Swimming

An interesting moment in Robert Breer's ostensibly atypical Pat's Birthday (1962), which follows Claes Oldenburg and friends as they celebrate Pat's birthday ... we see an idyllic scene at a swimming hole, a waterfall, friends & children, a relaxed time. And I think I realized something about the rhetorical functions, in American film at least, of the 'swimming hole' and the 'swimming pool.' The hole can be a private place (as it is for Reese Witherspoon in The Man in the Moon) or a group one (Pat's Birthday), but it seems to serve many of the same functions regardless--it's peaceful, restful, primordial, upfront, it's where we "get away" from life's harassments.

The pool, on the other hand, is just another source of life's harassments, its inanities (even when, as Herman Blume and Benjamin Braddock try to do in Rushmore and The Graduate, respectively, one wants to use it to escape). The pool, when private, is a conspicuous sign of prestige--the great Jason Robards, as Al Capone, shows up on his Miami vacation in his swimming pool in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (Roger Corman, 1969). When public, the pool is a veritable factory of hijinks, impersonality, manufactured emotion--above all, performance. Robards' Capone, in fact, has reporters over to his poolside as he gives a very 'performative' interview! (And, also, in contrast, in Pat's Birthday Breer has several shots of a public swimming pool--in long shot, impersonal, wearing none of the lyrical beauty of the swimming hole scene.) One can think of the great sequence in The Cameraman where Buster Keaton struggles to clothe himself properly and then, once in the pool, to keep his date--or one may also recall the plucky kids in The Sandlot (maybe only a movie people my age and younger know at all!?) among whom one, bearing a crush on a blonde lifeguard, schemes to get a CPR kiss by faking his own drowning, since the pool is apparently no place for honest admissions ...

Reese Witherspoon's swimming hole is frank, earnest. The swimming hole is where one can be naked, where a glimpse (or more) of bare skin asserts some innocence and straightforwardness of its own. (Maybe it takes us back to The Garden.) If it's natural water, flowing water, if it's surrounded by trees, one "goes back," or represents a "going back," like Jodie Foster's semi-civilized Nell, or one's secrets are revealed, as with the young man and young woman in Dragonslayer (Matthew Robbins, '81). Images from the opening of Sternberg's Blonde Venus flash through my head, too--but I can't bring back the narrative context!

The swimming pool sees nakedness only when it's "naughty," that is, one does not emphasize anything natural about it--it's a performative opportunity, as the notoriously showy pool fucking in Showgirls (not to mention John McNaughton's Wild Things, 1998) demonstrates. Or if there's no performance per se, there's another kind of 'imaginary' at work here--like the famous Phoebe Cates fantasy sequence in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

And just to make myself clear: I'm not trying to celebrate the 'swimming hole' and damn the 'swimming pool'--I'm just trying to clarify the connotative spaces these two settings tend to make for themselves. (And the "tend" is important--I make no claims to clear, cut-and-dried divisions here!) It's the same cultural, rooted ordering system which presumably assigns "honesty" to the hole and "performance" to the pool, if I'm even correct to propose these assignments. Perhaps I'll get comments from unconvinced readers with a laundry list of exceptions to disprove my 'rule.' Which would be OK, as at least it would mean I won't go on enamored of my own crackpot idea.

All of this ignores the figure of 'the ocean,' which is something else altogether, but that's OK because it's clear that this is anything but a rigorous stream of thoghts ...

The Film Journal

FYI ... issue 13 of Rick Curnette's Film Journal is up at long last, with the symposium on Hollywood director Richard Fleischer, to which I contributed the essay, "Follow Him Quietly: Richard Fleischer and the Consideration of Metteurs-en-scène." As I post this I've only read one other piece in the symposium, Robert Keser's long and excellent article on Mandingo, which very productively cultivates some quite similar territory to what I went into in my own brief discussion of that film. Good job putting this together, Rick & Peter ...

Coffin Joe

Some tour-de-force filmmaking, deeply attuned to, and stimulating for, the senses, comes from a shoestring budget and the imagination of filmmaker and actor José Mojica Marins, whose onscreen altar ego Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) terrorizes, torments, or haunts the "inferior" men and women with whom he shares the screen. Playing a crude Nietzschean Übermensch with some local color, Mojica's great feat here is that his altar ego seems to be both supernatural and (uh) human, all too human. But what makes the Coffin Joe films interesting is not primarily what they depict (which is interesting) but how they present it: Mojica's technique is a grab-bag of effects but all judiciously used, a good taste for severe and vulgar tricks, if you will.

À Meia-Noite Levarei Su Alma / At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1963) ... Zé looks for a bride who will provide him with the perfect son. He won't stop at maiming or murdering anyone to achieve his goal. This is, to me, the simplest and most basic of the four here, but it's taut and provocative. Probably also the funniest one mentioned here--Zé wants to eat meat on Holy Friday, and when his shocked wife says he might run into the Devil, he replies, "If I see the Devil, I'll invite him to dinner."

Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver / This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1967) ... Coffin Joe continues his quest from At Midnight... and in true sequel fashion, it's "bigger and better," as well as more diffuse, looser. There's a fantastic vision of Hell--the more one would try to describe it on paper, the more ridiculous it would seem, and it is ridiculous, but it's such a fascinating, visionary collision of Id and Ego, as so much of Mojica seems to be ...

O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixão / The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968) ... The first one that I saw, and I was taken quite by surprise. Three segments. A powerful episode in which some thugs try to violate a dollmaker's four beautiful daughters, a silent episode of love and obsession, and a final episode in which a professor tries to show the limits of love and reason to a horrified husband and wife. If you're not convinced of Mojica's artistry by the end of the first episode, with its distinctive and powerful design, then you probably will never be a convert.

O Exorcismo Negro / The Blood Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974) ... This is probably my favorite of the four I've seen, though Filipe commented here not too long ago that its reputation in Brazil is not so favorable. 'Self-reflexive' is just the tip of the iceberg (take that Charlie Kaufman!), as Mojica plays himself, beginning the film with a press conference where he discusses his plans to make his next Coffin Joe movie. He'll work on it as he vacations at a friend's home in the country. So when he goes to his friend's country home, what happens but something quite unusual regarding 'fiction' and 'reality.' (Y'know, I've never seen Wes Craven's New Nightmare but I feel like I should now...)

This is, of course, not even attempting to get into the specifics of Mojica's barebones but sometimes brilliant mis-en-scène which would require repeat viewings and more careful attention on my part. This is just a new fan's reaction, and nothing more. But I'll add my voice to the chorus that praises this filmmaker!

I must see soon Finis Hominis / The End of Man (the NYPL's video is damaged!) and Awakening of the Beast. Brazilian friends and video cultists: I know Mojica did many more films than this, so what else is around and how can I see it? And is this box set worth getting? If you don't yet know Coffin Joe, happy viewing ...

Sátántangó (2)

Now that I've had the opportunity to let my experience of the film ferment, I want to actually discuss it--and, here, not so much the issues around it. And in this respect I'm once again in accordance with the blogger Waggish, who writes some insightful paragraphs on the film. And to take a cue from him, I want to say a few things about Tarr's tracking shots and the way they compare with (to choose one) Antonioni.

For me a long track across an open space (in which people, objects, and landscape are integrated equally) feels, in Tarr, like a sigh, an exhalation--the sliding down into gravity's pull, as though the camera itself were a felled animal assaying its surroundings at length. Quite unlike Antonioni, whose shots--to me--seem to always scrutinize, they produce tight lines of vision, and in that I suspect he's quite comparable to De Palma & Coppola, to evoke discussion of these three made here back in October. I'm only anthropomorphizing Tarr's camera because this is what it feels like, and the vibe of its particular "personality" that I get is that it's passive, weary (and wary). It's also a camera very attuned to the liveliness of the images it captures, perhaps because it imparts little liveliness or tautness of its own.

The weight of these images is crucial but what's also important is that Tarr is not simply a "visualist"--I believe he considers Krasznahorkai very much a collaborator on this project, as a whole, and while I've never read any Krasznahorkai and can't say much for certain about what he brings to the project authorially, this is very much a film with 'novelistic' meaning and importance. Jonathan Rosenbaum has once or twice written about Tarr as Faulknerian, even, which not only describes the film's very dry comedy, but brings up the issue of its narrative organization. The dozen episodes are given immense weight through time, insisting upon its very deliberate pacing, a very "cinematic" thing, but they are structured like a 20th century novel, including (yes) a Faulkner one--and also I'm sure a Krasznahorkai one too, if I knew what one was like--wherein actions are repeated and obscured/clarified on the basis of whose subjectivity we are following. This isn't a matter of Rashomon-istic philosophizing, but a technique to better describe a large construction of reality (the film's reality) by way of more intimate brushstrokes.

And, in the end, there are moments like those of the fog, which I mentioned before, impossible to adequately describe, which remind me a little of Herzog and Tarkovsky, but all three have ways very much their own of handling the camera's capture of 'phenomena' (be it winds blowing the sand in Nosferatu or the disappearance of condensation on a table in Mirror). Tarr's concern, I think, is with the immanence of moments that will occasion burst through the ordinary. Philosophically, he's a skeptic, maybe atheist too (I don't know), and so he doesn't treat his phenomena like phenomena--he treats them like things that happen which other people treat as phenomena. (Does this make any sense? I can't figure out now how to phrase myself more clearly.) So by the 400th minute of Sátántangó, if not before, the viewer is likely defeated because the images offer us only transcendence at one remove: it's tantalizing, but we come to feel through the film's sheer scale and pace, and the character of its camera-eye, the crushing acquiescence that the collectivist characters undergo all this while ...

Circumnavigating the Cinema

Let's imagine film culture as a vast global terrain, and video technology, the Internet, and all the gratifications of commerce are the methods for mapping out and travelling on this terrain in this day and age. It's easy to get from place to place, and heretofore "remote" areas are becoming more accessible. Now we can throw around buzzwords, "rhizomatic" and all that, but for all the benefits of a smooth space for cinephiles, buffs, Net-surfing compulsive spenders, etc., to inhabit, it is necessary to point out that these benefits exist as part of a trade-off, and are not solely gains. There is always a price to be paid. This trade-off includes video, and the technological-aesthetic complications that arise, but furthermore it concerns questions of access. Once you level the playing field, so that access for "cinematic experience" is limited only by one's amount of disposable income (and leisure time), you negate & erase history, in fact you relegate history itself to the past--"this film, now restored and available on a pristine DVD, was once almost lost." And once the market makes it clear that 'everything is available' with a few clicks and a credit card transaction, if not with cash at your local videostore, anything that is not available doesn't exist. (Until ... the market makes it (re)exist by making it available!) This is a problem that has plagued film culture before video technology, but which is potentially more dangerous now because it is cloaked by the "ultimate freedom" of the digital marketplace.

It's not that things were once good, and are now bad. Things are changing. As Gabe put it, he can't decide if he wants to live in world before or after DVD's arrival. The question is how viable resistance to this latter-day strand of commercial hegemony will now be. Because true cinephilia, as I see it, is one not of consumption but devotion, not of hedonism but real world and cine-world engagement. And it's what ensures that film culture remains lively, that it changes and that we who follow it change with it, that we're never bereft of ways of connecting to other people and other cultures ... through films and through those who also watch them. Sátántangó, an unusual case, is important because those who have seen it, those who love it, and those who want desperately to see it are conjoined in a dialogue with each other--if this resolute, deliberate film (a film unlike just any other) is simply transferred to discs so that anyone can see it at any time and in any (video) way they wish, then Tarr's film becomes culturally irrelevant as an event, it's simply a marathon in Eastern European miserabilism. Of course this is how it is existing only in 35mm, as well--but I'd say, even apart from Tarr's celluloid intentions, film screenings ensure that the event trumps the novelty, whereas video availability reverses this. And all this happens basically in replacement, not in addition to, the small but greatly dispersed base of admirers whose dedication to the cinema, and to this single particular work of cinema, is a sign of connection and perhaps even fellowship.

More people will see Sátántangó if it's on DVD of course, but (a) I don't buy the truism that all art everywhere is best seen by more, more, more people--we need our local specificities, our hidden masterpieces, our holy grails, our challenges, our Mount Everests!; and (b) the trade-offs involved in this specific case with Sátántangó weigh too heavily against it as a work of art. Certain films, for reasons of form or scale, or maybe also reputation, are best not made so readily available for our television screens. Tarr's film is a work that requires an investment of time, patience, and energy from its viewers--it should be large, uninterrupted. And while one could feasibly reproduce these circumstances in a superb home theater, most people won't be seeing the film this way on DVD, and I fear that "to have seen Sátántangó" will lose a lot of its meaning.

Perhaps, perhaps "to have seen Sátántangó" in the sense I'm describing connotes a certain sense of elite club mentality (not the same thing as elitism!), but at least it's upfront about such. I mean, what does someone who sees the film with bathroom breaks, phone calls, and snack runs at their discretion (and perhaps a discontinuous viewing time) mean to accomplish? "Yeah, I sat through Sátántangó as well"--so one can say they've seen it and arrogate for him- or herself that much cultural capital, but perhaps without having put in the same investment for those of us who counted our days-months-years to see the film and then numbed our asses and dried out our eyes watching it as it was meant to be seen.

I am certain that there is a cinephile in, say, Arizona who longs to see this film, who lacks the money to travel far just to see it (trust me, I can relate on this point). And, in the end, when Sátántangó becomes available to all on DVD, I certainly can't blame this devoted person for seeing it on that format. I'm sure this hypothetical cinephile will be more appreciative of this compromised experience than, for instance, the quartet behind me at the screening who tittered at this film that "moves too slow." I won't begrudge such to anyone who cares this much, especially not when I occasionally take my own liberties with rare cinema (mpegs of c. 1970 Godard films!?). Still I--even as lucky as I am to live in New York--know what it is like to pay my dues, bide my time, await chances to see films for years (I have no idea when I will again be able to see my very favorite film, Une histoire de vent), and for me, not only is waiting for some films worth it, but it constitutes part of what being a cinephile (i.e., the audience that will likely want to see and most appreciate Sátántangó) is about. And a DVD of Sátántangó will render smooth and bland the complicated, fascinating terrain that surrounds the film, that helps make it singular, that helps make it important. This is a film, like some others, not meant to be seen under the basic commercial cinema-video lines of exhibition & distribution. It is meant to circumvent these formulae to communicate what it wants to communicate, and it is the type of film worth fighting for to keep "special."

That I want the film to be one of the "special" ones does not mean that I want to be unavailable or scarce--in my own film-healthy city I'd love to see a few screenings organized each year or two!--but I think it should be an event that only comes very occasionally, which requires the viewer to succumb to its terms rather than the other way around. When it comes out on DVD, I personally can't think of seeing it in this form.

Sátántangó

Maybe it's only because I finally saw it this time around, or maybe because it got a positive write-up in The New York Times. But Béla Tarr's amazing Sátántangó seems like a real cultural event here in New York City this weekend, where it enjoys a handful of showings at MoMA. (I think the film has had tiny "runs" in NYC rep theaters twice since I've lived in the city, but this may be the most extensive Sátántangó exposure the Big Apple has had since 1996.) The theater where my friend (it's his favorite film and his third viewing) and I saw it was pretty full, even if both intermissions saw a healthy flow of people never to return, and even if the 'cat sequence' (one of the hardest things I have ever watched) propelled a lot more people back out into the real world.

This blog entry on the film is a fantastic read, by the way, and one of the things it "sets straight" in my book is that Tarr is actually not very much like Tarkovsky: he's about (to paraphrase Waggish) an overdose of the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. The moments of 'spiritual resonance' that punctuate Tarkovsky, and which at his best take him into fascinating, singular wavelengths, don't exist in Tarr, who is inclined to undercut such transcendence, as when a character stops dead in his tracks, falls to his knees, and after watching him frontally, the camera cuts to a view of him (and his two standing companions) watching fog disperse before a ruined church. When he stands back up and the trio continue walking, one of them says, "What, you've never seen fog before?"

Sorry that analysis and reflection have been skimpy for these last two blog posts, but I have needed to get off my chest a little of the exhilirating weight of these heady, heavy, transformative, and long-awaited encounters. I won't be able to really say a thing about either The Text of Light or Sátántangó until many more days of weeks of pondering. When one of Claire Denis' most "perplexing" or "difficult" films, reputation-wise, is easily the cheeriest and smoothest thing you've seen in over ten hours of film-viewing in two days, you know it's time to shake things up and watch a yakuza movie. Which is what I plan on doing this weekend ...

The Text of Light

Cinema has given us the world in a coffee cup (Godard) and an ashtray (Brakhage). Whereas Godard is content to let his image stand by itself, a metaphorical concept-image within a progression of camera recordings, Brakhage tries to pull as many images as he can out of a single object and its refraction of light.

The Text of Light is a very sheer film. It came off to me as a bit intimidating, and while Brakhage's films usually seem like a shared vision, this was imperious, magisterial--it would have existed without me, that's for sure. It's almost austere, but that word doesn't sound exactly right, or totally right, because the film has some breathtaking beauty to it. (Maybe "sublime" is a better choice.) It's a film I'll have to work a long time to understand: so my problem is it is not that it lacks a surfeit of beauty, of awesome imagery (it has all that), but that I'm unable to unlock the mystery of its organization, I can't see how it achieves its effects. This is a film which defeats me, as I'm defeated also by Sharits' Epileptic Seizure Comparison as well as (in a gentler if no less bewildering way) Cassavetes' films. These are films that remind you that being a cinephile always involves, also, being a student.

In the end, though, the challenge was nourishing, especially after the surprising, dull disappointment of L'Intrus when I saw it earlier today--the first Claire Denis film I haven't liked. That one, too, may require at least one more viewing for me to clarify my feelings properly, and maybe appreciate the film more. I'll end with a funny quip from a few moments before Text of Light started:

Me (impressed by the unusually high attendence at Anthology): "Wow, some turnout for Brakhage, huh?"
Steve Erickson: "I think he's the new Tarkovsky."

Showgirls Blog Party

Dear Elizabeth Berkley,

So here you are at this metal pole. You lick the pole because it is "hot" for you to do so. You're to be "hot" because you were once Jesse Spano on Saved by the Bell. For the money they paid you, your role was not simply to be a stripper in a movie story, but something larger than that, something that expands outside of the diegesis and outside of the film itself, into the larger celebrity sphere. You were to be--not just play, but be--a "girl gone wild." That bearded man in the background of the film still I've linked to (sorry for only linking but Blogger's photo function is being melodramatic with me): he's as much a part of your role as you are, because your role necessitated from the first a spectator. Maybe, preferably, a "dirty old man." Maybe someone whose children watched Saved by the Bell (because, after all, your fan base on that show was not yet old enough to legally see Showgirls in American theaters).

Did you know that you sold yourself and not your acting talents, not even your good looks? You were a sacrificial lamb in this multimillion dollar T&A flare-up. You have unfairly shouldered the blame for this "travesty." Paul Verhoeven, Gina Gershon, Kyle McLachlan? They've all done fine post 1995--popular discourse may consider Showgirls a blemish on their careers, but it's just a blemish, not a cancerous tumor. (Of course, Joe Eszterhas achieved notoriety precisely because he wrote cancerous, scandalous material. So take that for what it's worth.) What people who laugh at the naked Jesse Spano fail to realize is that it was never your fault, at all, and that had they gotten any comparable starlet to play Nomi Malone, should would have been burnt by the flare-up, as well. It's a pity that you've been left on the curbside, referenced only by your humble rise on television and your ignominious fall on film. (I see you've since been in at least two moderately praised films I've managed not to see: Rodger Dodger and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.) I sincerely long for a bigger Berkley resurrection--just to see where it goes!

What was so shameful about Showgirls was that only it made transparent the stupidity behind the star success story, the girl-making-good, the triumph "despite" the machinations of a greedy system. Eric Henderson has already stated it perfectly: the film made viewers feel bad not about wanting T&A, but about wanting the conventional dramatic payoff. (At least pure sexual desire is honest and upfront, like "dancing at The Cheetah," while the cultural pedastal Showgirls topples is embodied in the Stardust's Goddess.) And as Christoph Huber has pointed out, director Paul Verhoeven "somehow represents the only Hollywood filmmaker who constantly exposes the cynicism inherent in blockbusters."

When you, Elizabeth Berkley, throw down your french fries in dismay early in Showgirls, you're acting in a completely unbelievable way. But when this film provides the viewer with such palpable unbelievability so early in the film (and this isn't the first instance of it in the film, either), and when the film's director has consistently given us variations on this register for years in either direction of 1995, well, you'd think that people would understand a little something about what Showgirls is and is not trying to be. You'd think so, anyway ...

Something Showgirls actually does try to get across is a sense of a system, a corrupt and crushing system, which immediately makes this "unrealistic" film more honest about our world than a great many "realistic" films. There is no evil little man pulling the strings that keep our plucky Nomi Malone and her friends down: no villains, really, only villainous behavior. On the flipside, no saints: only the occasional saintly act, and often depressingly limited, as Nomi's climactic "victory" over a lion-maned Vegas singer demonstrates.

One final recurrent aspect to consider as an example in favor of the film's complexity--every time that Nomi and Cristal (Gershon) trade a line or a sentiment about Nomi's nails, the meaning is never singular and clear, but instead carries with it layers of positive/negative, constructive/destructive, sincere/scheming emotions. That's sharp filmmaking, filmmaking in tune with the gut as well as the head, and a far better criterion on which to judge a film like Showgirls than whether or not you, Ms. Berkley, were believable in your sex scenes.

In 1995, my sentiments would have had no effect, they'd be viewed as only contrarianism. Now, in 2006, we have a network of fans who will sing praises for you and for this film. No longer contrarianism, we're quickly making inroads through reconsideration, and with luck will soon pass into revisionism. And why not, with Jacques Rivette on our side!?

Sincerely,

--Zach

British Sounds / See You at Mao

Sound? Awful. Image? It was a Windows Media file (or something close). But I'm still glad I saw a shadow of the film. Godard no longer seems to put much stock in his Dziga Vertov-era work & ideology, and seeing British Sounds one can sort of see why: there's a lot of fascinating work, some good questions being asked, some intriguing formal & imagistic propositions, but a large amount of it seems rote, thoughtless. (Though I love Godard, I don't think he's untouchable, and one of my dirty cinephile secrets is that I don't think Breathless is actually that impressive a film--at least as far as features go, I don't think he hit his stride until either A Woman Is a Woman or Le Petit soldat, whichever you consider "first," since the latter was filmed earlier but released later. And no need to press me on Breathless: I'm more than willing to revisit the film multiple times in my life, and hope to one day love it. I'm just expressing my raw, unsophisticated, untempered personal reaction to the film.) At any rate, British Sounds organizes its anti-capitalist screed through four segments, which, if you haven't seen the film are: the Vertov-era Godardian tracking shot (of an auto factory), a naked woman walking around her apartment, a 'television announcer' spewing reactionary rhetoric intercut with dialoguing working class folks, and some young activists doing hippie things. The segments are generally narrated, sometimes doubly or even triply narrated, so that if you're watching the film in the same non-ideal circumstances I was, you admittedly miss a lot of information. Some of the segments are tough going--the hippies especially, perhaps for no more defensible reason than that it buys into a notion I don't agree with, aligning the force of its sympathies so strongly with rock-and-dope youth counterculture. (I'm no expert but I've always felt like Pasolini probably characterized May '68 correctly, and I don't think the well-educated Marxist children of the bourgeois class--a category of which I'd say I'm part--are exactly the guiding light of revolutionary struggle!) The scene I like the most is probably the first one, where, as in Tout va bien, the distant tracking shot can help parse some serenity and (more) some sense of enlightenment from amidst a complicated political sound-image morass. You see the workers, you see the car parts, the reds and the grays, you hear the Marx & Engels and the cranking machinery, and instead of culminating in overload, one feels (or, anyways, I felt) strongly attached to the wavelength of the film, its hatred for the wage system, its unimpressed tracking-shot perusal of the system in action. I'm looking forward to watching some more from this era, so long a minor grail of mine.

Anyway, those are some very preliminary thoughts on British Sounds.

P.S. One of my dreams is to own a cat--the personality would have to be right, of course--whom I could name Mao. His or her nickname would be "The Chairman."

Occupied & Liberated

Some recent film viewing on 'occupation' and 'liberation' in some sense or another. Eddie Romero's Filipino-American low-budget action film The Ravagers (1965) is a run-of-the-mill work, but has a little interest. The romantic content, such as it is, comes between a white American woman (Bronwyn Fitzsimmons) and a Filipino man (Fernando Poe, Jr.), instead of with John Saxon as I personally would have been led to believe. So I am curious the extent to which Filipino films (although Romero was always insistent on his films being American productions, wasn't he?) would depict these sorts of interracial attractions (in The Ravagers it's all very tame, and nothing conclusive is shown). Was it a mark of progressive thinking to cross racial/ethnic/national boundaries? A mark of wishful thinking on the part of Filipinos towards a dominant American culture? (The Americans are the good guys here, of course: it's a WWII narrative with Japanese soldiers occupying a convent.) Maybe it was simply par for the course? Or maybe something entirely different?

There's a shot near the end of the film when three Filipino/American soldiers (among them Poe and Saxon) stand on a beach, and they're framed so that Poe is in the background, but he's also in the middle of the frame, and I realized that there was a simultaneous focus in the shot, with Saxon's commanding figure holding forth a certain sense of authority on the left edge of the frame, while Poe's body is the balance point, and the locus for the subtextual romance. I don't want to get too "postcolonial lit crit" on everyone, but for a single shot, there's a two-pronged meaning that's sociopolitically fascinating. We've got an iteration of white American 'big brotherism' as well as a certain gesture towards Third World autonomy (i.e., "they" get "their own" protagonist, uncastrated, civilized, appealing). The final shot of the film is an eerily ambiguous one wherein the sillhouettes of Poe and Fitzsimmons stand on the beach, several yards between them, staring at each other. There's a big question mark as to what their attraction means, and as to what it might mean. It was worth watching this whole mediocre (yet not bad) film for these final fascinating moments.

A different kind of occupation than that of Japanese imperialists and American liberators is the one that factory workers practice in the "narrative" of Godard & Gorin's amazing Tout va bien (1972). After having toiled outside the realm of Dziga Vertov agitation (oh, these films that I will finally see, albeit in diluted forms--more on that soon!), Godard had his "comeback" of sorts, although of course it didn't work well with audiences. What I like so very much about this film is how directly Godard & Gorin tackle the question of living politically, as I guess I'd phrase it. What does one do in the event of a strike but watch, try to learn some things? Having been personally, if not seriously, affected by two strikes recently (the NYU graduate teaching strike and the New York transit workers' strike) I've seen how vilely management and the media can attack workers--"selfish thugs" is a label somehow fairly attached to a worker putting his or her ass on the line, but never bandied about against the likes of Metro Transit Authority's upper echelons! So in Tout va bien, Yves Montand and Jane Fonda simply sit and watch and talk a little bit about what's going on around them--the bickering workers and their grievances, the caricature of a manager, the pettiness in gargantuan struggles (and vice versa). J. Hoberman's Criterion essay says that it's about celebrity, and the politicization of celebrity, but I think it's more about the transformation of consciousness from formlessness to political purpose, which is why Godard and Gorin make a point, in the end, of stressing that films show problems being solved one at a time, but in reality, there are a lot of struggles--major and minor, sexual, domestic, careerist--that one must negotiate in order to make any progress. I guess there's a pretty simple moral lesson towards which Tout va bien culimates, but it's at least a lesson about possibilities, sustainable and practical growth, which I find both comforting and motivating.

The fact that I'm not bemoaning this film's "datedness" or its tired communist ethos suggests, however, that I'm really out of lockstep, and out on a limb. Still, these are where my sympathies reside, and what can I really do about it ... ?

If readers may not want to get behind me on Tout va bien, let me push another slightly obscure leftist classic (unless of course you're really into leftist classics, in which case it's not obscure!), Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's It Happened Here (1966). This superb film is a fiction, shot in a highly 'documentary' key, which shows a Britain overtaken by the Nazis in World War II, and largely "laying down" in order to keep law and order. (Though more low-key, I think it's even better than Renoir's This Land Is Mine, and Brownlow & Mollo have the luxury of hindsight, which gives the film a meditative intellectual resonance we can't expect Renoir's firestorm to have had.) One character in the film, with "partisan" sympathies, gives a great little speech to the effect of, 'The awful thing about fascism is that you must be a little fascist to fight it. There's a little bit in all of us, and it's easy to bring out. It must be guarded against vigilantly, it's a disease of the mind.' Brownlow & Mollo--who are truly excellent filmmakers, this and Winstanley cement their names in British cinema history--make some of the most effective political cinema I know. Their images are spare, the photography as clean as the budget will allow (and the attention to "period details" in the production design appears meticulous); the acting is enviably "artless." The editing tends to produce a rhythm, a serene forward march which Brownlow & Mollo, as storytellers, match stride for stride with the movements of the characters. (The protagonist, a nurse, goes through a gray area, in sympathy, between Nazis and partisans.)

What's so sad--and I really was deeply moved by this film which engages in no histrionics, no pathos--is how matter-of-factly it depicts everything, so that we understand the desperation occurring in the actions onscreen, even if the characters don't. It Happened Here shows people, under the direct and dangerous threat of fascism, caving in to the conformism Tout va bien agitates its viewers to fight against.

Music: Gal Costa

Many weeks back a reader of this blog asked if I would be willing to do a write-up on favorite albums, personally meaningful ones. (Who was this reader? Well, if the name 'St-Germain' means anything to you, you're one of the lucky ones who know [of] the person who was quite probably the keenest cinephile of my generation. He's pulled a Terrence Malick in the world of film criticism, though!) I've been sitting on this request for some time now, thinking of which albums I would choose, and what I'd write about them. I can, and will, talk about the music's personal meaning to me, but I'd like to take a stab at the music itself, too. The problem is, it's very difficult to do this, as I am not the most musically inclined person in the world ... so if you choose to read this entry, and others like it, please be patient with me!

Gal Costa's Índia (Philips, 1973) is the first album of Brazilian music that I have "discovered" of my own accord. I sought it out online, downloaded the album, loved it, and got rid of that burned CD to buy the actual thing. I'd had recommendations before--globetrotting cinephile of Brazilian extraction Gabe Klinger once generously handed off to me a mix CD of Tropicália classics, a co-worker recommended to me Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges' album Clube da Esquina, and hey, I've also seen Carlos Diegues' famous, mildly entertaining and highly musical films (including, twice, Quilombo with its indispensible music by the man who is today the coolest Minister of Culture ever). You get the picture. But while this exposure is probably respectable for the average American, it still leaves me quite clueless with respect to the formal, historical, and sociopolitical currents that shaped and were shaped by Brazilian popular music of the 1960s and 1970s. So the following thoughts are going to come necessarily from the mouth of someone who not only understands only about 5-10% of what Costa is singing (my reading comprehension of Portuguese is a little higher so at least I could track down lyrics if I tried...) but wouldn't even know how to place it into a larger context if I could understand the words.

My favorite track is "Milho Verde" and it exemplifies a lot of what I love about this album--a certain musical idea (a phrase, a tone of voice) is pulled and stretched in a folk/popular composition that veers in a lot of directions, quite unlike a 'verse-verse-chorus' of much popular Euro-North American music at the time. I wish more catchy pop songs would do precisely this: float around for three minutes, introduce a new rhythm or some altered facet of tone or timbre late into the song, and maybe repeat this process once or twice more. The song becomes more like a journey or a meditation--an experience--than a compact message. The percussive syncopation (at least I think this qualifies as syncopation--recall I don't know what I'm talking about!) that underscores Costa's ecstatic, sweet-voiced delivery makes for something stimulating to both the hips and the head. As with many of the tracks (like "Relance") Costa picks out a quick musical phrase and voices it repeatedly, letting the processes of repetition and gradual/drastic changes provide the drama of the piece.

So what I essentially love about this album is the beauty of Costa's voice used in conjunction, and sometimes counterpoint, with the catchy but still sometimes 'prickly' beats and progressions over which she sings. I would love to hear what else I'm missing, what I'm making too big a deal out of (for I'm certain that I'm picking up on things and praising them in the same way a film rookie would praise an old noir for being "dark"!). And more Brazilian music recommendations are always welcome ...

Year's End

I've been something less than consistent in keeping up with email and the Internet over the past week or more. But I hope to get back into the swing of things fully a few days into January. This blog entry will be my obligatory best-of-the-year rundown. Since I didn't really see many 2005 releases (almost all of those that I did see were DVD viewings at my family's place during the last two holiday breaks), I definitely cannot offer a "top ten of 2005." However, I saw something approaching 350 films this year (including shorts and repeat viewings, but I didn't pad the list with either!), there were plenty of older works to enjoy and savor.

Film of the Year - A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974). I watched this alone, late at night, on DVD. Cassavetes is the supreme welder of the appearance of "documentary truth" with the cinematic potential offered by the performative-plastic.

Masterpieces - Know that this is not quite a complete list; I'm sure I skipped over a few when I ran through my film log; first viewings only - On Top of the Whale: A Film About Survival (Raúl Ruiz, 1982); My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946); Les Maîtres fous (Jean Rouch, 1955); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962); Epileptic Seizure Comparison (Paul Sharits, 1976 - mentioned in the Liberty Valance link as well); Ugetsu monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953); A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956); An American Romance (King Vidor, 1944); The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972); Black Ice (Stan Brakhage, 1994 - only on DVD, but this is the only film of Brakhage's I've seen just on DVD and suspected I still was "getting it"); The End (Christopher Maclaine, 1953 - but really all of Maclaine's film work, probably an oeuvre of four films second only to Vigo's); Docteur Chance (F.J. Ossang, 1997); Le Voyage à travers l'impossible (Georges Méliès, 1904); The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton, 1928); Carriage Trade (Warren Sonbert, 1973); The Loyal 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1941-42); The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960); The Long Gray Line (John Ford, 1955). The majority of these are major films by pantheon filmmakers, so no surprises here, except perhaps a few like Maclaine or Ossang.

Special mention goes to Dieter Roth's overwhelming installation Solo Scenes (1997-98), which isn't cinema, exactly. A great, great work anyway.

And of course, these were only the masterpieces amidst a whole ocean of exceptionally worthy films I saw, from which I'll mention five standouts:

Dark Horses - five near masterpieces (at least!) whose status took me at least a little by surprise - Bandits of Orgosolo (Vittorio De Seta, 1961); Winstanley (Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, 1975); Blanche (Walerian Borowczyk, 1971); Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936); Street Angel (Yuan Muzhi, 1937).

And this represents only a fraction of my filmic passions over the last year. What about Donovan's Reef (Ford, 1963)? Coffin Joe? Edward Yang's The Terrorizer (1986)? Artavazd Peleshian? A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971)? The bizarre mindfuck Three Crowns of the Sailor (Ruiz, 1983)? Cassavetes' Love Streams (albeit on pan-and-scan video--I forgot about the BAM screening a few weeks ago until it was too late!)? Strike! by Eisenstein? Naruse? Guru Dutt? Kawashima Yuzo's Not Long After Leaving Shinegawa (1957)? I could go on ...

But that was the best of my year in film-viewing.

Cinephile Business: Key Texts

(Be forewarned: I had some weird formatting issues with this entry, maybe because I saved it as a draft several times, so there may be strange text colors or line breaks that I can't figure out how to fix.)

Inspired by conversation at Esoteric Rabbit, I wanted to put down an annotated list of really important cinephilic documents for me. That is, I want to mention the works that have had a major effect on me which are about--explicitly or heavily implicitly--the practice of cinephilia itself, and the related fields of film scholarship & criticism. This could be a really interminable blog entry, but I'll genuinely try not to make it too long.

The first thing to understand is the presence of critical figures whose entire bodies of work have made them exemplars in some way or another. This means that I can mention a few "big" or personally meaningful articles but really must point to their entire "aura," and more than single articles or books or essays, I'm going to discuss people, writers. Reading a lot of their work, cutting a swath across their publications, is probably the best way to get a sense of where I'm coming from. (Sorry, Girish, that this can't be more concise and accessible! I did try to make it a list of single texts with commentary, but just kept getting carried away, in draft after draft.)

So: Jonathan Rosenbaum was a huge formative one around the time of my cinephilia's birth (as opposed to my broader enthusiasm for film or movies--'98-'99 as opposed to '95). That means: the reviews (Dead Man, Small Soldiers/Saving Private Ryan, Eyes Wide Shut, and Taste of Cherry especially) and the polemical essays which accompanied his treasure trove lists (especially the '96-'99 lists and perhaps most especially his Alternate 100 Best American Films).

After this, there were other figures connected to Movie Mutations (perhaps the central text on cinephilia, and I mean its general importance for me, not necessarily the degree of its alignment with my own feelings on the subject). Adrian Martin and Nicole Brenez are the two whose work I have latched onto the most (though let me stress that Alex Horwath & Kent Jones are hardly unimportant to me!).

Overall what I respond to is the passion and commitment with which they energetically tackle areas that mainstream movie culture would have us believe are high-and-mighty, esoteric and arcane, and barred so that non-specialists cannot enter. Witness the freedom in Adrian's first letter, when he says the early 1980s (when he would be roughly my age as I write this now!) brought him treasures from Marker, Wenders, Godard, Ruiz, et al.:

Suddenly here were the films playing right outside the maps of 70s' theory: free, lyrical, tender, poetic films, but also tough, savage, cruel, perverse, sometimes violent films; films that were open diagrams, unashamed to link up raw fragments of human (or humanist) experience with the most severe or expansive kinds of experiments with form. These discoveries got drawn into a rich historical loop, too: suddenly I and my friends were seeing afresh the films of Jean Vigo, Humphrey Jennings, and especially that unique pre-nouvelle vague figure, Jean Rouch.

Or Brenez's anecdotes about the Daney student whose tears she had to erase (over lemonades) after Daney said that the cinema would die; or the itinerary about her young cinephile-friends ("They get up in the morning (around noon), watch films over breakfast (on video) ..."). I don't have the same cinema-all-day life as these latter cinephile youths, but I want to share in that same intensity of focus, that same deep profession of love for film (and video).

Perhaps even more, from Brenez's letter, is her articulations of her own practice (I'll return to this in a subsequent post), such as when she writes about her work on Lon Chaney, and asserts, "[H]ow can one explain that the tools of psychoanalysis, such as castration and incorporation, do not encompass the inventions of Lon Chaney, but rather that Chaney opens a new field in matters of understanding the body?" Or the glee and sense of community she projects when (in her letter in the second Movie Mutations relay) she talks about the rebirth and proliferation of Epsteinian avant-garde cinema in France.

The past two years especially have seen some remarkable developments, I think--or maybe I've just been paying attention to them, finally. For one thing, there has been the rise to some prominence in English-language cinephile culture the work of Olaf Möller, who has been a blessed gadfly and indeed also a sort of singular (and contradictory?) combination of bulimic-skeptic with a self-appointed missionary role. (See Matt's Esoteric Rabbit entry linked above if this doesn't make sense!) A lot of the heroes of the Movie Mutations-crowd, like Hou, Kiarostami, and Denis, have become ensconced in contemporary canons of many critics and cinephiles, quite the opposite of the uphill battle Rosenbaum and others had to fight in the 1990s. I like the fact that Möller, in his Olaf's World columns for Film Comment, in his Books Around column for Cinema-Scope, in his Senses of Cinema top ten lists, and in a recent mother-of-an-essay he wrote for a Serbian magazine, is doing everything he can to keep cinephilia from being complacent, from growing ossified--it's a sign, and a truly exemplary one for me, to never let us wax lazy and sluggish in our own practices. Ultimately, what this essential-for-me triumvirate of Möller, Martin, and Brenez emphasize is that cinephilia is alive above all things, active and reactive to the world around it--socially, politically, ethically, historically, aesthetically, everything.

When Quintín writes his Anorexic's Case Against Uchida Tomo, and sets himself against a lot of practices I support, but this is one of the key recent texts on cinephilia because it draws some lines in the sand, delineating the emphases certain camps hold, without really devolving into an us-them battle mentality. As a friend suggested, it's a sign of Quintín's intelligence (and integrity, I'd add) that he acknowledges at his article's end that he may well be wrong.

Also recently, as I've already written about here, Andrew Grossman's very long essays and articles have been indispensible. The first part of his essay on Tsui Hark, which deals little with Tsui Hark, is amazing. And his long essay, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Ho Meng-hua," is superb and, like his other Bright Lights essays, productively questions a lot of accepted critical, academic, and cinephilic practices.

OK, I'm getting way too long-winded here, so let me just unceremoniously wrap this up with a few more names and texts: Nicole Brenez's "Ultimate Journey" essay and her "Vogel Call," and Tag Gallagher on auteurism, Adrian's report on the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival, and Robert B. Ray's book How a Film Theory Got Lost (which I must admit I don't own). These are some of the most meaningful texts to me on (or at least tangentially about) cinephilia itself. I'd be happy to elaborate or add more choices in the comments ...

The Long Gray Line (1955)

Just a few quick thoughts. This is probably the first bona fide masterpiece I've watched since The Cloud-Capped Star. I'm not giving away huge spoilers but if you'd rather see the movie first before hearing certain plot points, please see the movie ASAP! It's worth it ...

The moment when Marty (Power) & Mary (O'Hara) first meet is amazing. His marriage proposal to her, later in the film, is equally amazing. It was while watching this that I realized the extent to which John Ford's direction of actors is so deliberately his own. The proposal takes place on a porch bench. Up until this scene in the film O'Hara hasn't spoken a word, steadfastly so. Marty decides he's going to give her one last shot, he wants only two words from her: "Yes or no." (You can guess what she says out of the blue.) Ford has his actors sit straight, staring ahead and not really looking at each other, instead looking in the direction of the camera, eyes wide. They only turn to each other when their animated fury and passion insist on it. It's a moment like this--a moment when the turning of the earth is felt in the lives of the characters--where Ford always has them look off, gaze away from the substance of the illusory material life the film-narrative represents, and gaze into the suggestive unknown in the camera's offspace. The same effect is given in Ford's work within the frame when characters gaze at signs of dead loved ones, whether it's Nathan Brittles at his wife's grave in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or where Spencer Tracy's character looks at (I think) his late wife's portrait in the hallway.

The night when Marty & Mary's son is born and the (much later) Christmas night when West Point cadets crowd Marty's home are linked by the same song, which takes on multi-faceted resonance due to the circumstances around each social celebration, where loneliness is the acutely felt elephant in the room.

Maureen O'Hara is immortal, in case you didn't know. She counts as one of those cinema axioms, I'd say. There's a scene where the cadets are rushing off and she tries happily to swat one on the behind, and basically misses, and it's in the graceful arc of her swing, as well as the camera nonchalantly capturing her failure to really connect, that we get a glimpse of what Serge Daney might have referred to as the quickness of Ford's camera, where the blink of an eye brings you the world in a Fordian frame, but it's over before you can feel and realize it simultaneously. Which is why time crushes all, and why for Ford life in all its vibracy is still dwarfed by death.

John Ford ... Forever?

I feel about John Ford something like the way Armond White feels about Steven Spielberg, although hopefully I can be a bit more flexible in my thinking. If someone has a looming directorial presence writ large--larger in magnitude than anyone else--over their psychic geography of Hollywood, I suspect the choice of that presence says a lot about the person's view of Hollywood cinema (and its most positive potential) in general. For more people than any other figure, this single presence is doubtless Hitchcock, which is why there is so much written about him--and because Hitchcock deals with elements that happen to be ripe for analysis at the tools readily available for the academic and critical fields, he's had his lease on the pantheon slot renewed several times over.

This isn't quite the case with Ford, whose body of work is no more or less complex than Hitchcock's, but whose body of work is also hard to dissect and make sense of through the tools given us in film studies and film criticism from structuralism, from psychoanalysis, from "genre studies" and "star studies." Ford doesn't navigate these paths as much as Hitchcock. He does deal a lot with race, gender, and ethnicity. But the fact that his films constantly present culturally conservative stereotypes of such things--and sometimes, quite arguably, do so uncritically--tends to stifle analysis in depth of these elements, as scholars skim the surface of the work in order to decide how to best condemn Ford for his racist complicity or celebrate him for his heartfelt tolerance. Even so, as it stands Ford is still a great mystery to us, or at least he should be if we're paying close attention to his work.

In a film like The Long Gray Line--a masterpiece that left me humbled--we can see the huge swaths of material left unexamined if we limit our analysis (and our evaluation) to the matrix of race/class/gender, Mulveyan voyeurship, and bourgeois aesthetics. A textured ode to military life (and by extension, as most such odes are, to governmental military policy and abstract concepts like patriotism, sacrifice, and duty), The Long Gray Line, a "true story," focuses on the 50-year-career of an Irish immigrant who comes to West Point and spends his life there as an enlisted man and instructor (played by Tyrone Power). He sees his cadets grow up, learns some die in both World Wars, and along the way he marries a fine Irish immigrant girl herself (played by--who else!?--Maureen O'Hara). It could well be a recruitment film, especially story alone, but the important thing to keep in mind is that in the experience of a Ford film--for me at least, and for many others, I know--one doesn't take away any new or renewed faith in the often-conservative institutions and ideologies he depicts. One takes away, instead, an understanding of the working of these systems, the dynamics of them that have an impact on the characters' (and thus our) inner lives. This is something like the Straub-recognized "objectivity" they bestow upon their hero Ford, which I always hear about. Likewise one feels the effects of time, sees in it the spectral visage of our dead loved ones, our cherished outmoded traditions. Ford's cinema is a profound reminder of the eternal and preordained victory of unbeing, and the absoluteness of existence's transience.

Time and again Ford presents us above all with the private or social rituals people perform while they await collective death. (Though this collective death is often not the diegetic subject of the storylines, it is the implicit and palpable "untranscendable horizon" of the artworks.) The passage of time is crueler in Ford's work than anyone else's I can call to mind. The barely-retained veneer that Ford's reputation has as something of a sentimentalist (whose alleged sentimentalism we might excuse due to his "aesthetic greatness" and/or "historical importance") is misguided, I think. A lot of filmmakers who deal with death, pain, transgression, violence are in fact great celebrators of life and vitality: Imamura, Miike, Buñuel, others. Not to put too Eurocentric a spin on all this, but for shorthand we might say that these are the figures whose Nietzschean "fullness of pessimism" makes their cup runneth over. They throw into sharper relief their main concerns by concentrating on its constant negation. (A fleeting quote I remember reading or hearing somewhere: 'Pain lets you know you're alive.') Inversely Ford's parades and picnics, dances and broguish pub tussles, all work in counterpoint to their imminent destruction, their eventual total loss to unbeing itself, relieved only finitely by memories (individual and social) in the minds of the characters who inhabit Ford's world. Which is why Ford's traditions, and his institutions & ideologies that are in fact conservative to our progressive, enlightened laserbeam eyesight, speak not of complicity with the System, but as testament to its recurring processes of construction and destruction through the march of time.

And so when the System--when institutions of patriarchy or what have you--come in, through Ford's work, it is as an object of people rather than nature, progressively enough. And empathy and sympathy for the characters in these films (who in The Long Gray Line follow with human pathos the strict, traditional militarism of West Point) do not equate to our mutual complicity with their agendas, because it is Ford who so singularly lays bare the workings of all such agendas.

I Almost Knocked Down Henry Kissinger

No joke.

I heard about it first this afternoon at the Dosa Guy--some big function to be held at NYU's law school across the street tonight. A former Mexican president, the current Colombian president, and Henry Kissinger were to be among the attendees.

So after staying late at work I was in a hurry to get to the subway. Walking fast along West 4th St. in front of the law school I was ready to zip behind three fellows as they exited a car to head into the law school. One of them stopped and gestured to his companion behind him to return to the car for something. Because he stopped, my trajectory and his trajectory were to have met if I didn't slow down. I awkwardly slammed on the foot-brakes a pace or two in front of him.

It was after I stopped that I realized this damn-tourist-who-didn't-know-how-to-walk was none other than former Secretary of State and Nixon lackey Henry Kissinger. After a moment I walked on, stunned and incredulous.

Did I do the right thing by stopping my stride?

Critics I Like: Jit Phokaew

Unfortunately the (English-language) material available by Jit Phokaew of Bangkok is limited: from what I can find, it consists entirely of one short piece on Bulle Ogier and a bunch of lists (usually with commentary) for Senses of Cinema. So go there, do a search on him, and find what thou wilt.

What I have found is a cinephile with a truly devotional relationship to the cinema in all its forms. He celebrates Rivette, Duras, and a number of independent films I've often never heard of from all corners of the globe (and his favorite director is registered in his all-time list as Derek Jarman) and yet mentions his favorite developments in some recent subgenre or national cinema (Argentine films; or: "Genre films that I liked very much this year include So Close (Corey Yuen, 2002) and Naked Weapon (Ching Siu-tung, 2002) in the female-action genre...").

Thus he's made something of an art of list-making, concocting "20 favorites" or so with pithy commentary that shows he keeps his fingers on many pulses. One of the most tantalizing titles he mentions: Birth of the Seanema (Sasithorn Ariyavicha, 2004): "This is my favorite Thai film ever. I think Sasithorn deserves to be ranked alongside Maya Deren, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman, and Su Friedrich as one of the most talented and uncompromising female filmmakers."

(By the way, I'm only erring on the side of caution, due to the preponderance among websurfing cinephiles, by referring to Jit Phokaew as a male--I don't know anything about Thai names and perhaps this Critic I Like is a woman?)

I Think I Must See These Films

While I should have been focusing more attention on Christmas shopping this weekend, I gleefully pawed my way through super-cheap East Asian DVDs at a store a block up the Bowery from Lai Ying. Only now do I see and regret some more of the vast fields I have left untilled! As a teenager I would rent the occasional Wu Tang dubbed VHS, and I quite liked Tsui Hark (of the handful I saw, The Blade above all), and I otherwise just sort of skimmed the thinnest layer of the most well-known cult/genre/exploitation/alternative commercial cinemas of the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. But I certainly didn't learn it, in part because I was--and still am--not really able to identify with the cultish brands of videophilia that mark those fantastic magazines like Video Watchdog and Asian Cult Movies.

Now I want to be a fellow traveler in these circles.

So, high on the agenda for viewing sometime in the first months of 2006 are Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters, and Yokai Monsters: Along with Ghosts. Just as I must also see Miike's newest (released in Japan this summer) The Great Yokai War, inspired by films like these. (I feel bad that I missed Izo, but it was showing at the IFC some months back, and that place is not getting my money. But I guess I will shell out $6 or $16 for a DVD if I don't find it to rent at TLA.) What to do with these films, which have no reputation in Western mainstream or intellectual film culture, which will not help me advance myself as a critic or a scholar (unless I decide that kaiju-films and related areas are part of my "turf")? Why see them, let alone spend time thinking about them before I even get to see them? I've never gone so far into myself as a cinephile to forget that life is short and seeing that scarce print of a Lubitsch silent (or something) is not the worst thing that can happen. At the same time, part of really being a cinephile involves re-incorporating yourself and your cinephilia back into that "real world," that external world for which the lights don't dim, and to be good at that--to justify it beyond being a coach potato with good taste in entertainment--one needs some focus, some faith, some intensity, a certain degree of purpose and vision.

Good examples and some of the answers can be found in a matrix between Olaf Möller, Adrian Martin, and Nicole Brenez, among many others. With the latter two we have the quote from Adrian that Matt Clayfield reprinted in a comment on this blog, and of course Brenez's amazing counterintuitive proposition that the most important films are the ones we don't even know or see. Möller, a madman and a fine cinephile-critic (well anyone who reads this blog knows my opinion of him), always comes up with words of wisdom of his own, which come from his own experience but to other people about the relationship between film, cinephilia, and the world. I'm still coming to terms with it, but there's something big he's getting at here in his article on Farocki and the Filmkritik stable, which speaks to the way I'm dealing with films these days:

Ultimately there is, after all, a “ghostly apparition”. In Imaginäre Architektur (Imaginary Architecture, Germany 1994), Bitomsky uses multiple exposures in an attempt to bring into view various gazes in houses designed by Scharoun. It remains only an attempt, and Bitomsky thematises his “failure”. However, these multiple exposures become spectral images, shots of what we can't see and yet is there, never really tangible, a phantom without circumstantial evidence hence powerfully suggestive.

Living with films, a little the way one lives with music, a little the way it looks in 3 American LPs: looking at the world from a balcony, listening to Van Morrison, who is describing the way things are, then seeing it so.

It's easy to do that with the Filmkritik films, as a cinephile. A good many have videocassettes with films by Farocki, Bitomsky, Bühler and/or Thome right at the front in the video cabinet, clearly visible, clearly accessible; when they come home at night, alone, yet again, depending on how dark the mood they're in, they take a look at Highway 40 West – Reise in Amerika, at Kinostadt Paris (Film City Paris), or Leben – BRD. Thome, especially Berlin Chamissoplatz (W. Germany 1980), Das Mikroskop (The Microscope, W. Germany 1987), Der Philosoph (The Philosopher, W. Germany 1988) and Liebe auf den ersten Blick (Love at first sight, Germany 1991), is rather dangerous in such hours of bleak despondency. One holds these films dear, and with them the self-portraits of their auteurs, and their surrounds.

And I think I must see these films, also.

Cine-Reflections

Some thoughts of a clouded mind trying to reach that which is the title of this blog.

I write lately about my experiences with, and baby steps toward knowledge about, Indian films in basically a same way a little kid will show you a new coloring book: it's an undiluted (perhaps unwisely so) expression of satisfaction and happiness at the accumulation of something new and fascinating. (The Soviet experiences seem less new to me, since I already knew some of the films and the history and the mythology.) Call it the joy of learning. I wonder if many people who read this blog (or is that phrase "many people" oxymoronic here) actually care about these experiences. In the end, who will both see Roja and read this blog except for a tiny handful of people, at best? And I do not expect it to happen, either. For myself, I have not bothered to see e.g. A History of Violence, a recent hot topic for film-and-culture bloggers. (And on top of this I quite like Cronenberg. As for other hot topics in recent months, I won't see these Showtime horror films in the very near future. Or Brokeback Mountain. I did see No Direction Home, but basically declined comment on that one.) So in a way I must content myself with the very aloneness of my voice. I do sometimes mumble quietly to myself when I walk down the street alone, lost in thought, and I promise I'm not crazy.

At my friend's apartment last night I raided his small but good collection of Indian DVDs (some Raj Kapoor titles, Mughal-e-Azam, Guide, some others). He was telling me that part of the experience of seeing these Bollywood films, in the age before DVD especially, involved getting awful dubs and bootlegs from the store and watching them. And I said, "That's also what I'm interested in! Because it's not only seeing how films are intended to be seen, but also experiencing the alternate ways in which they are often seen." Or, when I asked him about Gujarati films, which is the language of his parents and grandparents, he mentioned how awful they tended to be (but I say that a whole new world of mediocrity and awfulness is somethign to experience!). This is important not because it's big business, which it is (and which is why I'm spending little money on it), but because it's a widespread cultural experience. Something like a billion people watch South Asian cinema: can any cinephile with interest in the world at large feel content passing over this rich tradition? I didn't feel like I could, at any rate.

For several years (in college) I tried with limited success to wring out a valuable theory of (tacitly American) commercial cinema, which mainly meant skimming mainstream and genre work which had redemptive auteurist value. Some months ago I started to give the whole question a rest, and resultantly it feels as though I've experienced a touch of unexpected zen. I was not going for a comfortable formula that would let me wallow in Hollywood's funhouse guiltlessly, nor for its opposite, a blanket condemnation of the commercial cinema for being an "enemy of art." (So much great art has been produced throughout history and geography in cultures we'd call quite hostile to "art.") I wanted a viable and complex way of approaching mainstream films and all those films that rest "beneath" it on the cultural radar.

The point, which I didn't see before, is not to base my experience and comprehension of these works in my pleasure, i.e., in my feeling of how a "great" or "interesting" or "bad" commercial/genre film worked. The point is instead to base my pleasure in how these films work, both as formal objects and cultural entities. And this is something I've written about here before, a sense of 'rhetoric' in which the form and material of an artwork is profoundly and intimately tied to larger, external, extra-textual realities and positions. And I can only speak of my own experience here, and haven't figured out yet how to best bridge a gap between myself and someone who will disagree with me. But, to try to clarify things on this end, I want to say that before, I would see an avowedly commercial film (let's say, one of these recent and oddball Spielberg films, like Catch Me If You Can). I liked this film quite a bit, and having liked it, would try to justify it as a great latter-day auteurist expression from this complicated entertainer. (At the time, I was a big proponent of Spielberg and especially a proponent of his weird string of films from A.I. to, well, Catch Me If You Can. Don't ask me where I stand on Spielberg now, because I can't even tell you myself.) I don't think I was wrong to try to justify the film--I think I was missing the opportunity for more productive thought. I didn't ask myself why I liked the film, only what I liked about it. I didn't ask myself why the film was addressing me in the way it did, only what was "good" and internally coherent about its address. In this way I found myself in curious boats with other supporters of the film who "got it" (or so we told ourselves), looking at my other friends adrift across the waves in the anti-Catch Me boat. I was trying to understand better how those of us in my boat felt in our mutual bond, when I should have devoted at least as much energy to throwing a rope over to the other boat. (This metaphor is awful, I know, but it's what I have to work with at the moment.) Concensus needn't be the goal, only meaningful communication and understanding.

Fast-forward to Thanksgiving break when I see War of the Worlds on DVD and think it's dreadful. But I no longer consider myself part of a film culture political war pro- or anti-Spielberg. I'm not interested in trying to force my enjoyment or lack of it, my erudition or lack of it, on anyone else. What I want is to try to find middle grounds between myself and the rest of the world (which is unlike me) and who has an opinion on this film. I don't want my discussion of this film, or even my private thought of this film, to end with, to be rooted in, "It sucks." (Likewise, I don't really want discussion of films I've seen lately and love to be rooted in, "It rocks"--even for that towering achievement, The Cloud-Capped Star.) To decide whether it's right to be endlessly annoyed or tearfully moved by a moment like oft-screaming Dakota Fanning's quiet "Are we dead?" is beyond the point. In this case I may be endlessly annoyed, but I know what it's like to be tearfully moved in a Spielberg film that other people feel endlessly annoyed about. (Just today a co-worker asked my opinion of A.I., which I adore, before largely dismissing it himself.) So I recognize my annoyance, affirm that I'm no more special than any other member in this species, and try to get at the realities and factual roots of this film's existence so that subjective opinion is the vibrant texture of a discussion among people, and not the (flimsy) foundation of our own little floating man-islands.

How do we do this? That's what I'm still pathetically trying to figure out. Perhaps I'm behind the curve but I feel finally like I'm on the right track for wanting to try to do this and not for bickering (within, no doubt, a corporate- and consumerist-approved philosophical matrix) about the merits of "the movies." Cue stirring score, serve popcorn, and roll the Oscar clip. Because I've realized that, the all-powerful market entrenched in place, I hate its merits, and I hate "the movies."

A Few More Points

1. I had never noticed this before, or if I had I'd forgotten it, but Olaf Möller had submitted his favorite films to Senses of Cinema two years ago. An interesting list, with some films I love (like The Thin Red Line or A Touch of Zen) and some films I haven't seen but should have (like The Best Years of Our Lives or This Sporting Life) and some films I just wish I could see (like Operai, contadini and Thomas l'imposteur). And if it's ostensibly his #1 film ever, then now I really, really need to go back and see Kagemusha, a film I remember liking but can't actually remember. I saw it when I was maybe 16. (If you're reading this, Mr. Contreras, perhaps I'll do a double bill of Kagemusha/Throne of Blood.)

2. Chinese films! I've seen only two of the old ones at MoMA so far. Sun Yu's Daybreak ('33), the first I've seen by the director, was decent. Rather simple and straightforward elements, but I appreciated them as mildly abstracted or stylized storytelling rather than 'well-rounded' drama. (Hmph, three dimensions are for bourgeois pigs anyway!) The ending is morbid and fascinating. I was really glad to see Red Heroine (Yimin Wen, '29); the film itself wasn't that impressive, but it was fantastic to see such an early example of the wu xia film. I also recently caught up with Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu ('01) which I liked but didn't flip over. It's a sensitive and nicely realized love story. Now I need to see Kwan's Rouge. Sammo Hung's The Moon Warriors ('93), honestly, exceeded my expectations. I couldn't discern anything special really but this is one of those films, like a good Charles Marquis Warren-directed Western (or maybe a minor De Toth like Thunder Over the Hills or The Stranger Wore a Gun), that simply makes the best case for the existence (and expense) of "generic" entertainment. We (the royal "we" at any rate) are willing to forgive it any number of minor inanities because it possesses no larger crippling stupidity. It's economical, tight storytelling, devoid of pomp and circumstance (except when a little of it might prove pleasurable), eschewing too much button-pushing or audience-corralling, simply letting its images flow one after another in a narrative progression, with a nice simple pattern of threads that may come together or taper off as they will.

3. Fellow New Yorkers: Did the Two Boots Pizza on Bleecker St. go downhill, or has it always sucked and I just never noticed it, or am I just unlucky? Over the past 6-12 months I've been there maybe three times, and each time I've left feeling like I wasted money. Today was the worst instance. (And to think that I passed up a bahn mi sandwich in Chinatown because "Two Boots is closer and I haven't been there in a while.") But the two or three times I'd had Two Boots before this recent period I've always thought it was excellent, and it always seemed fresher.

A Few Points

1. A good blog I just discovered, relevant to one of my chosen objects of study - http://parallelcinema.blogspot.com/ - basically just information and pictures on given Indian movies that don't seem to follow the "six songs, three dances" template.

2. Some filmmakers whose work I wish I could see: Shinsuke Ogawa, Arthur Omar, Mani Kaul, Carmelo Bene, Don Askarian, Mario O'Hara.

3. I hate how some New York Public Library VHS tapes are in fine condition, and others are shitty, and there's no way to tell or even reasonably guess which are which.

4. What's your favorite Russ Meyer film? I've seen maybe four, and like Supervixens and Cherry, Harry & Raquel equally--both solid efforts. Neither quite "list-worthy."

Ethnic, Social, and Political Tension in Cinema

Mani Ratnam's Roja (1992) is quite something; in its first hour especially, before the controversial political content really comes into play, it's virtually a masterpiece of popular cinema (simple, accessible, engaging, and itself engaged, spontaneous, vivid, organic, neither stupid nor lazily formulaic). But while I really liked the film overall I am troubled by its jingoism, where Hindu nationalism trumps ridiculously (but no doubt "humanely") sketched Muslim Kashmiri militant villains. It's political-dramatic resolution is akin to Rocky IV's climactic victory speech, where Sylvester Stallone preaches to a hardass Soviet audience (who were won over by his underdog Uncle Sam can-do spirit) that "If I can change ... and if you can change ... maybe we all can change!" Cheers all around. But what exactly is the point of these easy salves in which all it takes for sociopolitical tension to subside is for "our" good guys and "their" not-quite-bad guys to go through a (masochistically?) painful ordeal and come out ready to gasp their way through a chorus of "We Are the World"? It's almost like these types of entertainment are tiny exorcism-attempts for an embattled collective psyche. (And their real world effect is one of the placebo variety. Or sedative.)

Then there's the preachy Peasants in Distress (1994, pictured above), which features two brief kung fu scenes and a bizarre travelogue-ish coda. Authored by His Majesty Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, its about jealousy and romance among Khmer rebel fighters and two peasants they encounter in the jungle. In it, handsome humanitarian rebel Cheyrith picks up cute peasant-girl Nit. But fellow rebel, and rival officer, Mân, a mean bastard and a genuine civilian-despising militant, doesn't like it, and sees to it that the romance is "tragically short-lived," as the video box copy puts it. (He even twirls his handgun after using it.)

I have no idea who or what this film was actually made for--Western audiences eager to see fictionalizations of problems that the UN has tried to address? Sufficiently un-humanitarian Cambodians? So I'm not really sure how it should be judged; it's an off-the-radar film for me, and I watched it for precisely that reason. Even so, I can't see how justified the film's moralizing is. Once again, we've got political differences--including unsavory political convictions and actions--reduced to character flaws. These sorts of films tell us that people who kill civilians for a cause are either deluded or bad people with any number of vices (smoking, arrogance, alcoholism...). Olaf Möller once icily identified this problem, in which films turn real political problems and disagreements into fiction fodder and personal psychology. (I don't have on hand the issue of Film Comment--at least I think it's in FC--where he wrote it, so no exact quote or citation at the moment.)

One can see this mentality on display in something like The Interpreter, too, Sydney Pollack's recent entertainment that's (kind of) smart and (kind of) has a conscience. For no good reason I can see, Sean Penn's character (and oh does Sean Penn love playing these tortured types) is dealing with his own tough personal tragedy that forms a "strong emotional bond" between himself and Nicole Kidman (a white African who used to be a rugged freedom fighter before she started to "believe in what the UN was doing," got the titular job there, and moved herself into one amazing and tastefully-decorated New York apartment). Penn's character's personal loss is, at least on some level, equated with Nicole Kidman's personal experience of huge social loss and strife. Even if Pollack & Co.'s intentions are good, I tend to view this sort of storytelling as demeaning telescopy of psychological issues onto social ones, and a reduction of sociopolitical realities ...

But that's all I've got for now. Take this as untempered venting rather than a "thesis."

Also, how do people who read this blog like the inclusion of jpegs? Is it good, bad, a nice occasional inclusion?