Vintage '98?

In 1998 the United States had an "off" World Cup, to say the least, finishing (statistically) dead last out of 32 teams. In 2002 they had a decent World Cup, playing two mostly excellent games (against Portugal and Germany), recording only two victories in five games (against a surprised Portugal and a superior Mexico side), and managing to coast on good fortune the rest of the time. The (American) media like to rattle on about USA's #5 FIFA rating for the United States (which every soccer fan knows is merely indicative of the ranking system's faults, and in no way accurately reflects our footballing status). The fact that they made it to the quarterfinals last time just inflates fairweather fans' sense of what the American team can and should do.

I wasn't expecting a semi-final finish this time around, nor even a quarterfinal repeat. I understand that soccer talent doesn't spring up overnight. I didn't expect to see the United States advance to the Round of 16 after seeing their tough draw, and I still don't expect them to work miracles after today's match against the Czech Republic.














But some things are just too much. Here is my advice for the United States, who play Italy on Saturday:

Pass the ball even slower. You all were passing it pretty slowly in the Czech game, but I bet you'll perform better if you crank up the lethargy. The same goes for your feet. I saw a lot of standing around, but if we're going to win soccer games and the respect of the footballing world, we'll have to do more sauntering. Heels on the ground! As for moving into space and opening up for teammates. You barely did that against the Czechs, and I don't see how you could minimalize on this front any more. So good job at being the best on 'static football,' which I hear is all the rage at Ajax right now. And whatever you do, don't even try to pretend that you want the ball, you want to win, you want to play. It's clear from this game that you didn't, and I'm OK and you're OK with that.

(Eddie Johnson, you're somewhat exempt from the above sarcasm. You made something of an effort. As for the rest of you guys, it pains me to say it because I think some of you are fantastic, but this match was well below what anyone should just chalk up to a tough break, for any of you.)

All in all, it was one of the more embarrassing games I've seen a squad play at the World Cup level, and it's sad because I have been pulling for my fellow Americans so genuinely these years, and will continue to do so, as painful as it gets. But they were outclassed in every conceivable way by the Czechs, by huge margins. I expected Nedved & Co. to beat them. I also expected them to put up a fight. It's possible for USA to beat Ghana, and they do actually have the skill to perhaps top Italy if the Americans play a phenomenal game and the Italians stumble just a bit. We're not dead yet. But it's a prerequisite for this fan's respect for the team to play with some heart, which they resoundingly did not do today. And I see no reason why I should be optimistic about Saturday's game. It could very easily be another 3:0 trouncing from a dangerous Italian side.

The Czech Republic deserve praise for playing an excellent match--they're an extraordinary team.

World Cup highlights so far: watching Mexico beat Iran (and reach my personal score prediction of 3:1) while eating tacos and drinking cervezas in a local taqueria with friends; seeing Germany play their exciting opener; gradually starting to root for Trinidad & Tobago. Disappointments included Ghana's loss and Ivory Coast's loss, and also seeing that Portugal fizzled after some really fast and exciting play against Angola. (I didn't see the Netherlands/Serbia game.)

Futbol!

The FIFA World Cup starts tomorrow, and I may write a few blog entries on it over the course of the next month. Skip 'em if you actively dislike the game--some Americans, especially, have a psychological complex where they go out of their way to put down the sport. Some scattered thoughts:

Reason Why I'm Finally Rooting for Brazil: Ronaldinho. I've always loved what I've known and encountered about Brazilian culture, but I've never gotten behind their national soccer team because (a) they had a bad habit of eliminating teams I really liked in recent World Cups, and (b) I was rubbed the wrong way by some of their recent stars--Rivaldo, Romario, Ronaldo. But Ronaldinho? That goofy, infectious smile, and especially the superhuman skill ... what's not to like? He is the primary reason for my turnaround. (On the flipside, I would usually pull for the Clockwork Orange to do well, but I'm less enthusiastic this time around because of bad vibes from ... Ruud van Nistelrooy. Don't ever mistake me for a rational soccer fan.)

Teams I Will Root For, Always: USA (World Cup brings out my nationalism), Germany (I learned to play soccer when I lived there as a kid). I'm preparing to have my heart broken in the group stages by the US, and in the quarterfinals by Germany. But I'll be cheering them on--and hoping against hope--the whole time.

Surprises: Switzerland and Australia. I'm going to predict them both to make it to the Round of 16 at least. Switzerland may even surprise France and top their group.

Dream Final: England v Brazil, with healthy players all around. My real dream final would involve Germany playing a surprisingly great tournament all the way through to the trophy, but that's even less likely than the United States managing to emerge from the same group as Italy, Ghana, and the Czech Republic.

Prediction for Tomorrow's Opener: Germany 1 : 0 Costa Rica. The Germans will control the pitch but play cautiously, until Miroslav Klose's lanky ass finds its way in front of the right cross. We'll maybe have to wait until Ballack is fit to play to see the Germans try anything creative ...

Desire & Capital: More Notes

I'm about to begin reading Herbert Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension, and will hold that in comparison/contrast to some of his fellow Frankfurt Schoolers. A big question for me, when the mind wanders, is whether or not we have some mental aspect that is not imprinted by society, and is furthermore indomitable--i.e., is there something within "the human spirit" in which we (progressives) can put our energy into: a trigger, a tap, a safe space? Or is the project of human rights & civilization a constant and necessary battle against its own inherent threats--the "recidivist element" within our enlightenment (cf. Horkheimer and Adorno's prefatory notes to The Dialectic of Enlightenment)? As something less than even an aspiring historian, sociologist, psychologist, or philosopher, I can't expect to come up with good answers to this question in the foreseeable future. What I can try to do is see when and what artwork throughout history has to say about this question, what arguments it puts forth for an explanation of one form or another--and what material, practical, or ideological employment these explanations may undergo for people in historical reality. Being a cinephile I'm obviously drawn to the ways that the modes, technologies, and aesthetics of later modernity (or we can just call it the twentieth century) address this question. Special emphasis here on surrealism, fragmentative aesthetic practices, and the so-called unconscious mind.

When we, culturally, unloose and share our libidinous, mysterious, and starstruck fascinations upon the images we make with each other ...










(Above: Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart; Patrick Bokanowski's L'Ange; Luis Buñuel's Subida al cielo)

... is there something tangible we can get from this exercise of free expression and the recounting of dreams? Aside from the pleasure of that expression itself? Can we craft our stories and images to do what we want, socially? Well, obviously, we can and do, within limits--but what are those limits? Once we have started using a disruptive, disjunctive impulse to patch together new artworks that examine our social mores and patterns ...













(Vera Chytilova's Daisies)

... or our individual, psychic perceptions ...












(Carl Th. Dreyer's Vampyr)

... or our collective psyche (does it ever emerge with a clean bill of health!?) ...












(Alexander Kluge's The Eiffel Tower, King Kong, and the White Woman)

... can we really ever be assured of the revolution (of whatever magnitude and stripe we expect) we feel we've been promised? Does Makavejev urge us to fuck as a way of getting the revolutionary ball rolling or does he think seeing his films about--among other things--fucking will do the trick (now this is a question more easily answered with some simple research, though)? In other words, what are the real differences when a viewer sees a film that plays up its performative enunciation ('I am a film that is out there attacking or promoting something through my very presence') versus a film that seems to promote action at expense of itself ('I, as a film, am invisible and unreadable beyond being a call to action')? To ask a related question [which Marcuse tackles], is great art always potentially subversive and productive [if so what is great art!?] ... or is there something that politically-minded observers must be sure to separate when dealing with art, since something great might also be something bad?

My temperament in this case is cautious and a little pessimistic--my suspicions are that art (and aesthetic experience as a category within experience) are not essentially, not even always potentially, "productive" or "positive" sites for the human being. Whatever is deemed good or bad for people, art can and does do both.

Mayakovsky charged that the bourgeoisie were subconsciously afraid of the electricity (the force) they had invented--they ate by candlelight (quotation found here). If the larger project of surrealism, for instance, which melded waking, rational reality with the streaming mental reality of the subconscious, what ways can we make sure that we're not just unleashing some more latent force or invention of ruling interests? I'm not trying to even skirt with a 'vulgar Marxism' here, as though that which is suspected to be "bourgeois" is bad and deserves to be destroyed or ignored. I'm only caught inside a question: how can I be sure when and where my fantasies are my own? Will it really be a case of the the unconscious breaking through our false consciousness (maybe the first impulse of the surrealist-marxist) or will our conscious, rational minds have to save us from our own socially-constructed desires? Probably what is needed is a dynamic balance between the two. And when it comes time to construct or consume images, sounds, narratives ... we're left with a vital necessity to think on-the-fly, case-by-case, provisionally, with a pragmatic and somewhat relativistic rigor.

Which brings me back to where I've started, really, and I have the feeling that in climbing the saddle between the giant mountains of Social and Aesthetic Theory, I've done nothing more strengthen my grip on the rocks I'm already holding for dear life. (Which is precisely why I'm blogging on this subject rather than publishing on it, at this moment in time.) Still, there were some pretty film frame enlargements along the way, right?

All Kinds of Loose Ends

One of the cool things about Birth (some appropriate linkage here, here, and here--probably more that aren't coming to mind immediately) is that it doesn't suffer from what I'd call 'Vanilla Sky syndrome,' that is, a willingness in mainstream cinema to push into some interesting and really fractured territory (with regards to at least storytelling, possibly form), and an even greater willingness to resolve all these apparent loose ends in the final reel, reducing the whole experience into a clever puzzlepiece contraption--and severing all the loose and ambiguous, potentially profoundly evocative, tendrils that hurl out from the screen. I'm not against this sort of plot construction in an ironclad doctrinaire way, but, well, you can't imagine the disappointment I felt in the final minutes of Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky when I saw it some years back. Jonathan Glazer's Birth (I thought his Sexy Beast was very good, as well) feints in this 'plot cleanup' direction and so for a few minutes I was very nervous ... but it mostly retains the heft of its mystery. I'm not as over-the-moon about this film as some people, but definitely put me down in the camp that greatly admires and appreciates it, and would like to see more like it.

One of the depressing things about saying I'd like to see more films like Birth is that (as regular readers will know) I don't see many new films these days, for a variety of reasons, and though I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things, I feel really out of touch with not only the so-called moviegoing public (ah but don't all cinephiles?), I'm also out of touch with critics. Case in point: Peter Jackson's abyssmal King Kong, one of the most inane things I've ever watched. Also a critical hit. I don't like saying that films are boring because this really means "I was bored when I watched it," and with the right mindset practically anything can become interesting (or uninteresting). But for the sake of polemics and on the credit of my scarce usage of the word, I'm going to say it: this film is boring. Inept plot construction (what's with the black sailor-cum-lit-professor!?), a tired visual sense and production design, the Kraft-cheesiest trans-species "humanism" you've ever seen, and possibly the most blatant abuse of 'suspension of disbelief' principles in the history of cinema. If every single character (OK, every major white character) proves to be impossibly heroic, athletic, durable, and lucky ASAP, then what is the point of pretending for three damn hours that this action-adventure film is worth investing yourself into? It's essentially a lame and predictable (but fast!) roller coaster ride with some animatronic hugging along the way. You'd think there'd at least be a joke about how Adrien Brody is initially timid or Jack Black gets winded easily (or even some reference to Naomi Watt's superhuman whiplash-resistance), but nope--these horribly-frightened strangers to Skull Island prove themselves immediately capable of handling anything, and rescuing each other from everything. Anyway, I know a lot of people liked this movie and I don't really want to trash something just for the sake of trashing it ... but I felt the need to vent a bit. I don't do it that much, do I?

A P.S. about Kong--though I alluded twice above to race, I don't think the film is exactly 'racist,' a tag I believe some have attached to the film. (The '33 original is of course a racist film, borne of a cultural psyche rather than D.W. Griffith-like devotion to a cause.) I do think that Jackson's film has some serious racial baggage that needs examining, and it clearly has some residual content of the original's racism, but I don't think it's particularly malicious itself, nor 'racist' in any notable sense. Open to discussion on this point.

Desire & Capital: Preliminary Notes

I may start taking notes on the relationship between sexual desire and (Marxist) economic analyses in films that I see where the relationship between the two is implied or brought up explicitly. Sometimes the existence of overwhelming desire exists in a film as an (intentional) counterpoint to economic or sociopolitical crises, which causes the characters to behave in ways that don't appear to be rooted in politics, but which have a certain residual whose political roots are evoked through the structure of the artwork itself. In the famous 'Freud' and 'Marx' image from Godard's Le Gai savoir, it's as though the 'Freud' (libido) supplies the drama, and the 'Marx' (physical sexuality) supplies the action, and economy and society go on operating through individuals in ways that seem to be purely corporeal, neither economic nor social.












In Dušan Makavejev's Man Is Not a Bird (1965), the character Rudinski has to balance his dedication to his job as an engineer (for which he is given a medal) and his attraction to the young woman Rajka. A maxim that I believe the film postulates: a man cannot be ruled by his passions, but neither can he reject them totally--Rajka (as a mustachioed truck driver's advances suggest) is a bit more attuned to the pushing and pulling of the heart, and I think Makavejev's work is an ongoing attempt to unite the ideas of sexual liberation (release) with the self-control (labor & ownership) of workers, which arguably found its greatest culmination in WR--Mysteries of the Organism ('71). Makavejev is neither friend nor foe of the State, exactly, from my admittedly quite limited vantage point. What interests him is instead the attempt at true liberation in terms not only socio-economic, but in terms of the Godardian 'Marx' and 'Freud,' an attempt that a Communist government will not necessarily make in earnest, but which Makavejev will agitate for anyway.

Below, stills from Teorema (Pasolini, '68) and Shampoo (Ashby, '75) ...



















Pasolini was a Marxist of course, and Towne & Ashby left liberals (I would think?)--both draw interesting portraits of sexual attraction and desire, the sexual revolution, the possibilities of a certain political promise (and also failure). I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of Teorema or Shampoo, each of which I've seen only one time, but both films are about a certain sexual proclivity, a propulsion among their characters, to which 'backgrounded' social and political elements depicted in the films have a very serious and complex relationship. So, I hope, more on them in the future. As with my previous post, this is something like a sketch or a study of a more serious work that may result some months down the road.

Kinds of Panoramic Vision

Scattered notes for (possibly) a future project:

- The view from the window of a [train] passing a landscape. A nineteenth century innovation in perception ... this is something that Wolfgang Schivelbusch has written about (though I've not read his work on this firsthand). Early cinema recorded quite a few films as seen from the window of a moving train.

- 'Panorama as form,' wherein the above is manifested in the rectangular (including, possibly, CinemaScope) frame of the canvas--the parameters of the image reflect the first principle of the composition. Or this can be a camera track/pan (think of the traffic tracking shot in Godard's Week End, or the shot of the supermarket in Tout va bien), or the movement of the eyes over a broad space which this camera movement presumably mimics.

- 'Panorama as content,' that is, the suggestion through even as it runs counter to form, as below, wherein the desire to see all around becomes the emphasis of the image if not its organizational principle. Below is Alma-Tadema's A Coign of Vantage (1895).





















What makes these (particularly 'panorama as form') distinct from just any long horizontal space is that, representationally, they suggest or depict outright a coherent and unified space--unlike, say, the Bayeux Tapestry. One of my favorite 'follies' of early cinema is an attempt to create a coherent and unified space by way of pieced-together fragments, namely, the Cinéorama of Raoul Grimoin-Sanson (patented 1897, attempted to exhibit in 1900). Ten projections of footage in a circular sweep to show footage from ten cameras that go up in a hot air balloon over the countryside. When I was a child I saw a successful manifestation of this basic principle at, I think, Disneyland.

Ten Underrated Films

Via the Siren, a challenge from one Mr. Middlebrow to name "10 movies you consider overlooked, underrated, offbeat and in general deserving of not being forgotten." That's a broad field to cover--especially as 'overlooked' and 'underrated' don't mean the same things (despite a long and fuzzy shared border). Should I write about a film I chanced upon that very few people may know, or should I use the space to defend some oft-maligned film maudit? Highlight relative classics from cine-realms generally overlooked by the wider film geek scene I consider myself part of? In the interest of breadth, I figured I'd do a little of each. No need to bloviate too much now, I'll let my words for the films do the work. In no order, selected with loose and haphazard criteria:

The Tender Trap (Charles Walters, 1955)
Walters can run hot (Please Don't Eat the Daisies) or cold (Belle of New York) or somewhere in between (Summer Stock) but he's got a distinctive way of approaching material--he's a real artisan of 'Hollywood fluff,' artifice, candy-colors; a true scholar-in-action of the worldview, and the mindset, that underlies the genre of the Hollywood musical. This musical romantic comedy (rated with the faint praise damnation of 6.1 on the IMDB) is my favorite of the generous handful of Walters films I've seen, partly because it veers into mature, subtle dramatic territory about the nature of romantic contentment. In truth I don't remember the film in its details very well (I have a sieve for a memory), but I remember clearly the weird feeling I got from watching it, deeper and deeper I went into the film--as though it were expanding its MGM pop aura ever-wider and in so doing allowed us a glimpse of empty space within: relationships and entanglement. Not the world in a coffee cup--Cassavetes' Faces in a Sinatra vehicle.

Dreamchild (Gavin Millar, 1985)
Maybe I'm just a sucker for films about life & memory, about the reflective moment wherein a person or a community looks back on lost youth, past experiences, old beauty, missed chances, irrevocable changes. It's why Ford and Ozu are probably my two favorite directors. It's why I found Brokeback Mountain so moving (the shirts!) even if I'm still not even sure if I actually liked the film. This slightly odd film is about Lewis Carroll and his relationship to the girl who informed Alice (and her family). It's from a director otherwise unknown to me and was very moving, and suggestively delved into troubling emotional and psychosexual territory. (Another fantastic, underrated film that deals with 'mistaken pedophilia'--John Duigan's Lawn Dogs. Duigan himself is an underrated filmmaker, as Sirens, Flirting, and probably a few more attest.) Jim Henson created some puppets for some fantasy scenes that recreate parts of the Looking Glass text. IMDB rating: a respectable 7.0, but I never hear anybody talking about this film.

Not Long After Leaving Shinegawa (Kawashima Yuzo, 1957)
Like Dreamchild, this film has a fine IMDB rating (8.0), but I don't see it mentioned or hear it discussed recently. Though the crowd I saw it with at MoMA last fall laughed a lot and seemed to enjoy it, it didn't emerge as a "find" from the Japanese films that swamped NYC theaters last fall. Donald Richie devotes maybe 1-2 pages to Kawashima in his most recent edition of Japanese Film. At any rate, I wish I could see this film again, and also see more by this director. It's not a great film: it is, however, wide-ranging, free-wheeling, unpredictable, sharp, pungent, and vivid. Kawashima was one of the filmmakers Shohei Imamura studied under (another was, of course, Ozu), and his influence seems pretty visible from where I stand.

Driven (Renny Harlin, 2001)
This is not a joke! It's like a Hawks movie--not like a Hawks masterpiece, but more like a worthy, minor aftershock of what we would call the Real Thing. (Along the same lines: Hal Needham's 1978 film Hooper, about stunt doubles...) Economical without being sparse, shorthand without being rushed: the trademark of the studio system, and the sad victim of the post-classical production system. Its 1952 analog would be fine if relatively unremarkable ("a good flick for a Sunday afternoon"), but the fact that this kind of film was created under such conditions in Hollywood that practically demand Event Status from a work makes it something more noteworthy. IMDB rating: 4.3.

The Night They Raided Minsky's (William Friedkin, 1968)
I have a theory that Friedkin (not as a flesh-and-blood human, but as an Authorial Construct) started out with a lot of libidinous energy, "void of form," and before long he was shackled (or shackled himself) into a repressive masculinist straitjacket that made for a lot of the filmic equivalent of sex-frustrated handwringing, if you ask me. (It may have also accounted for the propulsive dynamism of his work: sometimes he can be very good, and I could have mentioned his 2003 film The Hunted on this list, too.) I'll have to test this theory out by watching more Friedkins than I've already seen, including (most of all) Cruising. Even so, I'd take this film (modest in scale but bold in tone) over The French Connection in a heartbeat--and I'd even take it over The Exorcist. It's a somewhat complicated story, but it's basically about the arrival and promotion of an Amish girl (Britt Ekland; with large, um, "protuberances") who wants to perform "Dances from the Bible" in the titular 1920s house of burlesque. How chaste these dances are (or are advertised as) is quite open to debate! Minsky's is under pressure from the police, the Amish girl has an angry father chasing her, and there's a fantastic rapport between the great Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom. IMDB rating: 5.5.

Land of Gold (Steve Marts, 1979)
I can barely find any information on this film, which was screened in a documentary class I took with George Stoney. I recall Steve Marts worked in advertising, and made this very lyrical short film about Oregon farmlands as a labor of love (maybe?) (as far as sweeping agricultural vistas of Americana it'd make a nice double bill with Days of Heaven). It's not "avant-garde" exactly, but I felt it had the same sort of feeling for image texture and rhythm. If you ever get a chance, try to watch it again.

Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (Yasuharu Hasebe, 1970)
Sexual and racial baggage make it hard for any of the characters in this violent youth film to "move freely" or exist independently. They're caught in a matrix. Meiko Kaji leads a girl gang against her rival-lover, a gangster who hates foreigners with nationalist fervor (and very personal venom). There's a "half-breed" looking for his sister. What I like about what I've sampled of the pop-genre-youth films from Japan at this time is that they reserved their energy for individual scenes and events, but let their "statements" or "messages" ebb up gently, with nuance. So that you get a high-energy film with subtle (or at least subtle-feeling) social and ethical commentary. IMDB rating: 6.7.

Last of the Comanches (Andre De Toth, 1952)
In postwar classical Hollywood, De Toth is a major figure. Not in terms of power or reputation, but in terms of artistic accomplishment--he deserves to be mentioned with Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Ray, Sirk, Preminger (i.e., that whole broad 'upper tier'). This is one of his best, if not his all-out masterpiece (Day of the Outlaw) or his most famous (probably Ramrod, which I haven't seen--my video copy went kaput before I got a chance to watch it). I've seen it three times and feel that it'd be just as fresh as if I were to watch it tonight. The thing about De Toth is that he could take a perfectly leisurely moment, a peaceful image, and disrupt it more quickly than we realize (as during one conversation cut all too short in this film). He could build up great, multi-levelled tension just by rolling a bottle down a bar (as in Day of the Outlaw). He was an entertainer, a 'plot-driven' guy; he was angry as hell about the political situation that rotted Europe for him and spurred him to flee to the States (if you get a chance, see his incendiary None Shall Escape from 1944); he was a consummate visual stylist whose touches were "fast and furious," but not flashy--they were always in service of a certain vision of ethics & human nature that obsessed De Toth. IMDB rating: 6.2.

These Hands (Florence M'mbugu-Schelling, 1992)
Forty-five minutes for those who like Kiarostami--from the gut. That is, for those who feel an affinity for a certain "simple" presentational ethos that builds fascinating social and aesthetic statements from deliberate pacing and spareness (other practicioners: sometimes Wim Wenders; I suspect José Luis Guerín; though I don't think that Hou, Tsai, or Yang do what I'm trying to pinpoint...). Women refugees from Mozambique work in a rock quarry, breaking up rocks into gravel. They work; they sing; they break to eat; at the end of the day they are done. Very straightforward, but there's a 'springboard' quality to the images and the scenes, they open up discussion instead of just sitting around inert and ambiguous. I've long contemplated writing about this film, and this broad "aesthetic," but I'm still mulling over the best way to express my thoughts. IMDB rating: 7.0, but a mere 5 votes.

The End (Christopher Maclaine, 1953)
I've avoided avant-garde cinema until this final slot because (a) to a depressingly large segment of the "film enthusiast" population it's all worthless, obscure, and hence "underrated"; (b) I don't know a-g scenes throughout history and geography well enough to know a lot of truly "underrated" works; and (c) more and more writing on a-g work will appear on Elusive Lucidity anyway. Still, this filmmaker (and this, his masterpiece) should be more widely discussed. The End is an ineffably weird masterpiece within Maclaine's very small body of work. Fred Camper on Maclaine here. A post I made on a_film_by here. IMDB rating: 8.9 (!) but only 13 votes (!).

James Snead on Kong

On Son of Kong (1933), specifically, which I have not yet seen myself:

"The [titular] ape's services to Denham late in the film compensate for the trachery of a group of whites defined as the "other" earlier in the film--namely, Captain Englehorn's crew, which has mutinied and sent the "bosses ... where all captains belong, over the side" in a single rowboat, with which they eventually reach Skull Island. The contemporary political overtones of this confrontation (when they approach Denham with their grievances, he says "We must be in Russia: here comes a committee of the workers"), unique among the three "Kong" films, might have something to do with a certain sentimental preference in the thirties for what was considered "faithful" black labor, seen as potentially less dangerous than the unruliness of agitated white Northern working classes. It is not impossible that the film is suggesting that if the Northern white entrepreneur of the thirties would only atone for the "harm" of American racial history, he might have a more obedient and loyal labor pool than the white Northern labor force, demanding equality, would provide."

--from Snead, White Screens, Black Images (Routledge: NY & London, 1994), pages 31-32.

Snead tends toward somewhat straightforward, plot-centric, and monolithic readings of the films in his material (maybe more willing to accuse the film of 'incompatibility' than to express such negative capability in his own work), but this itself could very likely be the function of this book's being an unfinished, and posthumously published, work. The flaws, though I do see them as flaws, still comprise one of the things that I like most about this book: that they feel almost like drafts, and we see certain bold interpretations or theoretical formulations before they've been as tempered and nuanced as they likely would have been had Snead lived to finish his book. (He died young, but with prolific publications and a great deal of manuscript material--scholarly and fictional, as the book's two editors and separate foreward writers, Colin MacCabe and Cornel West, attest.) Overall I like the assertions he's working out in his material, trying to achieve a balance in seeing/understanding what popular films reflect and what they project. Some questions remain as raised by the quoted paragraph above. For instance, why consign the 'white working classes' to the North, or otherwise suggest without references that the film might have done as much (despite a strong anti-union [no pun intended] history in the American South, the labor movement did exist there)?

Film & Historical Ruptures

Two possible ways to enact the ending of an historical epoch (if not necessarily the 'end of history'):

1) Allegorize it on the level of metaphor and allusion, and realize it on the level of form;
2) Literalize it through a narrative, and recast it through a 'defamiliarized' (or allegorical) setting.

The former: Derek Jarman's The Last of England ('87), a ferocious, angry "poem" about the Thatcher years that I only barely began to apprehend; the latter: The Matrix, which I watched again last weekend (the Significant Other had never seen it--and I, having not seen its two sequels, will do so shortly). The common ground between both of these very different films is the fact that they want us to contemplate--in some way, shape, or form--the major negative developments, even the death, of Civilization, a death we have passed by but may not even realize. Where Jarman and his collaborators were reacting to cultural & economic strife, and hurling their avant-garde cine-poetry straight out at the world, at the viewers, at the State itself I presume, the Wachowskis were taking a sense of panic (a severe "paranoic fantasy," as Žižek puts it) and folding it up, like origami with the Zeitgeist, into something new and only partly recognizable, suggesting that something was seriously not right with our (the Western, developed, technological) world. In some way we weren't free, and the film literalizes this bondage. As I finally look at the two sequels I'll be interested to see how they work out this issue--as it stands with the first film, we basically have the same premise and "critique" as in Fight Club, except with a different solution.

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And now for a little errand-running on the Internet: everyone who reads this blog should keep an eye on Digital Poetics just in case they don't already (I assume most already do)--I've really been enjoying Nick Rombes' last several substantial posts; furthermore, I find myself frequenting Marxist blogs (like this and this) as well as celebrity gossip sites (one favorite, and another). I wonder who else regularly visits both categories of blogs. Lenin + Lohan = good times. And I finally saw Brokeback Mountain over the weekend, contemplated writing something about it here, and still might, but ...

Two Quick Notes

Others have already noted and praised it, of course, but I would like to add to the chorus of cheers that has followed Tilda Swinton in giving this address at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It is an absolutely indispensible assessment of what the cinema is, can be, can do. It retains some faith in the cinema, but not the sort of faith of Oscar-night self-congratulation. I think a rental of The Last of England is in order.

Gossip Extra ('Don't shoot the messenger' edition): What great and quintessentially 'New York' filmmaker was spotted stumbling around in what appeared to be a state of deep inebriation, singing nonsense out loud, at 2pm in the East Village last Friday? I saw it with my own eyes ...

Dreyer, Fulci, Horror & Film Form

There's an interesting article by Michael Grant on Dreyer's Vampyr and Fulci's The Beyond available here.

On Vampyr (taking off from Bordwell):

This is one way of construing the fact that the narrative order of the film in its totality is not to be trusted. The status of what we are seeing has become undecidable, and as a result the temporal progression of the events we see has also become uncertain. The only order of time that we can trust is the time it takes for the film to be seen [...]. The result, in this case, is a tension. Vampyr exists as a movement by means of which whatever is imaged is abolished; and yet whatever is abolished is sustained, since the being of the thing is taken up into the being of the image. The world of the film is peopled by beings who are at once present and yet somehow shadowy, almost inhuman, monstrous. It is a world in which death may be said to have doubled the impulse to life.

Very much like Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, if you ask me: these are two European art cinema milestones whose narrative veneer can still frustrate those who want to "interpret" these works as though we've seen a window upon events (rather than window upon window upon window).












The gist seems to be: from the materiality of expression (romanticism --> modernism), the contemplation of 'the Real' (among other things, I suppose, that which pre-exists all material expression and cannot be 'named' by it, only evoked). I am temperamentally lukewarm on Lacan and psychoanalysis: I admit I don't know it because I've only read a small amount. So I won't attempt a Lacanian or Žižekian "reading" here of course.

But I can venture this much: one of the fascinating things about Vampyr is not only its aesthetic circularity (that it fundamentally refers back to itself, its own time, its own materials, rather than the projected fiction [the Symbolic?]), but that in so doing, it can pull apart the object of identification (the protagonist) in a really fascinating way. In this essay, Gilberto Perez suggests (after some deliberation): "One way of putting the difference would be to say that we identify ourselves with the young man in Nosferatu, whereas the young man in Vampyr is identified with us." And to a certain extent this is true, but while Allan Grey in Vampyr does "twin" our own consciousness, as Perez puts it, he himself is fractured into three different pieces two-thirds of the way into the film--sleeping on a bench, prowling around as an investigator, and pinned within a coffin. Dreyer essays a really fascinating conception of subjectivity and identification here--early in the film he shows us the frightening rupture of familiarity (when one of the two sisters, a feverish vampire victim, takes a sudden step towards the maniacal in front of her vigilant, horrified sister); at the later point he takes our protagonist Mr. Grey and just breaks him into protagono-trinity. (And people think Psycho was the first great modernist-narrative attack on audience identification with the subject!)

As for The Beyond, I don't remember it very well, but I do recall it featuring at least one gruesome sharp instrument to the eye, and those are always fun ...

Hummingbirds, Etc.

Last Saturday night I made it out to Jennifer MacMillan and Bradley Eros' Millennium Film Workshop program "Aerodynamics of the Hovering Hummingbird: Science, Cinema, and Ways of Seeing." The program--three and a half hours of science and cutting edge moving images!--had its peaks and valleys, content-wise, but was a nicely conceived and ambitious undertaking. I wanted to write some brief comments on what might have been my three favorite films/videos of the evening.

Liquid Crystals, by Jean Painlevé (1976), is what it is--a beautiful work of scientific cinematography by one of the field's foremost practicioners. I'd like to see it again.

Presepe, by Bruce McClure (2004). I'm still not 100% sure what was going on with this screening, but it was essentially a four-projector affair where clear 16mm strips where run through to create a flickering and slowly changing image that looked something like this for 12-14 minutes:














What made this interesting is, partly, the contrast it held to the lushness or the impressiveness of some of the other science/scientific images of the night, which were there to amaze--McClure's piece of 'expanded cinema' didn't impress itself on one's retina by means of extraordinary imagery or colors, or interesting recorded footage. It was all about the moment-to-moment presentation of minute changes of black-and-white, and the concomitant optical experience. The "science" content wasn't recorded, it was being created as we watched it. (Another not-quite-cinema work that did this in the program, Zach Layton's Electroencephalograph Functions (Brainwave Manifestation), did nothing for me, I have to admit.)














Then there was the film by Jmac herself, The Garden Dissolves Into Air. This project (which is "super 8 to 16mm to video") sets stills from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden edited at what feels like a steady, mathematical tempo to a 'soothing' soundtrack. The dissolve transitions from image to image make for a certain dreamlike status (in the program notes Jennifer mentions an affinity for Odilon Redon, "where the marvels of nature become part of the dream world"). There's a segment of flickering motion at the end--in the still shot format, when used judiciously and fleetingly, this can be a momentous technique (as in La Jetée). The colors are gorgeous. But what ultimately resonated for me was the way the video captured something about the transcience of the photographic image as put to rhythm (the rhythm of the cinema), but because it was slowed down and pulled away from chonophotographic sequence--no longer a 24fps illusion but a multi-second, edited-image dissolve rhythm--it evoked something almost primordial about the origins of cinema's powers, and the alternatives to "capturing" (and exhibiting!) nature other than simply recording and playing it at the standard speed.

Brenez and the Cinematic Image

Nicole Brenez, "The Ultimate Journey":

"Theoreticians, like cineastes, base a part of their meditation (written or filmed) on two common premises which [Vachel] Lindsay argued at the edge of cinema theory: the idea that film, because it does not imitate a referent but allows it to come forth from the real, can eventually provide the world; and the corollary that an image is not a plastic phantom but a dynamic principle endowed with the powers that demand to be deployed and reflected. From that spring the three axes of theorisation which seem to me to have been of major significance through this decade: work on the powers of the image, on the figurability of the subject, and on the thinkable relations between the cinematograph and history."

Trying to fully understand Brenez at her most abstract can be a real challenge, and only after years of reading her am I starting to feel comfortable appropriating a few of her ideas for myself. This paragraph I've read several times before, however, about what has moved her during a certain period of contemporary film theory (and its historical precendents), this time seemed like a real gold mine of an 'entry point' for a reader of her work. I'd like to unpack a few of the things she says as I understand them and explain why I find them productive.

TWO COMMON PREMISES

1) 'Film does not imitate a referent but allows it to come forth from the real and can eventually provide the world'
Many people talk about images as though they are fundamentally likenesses. (In his Iconology, this is how WJT Mitchell writes about it...) I would suggest that the image is its own clear 'action,' 'event,' 'happening,' 'being,' 'becoming,' whatever. The referents to which (some) images bear likenesses are "allowed to come forth" from the real by association with the imagistic enunciation, and it is this imaginative-psychic faculty (not simply representational correlation) that allows reality's profound connection to images. (The presentation of an image, perhaps, is not to create a noun but to perform a verb?) Images are the constant reverberant echo of their first moment of enunciation. To me, Brenez's call is one that recognizes that even utter non-likenesses are 'images,' which isn't to say that this is the one true denotation or connotation for the word, but that it is perhaps the most productive. Insofar as I am personally interested in the possibilities and properties of images, Rothko also gives us images. Ornamental tile mosaic: image. A letter or a pictogram: images. Furthermore, this conception might get us into a territory where the photographic possibilities of the cinema are not reproduced as essential properties of the cinema.

2) 'An image is not a plastic phantom but a dynamic principle endowed with powers that demand to be deployed and reflected'
The 'corollary' to the above--that images are not simply representations of the real (a 'plastic phantom' of it painted onto canvas, projected onto screen, printed onto page, digitally presented on a monitor...) but that they are actions ('dynamic principle') that call forth a complex set of individual and social effects in their real, material, historical presence ('powers that demand to be deployed and reflected').

THREE AXES OF THEORIZATION

a) powers of the image: what can an image do (to one or many viewers), what are the limits of what it is able to represent, what can it express, what can it embody and be? What are beauty and/or sublimity in an image? What are the effects, the consequences, of an image?

b) figurability of the subject: how does the subject manifest itself on-screen, in images? What is its philosophical genealogy? How does cinema 'configure' a subject--one who acts (Deleuzian classicism) or watches (Deleuzian modernism), a subject who represents a quality or quest (the conventionalized narrative character), a subject which edxists only in a social totality of individual-fragments (Renoir's Rules of the Game and Godard's Prénom: Carmen, pace Fredric Jameson), a subject without fictions but existent in the space between the plastic-projected film and a seat in the cinema (much avant-garde work; a component of Brechtian or otherwise direct forms of cinematic address: the Straubs, Rouch).

c) relations between the cinematograph and history: what are the material practices which make the cinematograph (as that generic instrument-name for moving image-making) what it is, what it has been? How do specific technologies and/or physical properties inhibit or encourage various practices (e.g., how might portability--thus mobility--affect what and how we film)? How do people see these images (not just 'movies,' but all manner of cinematic or semi-cinematic appearances)? How are people made to see some of these images? What roles do the images have in relating the past (and their own past) to the audiences of a present?

What is the ultimate significance of all this? Well for me, the idea that an image (and an image in time) is not simply a thing but very much an event, an action, opens up a whole new space to think about the films and videos I watch. One of the things I actually agreed with in David Bordwell's recently blog-discussed "Against Insight" article in Cinema-Scope is that there is indeed a severe limitation on the widespread idea that "there is a Zeitgeist, and films reflect it." Films also help produce the Zeitgeist, they act out minute strands of its flow through history, the image of (for example) a civilian war casualty isn't only a window onto real horror, a record, but a propulsion into some visual-informational sphere or another a piece of rhetoric--perhaps sometimes a very complex rhetoric. The same characteristics that can give images great, enjoyable freedoms are what can allow them be employed in a number of devious ways as propaganda, as lies. Images don't just "sit around," as soon as they exist they are pushed into employment in social reality. I'm feeling more and more strongly that to deal with images--and to deal with cinema--means dealing with its uses, effects, and consequences not because these things have "meaning" or that "content" is somehow more important than "form," but because no images exist without some kind of material entrenchment.

What I'm seeking--what I'm still striving to cultivate in myself--is a dynamic and balanced integration of various 'modes' of analysis , so that if I watch a DVD of a film, I can discuss the work as a rich text with an exegetical potential (a treatise), the film's historical place upon its time of release (its social function: an argument), my real-time engagement with the work (experience), and also the fact that I am watching this film on a digital reproduction (which is both argument & experience). Readers who find these issues interesting may want to read a previous entry I wrote on these issues at Argument, Treatise, Experience.

Out 1: Spectre

Unfortunately I can't offer the greatest report of Rivette's shorter and slightly less incredibly-rare version of Out 1, which enjoys three screenings this weekend at Anthology Film Archives. (As I start typing this, at tonight's showing the first of the reels--which run 40-50 minutes apiece according to Dan Sallitt's watch--should be winding down.) First things first: the print, while pretty worn, is hardly a travesty. It's pink, but watchable. What is a travesty is the fact that this film only has a single English-subtitled print known to exist.

I had gotten up a little early on Saturday morning (look at the post time for my 'Notes on Borowczyk'--that's when I started writing), and after a long day in miserable weather, and 9 or 10pm began to feel more like past midnight. Rivette's leisurely improvisational project just didn't get my best viewership, and though I don't know that I'd call the film a masterpiece, I'm quite certain that it's a worthy film whose worthiness I only partly grasped. (One could make a joke at Rivette's expense, maybe call his work boring and my giving it the benefit of a doubt authorial fanboyism, but let it be known that a few weeks ago I actually had to turn off my DVD of Cronenberg's Scanners--a film I like, and one with plenty of base "entertainment" value--with maybe 15 minutes left to go. Because I was similarly exhausted at an early hour. Seasonal allergies can do this to people!)

One of the most interesting things I came away with from the film was triggered by a comment that Dan made between reel changes about how Rivette and Rohmer both make a lot of films about characters trying to figure out some big truth. The major difference as I see it, however, is that Rohmer's characters are searching for what we might simplistically call a 'center,' a stable something that might dictate moral or ethical behavior. Rivette is interested in esoteric knowledge and its presence on the fringes of everyday life: he's both gnostic and skeptic (we might say he's skeptical by virtue first of his fascination with performance & improvisation, and his relative disinterest in "naturalism" or psychology) whereas Rohmer's approach speaks of his much more historically old-fashioned (i.e., conservative) ideas about society & truth. Where we go from there, testing and challenging and unpacking this observation/supposition, well, I'm not sure ... but I thought I'd throw it out there.

Mr. Clayfield, too bad you couldn't have been here to see the film. But we still have Noli me tangere to look forward to ...

Notes on Borowczyk

I have just not been watching very much or writing very much these past few weeks, but as I was going through files on my computer I came across some notes I wrote months back on two films by the late Walerian Borowczyk: La Marge (1976) and Blanche (1971). Here they are, mostly unaltered and unedited from when I wrote them. Beware that there are spoilers for La Marge, though it's not exactly a suspenseful film ...

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The generic erotic film can be transformed through distanciation techniques which foreground the artificiality of moralistic trappings. In La Marge the topos of the Sinful City finds itself abstracted and strained into something new.

In the opening scenes the viewer is given every indication that the protagonist, Sigimond Pons (Joe Dallesandro) is happy with his domestic life: a beautiful young wife and child in a country house. He gives to his wife various declarations of love in a handful of scenes, all appearing genuine enough. But business compels Sigimond to travel to Paris, and once there, he casually enters an affair with a prostitute, Diana (Sylvia Kristel). This unfaithful excursion is handled obliquely, with no character psychology or progression to cushion it, and as such the transition from marital fidelity to urban polyamory, from country to city, comes off as a rupture. This is our first clue that the film is doing something different, and valuable, with respect to the conventions and expectations of the erotic story structure. [ ... some general spoilers begin here and continue throughout the writing on La Marge! ... ] For later in the film, when news arrives of the deaths of both Sigimond's wife and his son, the moment is contemplative rather than mournful, lyrically matter-of-fact rather than tragic.

Thematically the city is a place of sin, lust, infidelity, mystery, commerce, even perversion: a familiar mix. But tonally--and I would argue textually--the city is simply an alternate location, and as such inspires alternate "needs" and "wants" than the country. The arbitrary production of desire that leads Dallesandro towards infidelity is an answer to the question produced by the social environment of the city; equally arbitrary, even nonsensical, the film suggests, is the moralistic punishment via loss of family that results in the story (i.e., the letters from the maid to Sigimond at film's end). In other words, the usual moralistic underpinnings which would 'punish' aren't given by Borowczyk the concomitant moralistic-psychologistic execution. This film tells a story about temptation and punishment, but its way of connecting the causal dots is one big skeptical shrug.

So this film takes the topos of the "sin city" and, through magnification, renders its underlying moralistic mechanism visible, palpable. There are two abrupt "nonsenses" which signify the critical (rather than generic) nature of the film: first Joe's excursion into infidelity, the other is the death of his family (punishment). Psychology, these treatments make no sense. Their generic requirement is pushed out into the open.

These are "nonsenses" because, in the first instance, the film elides clear character psychology (there is no gradual temptation, no rhetoric of the downfall of the country bumpkin); in the second instance, because the off-screen deaths come as a deus ex surprise rather than as a machinated progression. The deaths are treated (by the film's matter-of-factness, and in this way through Dallesandro, too) stoically rather than tragically: pondered rather than mourned.

By affecting this tone to the "sin city" trajectory, the film pulls back from the moralism and clings instead to the emotions instilled in the chain of events. La Marge captures something about the stupid, terrifying, ineffable, unfair, predictable structure of experiential life. This is also why it is so resolutely a physical film, so tied to the materiality of objects, bodies, furniture, rooms (and at least a cursory comparison to Bresson is anything but unwarranted). These are the things that stand out in the face of tragedy: the film is a lyrical reminder of that most obvious proposition of all, the immanence of the material world.

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Blanche is a narrative with a passive female at its center, but the mechanisms which ensure her passivity are precisely what the film examines, and they are stylized so as to deny any semblance of illusion as to their naturalism or necessity.

Every performance in the film is great because of the total lack of self-consciousness on the part of each player, though the actors are asked (or allowed) by Borowczyk to do very different things: the great old Michel Simon to bluster about a bit, to wear his age and indignity heavily on his shoulders; the divine Ligia Branice to reflect the broken glass of the narrative around her in her luminous white face and eyes; the two youths to be relatively stolid like Bressonian models.

An image of Blanche emerging naked from her bath is one of the first in the film, and it's a brief, casual flash that marks Borowczyk's aesthetic: he's very interested in glimpses, periphery, esoterica, transience--all that which gets pushed to the margins and washed over in the continuum of time and space. More on this later.

Boro's sense of space and editing is peculiar and highly individual (I'm not sure where he'd fit in Deleuze's taxonomy). He begins with a number of close-ups and closed-in framings, but ends up cutting (arhythmically?) to 'establishment shots' in which the story gets going. The composition for much of the story is flat, laid out like medieval tapestry. (Perhaps I should go into more detail about differences in space in medieval and renaissance space, and visual cultures in general? Mention Boro's use of period instruments? His love of aura and craftsmanship?) Borowczyk seems to love to cut on camera movement.

Blanche herself is a bit of a cipher, but the film enables us to see how and why this is so. Every attempt she makes to assert herself in some minor way (usually to protect a male whose suspected affections have aroused Simon's jealousy) is generally ignored. The film's stylization shows the utter theatricality of the men's treatment of Blanche, and whether it's dashingly chivalric or hideously patriarchal, it is rooted in the same source, the same drive towards idealization-possession of Blanche/women.

Onto the glimpses, or 'that which gets pushed to the margins of space and time.' Borowczyk is in many ways an Artisan in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Oh, not totally--he's not trying to turn his films into distinct and unique material works which have an aura. But he's trying to smuggle into this Age some of the values and objects which are from the time and place of auras. This is why Borowczyk is (can be) a supremely erotic filmmaker, not only a sensual one--because he understands the charge that can result from something rare, something denied, something swift, something precious; more than recreating a 'passing fancy,' he understands the appeal of one's fancy as it is in the passing. This is why there are so many quick but extravagant, lush, complex, shocking shots in Borowczyk's cinema. By articulating through film language this glimpse of something that cannot be ascertained easily, he is doing two things at once, one of which looks toward the past (because he is trying to capture and have resonate for the viewers something special, momentary, and unique, as objects and moments and people at one time were, and seemed, thus) and the other of which looks toward the future (because he is imagining things at least partly in a pre-capitalist mindset, which is to say a non-capitalist mindset: where something is not a commodity available to one who pays, but an experience that might touch and few and cannot be bought). Borowczyk is trying to remind us of the nature of the material and economic world, its very constructedness, by obliquely referring us to its alternatives, its precursors, and thus signifying its own limits.

I suppose it would be a great defiance of Borowczk's art if for example a "raincoat" viewer were to watch Blanche (or Love Rites, or La Marge ...) on video and pause or rewind during the erotic scenes. The moment is supposed to have passed; the glimpse is supposed to have been special.

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That's all I've got.

Miscellany

First off, I know I haven't been posting much lately (though when I do, it's incredibly long-winded). Spring allergies have just taken the life out of me, and though I've gotten over the worst of it--I think--I still don't have a whole lot of energy. I've felt very passive and vegetative lately--and this is not consonant with my new year's resolutions. I've watched almost no movies thus far in the month of April (though I have seen several episodes of The L Word on DVD ... maybe that will be a blog entry for the future).

I do have a question for my readers: let's say one keeps a blog, and one also publishes a piece of film writing. The sort of film writing that has footnotes. If one uses ideas one has already expressed in a blog entry, is there some protocol for citation? A prefatory note? Something? I'm finding that some things I blogged a while back have actually been useful for things I'm writing now, but I'm not entirely sure how to incorporate them ...

And, honestly, I have a second question for readers: has anyone read Mary Ann Doane's The Emergence of Cinematic Time? Any opinions?

Before the Looming End

I have tried very hard, several times, to write about Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Unfortunately I'm still not able to sculpt the highly emotional content of my relationship to them into something intelligible & usable for other people. I do have a certain amount of notes on these films; I do have material I can use. What I don't yet have is a writer's critical engagement (whether "critical distance" or "critical intimacy," pace some recent Sontag discussion). Consider this a 'coming attraction' for a long piece I will write ... eventually. Hopefully soon.

I will at least offer one pretty basic observation, the gist of which pleases me. At first, Celine is a romantic and perhaps even a mystical believer (she believes in love; she believes in reincarnation) and Jesse is a skeptic, a bit of a pessimist. By the second film, Celine is more world-weary, she comes across as the pragmatist and the agnostic; Jesse has softened into a romantic, himself. These aren't reversals of character: they remain "believable," they are evolutionary, developmental. But why the developments? Over the intervening nine years from their first meeting their daily mundane realities--their very personalities--have been marked by their profound subconscious yearnings into the ideal images each has of the other--which have no doubt manifested themselves in countless tantalizing dreams (cf. Waking Life).

P.S. If one goes here one can read an article on the two films by an esteemed reader of Elusive Lucidity (though that's of course the very least of his descriptors!) ...

Truth & Fiction

An Associated Press article, written by one Allen G. Breed, caught my eye. Read the first lines, which opine that the case "seems to fit the stereotypes so perfectly" (my emphasis). Two black women were paid to strip at a party for Duke's lacrosse team (mostly white), though one, the alleged rape victim, asserts that they thought they'd be dancing for a small group of people and did not expect forty men. The police have stated that medical evidence supports the woman's claim, not to mention broken fingernails, cash, and other belongings being found at the Duke University-owned house where the party and alleged rape took place. At least one eyewitness (the lacrosse team's next door neighbor) attests to at least a certain amount of conflict between the woman and the partiers, though his witness is only of verbal assaults. At any rate, this rape accusation seems quite credible even if a thorough investigation were hypothetically to disprove it. Despite this credibility, this AP article rhetorically dances about in trying to paint an objective picture of "conflict" in race and class in Durham, North Carolina.

The only "evidence" that Mr. Breed puts forth in this "dilemma" is assertions by the lacrosse team and members of the local population who support the team (mostly white, it appears). "It's so easy to see the incident ... in terms of powerlessness and privilege, town and gown, black and white. Many on campus and in the streets of this gritty working-class vertex of the famed Research Triangle are framing it just that way. But not everybody is comfortable with that." Obviously, I don't know what happened this night a few weeks ago, and if the accused are innocent I hope they're absolved. But what bothers me about this specific article (and not, say, three more balanced ones put out by the NYTimes--here, here, and here) is how heavily it stacks the deck against the black woman and the black community, as though they were on trial for being too resentful from their oppressed past, against their more privileged white neighbors--resentful enough, in the case of the accuser, to fabricate accusations. A black woman "sobs with impotent rage" when she reports racial slurs in her neighborhood; some people still refer to the University as "the plantation"--as though they're just unable to "let go" and are consequently oversensitive when white people might go just a tad too far.

Meanwhile, as I said, this article offers zero evidence that would bolster the case of Duke's lacrosse team. Only self-defense and cant from the team itself and those who sympathize with them. Nothing mentioned in their corner that would act as counterweight to the accuser's physical evidence of sexual assault and the evidence of at least some level of conflict at the party that night. The article tries to manufacture a tortured social and moral dilemma out of something that does not appear to be such. Certainly, we should not rush to judgment of the lacrosse players; but this is a journalistic case that goes well beyond the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty.' Allen G. Breed's bedrock assumption here is that it just seems too easy for this accusation to be credible. White privilege enacting sexual violence upon a member of a poor black population? It's just a little played-out, right? Of course--Roots did it better anyway! As though a woman's claim of rape victimhood were not subject to forensic investigation and juridical deliberation so much as narrative-aesthetic evaluation. "There's more than meets the eye," one white Durham local asserts in the article, though this elusive "more" stinks of a canard to me, based on what I've read. If there's more evidence that suggests this allegation really is a very complex one and that the lacrosse players may all be quite innocent, why don't articles actually mention this evidence? We have otherwise only assertions, and for now it seems that the word of privileged white college athletes is still worth at least as much as the word of a black woman and preliminary forensic evidence and eyewitness testimony. Or is it "too easy" to point that out?

Critiquing a fiction for presenting "too easy" a statement is one thing; dismissing or casting dubious aspersions on a real-life allegation because it, too, simply seems "too easy" is a sign of an ethical lapse on a societal scale. Why is it so difficult to believe that in 2006, privileged white male groupthink can still deal a vicious blow to a poor black woman? We can critique fiction, and art, for being "too easy" because we presumably can still maintain some moral clarity in real life. A film or novel that simply narrates an elementary historical injustice and asks us to feel upset about it should be insulting precisely because we already know this, and are already upset by it. And yet: apparently not all of us are so upset. Can I really allow myself the indignance I feel when so many of my fellow whites assume that racism is a thing of the past?

One reads the occasional article about the "CSI effect," whereby prosecutors are finding it more difficult to get convictions because TV-watching jurors want to be swayed by high-tech forensics. The mindset betrayed by this AP article seems to me to be related. We are subordinating material, historical reality to the aesthetic demands of our pop culture. Two relevant references from two of the twentieth century's great figures of literary theory come to mind here. Walter Benjamin, in his most famous essay, wrote that "[Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic." Meanwhile, Roland Barthes wrote (in what might be my favorite essay of his that I've read, "Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature") of accused murderer Gaston Dominici, who was defeated by a Justice that "took the mask of Realist literature"--according to Barthes, prosecutors spoke to give the provincial Dominici a "credible psychology" which "explained" his alleged actions, thus convicting him in what Barthes might have characterized as a dual act of jurisprudence and literary criticism.

If the alleged victim is, for some reason, lying or withholding information, then I hope she's revealed. If the lacrosse players are all basically telling the truth, I hope they make it out of this unscathed. But from where things stand, and from my perspective, some of the media are not giving this black woman a fair shake. Her victimhood or their innocence are the paramount issues; but what interests me further though is the media rhetoric that surrounds this situation and which may or may not correspond to actuality. I hope that further coverage doesn't come off like this AP article. Consider this my gesture of support (however feeble) for both of the black women's rights and their voices.

Finally: a few links - Justice 4 Two Sisters (blog) and Alas, a blog (round-up of links).