Links Abound + World Cup

Suggested reading/surfing material ...

Go here for "A History of Hong Kong Production Logos, Part One: The Early Years."

Photography, television, cinema, culture industry, Seinfeld's funniness, and one of my favorite novels (yes, in translation), Goethe's Elective Affinities (and more) first here, then here (same author, old blog & new blog).

If you haven't seen this ode to George Washington by indie comics guy Brad Neely, you may want to. Not quite work safe, if you work in a particularly stuffy place (or don't have headphones).

Commercial that's making the rounds lately as footage of "Italian soccer practice."

Speaking of the Italian soccer team, I have a queasy feeling that they (who made short work of Ukraine yesterday) will be the ones to dispatch Germany in the semifinal--they will do so with great skill, cynicism, and defensive singlemindedness. Wouldn't it be awful if the final were a match-up between, say, Italy and Brazil (assuming Parreira continues to avoid the beautiful and dominant soccer that characterized their Japanese victory)? Or, worse but less likely, if England were to stumble into the final somehow without really managing a single good 90 minutes for the entire tournament? (And I don't dislike Brazil or England per se--but I've been soured by the way they've played in this World Cup.)

As for the Germany-Argentina game, that was difficult to watch. It wasn't always great soccer, but to me it was a great battle. Though I would have been very disappointed if Germany were knocked out, it was sad to see Argentina go simply because they really were the best team in the tournament. That said, I don't think Germany failed to earn their win on PK's--they resorted to somewhat more conservative tactics against the South Americans, which worked well enough, and even if Argentina are the best side in the Cup, in this game they failed to put one more ball in the back of the net than Germany did, and that was with several severe German defensive lapses.

The games today are difficult for me to predict--Portugal and Brazil have the edge, certainly, but one would think England are bound to have a good game at some point in this Cup (maybe Lampard & Rooney can finally net a few beautiful shots today, against a Portugal team that's missing a few key players?), and Brazil's conservatism could very possibly be trounced once again by a canny French team that showed a bit of that '98 spark when they upset the Spanish a few days ago. If there's a midfielder I like watching at his best even more than Ronaldinho, it's Zidane. I have no favorites today (unlike yesterday, pro-Germany and anti-Italy), I only want the sides who exhibit better soccer to win.

Quote of the Day

"I am aware of and most grateful for the benefits of the age. No matter what complaints we may have, Japan has chosen to follow the West, and there is nothing for us to do but move bravely ahead and leave us old ones behind. But we must be resigned to the fact that as long as our skin is the color it is the loss we have suffered cannot be remedied. I have written all this because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved. I could call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them."

--Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, the final paragraph of In Praise of Shadows (trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker)

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

(Part of a Blog-a-thon which includes--tentative list here--Jen at Invisible Cinema, Michael at The Evening Class, and Girish.)

I don't know entirely what I want to say about this film (Lian Lunson's documentary Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man) or this artist (Cohen), so I'll figure it out as I write. The film intersperses footage of a tribute concert for Cohen with interviews with and some archival material about Cohen himself. U2 (particularly the Edge and Bono) make an appearance, and their presence closes the film, which is to me a blemish on an otherwise tasteful selection of musicians. (At this point, can anyone watch Bono without smirking or sneering? He brings out the cynic in me, that's for sure.) The rest of the talent (which includes Rufus Wainwright, Antony, Nick Cave, Linda Thompson, and many more) does passable-to-excellent covers of Cohen songs. What's fascinating to watch is how much fun most of these people seem to have singing these songs. Some of them dance or contort in ways that made me think that they were performing in front of a mirror at home, "trying on" Leonard Cohen like a suit, taking his words and milking them for full expressive effect. As though his words guided them somewhere altogether new--chords and lyrics (tea and oranges) that seduce them.

Here are some lyrics from one of my favorite Cohen songs (unfortunately left out of the tribute concert):

"And now you look around you,
see her everywhere,
many use her body,
many comb her hair.
In the hollow of the night
when you are cold and numb
you hear her talking freely then,
she's happy that you've come,
she's happy that you've come."

This is the fourth and final verse of "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy," which is a reflection upon a woman, Nancy (apparently someone Cohen knew who committed suicide). These lyrics are an exposition upon a certain haunting memory: the ghost of Nancy is that which invades your perception, showing others "using her body," "combing her hair," a voice which comes to you in the deep hours of the night. There's something both romantic and amicable in the narrator's recollection of Nancy, but it's told in an almost casual way ("Nancy wore green stockings / and she slept with everyone," etc.) so that her specter hovers in the mind of the narrator between significance and insignificance--she's an elusive figure, neither cipher nor center.

What makes this important to me is that, as Cohen insists in I'm Your Man, he's not a nostalgic person. Instead, LC deals with the problems of memory, and the inclusion of the past inside the present, not as a matter of nostalgia but as a condition of daily experience (compare this song to, say, "Bob Dylan's Dream"--a heartbreaking song, but as wistfully sentimental as "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" is stoically-resigned). This is to say, maybe, one doesn't look back in LC's universe so much as he or she is pushed forward by constant, complex, and even irrational presences of the past. Even when the signifiers can be ascribed to Cohen's personal life and history, the relation to the listener (and the potential for the reinterpreter) works because it is a whole self-sufficient system of meaning-making. This is what good songwriters and poets often do, constructing something deeply personal but expressing something that exists outside of persona.

At any rate, this is what I have to offer up in honor of Leonard Cohen--it's not much but there it is. Respond with your favorite LC songs/poems!

Round of 16

Germany! Germany! Two months before this tournament, a quarterfinal match-up between Argentina and the hosts would have had people saying "Auf wiedersehen" to Klinsmann's squad. And that still might happen: Argentina could win this whole thing, and Germany aren't guaranteed to stop them on their way. However, anyone who has watched this Cup knows that the Germans, to our pleasant surprise, are playing some of the most entertaining soccer. (Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger of SoccerNet wrote after the Poland match: "Of all the teams we have seen so far, Germany is also the one that has delivered the most unforgiving high-tempo, route-one football.") I feel my status as a Germany-supporter--over barren years!--has been vindicated by this tournament so far. It'd be a shame to see them stymied by Argentina. Just as it was a shame to see Mexico drop out after challenging Argentina so thoroughly.

I've been all over the place with my predictions, some of them way off (such as Germany continuing to play conservative soccer!) ... but two that I'm happy about predicting correctly are Switzerland topping Group G and Australia advancing to the Round of 16. I will be rooting for an upset in the Italy-Australia game--that's what would make that corner of the Round of 16 interesting, because otherwise we're looking at (probably) a straight-shot to the semis for Italy (as they can top either Ukraine or Switzerland). And Italy have given us, as I see it, the most boring soccer of the tournament, at least among the big teams. So bring it to 'em, Aussies! I'll drink a Foster's for the Socceroos.

Other predictions: England, Netherlands, Ukraine, Brazil, and Spain will advance in their respective matches. Portugal beating the Netherlands is possible, but it wouldn't be an "upset," but if there is going to be one, I'll predict Ghana to stun Brazil. Not likely, but ... . As for eyebrow-raising results, I think we may see Spain trounce France by three goals. A team with a lot of firepower versus a team that has had so much recent trouble scoring in World Cups? The only thing that stands in Spain's way is the fact that it, um, always always always underachieves.

A few words about the dearly departed Team USA: they could have done OK for themselves, but the fact of the matter seems that, while they can play well, they can't play extraordinarily well. In a Group of Death, they're still going to need a lot of luck to get out, and the fact that we faced the aging Czechs in their first and most invigorated match, that we had those two questionable red cards versus Italy, and that Ghana were awarded (in my opinion) a bogus penalty kick does not change the fact that we didn't display the high level of footballing that the Czechs, Italians, and Ghanaians all did in at least one game. Our attack is weak (the opponents' third is like kryptonite to the Americans). Our touch and our pace are nothing enviable. We may have been unlucky in a few big ways, but the fact that we exited at the group stages remains a fair estimation of our abilities & achievements--not just the US men's national team, but as a whole 'soccer culture.' Now to see if Jurgen Klinsmann can step on for Bruce Arena, as rumor has it, and try to repair our US soccer program for a good showing in 2010.

(Leonard Cohen post coming very soon ...)

De Palma Image of the Day *

* (Not necessarily a daily feature.)












A severe diagonal composition here, predicated upon the splash of color and of darkness: a woman's features (a woman whose "guilt" becomes part of the subject-matter and fabric of the film--like Carrie, like Femme Fatale). De Palma's images come to us pristinely but with unsettling formal properties--they are not always balanced, or are balanced all too readily (hence his penchant for split-screens). Something pent up may explode. An image like this one remarks upon the psychic state (as well as its fictive, dramatic energies!) of the woman-figure, the chosen protagonist, an underdog.

Excerpts on Revolution, Authority, Freedom

World Cup rantings & vague Marxist ruminations on cinema--I am sure that lately Elusive Lucidity has been more fun than a barrel of monkeys!! Here are some excerpts that I thought had a nice confluence of 'talking points' ...

From the Preface to "Political Position of Surrealism" (1935):

From Marx to Lenin, this period of gestation which lasted more than half a century [1848-1917] sustained such a great effervescence of ideas, the problem of its outcome gave rise to so many debates, the points of view relating to it clashed with one another on all occasions with such violence, and, finally, the view that was to carry the day did prevail so forcefully that I cannot help but consider the constituion--both through men and events--of scientific socialism as a model school. As a school of an ever more profound understanding of human need which must aim, in all areas and on the largest possible scale, at finding satisfaction, but also as a school of independence where each person must be free to express in any and every circumstance his way of seeing things, and must be ready to justify endlessly the domestication of his spirit.

For years now, however, a great deal of time and effort has gone into telling us that times have changed on five-sixths of the globe (since a catchword prompts us to subtract) the revolutionary has no longer basically to look to himself for the re-creation of the reasons which militate in favor of social transformation, and to try to accelerate, from the point where he now finds himself, this transformation by every possible means. He is invited to leave that up to other men--men who have "made the Revolution" in the U.S.S.R. and who, some day or other, will presumably be called upon to fill a providential role everywhere else. The unbridled exaltation over whatever these men undertake, be it great or small, takes the place of judgment with respect to the possibilities which are theirs. We are witnessing the formation of a taboo, of the deplorable crystallization of what may be the most moving and most protean in the essence of human demands. Can we be asked to toss onto the dunghill this unlimited capacity to say no which is the whole secret of human progress in order to watch and wonder unreservedly at what is going on without us at the other end of the world? No, this contemplative, ecstatic attitude is totally irreconcilable with the revolutionary movement.

=======

From Slavoj Žižek's "Can Lenin Tell Us About Freedom Today?":

This Leninist freedom of choice--not "Life or money!" but "Life or critique!"--combined with Lenin's dismissive attitude towards the "liberal" notion of freedom, accounts for his bad reputation among liberals. Their case largely rests upon their rejection of the standard Marxist-Leninist opposition of "formal" and "actual" freedom: as even Leftist liberals like Claude Lefort emphasize again and again, freedom is in its very notion "formal," so that "actual freedom" equals the lack of freedom. That is to say, with regard to freedom, Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort "Freedom--yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?"--for him, in the above-quoted case of the Mensheviks, their "freedom" to criticize the Bolshevik government effectively amounted to "freedom" to undermine the workers' and peasants' government on behalf of the counterrevolution.

... and, earlier in the essay ...

In contrast to this false radical Leftist's position (who want true democracy for the people, but without the secret police to fight counterrevolution, without their academic privileges being threatened), a Leninist, like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e., of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power and to exert it.

=======

In a prefatory segment to Michael Chanan's Cuban Cinema, there is an interview between Robert Scheer and Francis Ford Coppola from 1975, after the latter's visit to Cuba. One question & answer follow:

Did you ask questions about the problem of artistic freedom?

Yes. No one is permitted to criticize the government, other than through the channels that are provided for them. If you're a worker or if you're a writer, you can do it in your various workers' groups. In a factory they get together a couple of nights a week and discuss problems--how to make things better, what's unfair, and stuff like that. So, in other words, there are channels that allow you not to criticize the idea of the society but to figure out how to make it better. I like the honesty of it. They say no, you cannot criticize the government--that freedom, no, you don't have.

Here in America you can write or say anything you want, and many people in Cuba are very impressed when you tell them this. They are surprised when they see something like Godfather II. They wonder, "How can you make a film that says nice things about our Revolution?" But the truth is, I believe, that the freedoms we have here are possible because they do not even come close to jeopardizing the real interests that govern our country. If there were someone who really came close to jeopardizing those interests, I believe our freedoms would vanish, one way or the other. If there were a man, a political candidate, who was elected to office and began implementing real programs that were counter to the big interests, there would be a coup or a murder or whatever was necessary.

In Cuba they don't even have the illusion of that kind of political freedom. It's as though they're saying, "Our Revolution is too fragile, it has too many enemies, it is too difficult to pull off to allow forces inside or outside to work to counter it." I understand the implications of what I'm saying, the dangers. But I put it to you: if they are right--if their society is truly beautiful and honest and worthwhile--then it is worth protecting, even with this suspension of freedom. In Chile, the newborn, elected society was not protected in this way, and so it was destroyed. Ironically, the government that replaced it is not taking any chances and is controlling the press and opposition in a way that Allende did not."

(...at which point Ruiz fled his homeland and became one of our greatest transnational filmmakers...)

Not Over Yet

Before too long I'll get back to posting about films. (Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven sucks, by the way.) I can't even put out thoughtful game analyses or even larger intellectual musings about the culture of the sport. Only fannish reflection. This World Cup fever has been intense--and it's a really good tournament so far. At the end of the day all I want to do is drink. Sometimes not even eat--I think there were 3-4 days last week when I didn't break 1000 calories.

Italy 1 : 1 USA

Shit! The US still have a chance. They played a physical game, and even though I think the two red cards were harsh, the foul tally was pretty high. I think that our boys need to fine-tune the art of playing tough without playing rough, because yellow cards can hurt you in this tournament. The other thing USA need to do is figure out how to attack in the penalty area--too often they'd get to the Italian box and then just pass it around among their midfield, desperately hoping someone either got a breakaway or a cross. So they'd get up there quite often, but not go for that final slog. They need more team confidence in the attack! (Especially lacking players with long shots like Lampard's or Gerrard's, though Mastroeni's one effort yesterday was good.) Overall they played well against Italy, they showed that fighting spirit that makes them fun to watch even when they're not the most skilled team. Italy were disappointing, they were definitely the weaker side in the first half (though they capitalized on US defensive flaws very well with the one goal they scored), and it's to the US' credit and their demerit that they couldn't score a go-ahead goal in the second half.

Ghana 2 : 0 Czech Republic

Wow! Even more so than the US/Italy game, we see a completely reversal, and Ghana dominate the Czechs almost as much as the Czechs dominated the United States. Group C may be the real Group of Death, but by this second go-round Group E (the Group of Injury?) shows at least that all four teams want it (whereas Group C showed only three contenders: Serbia & Montenegro didn't seem to show up).

Ghana will be a dangerous match for the United States, but a doable one--what throws the US off so much is, I think, that daunting European tactical professionalism. Sometimes they can prepare themselves well against it (as with Italy yesterday), and sometimes they just crumble horribly (as against the Czech Republic). Ghana won't present that exact challenge, and so the US will have to play athlete-to-athlete, speed-for-speed, shot-for-shot. It should be an intense match. Either team could win it.

The one bad thing about the US and Ghana doing well is that if the Czechs actually exit in the first round, it'll be a big loss for the tournament overall.

Portugal v. Iran was a little bit boring. Cristiano Ronaldo bugs the hell out of me; we get it, you can move your legs around the ball really well. In these last two games, at least, has his fancy dribbling (as opposed to, say, his speed) actually made him at all dangerous!? As for today's games--the Brazil-Australia one should be excellent, hopefully the Socceroos can not only put up a good effort but also lull Perreira's squad out of lethargy. Croatia should trounce Japan. I have a weird feeling that Korea might upset France. They've got team organization whereas France don't give any indication of having found their form or their synergy.

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.