Turner and Crary

"The work of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Ruskin, and Turner and many others are all indications that by 1840 the process of perception itself had become, in various ways, a primary object of vision. For it was this very process that the functioning of the camera obscura kept invisible. Nowhere else is the breakdown of the perceptual model of the camera obscura more decisively evident than in the late work of Turner. Seemingly out of nowhere, his painting of the late 1830s and 1840s signals the irrevocable loss of a fixed source of light, the dissolution of a cone of light rays, and the collapse of the distance separating an observer from the site fo optical experience. Instead of the immediate and unitary apprehension of an image, our experience of a Turner painting is lodged amidst an inescapable temporality. ... The sfumato of Leonardo, which had generated during the previous three centuries a counter-practice to the dominance of geometrical optics, is suddenly and overwhelmingly triumphant in Turner. But the substantiality he gives to the void between objects and his challenges to the integrity and identity of forms now coincides with a new physics: the science of fields and thermodynamics."

-- Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (p. 138)

Wondering how to best figure this out so that I understand it viscerally: the historical chain of scientific progress, particularly in optics, opened up huge doors in our (Western) comprehension of visual and mental perception. By the time Impressionism rolled around, artists could claim this inspiration as physical, optical fact and inspiration. Eventually that proved not to be a satisfying parameter--the artists of 20th century modernism shaped the materials art to fit in visual perception their mental perceptions, i.e., expressionism in any and all of its forms. The movement from Impressionism to Expressionism was one that opened to floodgates of the mind/eye to science, then pushed the deluge back out into the world ...

(Sorry if the formatting is bad here.)

Torino 2

First day in Turin

I'll try to avoid talking about the common maladies one has at a film festival— that is, insomnia (bed is such a waste of time when there are drinks and conversations to be had on the day's films!), sleepiness (see previous), malnutrition (stuffing one's face at the hotel breakfast certainly doesn't suffice for the entire day), dehydration (one word: booze), and the many anxieties about getting to films on time and such. A plentitude of these "difficulties"will naturally appear in the off-space of this blog, and perhaps in between the lines when I start to turn in cranky reviews of otherwise pretty decent films.

And now, into worthier digressions…


















My first images of the Piedmont region, glimpsed from the plane window, were the Alps' peaks cutting throughthe settling clouds. When I got to Turin, I wandered for a while trying to get a better look at the surrounding nature. By the time I found what seemed to be *the* view – facing a portion of the city that rests on a mountain and which reminded me of Barcelona's Montjuic neighborhood – it dawned on me that the press office would be closing and I wouldn't be able to get my badge. I made it just in time, but when I got there I was told that my credentials were waiting for me at the hotel. The festival kindly offered a temporary solution, furnishing me with an invitation for whichever film I wished to see that night. Running into festival co-director Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, who assembled this year's complete Robert Aldrich retrospective, it became clear that the program to catch was Emperor of the North (Pole)*. A great print, Giulia advertised, and Keith Carradine and Ernest Borgnine would be there!

It was no surprise to see Olaf "The Shadow" near the front of the line. Olaf's last appearance on this blog was in late January. He continues to elude my camera (here he hides behind a tote bag for the Isola filmfestival in Slovenia):
















McMahonist that he is, Olaf sat in front – refusing "to miss a single grain". Borgnine was in the crowd, unmistakable. Introducing the film, he and Carridine spoke elegantly in Italian, Carradine noting (and I'm translating roughly here), "When I made this film I was a young man. He [pointing to Borgnine] not so much." Borgnine, 89, kept saying "Grazie per tutti" ("thank you for everything"), a warmness projecting from his big gap-toothed smile. The audience applauded and applauded – in fact, I've never seen an audience applaud so much (even at individual credits in the film's opening).

In the film, Borgnine transforms his trademark smile into a psychopathic grin: playing Shack, a railway conductor on an Oregon line dubbed "Emperor of the North Pole", he's a harrowing villain. The only man to match him is Lee Marvin's Number 1, a veteran hobo whose last ambition in life is to jump the Emperor undetected. Shack is introduced hurling a hammer at a hobo trespasser, provoking the hobo's gruesome dismemberment under the train wheels. Indeed, Shack manages to turn a variety of ordinary objects into deathly torture devices: chains, wood planks, cargo pins are employed memorably to expel drifters. Number 1 and Cigaret (Carradine), an apprentice rail jumper, mostly deflect Shack – who clearly enjoys taking his no hobo policy to homicidal heights – with their ow ntricks, the result of years of experience on the rails (the film takes place at the apex of the Great Depression).

A viable parallel to Aldrich's filmmaking – Emperor especially – is the Chinese martial arts film. In both, characters function within a world of strict macho codes. Their often violent and disruptive acts are carried out with formal grace and precision that relate to a fabricated morality, which makes the films fun to watch because the audience doesn't feel implicated in the bloodlust of the characters. Aldrich and the great D.P. Joseph Biroc are endlessly inventive in exploring the compositional and rhythmic possibilities of the action – one scene in particular, set entirely in a thick fog, is a triumph of atmospheric lighting and might be closer to something like the avant-garde Le Tempestaire by Jean Epstein than any Hollywood film of the period.

Emperor of the North is an action film in the truest sense, when such a thing was still delightfully uncompromised (the only recent Hollywood film that even comes close to Aldrich's mastery in its mano-a-mano action is Friedkin's The Hunted). Emperorof the North is also a film about trains, which takes us back to Lumière, Bitzer, Medvedkin, etc. At a crowded pub afterwards, meeting up with three colleagues from Slovenia, Nika, Nil, and Maya, we assigned metaphors to trains in cinema, such as the impression of the film strip speeding through light… A layman eavesdropper would likely role their eyes at such poetic critical discourse. But it's endearing, especially among a group of seasoned critics, to see such simple passion. Here's where we all share something essential about the history of cinema.

* The film's title, onscreen, appears as Emperor of the North, though the film is apparently more widely known under Aldrich's original title, Emperor of the North Pole.

--Gabe Klinger

An Afternoon in New York

(Ed. note--Gabe Klinger returns to Elusive Lucidity with some more festival reports. This is a prologue to Torino.)

A New York whirlwind: my presence barely registered on the city, but in a mere six hours I managed to lunch with Zach – persuading him once again to host me on Elusive Lucidity –, visit my friend Nemo on the Harlem set of his new movie (where I also met Hope, the super-hero lead), chat with the wonderful Sara Driver in Soho, and meet a former Chicago chum, Andy, for a beer on Bowery. If you're lucky enough to have the option, New York is the perfect place to charge one's batteries before a festival trip. Just standing on the corner of Spring and Lafayette waiting for Andy to arrive I felt awakened by the purposeful bustle of the human traffic, a steady stream of excited faces that left me wondering, enviously, what each and every person on the street was going off to.

To follow: first impressions of Turin, an encounter with Olaf, Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North, and drinks with the Slovenian critical contingent











An incredible autumn day in New York.

















Zach Campbell, illustrious blog owner
















In Harlem: Nemo and his mantle of pictoral curios.


















Hope: a super-hero in uniform















At nightfall: a cig with Sara in the park


















Andy on Bowery. A farewell beer...

















Departure from JFK.

--Gabe Klinger

More on Winstanley (the Film)

"As a result, there is a strangeness to the whole thing, an unfamiliarity. This is not just because its story is not well known to the general viewer. There are other reasons. The occasional explanatory intertitles are reduced to frustratingly brief captions to the action, affording but little information beyond the immediacy of the scene. The acting, particularly from the nonprofessional actors, seems tentative and uncertain; as a result, characters themselves seem unaccountably unaware of their Historical Significance. Some of the characters, particularly Will Everard and Captain Gladman, come and go, appearing and disappearing, abruptly and unexpectedly, their contextual significance unremarked. Winstanley himself is a cipher, a genial but baffling torrent of high-flown rhetoric, prayer, and common sense. Finally, to put a rather whimsical point to it, the storyline at times does not seem aware of where it is going or what kind of narrative shape it is assuming. At times it just drifts, blithely unaware of its own portentousness, refusing to explain itself, frequently denying our demand for quick and easy meanings.

"While freely admitting that some of these qualities stem directly from budgetary constraints and the inexperience of the crew, Brownlow defends this admittedly rough-hewn quality, particularly with regard to the use of nonprofessional actors. "Any conviction is killed as soon as most profession actors start 'acting,'" he says, "and this is the trouble with the kind of film Andrew and I like to make. They are supposed to show events that are happening while you watch them, as opposed to enacted historical pageants. If you don't feel these people are real and convincing, ... then we have failed." It is the very absence of calculation and professional polish, adds Brownlow, that is to be desired.

"Winstanley thus belongs to a select company of history films that is rare in the cinema. While it reconstructs a vanished world that displays what historian Simon Schama describes as "an unruly completeness," it also "challenges the truisms of linear history, where the order of events is progressive in both a temporal and a moral sense." In sume, continues Schama:

"These are the films that have respected the strangeness of the past, and have accepted that the historical illumination of the human condition is not necessarily going to be an edifying exercise. ... These are also films that embrace history for its power to complicat, rather than clarify, and warn the time traveler that he is entering a place where he may well lose the thread rather than get the gist."

...

"Winstanley also presented Brownlow with the opportunity to delve into a different kind of historical archive, the archive of the cinema. This is history as a construction of the film medium itself. Brownlow has acknowledged that Winstanley's visual schemas were inspired by the achievements of his favorite filmmakers, most of whom had themselves made historical films. There are allusions to Fescourt and de Baroncelli, for example, "who went back to the actual places in which the stories they were telling occurred and made films that were regional documentaries, albeit very dramatic ones." The carefully composed historical tabealux hark back to the style of D.W. Griffith's America (1924). The frenetic editing of the battle scenes of the film's opening sequence recall Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) and Orson Welles' The Chimes at Midnight (1966). The use of "typage," i.e., the reliance upon facial types rather than acting abilities to convey character, is reminiscent of the Russians Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Dovzhenko. And the extraordinary beauty of the landscapes--especially images of the farmers sillhouetted starkly against the windblown skies and meadows--and the naturalistic lighting of the interiors, captured by cinematographer Ernest Vincze (in his theatrical feature film debut), owe much to the Swedish cinema of Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjostrom (The Treasure of Anne, 1921 and The Outlaw and His Wife, respectively), and the work of Arthur Von Gerlach (The Chronicles of the Gray House, 1925). If Winstanley ultimately seems a graceful relic of the silent era, says Brownlow, that's only as it should be: "If Andrew and I had been courageous enough, we should have made Winstanley as a silent film with a full orchestral track."

-- John C. Tibbetts, "Winstanley; or, Kevin Brownlow Camps Out on St. George's Hill" (Literature Film Quarterly, 2003)






















Q: "You felt it had to look like a silent film?"

A: "Well, I live and breathe silent films, as you probably know. I have seen them in their original form and I don't think the exterior photography of that period has ever been excelled--except in Barry Lyndon which can be seen as perhaps the last of the silent films. There are two films which specifically had a direct bearing on Winstanley. One was Dreyer's The Parson's Widow. The other is Artur von Gerlach's Chronicles of the Grey House. Both are extraordinarily strong visually and I think that, despite knowing the seventeenth-century through paintings of the period which are often very colorful, we tend to see it as a black-and-white period. Andrew wanted to do the film in color but he imagined 35mm color which was out of the question financially. 16mm wasn't of sufficiently good quality. Now I've seen Barry Lyndon I think if we'd been able to do it on 35mm in color it would have been sensational. I was at one point thinking of making it a completely silent film--and it would have been a better picture because as soon as you hear dialogue in a historical film, however accurately it is written, pop goes the bubble of illusion. When you look at a recreation like the silent Stiller or Dreyer, of the seventeenth century you feel it indubitably is 1649 and there is no argument about it. Both Andrew and I are obsessed with the minutiae of the past and the creation of the reality of the past. That is probably one of the reasons I am so fascinated by old films. The painstaking recreation of the past is very important, obviously, in this picture. It originally had more commentary, particularly tracing the development of Winstanley's political ideas, but it had to be thrown out. The film fought shy of commentary and we had less and less of it. Most sound films are ninety percent dialogue and this was not going to be one of those films. A film can put over a handful of ideas. It gets stronger the less you ask it to do. So we made this as simple as we possibly could. Hence the title. I thought of lots of titles along The Wind and the Lion lines, The Sword and the Plough-share, lots of Hollywood titles with Max Steiner scores behind them, but it isn't that kind of picture. It is a desperate attempt to simplicity, at absolute purity. That's the idea of it, and that is why it doesn't attempt to do any more than it does."

-- Verina Glaessner, "Winstanley: An Interview with Kevin Brownlow" (Film Quarterly, 1976-77)

(Perhaps a bit more later.)

Painting of the Day

Links

Just a reminder, or an announcement if there are readers who don't know--I don't have a links sidebar on this blog (I'm too frightened I'll screw up something in the HTML editing process), but I do have my own domain name, with its own links page. Originally I had just put film-related stuff but eventually I asked myself who I was kidding. What's there are some--many--sites I visit regularly or semi-regularly that have something to do with art, culture, and/or politics. Preferences given to individual and small group sites & blogs rather than journals or official websites.

I've just added a few more sites and may continue to add some more tonight. Cheers.

A Scratch Sheet

"And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the Globe, dwels in man to govern the Globe; so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any Teacher and Ruler without him, for he needs not that any man should teach him, for the same Anoynting that ruled in the Son of man, teacheth him all things.

"But since humane flesh (that king of Beasts) began to delight himself in the objects of the Creation, more then in the Spirit Reason and Righteosness, who manifests himself to be the indweller in the Five Sences, of Hearing, Seeing, Tasting, Smelling, Feeling; then he fell into blindness of mind and weakness of heart, and runs abroad for a Teacher and Ruler: And so selfish imaginations taking possession of the Five Sences, and ruling as King in the room of Reason therein, and working with Covetousnesse, did set up one man to teach and rule over another; and thereby the Spirit was killed, and man was brought into bondage, and became a greater Slave to such of his own kind, then the Beasts of the field were to him."

-- Winstanley.

"Properly speaking, the first of these efforts, It Happened Here (1966)--an intricate imagining of England in 1944 if it had lost the war in 1940 and been occupied by the Germans--qualifies as science fiction. And the second, Winstanley (1975)--an account of the failed effort of a nonviolent religious sect called the Diggers to establish a commune in Surrey in 1649--qualifies as a period piece. But to my mind both films are science fiction, because a vanished era is the focus of the sort of curiosity, awe, and wonder commonly reserved for the future. In part because of the fanaticism about period details, both works are theoretically and stylistically somewhat naive movies, endowing the past with a voluptuous sense of mystery rarely found in more accomplished pictures."

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Naive? Brownlow & Mollo's films may in fact be ingenuous, but how did we mire ourselves in an orthodoxy in which political forthrightness and virtuousness are seen as de facto bad, boring, as undesirable as early morning calisthenics--or spinach (canned spinach) when what you really want is pizza & beer? Winstanley and It Happened Here (which Rosenbaum, a progressive individual of course, I should not indicate otherwise, did recommend in his review) offer pleasures that transcend the specific (and, I would argue, bourgeois!) problem of 'didacticism-versus-pleasure,' and hence override the problem of "accomplishment." Let's not underestimate the viewer: she who sees a film like Winstanley (or the superb Salt of the Earth, which I just caught last night) can surely intuit that these films are not constructed to function according to certain prescribed codes & conventions ... and thus make the large or small effort necessary to grapple with these "alternative" approaches on their own terms. I'm not claiming that an average viewer will accept, and does already accept, a film perceived to be poorly-acted, amateurish, dry. I am claiming that the outright rejection of such alternative, amateurish, or unaccomplished projects is a clear mark of social indoctrination and propaganda. The entertainment industry would like to make it appear as though we're still dealing with craftsmanship (thus, conveniently, the productions with the most money and moneyed talent behind them are considered to be best--$200 million vulgarian blockbusters for the lumpenproletariat, $50-100 prestige pictures for the kulcha'ed). In fact, craftsmanship has nothing to do with it. It's about the acceptance of a paradigm by which an artform is ruled by an industry, and an industry is ruled by major corporations. Even furtive, nominal rejections of industrial dominance are sterile and work only as illusory gestures: "arthouse," "independent," "alternative" films, often made, packaged & sold by subsidiaries of the larger corporations.

A writer who entrenches the idea of (H'wood) "accomplishment" as an ultimate criterion, something only to be mitigated at most, never ignored even when ignoring would be the appropriate action ... is simply oiling the gears & cogs of the culture industry as we know it.

In these cases, the meticulous enactment of historically-grounded speculation--the element which Rosenbaum isolates as being like "science fiction" in Winstanley and It Happened Here--is what the films are about, what they're going for. Their purpose is not to be sleek machines for temporarily, perpetually forgetting our experience in the concrete, material, unpaid-bills world. And audiences are quite capable of understanding and accepting this fact. Whether or not audiences actually do understand this and act appropriately, en masse, is something that falls--partly--on the shoulders of critics, connoisseurs, and experts.

"Is pleasure, that which has harangued film criticism for the past three decades, that which is the most transformative, fearsome, and liberating force known to queerkind, in fact predicated on such banal, nonsubversive criteria as ambrosial images, cool decorativeness, and mannered formalism? Can’t we do better than this? Doesn’t, say, the moral satisfaction delivered by the triumph of the underclass in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses (2000) outstrip in “pleasure” the indulgent sensualism of Treut’s self-congratulatory (if low-budget) style? Isn’t Loach’s focus on the tribulations and socioeconomic indignities endured by immigrant janitors and Latina charwomen — the kind of people usually ignored in liberal yet narcissistic LGBT cultures — really “queerer” (i.e., more subversive) than butch lesbian posturing? If Vicky Funari and Julia Query’s documentary Live Nude Girls Unite! (2000, above) yokes together titillating female nudity and socialist politics in its narrative of unionizing strippers, don’t we derive more pleasure from its rare angry muckraking than its commonplace ecdysiasm, which the directors deliberately deglamorize? Or, to rephrase the question, shouldn’t we?"

-- Andrew Grossman.

The New Arrival of the Angel

I was tempted to say that we live in a more secular age than our medieval ancestors--but it's hard to mark an epoch for its secularism when so large a chunk of the populace of the world's superpower nation hews towards fundamentalism. (The great secular age of the West may be over--but I wouldn't know, I'm not an historian.) Safer to say, perhaps, that the art is more secular, and how do we think about Christian or otherwise spiritual tropes when they've been co-opted and expropriated into a tradition that may think little of traditional notions of religion (to say nothing of antipathy)?

(JMW Turner; The Angel, Standing in the Sun; 1846)

(Paul Klee; Angelus Novus; 1920.)

"There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm."

--Walter Benjamin.












(The midriff of the esteemed Asia Argento in New Rose Hotel, 1998.)

For a moment I wonder if the 'angel,' having been so thoroughly understood in modernity for its symbolic functions (and hardly as a literal messenger or psychopomp) slowly became aligned with material things. Out of Turner (and the early modernism) we've got an angel coming from the ether into materiality (i.e., paint), though I admit I've done no research on that count as far as Turner's art is concerned. Pure speculation here. Approaching materiality, the angel is caught up in history (Benjamin). Eventually the angel appears as the emblem of history, tattooed on the body of an actress in a cheap under-the-radar film masterpiece. New Rose Hotel posits X (Willem Defoe) as a witness to History, but he thinks it's the mastery of his friend Fox (Christopher Walken), and he thinks he's privy to this mastery. Sandii (Argento), the 'Eurasian' love interest, the Angel, is no longer buffeted about by the storm of progress--the angel has been enlisted in its service. X realizes that, finally, he's the one buffeted about; the Angel stands as a figurative banner-holder for progress that threatens to override a dispersing, decaying empire ...

A reasoned historical argument? No.

A question to keep in mind for a major trope in Western art? I'd like to think so ...

Artaud You So

"That doesn't mean you have to make life in the theatre. As if one could imitate life. What is needed is to rediscover the life of the theatre, in all its freedom."

-- Artaud, "The Evolution of Set Design"

"Cinema: Through poetry, theatre contrasts pictures of the unformulated with the crude visualization of what exists. Besides, from an action viewpoint, one cannot compare a cinema image, however poetic it may be, since it is restricted by the film, with a theatre image which obeys all life's requirements.

"Cruelty: There can be no spectacle without an element of cruelty as the basis of every show. In our present degenerative state, metaphysics must be made to enter the mind through the body."

-- Artaud, "The Theatre of Cruelty--First Manifesto"

Working hypothesis: to be confirmed, disproved, changed, or revised as necessary: that art which calls upon cruelty is--in its social function--diagnostically pessimistic and prescriptively hopeful ... or rather, not hopeful, but active. (Which leads to an uncertain and neutral prognosis, neither fully cynical nor romantic.)

Cinema Violence

Noël Burch wrote,

"[A]ll really censurable images, whether erotic, repugnant, violent, or truly subversive (as opposed to images that ambarrass a party or a regime, though not society as a whole, and therefore inconvenience a government but do not traumatize its constituents: shots of the slums at Nanterre as opposed to shots of a fraudulent election) are, despite other possible differences, forms of aggression. ... Le Sang des bêtes is certainly not a film for children, but neither is Last Year at Marienbad." (Theory of Film Practice, p. 124)

Films, images retain the power to disrupt our complacency. We just have to keep recognizing how to burrow under our skin the right way. Cruelty can be rationalized, and once it is, its effects are won over as a commodity--one can undergo it willingly (cf. the end of Brian De Palma's brilliant "Be Black Baby" sequence in Hi, Mom!). This is what has happened to the horror film as a genre, very early on even, so that critics who want to argue for horror as 'subversive' must do so on the level of thematic content & interpretation at least as much as on the level of form or simply the pure realization of bloody, terrifying content ... probably more so. (Romero makes thrilling, subtle parables--superb films--but he doesn't assault our eyes and bodies. Fulci? Maaaaaybe.)

Ridley Scott started out as a worthy filmmaker--his first three features are really notable works, though I don't know that he's shot a single good frame since Blade Runner. (No, I haven't bothered to see everything.) I recall the strobe climax of Alien to be interesting precisely because it went out of the ordinary for special effects or mere "atmospherics" to weave in some literal, optical, graphic extremity. (There's also some strobe violence in the first Blade film, right? I have that sitting around somewhere, maybe I should take a look.) These sorts of images, semi-intelligible happenings, get back into the potential of psychic violence that films in the horror vein, grand guignol films, dark oneiric fantasies, can project. (They're what Buñuel thinks about in the moment before he slices the eye in Un Chien andalou, perhaps.) In my imagination, this is what certain recent films I still haven't seen, only heard of, only wish I had a(nother) chance to see, take to the extremes: João César Monteiro's Snow White, the films of Philippe Grandrieux ...

Flicker films remain one of the supreme forms of violent, aggressive cinema. Of course, when I see one of these films, I've come to the theater knowing what I'm in for, looking forward to it. Maybe I myself am even commodifying the experience, certainly I'm well-prepared and whetted for Sharits' neon frames or Kubelka's monstrous-sounding black-and-white Arnulf Rainer for the carefully controlled rushes that these films bring me. Regardless of what it does to me, however, and how I might nullify the violence, rationlize it, and experience it as aesthetic rapture, I see and hear the discomfort these films can still bring to others (which is so rare or tame in horror cinema). And cruelty, the subjection of an audience to discomfort or worse for some purpose, remains mostly a frontier for the whole medium. Is it a frontier worth exploring (and by exploring, destroying)?

There's a specter haunting this discussion, of course:





















He doesn't look very happy about it, though ...

Quotes of the Day (and Coming Attractions)

"For writers, banishment confirms the fact that literature is not benign. Most of the Chilean, Argentine, and Uruguayan writers forced into exile in recent years are paying the consequences of using words freely. As everyone knows, the dictatorships of the South erected a machinery of silence. They hope to hide reality, to erase memory, to empty consciences. From the vantage point of this plan for collective castration, the dictatorships are right to send books and newspapers that smell of gunpowder to the bonfires, and to condemn their authors to exile, prison, or the grave. Some literature is incompatible with the military's pedagogy of amnesia and lies."

--Eduardo Galeano, section 2, "Exile, Somewhere Between Nostalgia and Creativity" (trans. Mark Fried)

"For us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in blood."

--Frantz Fanon, "On National Culture" (p. 146 of The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox)

These are older words, above, but their urgency is no less deeply felt because of it. A viewing list, ten films whose role is to help in a struggle great or small, on some of which I promise to write in the next few months:

Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1926)
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Land and Freedom (Ken Loach, 1995)
Strike! (Sergei Eisenstein, 1924)
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971)
Winstanley (Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo, 1975)
Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo, 1933)
La Commune (Paris 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000) *
Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954) *
Flame (Ingrid Sinclair, 1996) *

* These last three I haven't seen (I know, I know), but are high on my to-see list ...

Studs Lonigan

What was I saying about only one Lerner film under my belt? Well, now it's two--this and Murder by Contract ('58), both solid films (Contract's probably better) that make me think, in terms of both tone and subject matter, of the sort of films Scorsese might started out with had he been ten years older. In fact Studs Lonigan, a once-controversial screen adaptation project for Lerner and writer-producer Philip Yordan, seems like a quite viable inspiration for Scorsese's GoodFellas and Casino, possibly also Mean Streets (but it's been too long since I've seen that one). The difference is that in Scorsese's films, characters have the feeling (the thrill) of agency--they get to be movers-and-shakers, and when things come crashing down (or when the thrill simply decomposes into the mundane), it hurts. In Studs Lonigan, our hero (played by Christopher Knight) never even really gets to grasp that sense of being in charge of his own destiny ... he just spends the duration waiting for it. Flirtations with the underworld never go beyond a few fizzled get-rich-quick schemes or mobster handshakes; alcoholism is the greatest vice Studs can get himself into. In a way this makes it all the more pathetic. And if absolution never comes, the film also remains, because of it, more incisive about the vagaries and illusions of middle-class existence than Scorsese's ever are.

The camerawork (a lot of strange angles from below) seems to be a bit of a marriage of early 1930s Robinson or Cagney vehicles (the film itself takes place during the 1920s) with Cassavetes and Beat energy of the time, the sort of flexed-muscle pulsing improv realism that marked the emergence of Something New on mainstream American screens at the time. (Sorry, is that "x-crossed-with-y" description too The Player-ish?) I can't say that, on one viewing, the film had a particularly clear and meaningful aesthetic organization, but it's in the half-exposed formal blueprints that one may find the most interesting strategy anyway.

At one point, deep in the film, Studs and one of his friends are playing pool. The friend says, "I met a pig last night. How's your love life?" Studs replies, "Catherine and I ... we drink a lot of coffee." At several earlier points in the film, scenes that open up like this in the pool hall may last for several minutes, but right after the coffee line we get a jarring cut to the beach. There are several such jarring cuts which seem to deliberately "rough up" the surface of the smooth classical Hollywood narrative: that is, the film isn't avant-garde or experimental, it isn't a profoundly subversive take on the H'wood narrative--it simply wants to render it less invisible, less taken for granted.

Any Lerner fans out there? What else is worth catching?

Velázquez of the Day

A painting from one of the 17th century's great masters.























The Needlewoman (1640). A simple portrait in whose details we can find a template for the cosmos. Faint brushstrokes establish the play of movement in hands & shoulders. Compare.

The highlighted bust: a robust physical reminder in the middle of drab clothing and dutiful work. Our bodies are not ephemeral; and as Wilheilm Reich and Robert Bresson might have agreed after a long conversation (or a short one), we don't have bodies, we are our bodies. Appearance is only the first step towards recognition of immanence. Compare.










Intent eyes, downcast--concentrated upon labor, and mysterious and complete in themselves to the viewer. Here is evidence of a psyche that is opaque and inscrutable to us. Compare.

A Canon Tally

"If one took all the masters and models through whom the Filmkritik directors explored their own work, and if one looked at selected works in retrospect next to each other, one could very quickly see the points of aesthetic convergence, and through these roughly sketch out the Filmkritik-style. The next step would be to describe the differences between the individual filmmakers. The great unifying figure, the director whom all honour to the same degree, is Jean Marie-Straub. Among the classical masters, they love Rossellini, Renoir, and Ford; they discover Grémillon and Ophüls again (for themselves); they define their work ethos via the pragmatism of Hawks, Tourneur and Sirk among the acknowledged directors, and in their writings seek proximity to Daves, Lerner, Fejos, and Hurwitz. Among their contemporaries they surround themselves with Pialat, van der Keuken, and Nestler."

-- Olaf Möller.

The trio of "classical masters" and those three 'pragmatists' of the American cinema I have covered fair enough. But Straub & Huillet, as mentioned here recently, I've still seen too little of. Off the top of my head: Grémillon, only one film; Ophüls, I'm still missing a couple of big ones (like Letter to an Unknown Woman); Daves, two or three films; Lerner, only one film; Fejos, no films; Hurwitz, no films; Pialat, six or seven; JVDK, nothing; Nestler, nothing.

Damn, I have work to do!

I plan on getting more regular, and extensive, posts up soon, but I still have problems with my DVD player--I think this is a software problem, as at least the brand new DVD-burner works just fine. All I've been waiting forever to do is take screen caps off of my computer ...

Modesty, Penguins, Thought Bubbles

Speaking of Losey, I haven't watched his Modesty Blaise (yet). But I did come across some great pulpish covers to the series that spawned the movie (try here and here). I love old, brittle paperbacks and comics--and I really love the covers, with with this range of (broadly) mid-20th century design. (For example, the sorts of things that Germano Facetti did at Penguin in the 1960s, the middle two covers being examples below.) The superb blogger Owen Hatherley sometimes writes about this sort of design. The basic illustrative invention on display in any number of 1970s-80s newsprint comic books, and the free play of panels across pages that could sometimes mark really interesting ones, attract me still, even though my days as a "comic book fan" are more than a decade past. (It wasn't long after I gave up or "grew out of" comics that I discovered films.) The fourth image below is from a '70s comic called Iron Wolf (which I've never read or even heard of, but I somehow stumbled upon that blog entry and it sounded fascinating), and the last image is of course the famous Pogo one ...

Losey's Klein

Michel Ciment: "For the grand rafle you used a lot of Jewish extras."

Joseph Losey: "Not only that--but many people of the crew had a direct experience of the period. Trauner for instance was a Hungarian Jew who had to work in a clandestine fashion when he was set-designing for Carné. The extraordinary casting director, Margot Chapellier, lost many of her family in the camps. The head of the laboratory at LTC, Claude Lyon, lost his mother this way too. We went to Jewish organizations for the final round-up of the Jews at the vel d'hiv. From them I had several thousand extras. On the first day of shooting at the stadium, quite a number of the older people just had to give up because they found it so close to what they had experienced that they couldn't stand it emotionally. They came to me and said 'We don't want any money but we're turning in our yellow stars because we simply can't stand and watch this for three days.'"

(Michel Ciment, Conversations with Losey, London/NY: Methuen. 1985. p.346-7.)

* * *

With a DVD viewing of Mr. Klein last night, I think I'm finally starting to get Joseph Losey. I've basically liked the handful of films I've seen by him but I never could find a way in, totally past that old cliché of 'appreciation more than affection.' Now things are starting to make more sense. Thematically speaking, Losey seems to gravitate to protagonists who slowly, desperately come to realize (if not completely comprehend) the structure and parameters of the prison-narrative they've been built into. In Mr. Klein it's about a certain obsession with one's own (very civilized) complicity in utter social & political savagery.

At several points in the film, Alain Delon appears in a crowd, long shot, and our eyes are drawn to him (still) while the people around him are mainly in motion. The ocular attraction of the individual that we hold for Delon in this instances is grafted onto the more fleeting instances where Delon's Robert Klein spies the other Robert Klein, who (unwittingly?) flees our protagonist's grasp as easily as horror movie villains stalk victims by merely walking--it's irrational, but the film insists on our acceptance of it.

I'd have to look at the film again, but I got the feeling that the colors in Delon's wardrobe were slowly leeched out during the course of the film--when we first see him he's in a rich, mustard- or rust-colored coat. By the end of the film he's wearing a pale trench coat, as though this experience is draining him metaphorically as a character, literally as visual screen presence. (Very possibly my perception is off, however.)

After the movie was over I saw that Jesus Franco's Vampyros Lesbos was coming on some channel last night (Sundance, I think), and so I decided I'd watch a little bit of it just to see what it's like (thus far I'm not sold on Franco). Over the course of the last night, the anti-semitic drag act in Mr. Klein has blended a bit in my memory with the the wordless lesbian performance we see in the beginning of Vampyros ...

... Dan Callahan, writing a Senses of Cinema Great Directors profile on Losey, thinks little of Mr. Klein: "though acclaimed by some, [it] is a laborious tale of the French Occupation told at a funereal pace. The customary nervousness of his camera had turned clumsy and awkward by this point." Do any EL readers agree!?

Andy Rector on The Lawless.

* * *

MC: "If you had not had your experience of McCarthy in America, you might not have been able to recreate so well this atmosphere of indifference and fear."

JL: "Certainly, because nobody was prepared to take a stand and say 'No.' Because if they did, then they were immediately blacklisted. The ultimate of that kind of attitude is what is happening now, torture as policy. Not torture to get information, because the police already have the information. Torture them long beyond the point where there would be any information that they could possibly give if they had it. The aim is to make everybody on the street so frightened that they won't even remotely engage in any kind of activity."

(p. 348)

* * *

MC: "Klein II must belong to the resistance. There's no other way of explaining his strategy."

JL: "Of course. That's why the girl works in a munitions factory. I wanted to show that he was a Rothschild type of Jew, who had musical gatherings and female companions, but who was at the same time committed. I'm thinking of Jean Lurçat, for example,a very cultured man, a remarkable painter, who became a leader in the Resistance. For if you are sensitive and enlightened, you make certain decisions in certain circumstances, you can't be an average bourgeois who eats at La Coupole. As Brecht said in Galileo, 'You can't pretend you haven't seen what you have seen.'"

(p. 354)

VHS Eulogy

An inferior technology nobody wants; people have not even bothered to say goodbye to VHS, and why should they? Except in the sense that a standard video dub appears--at this point--to be more resilient and lasting than a standard consumer DVD-R, there are no advantages offered by VHS (as a medium) to the average person, and hence almost no more champions for its cause.

But it has a history, and I and many other cinephiles helped forge our cinephilia from this bastard thing, home viewing on television sets. The first good video store I knew was a local branch of Potomac Video, a local DC/Virginia/Maryland chain with pretty decent selection. There was one a five minute drive from my house, and I remember that when I was 16 I went to see a movie with my Dad at the second-run theater, and on the way back we stopped by Potomac, where we signed up for membership, and I checked out two videotapes--The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and (this was the really important one) Days of Heaven. Rentals were $2.50 for a week, and through my junior and senior years of high school I made a near regular habit of two rentals a week. (The other sources of film-viewing at this time were commercial theaters and the occasional foray into DC's small but competent repertory scene, as well as my growing collection of VHS tapes recorded off of television.) The "video store" had, until this time, meant Blockbuster and its ilk--now I had films to watch that I'd only been reading about for a few years: Godard, Tarkovsky, Tsui Hark. I remember renting and watching Playtime with my friend Sahar down in my basement-room one evening, and we laughed hysterically and we're moved by this profound comedy, and it was not long after that that I started calling Playtime my favorite film. I didn't even get to see it on celluloid until 4-5 years later. I can vouch--Playtime, as much as it should be seen on the big screen, really is a durable work of art.

When I was a senior in college, someone else I knew, Maureen, left my roommates & I a few videotapes that she no longer wanted--she was also from the DC area, and used to work at another branch of Potomac Video, and had purchased these trashy tapes for a buck apiece when her store was selling them off. I still have the tapes and have watched them--Enzo G. Castellari's 1990: Bronx Warriors and Steve Carver's Angie Dickinson vehicle Big Bad Mama.

Nothing can replace--and nothing should supplant--the experience of the cinema; but VHS and the presence of movies on the tube did offer a new set of possibilities for the cinema to allow people to relate with one another, directly or not, and this way is simply continued (possibly perfected?) by DVDs. But the idea of buying a packaged object with which is something that is not "of the future," and when DVD dies out too, it will only be as a facet of the blip of home viewing tradition initiated by videotape and laserdisc. Tomorrow we pay for a streaming video, or an account with storage space on a server somewhere, or something else ...

I can't be the only cinephile out there who's interested in rescuing rejects from these videotape purges, these trash bins, $1-5 for sometimes great and sometimes rare (unavailable on DVD!) titles. I can't be the only cinephile for whom VHS still offers some attraction, because sometimes the home viewing experience for me is not about approximating the best picture and sound possible, with proper aspect ratio even!--it may also be about reviving phantoms of what you already knew and saw, what you long only hoped to see, compromises intact, and simply keeping alive a trickle of an imperfect practice that helped open your eyes when you were an adolescent.

Quote of the Day (IMDB Special)

The Comment:

"I am aware that this has won awards. There is something to this, that this film, like Titanic, scratches some Emo-self pitying itch that a better film never could without letting us be aware of it and sickened at ourselves.

"For my part, I say everything you can learn about absolute control of shots and minimalistic pedestrian acting, you should just see the later film Wall Street, it's very controlled, and it's actually about money, instead of about idiocy." (Final paragraphs, here.)

The Film:

L'Argent. Not joking.

Death (but not of cinema)

I'm not particularly well-acquainted with the films of Straub and Huillet, just a small handful, but the news of Danièle Huillet's recent death comes as a painful blow for those who would hope to make a better world (and make or advocate art that can help in that struggle). I can't say anything meaningful about Huillet's passing right now--and anyway Andy has already said a few words very well, so I can only endorse what he wrote, from my vantage point, which is less informed about the Straubs than his.

Who in cinema has left us these last few years (in this PB, Post-Bresson, age)? Andre De Toth, Jean Rouch, Walerian Borowczyk, Stan Brakhage, Maurice Pialat, to name a few that hit hard for me. Giants who aren't walking the earth any longer. But I suppose the cinema would not be the cinema without the threat of death and loss looming all around it--inside and outside of it. That's something John Ford might have understood better than anyone, and the Straubs, great admirers of Ford, surely had a enviable grasp of this basic truth. I find something oddly compelling in the fact that, at this moment, this by-all-reports fundamentally symbiotic filmmaking couple is now straddling the divide between the living (Straub) and the dead (Huillet). Jean-Marie Straub will never read this, but, regardless, I offer these images of Fordian communion ...

Book Meme

I don't normally do these things, but (a) Matt tagged me and (b) this one's harmless. You may have seen this meme making its rounds all over already. Books are my great weakness as far as spending money & taking up apartment space--my ideal home would basically be a library with a bed & a kitchen. I don't own thousands of books, but I have enough to groan at the thought of my next move (whenever that will be).

1. One book that changed your life?

When I was a junior in high school I read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which got the ball rolling (at first only slowly) to undo the damage of the previous 3-4 years of intellectual stagnation brought on by the middle of adolescence.

2. One book that you have read more than once?

The Communist Manifesto. (Since Matt mentioned a Barthes book, I could also choose my own: Mythologies.) I'm not much of a "re-reader" in the sense that I read a book from cover to cover multiple times. I have done that, of course, but because there are so many titles I feel compelled to read, I'm more likely to revisit passages of an old favorite rather than go through the whole thing again. I tend to tell myself I'll go through the whole thing again a little bit later in life. (I do the same with films.)

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

This question is impossible! Let me sketch a few scenarios. Am I deserted on the island with friends or acquaintances--i.e., we all survived the same shipwreck and are together on the beach? Then, if not a survival manual (that's really the #1 answer in all cases, but subverts the spirit of the question), I'd want something in which I could indulge contemplation and solitude amidst these people ... maybe I could finally read The Tale of Genji. Am I deserted all alone but have a big box of supplies, some booze, and reason to believe that I'll be picked up in a few months? Then I'd want a big, vaguely "literary" potboiler of a novel to pass the days and read several times--a really rich, compulsive page-turner, which could be The Count of Monte Cristo (if I'm in a 19th-century novel mood) or maybe something by China Miéville (if I want something weirder). If it's just me on the island, probably facing a gradual death, then I think I may want a book where I can gain comfort from my solitude--on the island and in the cosmos--say, W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, or a book of Paul Bowles' short stories.

4. One book that made you cry?

Elective Affinities. I think it's even sadder than Young Werther, at least the translations that I've read. It's one of my very favorite books.

5. One book that made you laugh?

I never finished it, I took it on a train ride from New York to my parents' house years ago, and only got halfway before accidentally leaving it behind ... but I remember thinking that Booth Tarkington's Seventeen was one of the funniest things I've ever read.

6. One book you wish you'd written?

How about Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema?

7. One book you wish had never been written?

Nobody seems to like this question, and for good reason. Can I make the socially responsible choice and say Mein Kampf (thereby suggesting that I wish to use my hypothetical powers to avert Nazism and the Holocaust)? If I wanted to be snide I could point out one of those screenwriting or "how to break into Hollywood filmmaking" manuals, but I don't know the titles of any ...

8. One book you are reading currently?

I'm in the middle of several, but the that I started most recently was Parker Tyler's Underground Film: A Critical History.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

There are a million--but the most imposing/inviting one that I actually have on my bookshelves is the Donald M. Frame translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel. I'll get to it sooner or later.

10. Pass it on.

Whoever might want to do this meme should just do it, and link to it in the comments so we can read. I don't want to pick just three people.