospect of thinking progressively on one's toes, provisionally & multiply, where there are innumerable paths to any given end, and a work of art has a lot of different aspects. (If I can toss off this judgment so freely it's only because it applies to myself, too.) Why do a lot of progressive viewers turn the game into a checklist for mainstream movies (e.g., this black lesbian occupies a lead role, thus the film must be progressive)? And I'm not trying to belitting the genuine necessity for analysis of representation, here. But I once came across a militantly "Maoist" film review that praised Spielberg's Amistad because it taught that it is right to rebel against oppressors! And this is not the only example of such crudity and cluelessness I've come across. And, whatever the centrality or importance one assigns to Hollywood and its international equivalents (the main arena or the giant enemy), I've found that oftentimes bad (progressive) criticism and cinephilia ultimately does precisely what Brenez bravely fights against--positing the 'industrial' (commercial) cinema as the center, and everything else as the periphery, the marginal. What we need to do is not invert that so much as shatter it.

Every work of art is an argument, an experience, and a treatise, and it's a major job of the critic (however defined) to locate and open up these forms of address, to try to see which ones are of greater magnitude and which ones are of lesser, to uncover how a film or any artwork gets to where it is and what it does while it's there. We should not be obliged to play by the rules of business ...

NYFF, etc.

The Shochiku retrospective this fall may well be the most vital series of the year. I'd love to see all the films. But just when I thought I would be in the clear, financially, and could at least get by with a little spending money on the side, student loans--larger than I was anticipating--rear their ugly head. So I will have to select only a handful: as many of the Hiroshi Shimizu films as I can make, at least one early Mizoguchi as well as The Loyal 47 Ronin, at least one by Heinosuke Gosho, Mikio Naruse's Every Night Dreams, and Kiju Yoshida's Love Affair at Akitsu Spa. That's at least eight films, a hefty investment for a single series during a busy moviegoing period, and I shudder to think that it's not even half of what I originally marked down as 'must see'. (Souls on the Road is also one I should really try to catch.)

As for the NYFF, I'll probably try to see only three films: Hong Sang-soo's A Tale of Cinema, Philippe Garrel's new film, and either Mitsuo Yanagimachi's Who's Camus, Anyway? or Sokurov's The Sun. I liked Yanagimachi's 1986 effort Himatsuri, which had some beautiful compositions and a nice sense of rhythm, but from all appearances it would be more important to see The Sun, and I do like the 20th century "bio" films Sokoruv has done that I've seen (Moloch more than Taurus). I have a feeling that the Hou and the Dardennes films, like a few others I want to see, will show up again, and I don't have the same immediate desire to catch them as I do for Hong's work. The Views from the Avant-Garde festival looks surprisingly lightweight (excepting the Straub/Huillet program); though I had high hopes to finally see everything in it this year, I don't think I'll feel too bad passing most of it over.

Being broke can really grate on one's nerves ...

Snatched ... (2)

Ferrara's Body Snatchers improves on a second viewing. The camerawork is more intelligent and foreboding than I had realized a few months ago. The creaky acting not such a distraction. In short, the sense of the film being a messy palimpsest (the B-movie brainchild of several disparate & divergent figures) lessens a bit, and everything works a little more cleanly than before. (Some spoilers again.)

As Brad Stevens notes in his book on Ferrara, the final shot, which has a soldier on the landing zone guiding our heroes' chopper in, echoes several earlier shots in the film, such as the one Stevens explicitly points out (Meg Tilly as a pod-mother, sounding the alarm when her human family flees), but the final image is a low-angle shot where the soldier is ominous like Ermey and Whitaker both are in the scenes which introduce them. The point is not that the pod people are frightening, but that the military people are, and the difference between the two ('mindless drones') is hard to spot.

(Has anyone noticed how much Gabrielle Anwar & Tilly's hair suggests the pod tendrils?)

Recent Films Seen

After recently watching some Keaton (The Cameraman--a long time coming) on DVD, I was prepared to do some research and investigate Keaton as the reluctant poet of modernity, but realized while watching the Harold Lloyd vehicle Number, Pleace (directed by Hal Roach/Fred C. Newymeyer) that really that's an unfair title to hoist onto Buster, because (a) it's too vague and doesn't do his genius justice, and (b) Keaton's brilliant reaction to modernity is still just one reaction to it.

Number, Please follows the travails of Lloyd as he tries to woo a sweetheart at a theme park (Coney Island?), where he's ill-fitted to a world of Merry-Go-Rounds and telephones and has a string of exasperating encounters with the manifestations of a busy, technologically unfamiliar, world. That's right, it's basically a Keaton scenario, and was no doubt formally invented before either Lloyd or Keaton became stars!

What distinguishes Keaton is necessarily more specific, more localized ... it has to do with his face and body and their singular sharpness, the direct pose of Keaton's stare (large eyes directed fearfully and sometimes defiantly at those competitors in the frame). It has to do, also, with the faculty of imagination. Film comedy, no less so silent film comedy, is of course very conversant with fantasies of its inept heroes; in The Cameraman Keaton captures the philosophical resonance of this sort of fantasy when his character mimes a game of baseball in an empty Yankee stadium. I want to one day be able to pinpoint why that is profoundly moving (in its distinctive way) in addition to being funny, whereas my imagining of Chaplin or Lloyd doing it would come out to be something very different indeed.

The fantasies of childhood pop culture take on their own moving resonance when one revisits them later in life. I recently subjected/treated myself to revisitations of two big films for me from the Eighties: The Dark Crystal (Jim Henson and Frank Oz, 1982) and The NeverEnding Story (Wolfgang Petersen, 1984). In both cases the act of watching the films proved simultaneously disappointing and exhilirating. Disappointing because I thought that, overall, neither of them worked well 'as films,' though I surely wanted them to do so. (Some images in The Dark Crystal were fascinating, and I loved the pacing. I still think there's something bizarre and transfixing about the cataclysmic climax of The NeverEnding Story.) Exhilirating because I wasn't necessarily expecting them to work, and one can simply go into these works as if reacquainting oneself with a comfortable environment. I am no more able to understand the distinct appeal of certain 'blocks' of information in these (and other) films that appealed to me when I was a kid: the moment in which Bastian (Barrett Oliver) takes a single bite of sandwich in Story and then puts it away; the throwaway line where the girl in Dark Crystal tells the hero that he doesn't have wings ("Of course not ... you're a boy") that always seemed to vivid and pronounced when I watched it in grade school.

The power of the clear uniqueness of a film-moment found its way crashing home in my (looooong-awaited) first Garrel film, Les Baisers de secours (1989). It contains, among many beautiful things, a moment of quick, apparently aleatory magic (deeply akin to Kiarostami) in which a mother and son walk by the street, the mother pointing out pigeons to the little boy. "It won't fly," he says, and after a beat, a pigeon directly behind him shoots up into flight. This could have been achieved in post-production, using non-synch sound, but the unexpected impact of the moment is the same.

I chose to pass up the one playing at BAM tonight, for a number of reasons, but I hope to see the rest of the films in the series.

Genre Films (2)

As I noted before, a problem with the study and appreciation of contemporary genre films is that a lot of them are absolute drivel. It doesn't help when even the "names" among the ranks are inconsistent. Paul W.S. Anderson makes futuristic films with, a think, some identifiable "concerns." But I watched some of Soldier (1998?) a little while back--I had seen it before--and found little of interest, even though it 'fits' in a certain auteurist sense. I know some people think Event Horizon ('96) is a good film, and I'll have to go back and look at that, but really my esteem for the most commercialized young Anderson in movies today is based on Resident Evil ('02). Has anyone seen his first feature, which I think is called Shopping? It has Jude Law and I think Bill Krohn once plugged it ... but keeping track of the movies Bill Krohn recommends is practically impossible.

Let me suggest a different model here than the 'smuggler' of auteurist genre cinema. There is also a 'surfer,' someone of a little or a lot of talent, though probably less "personality" than a smuggler, who doesn't wrestle a vision into a project, but who rather tries to temporarily harness a flow or a series of flows, to sculpt something of beauty and control out of the great Zeitgeisty wave. And it doesn't have to correspond only to today's Hollywood cinema: it might be best applied to any director who seems to make one or two or three bizarrely impressive films that seem to be, on one hand, total products of The System, and yet are unusual enough to exist well outside the mainstream of The System. We need a theory of 'surfers.'

Dreaming About Retrospectives ...

If I were an uber-programmer at a rep house or university cinematheque with a respectable archive, some superb contacts, and a windfall budget, these would be a baker's dozen filmmakers whose bodies of work I'd try to bring to the screen right now. The first five choices are only names to me, the next eight are names I have some familiarity with. Those who've followed my blog with any regularity know that a lot of these names have appeared here in the recent past, more than once. Some are totally new. Consider it a snapshot of what I'd like to see on celluloid. And feel free to list your fantasy retrospectives.

Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi
Artavazd Peleshian
Adolfo Arrieta
Robert Kramer
Rene Vautier
Harun Farocki
Raúl Ruiz
Yevgeny Bauer
Walerian Borowczyk
Takashi Miike
Buster Keaton
Abel Ferrara
Jean Rouch

(Why am I in such a daydreaming mood lately?)

Méliès, Silent Film, Pedagogical Concerns

So today on my lunch break I took at a look at two Méliès films on DVD, Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904) and Photographie électrique à distance (1908). I'm pretty sure I saw the former, one of his most famous works, before, but it's quite possible that I only saw an excerpt. (In the past I haven't always been good at marking down short films, noteworthy fragments, etc. in my viewing logs.) Le Voyage... is a remarkable, amazing, beautiful, the sort of thing that becomes embedded in one's memory, or so I would think but maybe I had forgotten it already once.

As I looked over the types of films screened in my silent cinema course at NYU, and thought back to our readings, I became very dissatisfied. None of it sparked in me the intensity of feeling I've had towards early and silent film lately. It seems like a standard line.

It wasn't the professor's fault, it wasn't the TA's fault: they were both fine. I think it has more to do with a certain rigidity of curriculum, so that we go over predetermined points (racism in Birth of a Nation, women filmmakers, the Lumières vs. Méliès, and so on) and the real opportunities for engagement, vigorous and passionate engagement, with this arcane and primitive material find themselves passed over. In effect we take our medicine: hem-and-haw over the question of Griffith and ideology, nod our heads at the history lesson that Oscar Micheaux provides a week later, etc.

I suspect that if I were ever to teach an introductory course on silent cinema I'd begin with as much of a hands(and eyes)-on approach to late 19th century Western visual, scientific, and leisure culture as I could. And in the first or second lecture, whenever I got around to showing a "proper" film, I would have tried to recreate the experience as outlined and stressed by Tom Gunning, where the magic of the movies was in fact the appearance of motion from out of a still projection of a photograph. I would emphasize the multiplicity of ways of making, exhibiting, and taking in these cinematographic images--it wasn't a straight line from the mythical December 1895 night in Paris to the Regal Cinemas on 14th St. in New York, and it's not enough to simply say that, it's necessary to show it, and to spend some time in those alternate pathways. Look at coloring techniques, sound and music, narration, intertitling, and all the things that make these objects interesting, and not simply relevant to academic/theoretical concerns of the day. (And I'm not downplaying those concerns, just denying that they are all that matter, or all that legitimize the study of silent film, or any kind of culture.) I'd want students to revel in the sheer power of Le Voyage..., to discuss and write at some length on the tactility of colors, the importance of motion in frame, composition strategies, speed and pacing, connections to other media, and (let's not be scared of it) actual philosophical questions raised by all these practices.

(I'm well aware I'm being perhaps a bit too idealistic, but I don't think I'm being wrongly idealistic. Still, while I'm dreaming: it would be great if professors would screen prints, even if only 16mm, and if they would also give students in a class like this the chance, if at all possible, to do something I still long to do ... see a nitrate print!)

Video Games

Recent email discussion with one of the great (former) web cinephiles of my generation has piqued my curiosity about videogames, especially games as complex works open to both hermeneutic and historical investigation.

My all-time favorite game was probably Blades of Steel (Konami, I think? ... for NES), which I basically mastered (it's an incredibly easy game to master!). But what I want to talk about is a game for which I had much less proficiency, Samurai Shodown (the versions I was familiar with were the arcade one and SNES). This was a fascinating game which, for the most part, reinterpreted legendary and historical warrior figures (most, but not all, of which were Japanese in origin), gave them weapons and special moves, and stuck them in combat with one another. So as a text which "reimagines" cultural history of some kind, it's worthwhile. But its gameplay is also important--it always seemed like the most graceful of the fighting games of its period, which relied on psychology (e.g., a special meter measured how angry a fighter was, so that his or her hits were more damaging when they were landed). Moving to and fro and sparring was just as much of the action as a well-placed flurry of sword slashes: the intensity of combat was subdued (though not diminished) in a certain way in contrast to, say, Street Fighter 2 or Mortal Kombat. Playing Samurai Shodown was not solely a way to pass time; there was a certain transference of consciousness involved in the playing, so that the space and time of the game took on a kind of resonance; this is something that needs to be discussed and which has been discussed a little by the aforementioned cinephile, at least.

Thinking of videogames as complex, rich aesthetic objects (whether high art or not) is not something most of us, cinephiles or culturally savvy folks, are adept at right now, I think, but in the future thoughtful appreciation will be more widespread.

This and That

This is going to be another substance-lite collection of random thoughts. Sorry. Over the weekend I read in full a book I bought for my silent cinema course some years back (but I don't think we were ever assigned any readings from it!) ... Paolo Cherchi-Usai's superb Silent Cinema: An Introduction. Today I skimmed through Cherchi-Usai's The Death of Cinema, a fascinating book in its own right, I think. Whenever I'm able to purchase books regularly again, I think this will be one of the first film books I pick up. (By the way, have any readers read the recent book of a conversation between Godard and the Egyptian--or Palestinian?--critic?)

The Méliès films were shown at Anthology this past weekend, weren't they? Too bad I was out of town and had to miss them, because Cherchi-Usai's book has sparked an interest in looking at some silent films (on film) and I want to scratch that itch.

Last night on the subway I saw a curious pair. They were two high school boys (maybe--maybe--they were young college students) who were decked out in a carefully studied neo-retro look and sat next to each other. And I do mean "carefully studied" ... this isn't the don't-think-about-it-and-let-your-hair-grow-out-too look that marks the appearance of some people (like, um, myself). This was a planned plundering of subtle sartorial affectations from the years before and after 1980, including some shaggy rocker hairstyles with that just cut look. Anyway, the taller blond kid was sitting slouched in his seat, legs far out, staring at the floor. The shorter, dark-haired guy was sitting back straight and legs bent underneath his seat, his upright face gazing into the nothingness right in front of them. Neither moved for the handful of stops I shared a subway ride with them and a few other passengers. When their stop came, the tall one stepped in front of the short one, crossing his path, to go to the door at the front of the car, and the short one zipped to the door in the middle of the car, (effectively making a curvy X path, going to the doors on the side where the other person was closer). On the platform they eventually caught up to each other, standing just outside of reaching distance from one another, glazed gazes still plastered on their faces, not talking, not acknowledging each other. What were these two guys? Brothers who don't get along but share a wardrobe and go to the same concerts? A young gay couple having an awkward fight early in their relationship? I was just really inspired by the possibility of a telepathic link between them ...

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?