Sicilia!

I've seen, I think, seven Straub/Huillet films now (shorts & features), but not until last night did I have a reasonably optimal screening experience--projected on celluloid, the print was decent, the theater acceptable, and I wasn't suffering from any lingering colds or exhaustion. I have a weird track record where I show up to the couple's films very tired after a long day, or having come down with a bug, attending the screenings at all only because of their rarity. (Later in the evening, during another film, I admit I started to yawn and slouch over--the body wasn't cooperating!) Sicilia! may be greater than other S/H films I've caught, or maybe it's simply benefitted from having a fair and proper go-round. All of the S/H films I've seen have been good, interesting, even great--but this one hit me very, very deeply.














As I hope to teach film one day I would love to show the sequence (at the end of reel one and the beginning of reel two) when Sicilia! becomes silent--just after the train car conversation, before Silvestro reaches his mother--and we just see a few tracking shots from the train. These tracking shots and pans of the Sicilian landscape (they reappear a few more times) are breathtaking, and the one from the train (with Mt. Etna, I believe?) would be a perfect comparison to Robert Breer's great film Fuji in a class ... to show how the static integrity of a b&w Straubian image compares to the dynamic fluctuations of Breer's photography + animation--how both achievements are great in their own ways, how they may work in tandem to express something about perception (in this case, the simple act of looking out the window from a train ride, with an important mountain in the distance) and even cognition ... Breer's images articulate (among other things) the way the eye creates an conception, or a conceptual image, out of disparate and conjoined images; I think S/H's indicates something about constancy versus change (the implacable lonely peak in the background, the rapid movement of the Mediterranean brush in the foreground). Straub and Huillet are ("they" were) filmmakers who delight in words, in conversation: they may be called dreadfully boring or any number of bad things, but "empty" formalism is a battleaxe no sane person can charge them with. And it's so refreshing to see these meaningful, anti-verisimilitudinal conversations laced together with shots of landscape. Powerful and intelligent images, great natural beauty, the establishment of human contact as monumental as the sensual consideration of terrain of countless generations (and gods) ...

The Cassavetes Letters, #3

(The first and second letters.)

Dear Matt,

That saucepan is an axiom of the cinema! Let’s forget performance for just a moment—if one wants to talk about how Cassavetes allegedly “captures life,” we need to discuss the treatment of food and drink and meals! When I was a kid and saw an episode of Star Trek on television, I asked my Dad why we never saw the characters eating. “Well, we don’t want to see them eat. We want to see them work.” But that’s not a natural predilection, is it?, that has to be taught, inculcated just like so much of what we assume cinematic material “must” or “should” show us, fulfilling the desires we’ve been told we have. Like the Oedipal complex—it’s not that it’s universally true through time and space, it’s that it has been made true in certain cases through means of production, circulation, repetition. A cinema that gets us thinking or remembering or imagining for a few moments a glass of red wine and spaghetti, about an amiably awkward breakfast after a long shift … that can be special simply because its presence is rare. In Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica contrives hunger for his father and son characters. I’m not saying one has to reject De Sica for this reason, only that even the most seemingly heartfelt humanist moments of, say, hunger and fellowship are usually swept up in a much larger operation. Perhaps they’re swept up in Cassavetes, too—but it’s not that kind of operation, not that kind of story or image or space. His are something else.

Neither are they like the bottle of liquor passed around in Deliverance, on the characters’ first night on the river, where Boorman and Zsigmond follow the bottle around (cutting off character’s heads in the frame, if I recall) as it’s offered and passed from man to man. That’s a gesture, a line: a visual flourish that says something about John Boorman’s “universe” (and Vilmos Zsigmond’s, and 1970s America’s, and who knows what else). But we know it is operatively different from the saucepan in A Woman Under the Influence because it feels different: the emotions it triggers, the way it triggers them, are informed by other aspects of the film. We might say for instance that in Deliverance the clean liquor-line of the camera is in fact a last hurrah of camaraderie before the more harrowing events of the second day on the river: very very roughly, it’s the calm before the storm. That’s its simple, small narrative operation. The saucepan-line in Under the Influence, however, has no similarity in function beyond the fact that it brings people together in a shot under the aegis of communal consumption. We can see from the activity of the characters that the action isn’t about finding a dramatic point to emphasize, foreshadow, deepen (or clarify)—it is instead to get a sense of bustle: chaos of a family, of the way this Longhetti house runs (open to strangers; a balancing act between Mabel’s Mabelness and Nick’s simplistic good love and limited mirth). It’s about character rather than plot, but that’s too crude a way to put it, for how is it “about” these characters? Clearly the shot like that doesn’t do much to establish or draw out Nick/Mabel/whoever in three-dimensional, novelistic form. It doesn’t make them well-rounded, it doesn’t make them more or less sympathetic. It does establish a program of graphic movement; a rhythm as seen in the surrounding legwork and gestures (surrounding/anticipating this all important breakfast-spaghetti saucepan!), identifying the characters not so much as successfully literary transformations (conceptual-verbal trinkets) but as individualized and interacting auras of movement and visual-aural persona whose powerfully, suggestively sketched (just sketched) behaviors accumulate the gravity of personality over (cine-)time. Cassavetes mastered a own way of rendering Character onscreen, cinematically, in a non-literary way. This is part of what makes him so special. Even when he wasn’t being particularly revolutionary, Cassavetes was simply remembering things that almost every forces around him sought to forget, erase, suppress.

And anyway, Matt, I have no doubt bored and befuddled you enough with my eight-mile sentences. Food—let’s get back to that, to illustrate a point—and as you mentioned in your letter, there are also alcohol and tobacco (and caffeine) as initiators of social experience, and of individual experience. Consumption is sometimes overlooked in discussions of cinema, which is in its dominant format, after all, one big commercial product to be consumed.

A tangent, because when it comes to Cassavetes a tangent is always a fine thing to go down for a while—let’s pretend it’s three in the morning and we’ve had eight shots of single malt apiece—have you ever seen Big Night, which I have not seen and have heard has some of the most delicious images of food and cooking? How does it stand up in this age of constant cable cooking shows? And if my inadvertant alliteration didn’t just make you choke on your coffee, perplexed, what can you tell me about La Grande bouffe, if you’ve seen it (again, I haven’t)? Because there’s plenty of discussion of sex and sexuality in the cinema, but what about that other element that is supposed to separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom: taste, literal taste, the enjoyment and savor of food? Because as surely as one could write about gender relations, desire, the sensual/sensuous body in Cassavetes, one could—and should—write about the way that the sensuous intake of calories and substances operates on the viewer and her psychology.
What do these images mean to you?





































































Because every time I ask myself this question (as you know I’ve mulled over this letter far too long) I find myself coming to different things, different emphases, each time: the establishment of routines; the structure of (economic) power which runs amidst these routines (a real and political presence in the Cassavetes world); the pleasure of these routines; the pleasure of an individual moment of consumption in explicit contrast to routine (capital-r Routine?); the utter drabness of modern (American) business life; the secretary as the harem-corollary to the ‘60s playboy swinging girl; the way hangovers express themselves in our bodies.

Substances nourishing or otherwise are interesting in films because, among other reasons, they ground a certain basic corporeality—this other corporeality to stand beside ‘sexuality’—and in this way depictions of eating, drinking, smoking, etc. share something with the way cinema, or art in general, deals with sex and violence. (It’s about material, “content,” that may—but needn’t—inspire strong affective reactions in viewers.) At any rate when we see a character smoke, eat, or drink we are drawn to their bodily reality in some way, the illusion of their physically manifest presence on the screen, the reminder that the emulsions or pixels suggest of something ‘filmed,’ and so ultimately I think there’s something very Bazinian-ontological about almost any cinematographic representation of consumption, because it indicates, sometimes it clearly records, a reality of physical processes that strengthens the illusion of life in the frame.

1) Life is a process.
2) Life flows.

And because the processes flows, continually, well, this is how Cassavetes thinks and works and this is why he creates his uniquely “lifelike” characters (gradually, over cine-time, remember!). And blood flows too, which indicates the significance of Cosmo Vitelli’s wounds in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, because just as important as eating, drinking, and smoking are in Cassavetes (as signs of life, celebrating or simply surviving, of sociality, vitality), is the idea of life lost. One irretrievable flow is time (Love Streams experiments with this a bit: it’s the Cassavetes film that “looks back” the most, I think), another is blood, and in fact everything is flowing—love, hate, compassion, ichors, anything and nothing in particular. I don’t know if you’ll want to pick up on this idea: blood, flow, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie—if you don’t, that’s perfectly all right; but I think I may come back to it myself when I reply to your next letter.

Yours,

Zach

Progression

Detritus

It's Red Desert that opens with Monica Vitti acquiring food for her son, right? I'm not misremembering films, am I?

Pedro Costa's No Quarto da Vanda strikes me as one helluva masterpiece. O Sangue and Casa de Lava are promising films; but Vanda is something very strange and rare. Better than Colossal Youth even?

Machinery, industrial landscape, the slums, the exploited, the forgotten: Antonioni's Red Desert, Gianni Amelio's Lamerica (also Stolen Children--and as for forgotten children, Wim Wenders' Alice in the Cities), Sohrab Shahid Saless' Still Life, Tarr's work, Kusturica's Underground, the anti-state and post-communist detritus of Makavejev (Sweet Movie) or Angelopoulos (Ulysses' Gaze). Something links all these films in my head. Need to see--Wajda's Man of Marble, Skolimowski's Deep End, more early Mike Leigh.

The lament of civilization's destruction, i.e., change: mischaracterized in a bad political gesture by a great artist in Manoel de Oliveira's A Talking Picture (somewhat sabotaged by John Malkovich, whose presence I can't yet reconcile with the rest of the film). The cinema--modernity--gets analogized to the train; what's it mean that Oliveira puts his Western civilization voyage on a cruise ship?

Anyway, back to what I've been seeing lately. Occasionally in the comments to blog posts or message boards, in the wake of the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni, people will sometimes say things like, "Now that the serious days of the arthouses are over, all we have is commercial crap like Transformers." The implication is that nothing is happening of worth, as though the 1960s "were" L'Avventura and Persona and the 2000s "are" Live Free or Die Hard.

Well, among other things, Pedro Costa is happening. And there's a NYC retrospective as we speak. Ossos (which I haven't caught--tomorrow, I hope) gives way to In Vanda's Room, whose impoverished and drug-addicted protagonists are relocated into government housing for Colossal Youth. I think Vanda may be the most beautiful film shot on video I've ever seen. Costa's long, cumulative opus (structured editing doesn't seem to play a part in its impact) relies on the rich density of compacted time--it took two years to shoot (and one to edit, so perhaps there's more to the editing than I was able to discern on initial encounter), and the resulting material plays for a definite period of time, that is, we can sense what has changed in the community from beginning to end, but I don't know if we're really able to figure out how long the narrative takes. There's no narrative "anchoring," in fact, during parts of this film I thought to myself that I had no idea how far along into the running time we were--a sensation I haven't felt since I watched Tony Conrad's The Flicker! Georges de la Tour-like lighting makes for some of the most eye-popping scenes, where yellow-orange candlelight casts only the barest, starkest warm light in a field of black as the junkies shoot up and ruminate on the impending destructing of their neighborhood, Fontainhas. I'm fairly squeamish, too, and though I don't have a particular problem with needles, heroin has always kind of freaked me out, so watching some of the scenes was very, very difficult--yet their matter-of-factness, and even their unsentimental poetry (as as in one of those de la Tour-like scenes, when one junkie is trying to find a neck vein on another and unsuccessfully attacking it with an old needle), ground these passages in something almost primal: the needs of people who are trapped and yet aware of their traps, and to some extent acceptant of them: "This is the life we choose." It is, and it isn't, and Costa's film--showing individual behaviors and juxtaposing them with the encroaching outside demolition of the district--captures this dialectic. It's very moving, very terrifying. And in its own way it (and Costa's other work) contributes to my personal lineage or network of decaying Western(ish) civilization, too, the intertwined destinies of buildings and ruins and development and human beings of differing classes--there's a great lecture series or college course to be formed out of some or all of the films I've mentioned in this post, I think ...

Quote of the Day

"A dialectical view of history strengthens us in the conclusion that our relationship to the past can never be that of univocal moral judgments but always involves what amount to structurally determinate ambiguities, historical mixed feelings. I have tried to articulate elsewhere the ways in which the kinds of judgments we make on works of art--as progressive or reactionary, as ideological document or formal artifact--vary themselves in function of our practical distance from the past and from history: a really complete act of historical apprehension would indeed involve all of these apparently contradictory judgments in turn, if not simultaneously, for the works of the art of the past are always all these things at once, class apologia just as much as sheer formal invention, and the realities they express involve both positive and negative impulses together, both "progressive" and "reactionary" elements."

--Fredric Jameson, introduction to the English edition of Henri Arvon's Marxist Aesthetics

"Landmarks in the History of Taste"

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote up a dissenting opinion on Ingmar Bergman in the New York Times. In a certain sense it's refreshing to see that someone is willing to write about Bergman (not an anti-intellectual hatchet job, that is) at this moment and not be a huge Bergman fan. As something of a Bergman-skeptic I felt awash in a sea of much agreed-upon appreciations on blogs, websites, newspapers that decided that Bergman was not only a major figure in the history of cinema, but that he was one of the absolute elite, untouchable by anyone still living, possessing a body of work that far outshone almost anyone else in terms of universal human import and complex, profound, probing themes. (I do not share in any of these assessments.) But in fact I think what makes Rosenbaum's piece stick out is precisely one of the areas where he's not quite correct: for after Bergman's death what did we get but a great deal of heartfelt appreciation of the filmmaker? So, is Ingmar Bergman's star dimming, waning, descending? Maybe, probably, it had some--5 or 10 years ago. But I don't think it's stayed lower. Bergman's presence on DVD and probably a number of other sociocultural reasons I've no inclination or gift to parse out have, if anything, confirmed his stature.

Rosenbaum writes in the Times:

So where did the outsized reputation of Mr. Bergman come from? At least part of his initial appeal in the ’50s seems tied to the sexiness of his actresses and the more relaxed attitudes about nudity in Sweden; discovering the handsome look of a Bergman film also clearly meant encountering the beauty of Maj-Britt Nilsson and Harriet Andersson.

One could say this about pretty much the entirety of the European New Waves, loosely defined. Beautiful women (not uncommonly held up as icons of a less "enlightened" gaze) abound in 1960s Godard, Jancsó, Rivette, Bertolucci, or Antonioni, don't they? So if a little bit of sex helps sell the Art (and that does include genuinely great art), well, Bergman was hardly alone. And anyway, wasn't this kind of openness about audiences grooving on the sexual dimension of arthouse films something Rosenbaum himself dismissed as cynical about a decade ago:

Von Trier may be deeply cynical, but he's much less so than Terrence Rafferty was when he recently wrote in the New Yorker, "If Breaking the Waves becomes a hit, von Trier will have proved that the American audience for foreign films wants today precisely what it wanted in the boom years of the 50s and early 60s: nudity plus theology." A little later he added, "It's tempting to attribute the decline of the European film to the increase, over the years, in the erotic explicitness of American movies." When he says "decline" and "the European film" it can only be in the context of the American marketplace--specifically the European films selected by American distributors, the tip of the iceberg Rafferty seems happy to accept as the whole. Apparently he believes the only reason films are made in Europe is to satisfy Americans who want to see tits and ass mixed in with their theology, and if these needs can't be met European filmmakers might as well hand over their assignments to "pure" American artists working free of such pressures (say, Brian De Palma in Mission: Impossible, a recent Rafferty favorite).

I can't recall much nudity or theology in European movies such as Mon oncle, Breathless, The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, Last Year at Marienbad, Eclipse, Ashes and Diamonds, or The Magician--to cite only a few of my favorites that did well during those "boom years" (alongside such commercial flops as Pickpocket, Lola, and Dreyer's Gertrud). So I guess if American viewers are the nincompoops Rafferty claims, they must have had other dumb reasons for going to these films.

Actually I think Rosenbaum is more on the right track now than then; nudity as well as sex appeal (sometimes separately) played a big part--and continue to play a big part--in attracting audiences to art films. Cynical Terrence Rafferty may have been, but he wasn't totally without a point! Sometimes this was not intended on the filmmakers' parts (e.g., a Danish domestic drama from '59 could have been re-edited and dressed-up into a little sex comedy for American audiences in '61), but sometimes the filmmakers were complicit in the allure--and, one fold further, might have even consciously alluded to or critiqued aspects of it (Godard's famous sliding camera over the bare ass of la Bardot in Contempt). But the fact remains--if Bergman's popularity in the arthouse was conditioned partly by his beautiful actresses, so was everyone else's. (And the question also remains--should we really consider audiences "nincompoops" if they go to arthouse theaters for reasons both "high" and "low"?)

Rosenbaum continues (NYT):

If the French New Wave addressed a new contemporary world, Mr. Bergman’s talent was mainly devoted to preserving and perpetuating an old one.

But the preservation of the old world in a given time is usually a function of the present's activities, no? If Bergman was presenting us with the concerns of 19th and early 20th century theater and literature (and I think he was), he was still necessarily doing it in a contemporary context--he had to have been--and thus treating concerns that enough people, enough places, must have found worthwhile. Truthfully I'm not sure if any artist is ever "of the times" more than any other. The vanguard, the onward push of history only makes sense if that which exists prior to it is still around, still matters. (And the Nouvelle vague, addressing a new contemporary world, was no great shakes, politically--les Cahiers had its share of religious and right-wing sympathies in those early years. If we're supposed to laud artists for their fearless embrace of the Now and the New, in manners presumably compatible with our own, I'd say I must reject a lot of 1960s art cinema.)

Above all, his movies aren’t so much filmic expressions as expressions on film.

Stephen Dwoskin said that Raymond Durgnat showed up at the theater and bypassed the question "What is film?" by saying "This is a film!"

This sentiment should be put onto plaques and sold at concession stands.

Frankly, I don't think Bergman can touch the likes of Dreyer or Bresson as innovators in film form, as investigators of the medium and its materiality. I personally hold these latter two up much higher than the Swede as all-around artists. Yet, Bergman's "expressions on film" are no less cinematic, no less visual/aural, than Lancelot du lac or Vampyr. The cinema is an instrument of modernity (and its wake) and consequently the modernist attention to medium as field of investigation itself is something highly applicable to film. (And though we're dealing with a medium of mechanical reproduction, film is not just reproduction: it has material presence, it has a little bit of aura about it too--we can not have expected Walter Benjamin to travel this road, but we should recognize it by now.) OK. But pragmatically using the cinema as a literal medium, that is, a way to get to something else, express something else (the medium basically unimportant as long as it satisfies this function) is not an awful thing because they are centuries of history and craft barreling into this thing, Cinema, at high speeds and saying, "Modernity bedamned, give me a story, concept, or emotion--not a film strip!" It may not make for the greatest art, depending on tastes. Maybe it makes for the most "universal" art to some people. At any rate, the most recent Bergman I've seen, The Virgin Spring, struck me as a fairly "medium-invisible" explication or expression of themes: the logos of ideas conveyed by drama, presented (not incompetently) not simply as filmed theater but by relatively conventional patterns of filmic storytelling. (The second half has some striking imagery too.) And I think it's a better film than Persona, which is where I think Bergman tried to make reflexive and modernist forays into the psyche of the viewer and the workings of the medium itself (and, for me, fails miserably). Whatever Bergman's strengths finally are, I suspect they are not served by vanguardist treatments of modernity but of the continued tradition of certain older patterns within modernity. I think this is why he might still matter, which is not to say that he automatically matters, that he's beyond any debate, that he is necessarily more universal or timeless. We certainly cannot, should not, assume the last. (Less "great," less prolific, less spiritual, but I think Walerian Borowczyk actually harvests from some of the same fields--a premodern past beckoning within the trappings of modernity.) Are Bergman's works "landmarks in the history of taste"? Of course they are--all very hallowed and very reviled works are. (And I'm sure Rosenbaum would not dispute this.) But that doesn't prove the facts of their merits or demerits, either, does it? Just as Godard may have had his heyday in the 1960s: his reception is important historically, helps us understand his art, but his worth is ultimately not correlative to his acknowledge relevance or acceptance (or dismissal) at any given time or place.

Anyway cinema isn't actually a thing; it has no essence: it is a huge and unmappable system of possibilities. And Bergman's paths were one of those possibilities. "Expression on film?" Maybe. But--still--this is a film.

Odds & Ends

Going for quantity over quality this time around, on my last visit to Washington D.C. I hit up both wings of the National Gallery of Art, the African Art Museum, the Freer, and the Sackler in the space of about five hours. Whenever something stood out (as in the almost hyper-proto-Turneresque painting above: Alessandro Magnasco, The Baptism of Christ, c. 1740) I stopped to mull for several minutes. But mostly I sped through the museums, relatively speaking, just trying to refine my overview of what the city of my (later) teenage years still had in store. I hadn't been to any of those museums in at least a year.

* * *

Tonight I visited what must be the most delicious block in Queens, if not all of New York City. Roosevelt Ave, between 71st and 72nd. It has Zabb, where I've had many a fine meal (the best ones have tended to start at midnight with a motley assortment of byo booze, ending in calorific stupor between 2 and 3am). But this evening I also went to Burmese Cafe, the last of a certain circle of food-adventurous friends of mine to do so, where I sampled tea leaf salad, ginger salad (refreshing, thicker than I expected), sour pork & soy curry (tastes dark--and delicious), chicken & vegetable noodles (very eatable but routine compared to rest of meal), fried eel (slightly chewy, but damn good anyway), golden triangles (mini vegetable samosas), gram fritters, a curry fish dish (ohhh), and fried bitter melon. Every bite a delicious little explosion in the mouth, especially the sui generis flavors of tea leaf salad and the bitter melon (neither of which I'd tried before). Best of the rest were probably the pork and the spicy orange sauce that accompanied the fritters/triangles and also the noodles (where it was mixed with cabbage). All washed down at a leisurely pace with some Red Stripe. Understand that I sampled these dishes, I didn't devour huge portions of them--no more than a few spoonfuls of each, which is why I was able to try so many things. I'd recommend to any New Yorkers to do the same, at least on their first trip out here.

After Burmese Cafe--which may be the only all-out solely-Burmese joint in NYC, or so I read--we decided to hit up UFC, Unidentified Frying Chickens, a Korean fried chicken joint just a few doors down from BC & Zabb. Ordering a small order of spicy wings & drumsticks for six of us (a little more than one piece per person) was a fantastic dessert--if you like dessert meaty & spicy, that is. And dessert or no, it was pretty delicious. Best Korean fried chicken in the city? Probably not. (One in our party at least had a preferred place in Koreatown.) Great fried chicken in Jackson Heights? Definitely. (Note: the place has a definite "chain" vibe and I would probably not order anything on their menu aside from the chicken and radishes, save maybe the sweet potato fries, which looked tempting.) But the fact that the storefronts to Zabb, Burmese Cafe, and UFC all exist on the same twenty yards of sidewalk is pretty incredible. It is to inexpensive NYC restaurants what Bergman & Antonioni's close-together deaths are to film culture: something extremely rare which should not go unnoticed.

* * *

Speaking of Bergman & Antonioni--yes, I still do want to post about them. But I should remark that I actually have a very "troubled past" with Bergman. I respect him as an artist and historical figure of course, but, truthfully, I have a low opinion of some of his major films (Persona especially), and because of this low opinion I have not been very good about seeing very much of his prolific work. His unfortunate death is giving me a reason to reconsider his oeuvre, try to be generous about it, try to re-examine my opinions (check old conclusions, scout for unwarranted prejudices). This need for re-examination is also because a lot of people whose opinions I respect have great esteem for Bergman. Antonioni poses this problem a little (just a bit) as well--though I feel much more personally aligned with his work than Bergman's, even if I feel like, say, Blow-Up too is not so great a film--so I just wanted to set the stage for my (hopefully) forthcoming examinations. But neither of these filmmakers, giants though they were & are, move me to the same extent that, say, the hypothetical one-two punch of Godard and Rivette's deaths would move me.

* * *

A quick food question to any readers--how do you pronounce 'lychee'? According to dictionary.com it's lee-chee, but I know a lot of people who say lye-chee. Some of these lye-pronouncers are East Asian and have even held this over me as authority on the matter--but I learned lee-chee from some Vietnamese girls I befriended in high school who used to keep it in their lockers and pass it around for snacks between classes (which is when I first had the fruit), so I've never been convinced. Just today it came up again so I'm confused ... (Actually, I did a little basic Googling and found this, which seems to explain the matter. But I would have guessed Vietnamese people would have had a pronunciation closer to the Cantonese rather than Mandarin? So I suppose this guess would be wrong? Aghh ...)

That Face

Lucia Bosé, Cronaca di un amore (1950). Star of several other films (not enough well-known classics), almost none of which I've seen her in. Beautiful but singular: not bland, but rather a being of shadowy private intensities. More soon, I hope, on Antonioni and perhaps Bergman too--but anyone who glimpses the infrequently updated From the Clouds will know I'm slow in getting around to posthumous celebration-analyses.

Scratch

"When [Mario] Schiano moved to Rome from Naples around 1960 he found a jazz environment of cold studio professionals and well-to-do amateurs playing Trad. He didn’t care about factional fights, joining New Orleans-style bands like the Aurelian Syncopators where his presence triggered heated arguments about “purity” of style, and where he also crossed paths with Ivan Vandor. In the mid-sixties a breath of fresh air came when many avant-garde jazz players arrived in town to play or just to enjoy Roman life: Gato Barbieri, Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, Kent Carter, Paul Bley, and Barry Altschul stayed with friends, musicians, actors, and painters. They enjoy “La dolce vita”, jam, and bring first-hand news of what’s happening in jazz on the other side of the Ocean: Ornette, the free experiments. A parallel nomadism manifests itself with young American musicians escaping the stifling atmosphere of Darmstadt's Ferienkurses and joining forces with Lacy in Rome to form MEV: Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum; with a similar perspective, Franco Evangelisti creates Nuova Consonanza (see the perceptive article by Art Lange in PoD Issue 11)."

-- Francesco Martinelli, Point of Departure

I often wish more film criticism looked like this, forming categorizations in historical strokes, seeing 'schools' not as fixed ideas but as meetings & confluences of different individuals, making every turn seem potentially interesting because it crackles with all the promises of History. This is, in fact, part of what I like about Olaf Möller as well as MHVF member James Cheney.

Hairspray

"Yet there are many white youths who desire to move beyond whiteness. Critical of white imperialism and "into" difference, they desire cultural spaces where boundaries can be transgressed, where new and alternative relations can be formed. These desires are dramatized by two contemporary films, John Waters' Hairspray and the more recent film by Jim Jarmusch, Mystery Train. In Hairspray, the "cool" white people, working-class Traci and her middle-class boyfriend, transgress class and race boundaries to dance with black folks. She says to him as they stand in a rat-infested alley with winos walking about, "I wish I was dark-skinned." And he replied, "Traci, our souls are black even if our skin is white." Blackness--the culture, the music, the people--is once again associated with pleasure as well as death and decay. Yet their recognition of the particular pleasures and sorrows black folks experience does not lead to cultural appropriation but to an appreciation that extends into the realm of the political--Traci dares to support racial integration. In this film, the longing and desire whites express for contact with black culture is coupled with the recognition of the culture's value. One does not transgress boundaries to stay the same, to reassert white domination. Hairspray is nearly unique in its attempt to construct a fictive universe where white working class "undesirables" are in solidarity with black people. When Traci says she wants to be black, blackness becomes a metaphor for freedom, an end to boundaries. Blackness is vital not because it represents the "primitive" but because it invites engagement in a revolutionary ethos that dares to challenge and disrupt the status quo."

-- bell hooks, "Eating the Other" (1992)

(Shockingly, this Hairspray musical is not bad at all. But it still can't compare to the Waters version, which I'd like to see again soon...)

Thinking

Thinking Bloggers (btw thanks again, Peter).

There are plenty of blogs out there that are worth reading. Some of them I mention on a regular basis and EL readers know of my admiration for this & that site. I originally was planning on scouring the Internets to see if others had mentioned these blogs before for this award, but as I'm already well behind, and as I'm a little lazy this morning as I finish this up, I'm not just trying to choose one's that, off the top of my head, haven't been chosen by blogs I frequent ... so:

Critical Montages - Yoshie Furuhashi's not-quite-frequently-updated-enough blog comes out with a number of issues related to her work as activist & writer regarding anticapitalist resistance, globalization, religion, the global south, and so on. Substantial in content but on just this side of being 'pithy' in length.

Football Is Fixed - If you're interested in the sport (soccer, that is--not American football) just go here and add a bit to your education of big money sports in the current age. Much of it is over my head because I'm embarrassingly stupid & ignorant about a lot of aspects of business. From the front page description: "AIMING TO RECLAIM THE GAME FROM THE PSYCHOPATHIC POWER PEOPLE To expose and confront the corruption that blights the beautiful game. To address the regulatory framework that allows such corruption. To optimise the betting/trading process by providing blue sky thinking and general hints relating to the gambling experience. To place football in the strata of the global spectacular society and to address feedback loops with other sectors. To celebrate proper football."

A Placid Island of Ignorance - Jim Flannery seems to have seen, heard, and read a dizzying amount of material. He & I have a friend in common, although I didn't immediately make the connection between the fellow my friend mentioned from time to time and the guy who participated in the Avant Garde Blog-a-Thon last summer. Weird synchronicity when I had our mutual friend over to my apartment and was telling him about my "counter-canon" of last year (and he mentioned Jim as an example of a positively voracious engagement with art), and when I decided to get on the computer and just show him my list, the most recent comment to my entry was left by none other than Mr. Flannery himself. Weird. I wish he'd post some more entries, myself--but he is updating his lists of things he's reading, etc., and the backlog provides for great browsing.

Rigorous Intuition - Canadian writer Jeff Wells; conspiracy theories, progressivism, philosophy, anti-pedophilia, UFOs, media studies ... there's just a lot of stuff packed into these posts, frequently illustrated by Photoshop collages and epigraphed by Bob Dylan lyrics. Like a blog version of David Blair's Wax plus Noam Chomsky and a few other things.

Waggish - Actually not too unlike Furuhashi's blog in that the entries are frequently no more than a few paragraphs, but one can always learn something, see something differently from visiting the blog. Mr. Waggish does philosophy, all manner of modernist literature and cinema, and keeps things in dialogue (e.g., continental/analytic thought).

I'm not tagging anyone. I don't need the people I've linked to to do their own. I just think EL readers should check out these places if they haven't already. Cheers.

Hmm.

1. From Nathan Lee's review of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry:

"Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is as eloquent as Brokeback Mountain, and even more radical. "The gay cowboy movie" liberated desires latent in the classic western, and made them palpable (and palatable) by channeling them into the strictures of another genre, romantic tragedy. Progressive values were advanced by a retreat to a traditional mode of storytelling, the love that dare not speak its name rendered intelligible through the universal language of the upscale weepy.

"Chuck and Larry takes this strategy much further, baiting a far less adventuresome demographic. Gay themes won't deter the Sandler cult, who can rely on their man not to be a fag. And that, precisely, is the canny maneuver here. Our pussy-loving men's men are New York City firefighters to boot, the very embodiment of all-American heroism (and object of gay fetishism). Sandler's womanizing bachelor Chuck Levine reluctantly agrees to play the homo husband of his buddy Larry Valentine to help secure pension benefits for Larry's kids—one of whom, a flaming little 'mo named Eric (Cole Morgan), likes to practice numbers from Pippin in an outfit inspired by Flashdance. Oh, snap! Chuck and Larry is the first movie to effectively hijack that all-purpose justification for right-wing bigotry, "protecting the children," and redeploy it as a weapon of the homosexual intifada."

2. Andrew Grossman, excerpt from his Bright Lights essay "Sexual Atonality":

"The problem, though, is once again intentionality: in order for the queer collisions and subsequent catharses to occur spontaneously and with minimum public resistance, stealthily queer films would have to be released with no demographic advertising, promotion, or any intended audience, ensuring that all audience members, the unsympathetic and sympathetic alike, could equally enter the theater without being frightened away (or, indeed, attracted and flattered). It would be paradoxical for filmmakers to intentionally create a film with no intended audience; indeed, I am unaware of any such film. However, I have found one sexually explicit film that accidentally, randomly, and amorally — that is, queerly — seems to be intended for multiple and simultaneous conflicting audiences — Hero Dream.

"When all other queer films have been exhausted, desperate academics may turn to this presently un-interpretable artifact, perhaps holding some intelligentsia bee to determine whose analysis is the cleverest and most quotable. Director Lau Keung-fu’s Hero Dream seems the first and only film of its kind: a low budget, generically macho Hong Kong action film unaccountably interpolated with — in addition to a few prosaic scenes of heterosexual rape and one sequence featuring a nude male bodybuilder — explicit, lengthy, X-rated sexual encounters between male-to-female transsexuals equipped with both penises and breasts. There is some semblance of a plot. To avenge his wife’s murder at the hands of Thai crooks, tough cop Chin Siu-ho — once the stalwart hetero hero of numerous Shaw Brothers adventures and mid-1980s classics (Mr. Vampire) — journeys to Thailand, joins forces with the local, machine gun-toting “Transsexual Gang,” and, with little explanation, occasionally lounges on a hotel chaise while before him two transsexuals have open, tender, full-frontal (if flaccid) intercourse. One of the transsexual gangsters falls in love with Chin secretly, and comes rushing to his rescue with jeep and automatic rifle when he is overpowered by the villains; taking a fatal bullet for his beloved, the transsexual dies in Chin’s arms, a gesture that unintentionally parodies both heterosexual tragedy and the honor-infested buddy-buddy embrace common to the Shaw Brothers martial arts films in which Chin once starred. Flabbergasted and dumbstruck upon hearing the transsexual’s romantic confession, Chin can muster little more than a “Thanks, but no thanks” as his bloodied savior-transgressor slumps limp in his arms. In the grand finale, the entire Transsexual Gang proves sadly impotent and pitifully unskilled in wielding the machine guns we automatically interpret as hard male power; climactically rushing into the villain’s den to assist our hero, the transsexuals are, dozen by dozen, mowed down like trapped turkeys, leaving impenetrably straight Chin to mop up Thai villainy with single-handed, heterosexual zeal, and then shower his affections on a lovely Thai nurse.

"Considering the perfunctory normalization of heterosexuality at the film’s close, at whom, exactly, is the film’s abundant transsexual pornography directed? The typical testosterone demographic likely to buy tickets for a Chin Siu-ho B-movie, even one with a tell-tale “category 3” rating (the HK equivalent of NC-17), would surely recoil at the very thought of penises and breasts existing harmoniously on the same body, and nauseate if forced to witness several such bodies rapturously and frequently intertwine. A perverse but unlikely argument might suggest Hero Dream’s exoticizing of Thai kathoeys is intended as a cynical, repulsive, Mondo Cane-style spectacle for straight consumption. Nevertheless, we must conclude the film’s raison d’être is more d’être than raison — a chaotic intermixture of colliding sexualities defying rationally goal-directed (i.e. demographically-motivated) explanation.

"Amazingly, Hero Dream does appear to be an example of a coordinated film production that produces random, aleatory generic and sexual experiences (mis-)directed at multiple conflicting audiences — those who enjoy heteronormative B-grade action films and those who enjoy transsexual erotica. But can we ever satisfy the second condition of amoral queerness, an entirely random viewing environment unprejudiced by any advertising or promotion that might disclose that this is a queerly-inclined film to be resisted or avoided altogether? The posters for Hero Dream present it as a superficially generic, violent action film whose shoot-outs and kung fu battles should lure a normative, mass audience — there is no indication or forewarning that unguarded audiences will be soon jolted with dissident, vivid pornography violating demographic norms. This demographic violation crucially separates Hero Dream from better-known queer action films like Clarence Ford’s Cheap Killers (1998), which is far too sexually coy to jolt, educate, or effect a change in the perceptions of a mass audience, and Marcelo Piñeyro’s more explicitly gay Burnt Money (2000), which sells its homoeroticism to a sympathetic queer demographic right from the start.

"Nevertheless, did any public screenings of Hero Dream ever really attract unsuspecting, random, diverse mass audiences? I was fortunate enough to have experienced precisely such a screening of the film, in 1999, at Manhattan’s now-defunct Chinatown Music Palace, infamous for its general disrepair, slightly urine-scented viewing area (depending on one’s proximity to the uninhabitable bathrooms), and frequent lack of seasonal temperature control. By 1999, first-run HK films were growing increasingly unwatchable, and the Music Palace was attracting fewer and fewer patrons. One week, the owner, presumably defeated, alcoholically desperate, and now indifferent to conventional mores, dug into his archives and unearthed the unheard-of Hero Dream for an unsuspecting audience of beggars seeking shelter, adolescent boys smoking in the balcony, henpecked Chinese husbands escaping their peckers, a few soldiering cineastes like myself, and whomever else happened to randomly stumble in (along with the usual stray cats) from the bitter cold.

"It would have been unnecessary to survey departing audience members to gauge their reactions to the screening: during sequences of transsexual pornography, the entirely male audience observed a tangible, agonizing silence broken only by intermittent, derisive, nervous titters (from the boys in the balcony, I’m sure) during the transsexual turkey-shoot finale. To be sure, as a random experiment in cinematic receptivity and education, the screening was an icy, alienating failure, resulting in no catharsis or epiphany. Perhaps if the theater had been sold-out, with unsuspecting viewers piled in shoulder-to-shoulder, unable to make their defensive laughter convincing and unselfconscious, unable to hide their blushing emotions from one another, unable to look down from the screen without their cowardice being judged by an intrusive neighbor, a segment, at least, of the once-uncurious, belligerent audience might have lowered its defenses or burst into revelatory, mass-hypnotic elation, just as worshipful outbursts of laughter occur only in collective spaces, where one’s individuality is irrationally, spontaneously surrendered to the group.

"Though the viewing conditions were not optimal that day — they will probably never be ideal — I can nevertheless swear that once in my lifetime I’d not simply seen a queer film, but was in the midst of a queer experience of a film."

Sitney on S:S:S:S:S:S

"The multiple superimposition of water flowing in different directions initially presents a very flat image. But the subsequent scratches, which are deep, ripping through the color emulsion to the pure white of the film base and often ploughing up a visual residue of filmic matter at the edges, affirm a literal flatness which makes the water appear to occupy deep space by contrast.

"The dilemma of Sharits's art has turned on the failure of his imagery to sustain its authority in the very powerful matrix of the structures he provides. His search for metaphors and icons for the particular kind of cinematic experience that his films engender has not been as successful as his invention of markers to reflect the duration of his films. In N:O:T:H:I:N:G the off-balance, empty chair and the draining light bulb allude to the floating, almost intoxicating experience the seated viewer feels after extended concentration on flickering colors, pouring from the projector bulb. The matphors of T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G totalize the suicidal and sexual inserts of Ray Gun Virus and Piece Mandala/End War and represent the viewing experience as erotic violence. Curiously in S:S:S:S:S:S he represents, unwittingly of course, the metaphor Kubelka is so fond of elaborating for the structure of Schwechater; in his lectures he always compares that film to the flowing of a stream. In Sharits's film too, the complexly deflected water flows are like the illusory movement of cinema. However, these matphors either lack the immediacy of the color flickers or the scratches around them, or they overpower their matrix, as in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, and instigate a psychological vector which the form cannot accomodate as satisfactorily as the trance film or the mythopoeic film."

-- Sitney, Visionary Cinema (3rd ed.) (pp. 362-4)

I half-agree with Sitney's characterization here but can't bring this to terms with the fact that I find Sharits so powerful and captivating, on the highest level of the American a-g cinema that I know, that is, with Breer and Brakhage and Maclaine et al. Though Sharits is an established presence in the a-g canon, he's not actually all that lauded. (Consider too that, for instance, neither Yoel Meranda nor Fred Camper include Sharits on their 'A' or 'B' lists of recommended cinema; Parker Tyler gives him faint praise if I recall; but Dwoskin in Film Is... treats him seriously and sympathetically for two pages.) I think in a way Sharits (as author-construct) is slowly becoming one of "my" filmmakers--not in any kind of proprietary or territorial sense, but in the sense that this is an artist who (regardless of specific level of greatness) you're willing to go that extra mile for, you find yourself drawn to for reasons parallel to (but not quite the same as) their artistic brilliance or whatever--for me, for instance, not only Ford & Ozu & Godard, but Borowczyk, Kiarostami, maybe Ferrara and Farocki ... and others ... the filmmakers in whose work one finds vast reservoirs in which one can work out all your problems and undertake journeys ... in tandem with the filmmaker. Though this phenomenon extends well beyond film obviously, in fact more accurately extends from other areas into film.

Lady Chatterley

The first time she goes to the stream, she kneels politely and drinks from a cup. The second time--in sexual bloom--she crouches over the stream and scoops up the water with her hands, and Ferran has her shot more in close-up if I recall. In the third, when she's out with her husband, she resorts to the cup again. He makes a comment to her that I didn't catch in the subtitles ...

An interesting film. And I don't think I'd be spoiling anything to say that I am grateful for endings (in any film) like the one this one provides--that is, cuts to black that come a split-second before "we" are ready for them.

N:O:T:H:I:N:G (2)

A strange thing--after revisiting N:O:T:H:I:N:G yesterday I noticed that the film seemed like a more mellow, even inviting experience than the first go-round. Is this because of my mood, i.e., my eyes & mind in interacting with the flickering colors picked up on the subtler modulations and fuzzier tones, the more 'meditative' aspects of the work in question? Or am I simply going down the path Sharits himself hoped to guide his viewers to, he who emphasized the aspects of his work that correspond to a mandala more than to a kino-hammer.

S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED was a bit beyond me at this point. A powerful film. It will need repeat viewings though.

Knocked Up

"Ultimately, what makes Knocked Up a terrific film—one of the year's best, easily—is its relaxed, shaggy vibe; if it feels improvised in places, that's because Apatow trusts his actors enough to let them make it up as they go, like the people they're playing. It's more than just a loose-limbed variation on About a Boy. It's a sincere meditation on adulthood, accountability, and fidelity—and, yeah, getting high."

The above paragraph closes Village Voice writer Robert Wilonsky's review of Knocked Up, and what's strange is that it's hard to tell at all how much he liked the film in the paragraphs beforehand. (He mostly just describes the film, the actors, and what happens in it.) So the whole review is basically a plot review, the most cursory "auteur" analysis of Judd Apatow ('look, he does similar stuff on his handful of TV shows and his one other feature film'), and then a tacked on sentiment: 'It's just really great because it just feels thrown-together, and it deals with serious stuff but also not-serious stuff.'

Count me as a skeptic. I laughed at parts of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I laughed at parts of Knocked Up. (I haven't seen Apatow's TV work, and I certainly haven't dismissed him yet in that format--I'm quite willing to believe his talents are better suited for sitcoms than feature films in terms of conventions & likely possibilities.) But I feel miles away from the crowds of people who said (publicly, or to me in person) these not only seriously hilarious films, but that they were also shockingly, seriously good films, too. "One of the year's best, easily," indeed.

Eh.

What I see are two bald wish-fulfilment fantasies about groups of guys whose One Dude ends up romantically linked with a much hotter, and bizarrely much-more-socially-isolated woman. (Male comeraderie is important here, and Apatow himself acknowledges this in his films by giving Heigl a line about it in Knocked Up: it's not unself-conscious comeraderie, god forbid.) So there's obviously a wish-fulfilment element in these movies; OK; not the end of the world--tons of movies similarly are made with wish-fulfilment functions. But whose wishes, and how are they being fulfilled, and how honest are these films about it all?

The plot construction seems shaky, almost inept at times (there's not much flow, such as the total ellipsis of any kind of return trip after Rogen & Rudd take an all-night trip to Vegas, leaving their neurotic significant others behind). This doesn't bother me much. And in fact I think some critics--such as Wilonsky--have expressed their opinion that this is part of the film's charm. Perhaps it is. But what does seem strange is the arbitrariness of the characters once they're placed in that plot. Mann, as the neurotic wife, is a total cipher, basically she has two or three levels of 'neurotic' that rise & fall on the basis of narrative convenience and nothing more. (She's neurotic enough to fuel a sideplot about marital jealousy, and to provide the foil for catharsis during Seth Rogen's speech near the end of the film--but sometimes she's pleasant, and as beshroomed Rogen explains to Rudd during their Vegas night out, and the viewers, who I'm not sure are given any information to be sure of this on our own, she's neurotic just because she loves hubbie Paul Rudd so damn much. Because, of course, Apatow-movie women don't have anything in their lives outside of family, geeky lover, and perhaps a trifling job. Passions & interests? Actual friends? Opinions on things outside family & love? Nah.) Not to mention the weird specter of class divisions that sits over the film, operating subtextually but clearly enough, but not quite highlighted outside of the issue of the main romantic mismatch--did anyone else squirm when Mann started cursing at the nightclub bouncer, demanding her right to not wait in line for the club, because he's merely a doorman, just a lowly bottom-feeder: a viciously classist explosion on the character's part that played awkwardly to me, and not in the way I think it was intended to feel awkward. (I know we've made a bit of progress in recognizing when comedy, or any kind of storytelling, uses rants against women in order to play on perceived or targeted aspects of viewers' misogyny; surely there are similar games being played to denigrate "the working class," though of course in America that's a less explored topic.) If Knocked Up made explicit, by means of dialogue or film form or anything, any of the Rudd/Mann family's financial privileges (evidenced only in the manner of their beautiful house and their beautiful birthday cake for the daughter and their beautiful svelte bodies, which is convention in Hollywood cinema of "middle-class" life, not actually a signifier of the real minoritarian wealth it represents) I'd be more inclined to treat Mann's rant as an example of her self-righteous sense of privilege ... but instead I got the sense we were being corraled into think nothing about the obvious class privilege itself but primarily, instead, merely 'What a pathetic uptight bitch, she shouldn't worry about being so old and being so controlling.' (And, so, well, could this be misogyny?)

I know, I know--I'm "supposed" to be laughing and thinking that it's great that this comedy passes off jokes about "Babe Ruth's gay brother, Gabe Ruth" and yet also says something "smart" about relationships and how life throws curveballs and there are no perfect fits, etc. ... but I just felt like I was seeing the gears & pulleys that operated all these jokes, seeing the assumptions that were intended to make us want to laugh ("get it, Steve Carrell is playing himself and he's kind of an awkward asshole"), and regardless of whether any particular joke was predicated on sexism or some other sociopolitically unsavory thing, the fact was that the jokes only rarely seemed to sing, only rarely seemed to snap--they mostly just played like "business as usual" to me. Like I'd heard the joke many times before. (I also just read Laura Kipnis' fascinating plain language theory book, Against Love, which hasn't inclined me to look upon the serious underpinnings of this basically conservative romantic comedy like this as anything agreeable or innocent.) I just couldn't locate a spark in this film, or 40-Year-Old Virgin, and it's not because I'm against all of these contemporary smart-dumb comedies: I am a devotee of Zoolander and Drop Dead Gorgeous; I will say a few kind words about Old School and even more kind words about Road Trip; I adore a lot of what's in the Farrelly Brothers' cinema (at least until 2003, I haven't kept up since then). It's not a matter of genre or of brow-height.

What I am intrigued by is the likelihood that Apatow is contemporary Hollywood's greatest apologist for suburbia: strip-mall, pop-culture, consumerist suburbia. Apatow is all about his characters having tons of at-your-fingertips pop culture knowledge (as even Mann's neurotic anti-geek whines at one point, "I like Spider-Man"), Macs, DVDs, posters, sports, mass-market junk food. It's all about watching TV, surfing the Net, going to the movies, buying knick-knacks, eating at godawful-looking chain restaurants (including the upscale ones): this, plus monogamy with a gorgeous woman, is "life." I wish someone would take footage from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, perversely turn it to high-contrast b&w, and edit it to some noise music to make a short film about the visual horror of strip malls & megastores & food courts flanking eight-lane roads. From these two movies, anyway, Apatow is totally at home in this world of PF Chang, RadioShack, Starbucks, Home Depot, and Sam Goody, and the houses we live in to fill with products from these places. It's his milieu in the same way that Woody Allen fictionalizes his New York, or that Larry David fictionalizes his Los Angeles. And I don't think he's critical of it at all--the closest he comes to it is in suggesting that pop culture and consumerism shouldn't be pursued to the points where (a) they keep you from being a productive worker in society (start a company on eBay! just go out and grab a web programming job!) and (b) they keep you from devoting attention to your hot love interest.

I'll probably pass on the next Apatow Laff Festival ...

Image of the Day

Miracle of St. Nicolas, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ca. 1332.

Gombrich on Malraux

"One can hardly avoid the suspicion that the voices he has lent to the art of the past are meant to drown a deep fear of the silence which would fall if Spengler were right:

Though the Wei Bodhisattvas and those of Nara, Khmer and Javanese sculpture and Sung painting do not express the same communion with the cosmos as does a Romanesque tympanum, a Dance of Shiva or the horsemen of the Parthenon, all alike express a communion of one kind or another, and so does even Rubens in The Kermesse. We need but glance at any Greek masterpiece to see at once that its triumph over the mystery-laden East does not stem from any process of the reasoning mind, but from the 'innumerable laughter of the waves'. Like a muted orchestra the surge and thunder, already so remote, of ancient tragedy accompanies but does not drown Antigone's immortal cry: 'I was not born to share in hatred but to share in love' (pp. 635-6).

Who would not prefer the driest philological gloss on the exact meaning of Antigone's 'immortal cry' (which is not a cry but a reasoned statement in a momentous argument) to this 'surge and thunder'? For if we trouble to analyse the content of the paragraph we discover, as only too often with Malraux, that it dissolves into a truism. Buddhist art (the names of the schools which produced Buddhas are mere ornament) differs in spirit from Hindoo, Greek, and Christian art but they all (including Rubens' genre) are religious. Even Greek tragedy is (and who ever doubted that?). Perhaps the rhetoric serves no other purpose than to hypnotize and bulldoze the reader. But it is surely more charitable to assume that strings of names and rows of images function like the names of divinities in ancient incantations to reassure the writer rather than the reader. They may be an expression of that authentic Angst which is the true root of the expressionist hysteria--the anxiety of that utter loneliness that would reign if art were to fail and each man remained immured in himself.

To return to sanity does not mean to ignore these problems but to face them. Perhaps they are not quite as formidable as they look. They become formidable only through the adolescent 'all-or-nothing' attitude that colours so much of the writing of Malraux's generation. To the question whether we can understand the art of mentality of other periods or civilizations, or whether all is 'myth', the answer of common-sense is surely that we can understand some better, some worse, and some only after a lot of work. That we can improve our understanding by trying to restore the context, cultural, artistic, and psychological, in which any given work sprang to life but that we must resign ourselves to a certain residue of ignorance. In art, as in life, on certain elemental levels men of different civilizations have understood each other even though they were ignorant of each other's language. On others only an acute awareness of the context in which an action stands may prevent our misunderstanding. This commonplace philosophy would hardly bear stating if it had not some relevance to the 'Museum without Walls'. For it is remarkable that this Museum only contains sculptures and paintings. Where the medium of art is words we can still distinguish between degrees of understanding. True, once in a while we have witnessed a metamorphosis of works of literature which parallels the examples adduced by Malraux. The tragic Shylock or the neurotic Hamlet may be a case in point. But by and large we know it needs a greater imaginative effort to understand the Roman de la Rose than to enjoy Pride and Prejudice, and we can say why. Nor are we frequently in serious doubt whether a piece of music is intelligible to us or not. We realize that in Oriental music we cannot distinguish a dirge from a ditty because we lack familiarity with the framework of harmonic conventions on which musical meaning so largely depends. Perhaps the way out of the expressionist impass must lead through an analysis of similar relationships in the visual arts. It was the optimistic faith in the efficacy of colours and shapes as a universal language that landed us in this dizzy philosophy of myth and metamorphosis. Even shapes and colours acquire their meaning only in cultural contexts. The less we know of this context the more we are forced to dream it up. We may enjoy this challenge to our imagination and relish the sense of mystery that is aroused in us by what looks remote, exotic, and inscrutable. This is one of the reasons why our age is so ready, as Malraux says, 'to admire all it does not understand' (p. 598). But we may come to see that our fathers and grandfathers were not quite wrong, after all, when they thought that we understand certain styles better than others. That a Rembrandt self-portrait or a Watteau drawing 'means more' to us than an Aztec idol or a Negro mask. Not that we need forego the pleasure of looking at stimulating forms even where we do not understand. We also look at rocks or driftwood. Only we must try to relearn the difference between stimulation through self-projection, which, when applied to art, so often passes for 'appreciation' and that enrichment that comes from an understanding, however dim and imperfect, of what a great work of art is intended to convey.* We need not worry about these distinctions every time we look at a work of art. What matters is only that we should not surrender our sanity by losing our faith in the very possibility of finding out what a fellow human being means or meant. Critical reason may be fallible but it can still advance towards the truth by testing interpretations, by sifting the evidence, and thus widen the area of our sympathies while narrowing the scope of myths. It will need a good deal of clearing up, after the expressionist earthquake, to reconstruct the Museum on these more modest but more secure foundations. Meanwhile we owe a debt to André Malraux for having recorded with such verve and intensity the impact of this traumatic experience on a rich and sensitive mind."

* I'm including the footnote Gombrich put here: "Intention in art is not everything. Neither is expression. But where the intention is missed our response to the rest will also go wrong." The passive voice in that sentence in the main text is crucial.

--from E. H. Gombrich, "André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism" (a review of The Voices of Silence), The Burlington Magazine, vol. 96, no. 621 (Dec 1954), pp. 374-378.

Momentary Reflection

A trend over the last few months: I've noticed that overall I'm seeing fewer films, something that tends to happen annually as the weather gets warm. But more than this, lately, I notice that I tend to watch in splurges. Three or even four films in a day (I've had two triple bills recently, one at MoMA and one at the home videotheque); or no films all week long but then several over a weekend.

Otherwise I spend my time reading more. I find I go through cycles where I'm afflicted with something probably vaguely comparable to attention deficit disorder. I don't know what to read, what I want to read, so I tend to read shorter things--articles, reviews--and I skim longer works ("a little Benjamin, then the critical introduction to this Balzac novel...") Then this passes and I can knock out several books in quick succession, on top of the other articles and essays and skimming.

One of the solo joys of life is finishing a book in a day or two, something I can't always do even when I'm blessed with a windfall of free time. My most fortuitous convergence of necessary free time and a willingness to read, with focus, came on a flight from Italy back to New York. I knocked out Death in Venice (including a few critical appendices in the Norton) and The Baron in the Trees.

* * *

I mention all this because I'm curious about people's reading habits, how they feel they've changed with the advent of websurfing. As much as I love my computer and all the Internets it's really reconfigured my time management when it comes to devoting time to reading print. It's not that I read much less print, it's that I read it in smaller chunks of time.

Which, of course, is not always the best way to read!

I know there's got to be a mountain of journalistic and scholarly literature devoted to this question. And maybe I'll get to some of it (five minutes at a time). But in light of Matt's announcement that he has to write shorter pieces because long paragraphs are problematic for surfers, I do have to say that some of the most important and formative things I came across on the Internet were long and sometimes difficult-to-follow pieces which I had to work at, chip away at on that computer monitor, mouse click by mouse click, revisitations and all. Some examples that taught me about radical politics, for good or for ill--words on life from a political prisoner, or some sites from an online Leninist activist; or we cannot forget the Movie Mutations letters, which I first stumbled across online, connected to UC-Berkeley I think, where I read and re-read these long and personal reflections on love and theory and friendship (themselves texts too, on "discovery"), understanding a little more each time I visited the letters anew. At the age of 16 or 17 or so, sitting at the computer in my room before I went to bed on school nights, this was an intellectual education I simply wasn't getting in school. And the very long, graphics-lite essays were as integral a part of my "online learning" (and my learning to be online) as were the more hyped choppiness of digital interactions on message-boards, through email and IM, and so on. What the Internet did for me was not decrease my willingness to engage with long and complex texts: what it did was condition me (or allow myself to be conditioned) to approach almost anything as a text which I could split into discrete units and read utterly at my leisure. That had never occured to me before; one read for a certain amount of time: until the chapter was over, until there was something else that needed immediate attention, or until the time to read was up. But to read something for not even 5-10 minutes, or to reading part of something very long for only 15-20 minutes ... and then just stop and move onto something else altogether? I can't remember thinking that way until the Internet came around.

* * *

Lately I've been turning the computer off at home more often, which has boded well for time management. I fear that the ability to Google almost any new topic that interests me could become a huge crutch if it hasn't already.

* * *

Of course, I'm also in the middle of cat-sitting for several weeks, and this cat we have as a houseguest has taken a big liking to me. And when she's not sleeping, she's very jealous of time I spend paying attention to anything but her ... that includes the computer.

The Vain Glory of Command