On a Polemic and Vanguards

"...But the other episodes, meant to constitute a kind of anticinema (a notion not to be condemned in itself, and which has been developed along very interesting lines by Bresson and more obscure avant-garde directors like like P. Gilson) fall awfully flat: a man comes into a room, hangs his hat on a rack, goes out of the shot, the hat vanishes, he comes in again as before, hangs up his hat, goes out, etc., ad infinitum, while a pianist practices ever-ascending scales. This gag is hardly worthy of Méliès, and Messrs. Richter and Man Ray had gotten beyond that sort of thing long before sound came in.

"Why was this rather slick piece of tom-foolery awarded the Grand Prize at Brussels? My guess is that neither art nor experimentation had anything to do with a choice which seems to be a nostalgic attempt to rehabilitate an irresponsible form of film fun which has been dead and buried for more than thirty years."

--Noël Burch, from "Why a Prize to Dom" (letter), Film Quarterly (1959)

"Describing the films of Robert Breer is an extremely difficult task, for he is one of the most thoroughly original creators working in films today, in terms of both technique and sensibility. Roughly speaking, his works belong to that category of films generally called "abstract" (though his are also highly "concrete"), but differ from everything else that has been done along these lines in one basic respect: Breer is undoubtedly the first film-maker to have brought to his medium the full heritage of modern painting and the sum of sophisticated experimentation that it represents. Breer began his career as a painter, was one of the early members of the postwar Parisian school of abstraction froide (disciples of Mondrian, the Bauhaus painters, and, more recently, Herbin), and his first films were candid attempts to "animate" the large forms and pure, flat colors that peopled his canvases. His first really successful film of this kind, Form Phases IV, was for the most part a continuously animated flow of vaguely geometrical, clearly defined shapes evolving on a flat surface according to extremely complex rhythmical patterns, and it exploited ambiguous relationships between optical planes to remarkable effect. This seven-minute film was practically without "cuts" (in this case juxtapositions of completely dissimilar patterns) though it did employa form of ellipsis by which fixed images underwent series of sudden, partial transformations. This last technique had already been employed, though in a much more schematic form, by the Swedish painter and film-maker Viking Eggeling, who is Breer's only real precursor. (In a sense, however, that great French primitive Emile Cohl might well have recognized the author of A Man and His Dog Out for Air as a worthy heir to his own rhythmic and graphic genius.)

"... In view of Breer's obvious importance and originality, one cannot help wondering why the Brussels jury neglected his work when it came to handing out awards. The choice of Dom as grand-prize winner would seem to indicate that they were simply out of their depth, though this is rather surprising considering the reputations of the individual jury members. A partial explanation may perhaps be found int he quality of the sound tracks which Breer has added to his films. These seem little more than hasty afterthoughts, and their rather haphazard clumsiness is a shocking contrast to the refined, studied complexity of the images themselves.

"His most recent film is A Man and His Dog Out for Air, which is a completely new departure in Breer's work. Returning to almost pure abstraction, he shot this very short but brilliant film entirely in black and white. It consists of an astonishingly complex ballet of marvelous wiggly lines, is animated with unprecedented virtuosity, and suggests, I feel, an entirely new notion of cinematic space."

--Noël Burch, from a review of several Breer films, Film Quarterly (vol. 12, no. 3, Spring 1959)

* * *

Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica's Dom.



Robert Breer's A Man and His Dog Out for Air.

* * *

These preceding quotes, of course, were taken from "early" Noël Burch, when his vanguardist-formalism, perhaps a kind of politically-motivated elitism (the object of his scorn was American/Hollywood hegemony in all its forms), ran rampant. This softened and mutated as Burch went through various other, uh, "form phases." (You can find his praise of Showgirls from not too many years ago.) But even this extreme dedication to modernist forms, to calling certain things (like the animation of Lenica & Borowczyk) outmoded, even irresponsible ... well, that too still has some roots in a political critique. Burch's vanguardism is not along the lines of a prescription for the masses, i.e., if we all just watch and appreciate Robert Breer's movies then capitalism will fall.

I have no worthwhile opinions about either film; I love Borowczyk but I like his animations with Lenica less than the live action stuff. I concur with Burch and pretty much everyone else interested in experimental cinema that Robert Breer is a master. Obviously both films are damaged by watching them in tiny GoogleVideo boxes.

* * *

Burch wrote more recently (2004), by the way, in a piece titled "Complicity" written for Cinema Journal:

"When I arrived in Paris as a student in the early fifties, one of the things that struck me immediately as "different" was the minuterie, the time switch that as a matter of course equips every apartment-house corridor and stairwell in Western Europe. And when I first returned "stateside" two decades later, I remember being disturbed by those New York hallways lit night and day, although I still knew nothing of things ecological and would have to relearn how the United States has this fear and hatred of the Other . . . and the dark. In that longer essay, this would lead to a discussion of gun culture, and to the culture of revenge that seems so intimately connected with it (and of course to that suspiciously overconfident cult of the masculine). Robocop remembers who he is when he remembers whom he must kill. How many movie and TV dramas are about revenge? The absurd attachment to the death penalty on the part of so many states and so many individuals is the clearest expression of the importance to U$ society of sheer revenge. A death penalty that, moreover, even abolitionist states seem happy to join in exporting, generally in the direction of people who are not white and who are not supposed to be able to fight back—as Noam Chomsky never tires of reminding you.

"Tom Frank recently accused the "left" in his country of not seeking to really understand the "silent majority," that "other America" that does not like feminists and queers and supports the likes of G. W. Bush. By damning them out of hand, by seeing those men and women as the absolute Other, the Left has itself become an obstacle to change. The way forward lies toward those "ordinary people," not away from them. We all know what he means. But I think that despite that highly visible ideological rift between the "anciens" and the "modernes" in the United States today, exacerbated by Vietnam, feminism, abortion, and the blatant display of permissiveness, the creature comforts of the ultimate consumer society constitute an inestimable cultural cement in which even its severest critics are mired. As individuals. But we are talking about a country where individualism is the unofficial religion (here I would bring in the car culture, the oil market, war conducted as a drug bust, and the typical contempt for the lives of aliens, nonpeople, Martians). Any administration, from whichever faction of the conservative coalition, that speaks out in the name of the American way of life is bound to have broad tacit support for interventions covert or overt. This national egotism is not, of course, peculiar to the United States, but it is taking more and more ugly forms there. The Green presidential candidate in the last French election put all this in a nutshell when he wrote that "America is prepared to change the world to keep from changing its lifestyle."

"I suppose my position could be described as cultural pessimism, of which I have been accused in the past. If this means being pessimistic about U$ culture and its foreseeable impact on the planet, on the immense majority of poor people who inhabit it, and even on the rest of us who are richer than most, then the accusation is fair enough. However, this is still a very large planet with many peoples on it, and despite or perhaps even because of global capitalist productivism, other models will emerge and prevail. That is my hope for the future. "

Brought to You by René Vautier

5 principes de base pour un cinéma engagé

1. Tâche de rapporter de vraies images plutôt de raconter des histoires fausses.

2. Il ne faut pas laisser les gouvernments écrire seuls l’histoire, il faut que les peuples y travaillent.

3. Écrire l’histoire en images. Tout de suite.

4. Créer un dialogue d’images en temps de guerre.

5. Face à la désinformation officielle, pratiquer et diffuser la contre-information.

From an appendix, "Définition et principes pour le cinéma d'intervention sociale, par René Vautier, Cancale, 2003" in Nicole Brenez, Cinémas d'avant-garde, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma - SCÉRÉN-CNDP, 2006

Barbarians at the Gates

High drama in the moment, and then the moment of respite, and though I would like to seize on this word, "respite," and connect it to the Harun Farocki film of the same name that plays as one of the Jeonju Memories digital projects with Eugène Green's new film, I don't know that there's a connection of any kind, except for perhaps a deep philosophical one that I'm not prepared to make right now.

Peter Paul Rubens, Bacchus (1638-40)

Claude Lorrain, Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648)

I'm about to take out Robert Harbison's Reflections on Baroque out from the library. Who knows if I'll have time to read through it or not, but it looks like a gorgeous text (published by Reaktion). Any thoughts out there on the book? In my stuttering, sputtering education--mostly but not entirely autodidactic--I seem to pounce from historical period to historical period within the great story of the West, alternately "identifying" with (say) the Hellenistic civilizations, or the Western European medievals, or the Baroque, or fin de siècle, at different times--never, of course, acquiring anything more than a dilettantish investment in any of them. It's a frustrating lack of focus on my part, and my only consolation is the thought that, in many, many years, I'll simply end up as a well-rounded individual.

Baroque theater director and writer, in recent years filmmaker too, Eugène Green--a transplanted Brooklynite who (like Noel Burch) fled America and wound up in France, decades ago--includes in his recent digital short film, Correspondences, a shot of a computer search engine clearly modeled on Google, but where that company's name is supposed to be, there appears the word (rainbow-colored), 'Barbare.' I don't think it's merely aristocratic backlash at crass, commercial technology that marks Green; he seems a politically aware man (and certainly Brenez, a champion of his, is such); and in any case his film reserves a certain sympathy for its two teenage protagonists. Correspondences is not composed visually like anything Baroque, per se--or rather, Baroque is a competing element with a certain (neoclassical?) austerity of line, color, and object that marks Green's frames. No consumption like Bacchus; no voyages like Sheba. Just two young people in sparsely decorated rooms, communicating via email.

Reel Two

Last night I had my first encounter with the work of Gregory Markopoulos. Eniaios IV, "Nefeli Photos," reel 2--a half-hour of incredibly beautiful, fleeting images working on my eyes and mind in ways I hadn't experienced before. It was easily the highlight of four consecutive Views from the Avant-Garde programs I saw, the last four of the weekend. (Not to say there wasn't strong work elsewhere in these programs; there was, probably Breer & Farocki's work most of all.) But this tiny excerpt from the Eniaios project (an 80-hour-long opus) seemed extra-special. Rhythmic arrangements, slowly unfolding a space, shafts and orbs of light, afterimages and sillhouettes, the most austere apportionment of unforced beauty (spread out over time, like a web spun--perhaps by the spider seen in the opening minutes), the interpellation of History (a Byzantine church as a physical space--a room--but also as a mode of vision and of experience, that is, a way of being and feeling). Each shot is carved, like sculpture, in both space (many of the shots are largely shadowed, so you're seeing maybe two-thirds black frame for an image, the bright light and colors resting like a block amidst the rectangular composition) and time (they appear fleetingly, for a few frames or a few seconds, and disappear into the void again, and we pass them like landmarks and mile markers in our film journey [apologies to Doug Cummings]). At one point I thought to myself, 'All told, this Eniaios has to be the most amazing cinematic achievement ever.' It's not even as though this particular work/segment itself felt like a "masterpiece," a monument--it seemed almost earthy, everyday, rather. But I think that it was just working at such a high level, in such an incredibly rich, economical register, that you could start to speculate what its companion pieces might look like, what directions it might go on. Surely it's only speculation; and what do I know, this is the only Markopoulos I've even seen? But this is how it moved me.

Markopoulos's contributions to film form begin with his earliest work of the 1940s, develop through the subsequent decades, and culminate in ENIAIOS, on which he worked during the final years of his life. His important innovations, such as editing with the smallest unit of film (the single frame), and the simultaneous narrative of past, present, and future, or his most individual use of colour, are all directed towards the representation and resolution of complex emotions. These innovations prefigure many contemporary practices in the arts. (source)

Foxy Croquette O-Gin (Amazing Lives...)

Esther Kahn

New Yorkers: one of the greatest narrative films of the decade so far (what compares?--No Quarto da Vanda, The House of Mirth, Before Sunset, maybe some Hong Sang-soo and Le fils) is coming to a local screen tomorrow. Esther Kahn at the Museum of the Moving Image (142-minute cut which is what's on the R1 DVD), followed in the series by Bergman's Summer Interlude. Myself, I may or may not make it out to the film, which I've seen more than once, on screens big & small, but if you don't have tickets for the Guerin film at NYFF, then perhaps you owe it to yourself to see Arnaud Desplechin's greatest work to date.

(I think I will never cease to find it strange that Desplechin found his biggest hit to date with the US cinephilic audience in Kings & Queen, a good film but his weakest one too, as I see it. What's strange is that Kings & Queen is not really a departure, stylistically or thematically, from his previous work. It's jumbled, narratively loose, full of odd mixtures of tropes & acting styles, i.e., all the things that ostensibly made his earlier films coterie favorites at best. Yet when Kings & Queen was released here it made something of a splash. I just don't understand why, why it was that film that did it. Shoulda been an earlier one, frankly.)

AD's top tier: Esther Kahn

Next: La Sentinelle, Playing in the Company of Men, Comment je me suis disputé ... (ma vie sexuelle)

Third: La Vie des morts, Kings & Queen

Take a Look

Low Culture

Ruminations of a mildly polemical, highly speculative slant. On the spectacular. Not in the Debordian sense here--more like 'the Colosseum' or Tom Gunning's 'Cinema of Attractions.'

A generalized historical picture, which of course I've touched on here before: it wasn't until about 1903 that the middle classes--who were largely responsible for cinematic production from the get-go--also began to heavily join the ranks of moving picture audiences; this is how Burch figures it, because the triple-blade shutter eliminated the most physically painful aspects of the flicker, which the working class audiences were apparently more willing to endure at the time. (As I understand it there is more nuance to this history of filmic spectatorship, but I think as a basic gloss it still holds.) [EDIT: I've misremembered the date, it was in 1909 that flicker was more or less eliminated in movie screens, though the shutter for it was invented before this date. Six years is a long time in early cinema history so I've made a gaffe. See comments below.] It was shortly after this change that what Burch calls the Institutional Mode of Representation began to take effect; that the (commercially) dominant form of films went from being a variety of spectacles ("cinema of attractions") to narratives that, among other things, incorporated those spectacles. When the very great flicker films of the 1960s were made, no revolutions came about as even a partial a result of them obviously, but a new and I think fascinating cinematic strain came [back] into being, at least. It was an experimentalism that did not hurt the bourgeoisie, as scholar Burch and practicioner Tony Conrad may have hoped, but keep in mind that it also wasn't co-opted, whereas a lot of (say) the Nouvelle Vague's effects and tropes were. Paul Sharits, who did a lot of work with flicker and with violent imagery and sound, actually comes across in his writing as more of a thoughtful hippie type with a pedagogical slant: he was trying to make films that would bring people to meditative states, not High Works of Art so much as tools for beauty or peace. This is one of the major reasons why I think avant-garde/experimental/poetic cinema deserves to be talked about still, and not as "elite" cinematic product--not because of vanguardism, but because it strives to fulfill simple human desires for beauty, fascination, wonder, reflection, criticism, etc. I think there is good reason why a lot of the "real" avant-garde, as distinguished from the modernist "art film" tradition insofar as we can distinguish the two, has actually not been appropriated and co-opted by capitalism. It hasn't been harmful to capitalism, but it could be helpful outside of capitalism. Whereas narrative(/art) masterpieces of cinema are frequently geared towards a number of ideological projects, and of course operate first and foremost in the global profit system (and Bruce Baillie films don't)--even when these complicit commercial works are, by all means, masterpieces. The avant-garde in painting has a big money market behind it; in cinema, not really, unless you're talking about visual artists "visiting" cinema-land (Matthew Barney, whose films I've not seen and make no judgments on).

Part of what this entails is bringing the vaunted a-g tradition "down" to low culture--serving perfectly obvious, transparent functions. Now obviously, dealing with hyper-educated mathematics-flirting works of Hollis Frampton is not a passive experience, nor is it helped by ignorance of a lot of what Frampton was working with, in terms of cultural references and material. By bringing part of (a very marginalized) high culture "low" I don't mean that I want to dumb anything down. But to recharacterize the works as having everyday functions, which I am confident the films of Brakhage, Sharits, et al. can fulfill should anyone want them to. But if you look at a lot of what is despised in media culture today, such as the stuff that film critic Mark Kermode wouldn't bring himself to watch, you'll see that it attracts viewership among people who, I think, aren't that fooled as to the form and content of what they see--does anyone think the viewers of American Idol, NASCAR, pro wrestling or numerous other bad/disreputable/"guilty pleasure" shows are not aware of the sensationalism, the deft narrative/spectacular constellations, which draw viewers in? The much-ignored, ridiculed working class and poor, and possibly also the market of middle-class adolescents, who comprise a lot of the audiences for bad TV and such, I think they're all largely aware of properties (the limitations as well as desired functions) of these works. (Having been a middle-class adolescent, as well as having my familial roots and personal experience in working-class backgrounds, I have to say I'm less optimistic about teenagers with pocket money and status issues than I am about rednecks who watch WWE.) The respectable move is to always justify why something is good, not to simply say "I like it, I'm drawn to it." To identify a guilty pleasure is to submit the honesty of the latter type to respectable "taste statutes." Of course many people may be honest about what they like without being critical of why they might like it, too.

And: does anyone actually think that in 1902, working class audiences of motion picture exhibitions were just similarly immune to the painful headaches caused by the unchecked flicker of the projector beam? That they didn't know that more comfortable and refined leisure activities existed "out there?"

One of the interesting charms of pomo capitalist extravaganza Domino (Tony Scott, 2005) is how it does at least give this voice to representations of the presumed-uncritical viewership of precisely this sort of film. And it exhibits these people as fairly savvy of their media environment. The Fast and the Furious is another example, as is maybe xXx. One could say that in all these high-tech, high-octane, media-savvy action films are packaged and presented advertisement for new technologies, a way of selling (images of) cool shit like computer devices and cars to the people who paid to see the movies, i.e., a continuing "education of the senses." And I think this is an eminently reasonable assumption, at minimum, and partly composed of obvious, demonstrable facts, e.g., the role of product placement. But at the same time as the films fulfill these commercial/ideological functions, I think some of them depict, echo, or mirror a certain level of consumer awareness (and thus, by extension, an aspect of human agency) that is not nearly as well-reflected in more respectable middle-brow works. I think it will take a more extensive set of film-to-film comparisons to really seize on this but this is a project I am interested in pursuing, seeing if my hypotheses would pan out.

Insofar as I am optimistic about these "types" of films, and the image-commodity mediasphere of low cultural sensationalim--and my optimism is limited--I would say it is because it, too, fulfills viewer desires (e.g., for spectacle) a bit more honestly than most media, more respectable and visible and "memorable" media. That honesty can lead to transparency and, from the point of view of critical analysis, I think it may be easier for the organic intellectuals of today to grapple with this.

Television

Michael Newman has an excellent article on television and cultural legitimacy here (thanks to Girish for pointing it out). As we celebrate the "erasure" of high-low biases, and the acceptance of television, are we really just plowing over another hierarchical social mapping in the process?

* * *

Mark Kermode has a really problematic "conversion" article (hat tip to The House Next Door for linking to it the other day) where he, as a film critic, learns to stop worrying and love the boob tube. Cinema, that is, movies, always seemed more profound, a better and more immersive and hence more artistic experience, than television. (His favorite film ever by the way? The Exorcist. He's no purist of cinema as an aesthetic form.) After years of near-abstinence from TV, he finally caves. How does he do it? Well, he watches drama & comedy series, which line up most congruously with the artform, these movies, he so loves. No news or documentaries (he had no beef with those), no reality television shows ('the new porn'), no makeovers, etc. Most of the original content on television that differentiates itself from cinema is therefore disqualified from consideration before he's even started.

In short, he's not saying anything at all about the forms of cinema or television, as modes of exhibition, as political entities, or even as aesthetic fields (except for a few dumb remarks I'll touch on in a second). Why am I not surpried? This essay is nothing more than a cog in the big ideology machine to erase certain differences between film, television, and (though unspoken) computers--which, with the rise of digitization and its (illusory) smoothing out of "everything" you could ever want in the marketplace, serves the corporations whose products get shifted around from cinema screen to iPod to flat-screen, not always in that order. And as Newman's blog entry indicates, a lot of the hierarchies remain, so let's not be too thoughtlessly optimistic about the future, here.

Mainstream film reviewing and television reviewing both frequently operate as product endorsements; advertisements for a company products en toto, or a way of life (if not always for a particular product--like, say, an Uwe Boll film). This doesn't mean professional reviewers are all mindless; but the game has become so rigged that even the smart, dutiful ones have to cave in. And of course, the game has been rigged so well that some of us whippersnapper bloggers are reviewing movies, and hence advertising for companies in some capacity, for free. One difference between film and television commentary is of course the role of justifying the series format for the latter, and evaluating a TV show as it goes along. Someone gives up maybe two hours on a film they saw; but following a show involves more time, and the impetus these days of hooking viewers through continuity-reliant dramas seems to be at a peak. This goes beyond a critics' view of things, though I think it has a certain middle-class apologetic to it (thou shalt justify why you spend time watching Veronica Mars). More conventionally denigrated low-class forms of television--professional wrestling, soap operas--draw people in just as shamelessly, but regular viewers of these programs have always acknowledged it as precisely the addictive ruse it is, I think. Very popular, middle-class, middle-brow (or boutique) shows like Grey's Anatomy or House or whatever else are "canonized" on the Internet and around the water coolers not because anyone waxes poetic about their quality so much as the fact that they've hooked everyone in, from episode one to the latest (which of course then becomes a major foundation for TV value judgments).

Whereas television viewing, especially for the first 15-20 years of cable, was known for being transitory, fragmented, imperfect, it's now beautifully consolidating that spectatorship. Ideally speaking, no differentiation of media of scheduling stands in the way of the worlds of image-commodities (see post on Culture Monkey below). You can TiVo a series, or Netflix the DVD box sets, and watch it all in order at your leisure. Now that you don't need cable to watch cable TV, and commercials (as they are) are slowly becoming obsolete, what matters is first to ensure viewership when one can't fix it in space in time. Hence all the hooks; hence the "addictions" to TV on DVD (etc.);

Mark Kermode writes:

Well, on one level, TV clearly has improved, with the move toward the rectangular 16x9 widescreen image meaning that modern TV dramas no longer need look 'boxy' or 'cropped', a long-standing aesthetic barrier. Just as cinema's evolution from the old 4x3 'Academy' screen ratio to the more elongated 'widescreen' format was as significant as the advent of colour, so television's new picture dimensions are broadening its creative horizons immeasurably. Put simply, TV is no longer square. This is a major improvement and it's significant that my strict policing of my kids' TV viewing habits allows them to watch programmes on CBeebies and CBBC but only in the correct aspect ratio ('How many times do I have to tell you, Tweenies is anamorphic 16x9!').

You've got to be kidding. He's been utterly brainwashed by consumerist jingles! I'm as happy as anyone else that DVD has won the battle for widescreen video presentation, and I think it's great that TV channels commonly present films in their correct aspect ratio now. But this fetishization of widescreen (like the fetishization of all things "digital") is fundamentally no more than a proof that someone has taken a shovelful of marketing shit. Academy ratio does not look "inherently" boxy or cropped, of course. It probably will if the original print of the televised image was composed in 2.35 or 1.85. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with the good old-fashioned "square" image, and a critic who does not realize this is someone whose aesthetic faculties have been trampled and buried (sans funeral) by advertising-speak. Does Mark Kermode, lover of cinema, really think pre-1953 cinema was so limited by this "aesthetic barrier" before CinemaScope came to the rescue? That no beautiful images were composed for 1.33? I hope not.

(My parents, who have a massive widescreen TV in their basement, have everything set up so that DVDs of Academy-ratio films are cropped top and bottom so as to be "properly" widescreen. When this is happening with regular folks all over, it's not a victory for historical awareness of our moving image heritage--it's a sure sign that technology companies have referenced and used that call for awareness as a ploy to sell their newest product.)

* * *

I've just finished the first season of HBO's The Wire, which came very highly recommended. And there is much to recommend it. The ambitious plotlines kept me from having any good idea of what was even going on until the third or fourth episode. As a treatise on crime and political corruption in America, it's a relatively clear-eyed account--it says what everyone knows (but which our mainstream media of course back out of when the setting is not fiction), that the political system is corrupt and full of bribes and backdoor deals; that bureaucracy frequently and conveniently inhibits itself from doing anything about this; that poor (black) communities are being continually blighted as a means for profit (not only drugs, but lucrative urban redevelopment projects); that police brutality comes from a number of sources (class privilege, race privilege, a brand of "populist" moralism--when the black lesbian and likable cop Kima rushes to join in on a beating, she's screaming at the perp, "Why would you hit a cop!?") but effects the same domination. And The Wire offers spectacles of cops-and-robbers violence, and occasionally a bit of sex. There's lots of dry humor. It knows exactly how to keep interest high from scene to scene, episode to episode.

Aesthetically speaking. There's one scene where a character named Bubbles, a heroin junkie, is thinking about going clean. As he sits on a park bench there are shots of sunlight through tree leaves; birds chirping. This is where The Wire is at its lowest--when its stylistic choices seem, not inappropriate, but borrowed. It's not organic to the style of the show in any way, it's just something the director or DP thought up because he wanted to show the inviting freshness of a drug-free life; it's like a slick commercial, but a little subtler. Where The Wire is at its best is maybe in its presentation of Omar (Michael K. Williams), a humanized spin on the Badass Motherfucker routine, who in small moments and an admirable seamlessness between performance, writing, and camerawork reveals a deep capacity for love, an adherence to codes ("I've done some dirt, but I never shot anybody who wasn't in the game"), and in his love (the pale boy in the photo below is his lover) and his work (he puts on a show for us viewers whenever he's out to use the guns) he exhibits a taste for beauty. Neither perfect nor "clean," his budding strength is one that is alternative to the system that The Wire depicts and (to an extent) critiques. He indicates something of what might step up if the sociopolitical system presented were actually, amazingly, to start to crumble. He's not a street criminal because he's an underbelly capitalist (like most movie & tv gangsters); and neither is he Robin Hood, mind you; he's a survivalist and he is a certain figuration of potential. It will be interesting to see where this all goes. "I'm hooked."

Quote of the Day

(You know how the sun rises each morning? That's how I feel about cinema. It is always new.)

-- Jen MacMillan

La Peinture cubiste

For French readers.

Thierry Kuntzel and Philippe Grandrieux's La Peinture cubiste, a film/video-produced hybrid that MoMA has shown (on a worn videotape) in their series in tribute to the late Kuntzel, may very well be a major work that we don't often hear about.

Never have I been more frustrated at my own inadequate comprehension at French, particularly spoken French--words and phrases bubbling up so that they made some sense but, without subtitles, I was generally adrift. I must really learn this language. This videofilm could be one of my favorites. Grandrieux filmed (a cubist painter and his wife, in an apartment), and Kuntzel videotaped (negative filter effects, tromboning to distort the linear integrity of the objects). Something about the nature of vision, the visual experience of a cubist painter as he sees the objects and furniture of his room; Grandrieux & Kuntzel have situated him in the history of Western painting since the Renaissance. I think it could be great. I wish I could tell.

James Gray in the NYTimes

(From a few weeks ago, hat tip to Ryan for pointing out what I'd missed):

We Own the Night makes the most of seldom-seen locations, especially in the three action set pieces. To film a nerve-shredding drug bust, the production team found an actual stash house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx is the scene of a rainy car chase reminiscent of The French Connection. And the final face-off unfolds in a patch of head-high reeds at Floyd Bennett Field, a former airport in Brooklyn. (One of the reasons it took years to get the film off the ground was Mr. Gray’s refusal to shoot any of it in Toronto.)

Like Mr. Gray’s other films We Own the Night strives for a heightened emotionality that often seems in conflict with its macho environment. “There’s surface subversive, where it’s worn on the sleeve,” he said. “Everyone wears a hat, the ending comes in the middle. What I prefer is where the subversivenes is almost a Trojan horse and is deeper within the film,” as in classical Hollywood cinema.

“There’s a repression about that period I find amazing,” he added. “You’ve got the ‘A’ story and then beneath that something totally at odds with it. You have a movie that exists on two planes.”

Mr. Gray is smart and neurotic enough both to complain about being misinterpreted and to know that he shouldn’t. He doesn’t want to sound defensive but can’t help griping about what he feels are wrongheaded criticisms.

To his chagrin the Variety review of his new movie called him out for using Blondie’s 1978 song “Heart of Glass” in the opening club scene. “The idea that if your film takes place in 1988 it should only have music from 1988 shows a totally limited sense of history and how history is an accumulation of details,” he said. “Is all your furniture from 2007?”

But he is most irked by the contention that his film is cop-glorifying, flag-waving or even pro-Bush, a connection some have made because of the Bushian ultimatum Mr. Duvall’s character issues to Mr. Phoenix’s: “Either you’re gonna be with us or you’re gonna be with the drug dealers.”

“That was a conscious George Bush comment,” Mr. Gray said. “But that’s not the filmmaker endorsing the behavior. One of the reasons Henry IV [which was an influence for We Own the Night--ZC] reverberated for me in the first place was the current White House.”

Branded World

There are some very interesting things over at Culture Monkey, a blog you should definitely check out:

"Today the ideal blockbuster is part of an entire universe of image-commodities and commodified experience, stage managed in all their myriad formats by a single media conglomerate. Should the consumer wish, video games, animated series, comic books, novels, role-playing games and fan communities, all interrelated to an unprecedented degree of detail, can ensure a near-total independence from the reality of others. The blockbusters of the 21st century, including Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the granddaddy of them all, Star Wars, are not just movies, or even just stories: they are worlds unto themselves."

* * *

The idea of wholly-produced 'worlds' that traverse media--realms into which the fan (however casual or hardcore) can immerse himself--has always appealed to me. Of course it's part & parcel of marketing, this profit-wringing through the variegation of 'image-commodities,' but there are some interesting things done with the possibility, like Mamoru Oshii's Kerberos, which I'd love to eventually delve into beyond the few films I've seen from the saga. I hope to finally get some thoughts on Tachigui--The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters up here.

Ethics of Cinematic Dissemination

A bit dense and labyrinthine and wound up into a ball of yarn in my head; please forgive because I'm going to try to unpack later ...


Let's not think of this in terms of market freedom alone, i.e., the ability for corporations to disseminate practically whatever they want for profit, on terms that suit them. Look at cinema under an authoritarian regime: invisibility, inscrutability, in fact even esotericism, might be good things in terms of evading authority and censorship (meaning authority does not recognize the weapon that passes beneath its gaze). The benefits of so-called universalism, of a mostly, easily culturally-translated mass-produced (but, remember, never actually "popular") vernacular (like the Hollywood/HK action film-product), include a big forum for discussion which can be a good. The solution is not a homogenization of these two polarities ("neither totally mainstream nor obscure = ideal"), but the strategic dialogue between elements of both and all that exist in the regions between each theoretical extremity. It's common sense, but almost never practiced ...

I think this impulse is part of what has connected some makers of avant-garde cinema, as well as theorists and scholars (e.g. Burch), to early cinema, pre-Institutional Mode of Representation. A utopian desire, and maybe a naive one in some ways? Perhaps. (I'm not the historical expert to have a noteworthy opinion on the matter.) Under classical narrative cinematic conventions, things like editing, plot structure, camera movement, etc. are often made to feel invisible, or at least seamless--we are trained as viewers to experience these as seamless under the IMR and its close relatives (low-budget or 'authorial' exceptions acknowledged). There's the highly untrue truism, 'good direction is direction that you can't see.' Whereas in a work of early cinema, as in much avant-garde cinema (or 1920s Soviet montage cinema), the artwork has a non-formulaic or alternatively formulaic make-up. A cut awakens us, keeps us on our toes, because it hasn't fallen into a pattern we've been trained to receive. That reception-training is bound inextricably with the education of the senses that modernity's technological culture instilled upon its inhabitants ... thus, to experience a work (or even simply an instance in it) against the grain of a dominant set of pedagogical-aesthetic patterns is to make one infinitesimal movement against that very culture. (Perhaps only one small movement, though: let's not oversell the "revolutionary" potential of the underground film.)


So the ethical dimension of a shot, a cut, a pan or zoom, whatever, exists because


(a) it bears a relationship to viewers (individual, class), and

(b) because it exists in a system with certain aesthetic patterns finessed and employed in the interests of a (ruling) class for those (mass) viewers' consumption.


Understand, of course, that this is no argument about the greatness of mainstream works: the Hollywood style, or mainstream formal-invisibility, a number of dominant narrative and spectacle-presentational patterns all work because they are on some level effective. We needn't "reject" Trouble in Paradise or Notorious because they operate under the auspices and political program of 'the Hollywood style' (more a stable of stylistic potentialities, really). The question is simply being realistic about how we understand the role of form in sociopolitical discussions of cinema/media.


Special knowledge: the ecology of what we might call anti-mainstream, or anti-IMR practices (production & reception) in cinema and media--which could include digital piracy and sampling as well as it could include anti-bourgeois (!) seizure-producing flicker effects--need not fit the model of avant-gardism. I think this has been a mistake, that some of the literature which deals with alternative practices foregrounds vanguardist purity when it should be foregrounding 'alternativity' (not necessarily marginality)--and aesthetic and thematic self-sufficiency from the mainstream. This posture of exceptionalism has already been co-opted, if it hadn't been from the very beginning. (Look at IFC's smarmy commercials about how it's good because it's, so, like, not cheesy Hollywood crap.)

Wanting People to Know

(Photo: Bob Bird/AP)

"Carmen Williams said she wanted people to know what her daughter [Megan Williams] had endured."

Read this.

And this. To what extent are bloggers ethically obligated to speak up about certain issues? (And not every blogger fits into the category of navel-gazing teenage livejournal diarist or grassroots quasi-journalist, even though this is what all the hype about "bloggers" seems to indicate in the mainstream press.) Probably nobody expects someone who blogs about, say, the corporate world, obscure free jazz recordings, or collectible action figures to interrupt their regular programming and write a post on the Jena Six, or Megan Williams. But what about a blog like this one, with pretensions (ah, more gently now: aspirations) to periodically address very real issues and events of power, and the media? Nobody comes here for news or commentary on POC issues, or radical/progressive issues in general. And yet, Ilyka Damen points to something important here--that is, if you've set precedent for stirring the pot in one way, let's say "the pot" of power structures, the feared race/class/gender matrices, you've built a certain amount of ethical expectation and obligation for yourself. (For my part, I think I've set up these expectations numerous times, and subsequently I've failed at this...) If you've got time to comment on the University of Florida student who was tasered, for example, there's no point in making excuses for not also adding your voice--or pointing clearly to others'--to the movement for justice for the Jena Six, for Megan Williams, for the six lesbians from New Jersey who are still awaiting justice and probably won't get it, for a lot of other struggles that may not be centered on the subject position of white middle-class people who get the short end of the stick from the law (like the UF guy).

(And speaking of which, I'm still figuring out how exactly I feel about the reports of this $1.5 million Duke Innocence Project ...)

The Furnaces

A user named 'dharmamarx' has very helpfully uploaded clips from Hour of the Furnaces (with English subs) to YouTube. Here's the incendiary introduction ...

Image of the Day

Quote of the Day

"The writer, as the producer of a text, does not manufacture the materials with which he works. Neither does he stumble across them as spontaneously available wandering fragments, useful in the building of any sort of edifice; they are not neutral transparent components which have the grace to vanish, to disappear into the totality they contribute to, giving it substance and adopting its forms. The causes that determine the existence fo the work are not free implements, useful to elaborate any meaning: as we shall see in the course of a very definite example, they have a sort of specific weight, a peculiar power, which means that even when they are used and blended into a totality they retain a certain autonomy; and may, in some cases, resume their particular life. Not because there is some absolute and transcendent logic of aesthetic facts, but because their real inscription in a history of forms means that they cannot be defined exclusively by their immediate function in a specific work."

-- Pierre Macherey, Theory of Literary Production (ed. Geoffrey Wall, p. 47)

More a private reminder than anything else, but I thought I'd like to pass on the paragraph anyway ...

Jarman Interview, 1993

Luis/Alfred

Finally caught up with Buñuel's El and I'm wondering if anyone knows of any good lengthy texts (whatever language, if it's Romance I can parse it and get a little something) handle the question of parts of El's apparently massive influence on parts of Vertigo. Do any of the Hitchcock biographies or anything deal with this? And given how much hell Brian De Palma received with his "Hitchcock ripoffs" (which were, of course, a mere handful of completely forthright engagements with the Hitchcock corpus/mythos: whatever else one thinks of them), has anyone replied how heavily the Master of Suspense seems to have "borrowed" from Buñuel here?

(Speaking of Hitchcock books: has anyone read the two-volume Hitchcock's Cryptonymies by Tom Cohen? Looks fascinating but very intensive, maybe too thick a slice to add to my plate at the moment.)

Image of the Day

Hour of the Furnaces

I wonder what it would have been like to see this film (which I've waited a long time to see) the way it was apparently intended by Solanas & Getino--that is, with debate, discussion. This is one of the biggest problems with the spread of 'political' film today: its neutralization in the social act of seeing the film. Sure, there's always the chance to impress someone at a party with anecdotes about the four-hour Argentinian anticapitalist film you saw, but if it's not showing up again at a screen near you ... then what? And the surge of home screenings, for groups of people, of various Iraq or anti-Bush documentaries is better than nothing; a step forward. But what of the actual discussion amongst strangers, really disparate people potentially, in theatrical venues?

Whose blood didn't boil throughout parts of this film? Isn't the point to channel that energy somehow? Even almost forty years later, it's still got something to it ...

Management Speak

I've started coursework for my MA. I doubt I'll be blogging about the experience as I go along; Elusive Lucidity is a place for me to write about things I don't really get to talk about in my day-to-day life, and school (like work) gets as much play as it needs. This post serves only as a reminder to myself, to keep trying to pull myself out of too-easy thought patterns, to keep thinking--which is a challenge never surmounted, only battled to a truce and judged on one's satisfaction--even when other parts of scholarly life might come easy. The lure of certain kinds of speech can sometimes blind us like a shiny object for a raccoon ...

Viacom:

The Viacom Corporate Responsibility Council seeks to provide company-wide guidance and support to pro-social programs governed by our brands. While nurturing each business unit's distinctive identity, the Council collaborates on Company-wide pro-social efforts, as well as, projects at the business unit level. The Council educates employees and audiences about key pro-social issues to inspire, enlighten and ignite action in both the public arena and within our own employee family.

... Or there are always the groupings of three (via Time Warner, whose "businesses strive to gain competitive advantage from opportunities for constructive collaboration"):

Whether measured by quality, popularity or financial results ... Entertainment maintain unrivaled reputations for creativity and excellence as they keep people informed, entertained and connected. ... We are innovators in technology, products and services. ... a focus on growth, engagement and monetization. ... Most important, our people’s leadership at every level — their creativity, talent and commitment to excellence — ensures that Time Warner continues to provide the high-performance service, trustworthy information and enjoyable entertainment our audiences, members and customers expect.

(That last sentence is so beautifully vacuous, squaring itself with a hat trick of trios, "ensuring to continue to provide," boldly pushing the oxymoronic "leadership at every level" ... four stars!)

If I felt less gauche doing so I'd quote an even longer passage from Chabert, but if you'll excuse me, here are three quite substantial paragraphs from some months ago that I found illuminating:

Frederic Jameson wasn't the first but was perhaps the most eloquent and observant to explain how/why postmodern aesthetic product works on delivering an illusion or facsimile of content. (The first stage of this perhaps was the treatment of content as mere simulacra of content, which was actually the - unspoken- ideological posture of New Criticism.) Without the goblins, the ghosts, the fabulous plot, the fantasy, low-genre or pastiche elements - the vulgar post-modern phenomenology - we have empty, coat-hanger texts, texts which entirely refuse, indeed shrink from, the traditional material referents of the image constellations and narrative paraphernalia they marshall. (There are exceptions, of course).

Did I say vulgar? That is precisely the wrong - the most insulting - word. It is the vulgarity of social reality ('vulgarity' has beome a synonym for 'materiality' or 'reality') whose urgent suppression and avoidance (as above all a rude, inescapably uppity and frightful incongruity which artistic imagination must, like a phalanx of private security guards, close out from the privileged spaces where the sheer lavishness, the conspicuous costliness and profitability, of the capitalist mass culture's artifacts are displayed) - whose inadmissibility (theoretically bumped up in class to unknowability), then, inspires all this density of simulacral reference.

In this sense one has to class (you should pardon the expression) Spectres of Marx in this genre. If it had been forty times or so more widely read one might be tempted to accuse it of influence on something. Derrida was a very inventive, stupefyingly erudite, and more importantly kind and generous man, but where where does a person in his economically and socially elite minority find the chutzpah, really, to declare the concept of class pernicious, shameful and requiring obliteration on the grounds that it is metaphysical? The Telltale Heart of this ambivalent, and ambivalence generating, work - introducing the new figure, Spectrology/Hauntology (which in the decade since its English translation's release has been more successful than any other new figure of its kind in its target niche), this recursively monstrous changeling- is the drumbeat of denouncement of vulgarity as part of the tireless self-dramatising as a just-baptised bumpkin in a pristine white terry robe, perpetually emerging from the cleansing steams, performing that obsessive and at this point supersititious warding off of the evil materialist eye described by Timpanaro as characteristic and obligatory for all Marxisms or 'Marxian' inquiries, running through the entire work, and punctuating its episodes of textual explication. It is rare for Derrida to make positive, plain language proposals, but curiously it seems about half of the few occurrences of such unhesitating statements in his entire oeuvre appear in his reading Marx; here, confronting Marx - confronting "the philosophy of praxis", confronting an argument which among other things suggests that this fantasy Derrida promotes* of the role of bourgeois sages and administrators is both bogus and insidious - deconstruction transforms from an operation which coaxes into bloom the reticent and stunted seeds of the text, which obeys its object in the obstinate pursuit of a tendentious poetical purpose, to an old fashioned, if tactically and lexically newfangled, rhetorical refutation. This unaccustomed podium-produced debunking - with all the characteristics of the feared vulgarity except clarity - is not occulted so much as minced and scattered over the deconstructive stew as garnish, not stirred in, remaining visible and available for gleaning. The refutation, buoyed up to a level of respectability by the stew below with its strong flavouring of commitments to an undeconstructible justice, is confined to a certain aspect of Marx, that is, to that aspect for which Marx has remained an important thinker for people outside the academy and a troublesome, quarantined and habitually mangled one within, namely, to his critique of capitalism. What is allowed to pass in the purported celebration of the Marxian legacy is Marx' critique of some clerks' text-product. If that is a celebration, who needs stonings?

* * *

On the masking of content there is little I can say. ('I hope to redefine, reimagine, and reinterrogate the notion of masking in the interstices of social, spatial, and ideological arenas.') The enemy here is not difficult language, it is not Continental philosophy, it is not some "outmoded" Marxism. The vigil stands to watch for apologetics for a dominant order; the apologists are often unwitting wolves in sheep's clothing. Enjoy the clips.

Thanks, A.O. Scott

"The best of the old westerns were dense with psychosexual implication and political subtext. Often dismissed, then and now, as naïve celebrations of dubious ideals, they were in many ways more sophisticated than their self-consciously critical (or “revisionist”) heirs."

(via)

I love Clint Eastwood's Westerns and Jarmusch's Dead Man, but the fact of the matter is that they have added to--not "outdone"--the autocritical, artistically complex Western tradition already established by the likes of Anthony Mann, Andre De Toth, and John Ford among others ... including, definitely, Delmer Daves' original 3:10 to Yuma. Haven't seen the remake, will do so if I can find time and a spare $11. But this is one of my biggest pet peeves, the thoughtless, history-blind acclaim of "neo" or "revisionist" Hollywood genre films that are often more aesthetically and thematically retrograde than the films that the commentary end of the culture industry tells us they're updating.

Spooks

The Spook Who Sat by the Door changes registers a few times throughout; it begins on very procedural terms, leavened throughout by very wry black comedy. A black man, Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook), excels and attains token placement in the CIA, where his 'Uncle Tom' tactics get him ahead. Lots of small gestural and behavioral beauties--like when Freeman is called last-minute from his job as Director of the Reproduction Department (he makes photocopies in a back room all day, the only job they're willing to give the black hire) to give a tour of CIA facilities to a bunch of white Senators--he advances his hand for a shake ever-so-slightly before dropping it again, acknowledging that he'll get no fraternal greeting.


The film then goes into a different kind of procedural mode, from institutionally-critical to productive: Freeman makes contact with a militant black gang in Chicago, asserts himself as its ring leader; they become an active Black Panther organization (in all but name): our hero's really a radical, and nobody suspects because they don't think the black militants are capable of intelligent resistance.

And from this point there's a certain docudrama urgency to the film (e.g., amazing crowd control and shooting in a neighborhood riot sequence). The Spook Who Sat by the Door has a variegated style and a loose linear structure: a lot of registers to work even (even broad slapstick once or twice), and it succeeds in most of them.

Hogan's Heroes actor Ivan Dixon had something to him as a director, though his directorial work was almost all in television I think. 'Subject for Further Research.'

Images of the Day

When it comes down to it--here is some "elusive lucidity." Maybe I should just turn this into a Jacques Rivette blog?

Simon on Bergman

Let me put it this way now: What Shakespeare is to the theater, Bergman is to cinema. Neither of them has been or is likely to be equaled. There have been other great film directors: Fellini, whom Bergman loved; Bresson, whom Bergman selectively admired; Antonioni, whom he came to appreciate; and Renoir, who mostly left him cold. But none of them so expressed the whole human being, so encompassed human variety.

Alex posted here: "Overall, Bergman nearly always surpresses politics - characters from the middle ages appear as angst-ridden moderns. Characters from the nobility of the nineteenth century appear as.....angst-ridden moderns. Making movies about other times is a perfect way to explore politics other than our own (Kurosawa Welles and Jancso utilize this method, for instance)- and Bergman ignores the opportunity he himself is creating. Bergman often creates figures who very naturally would have political pasts and activities and ignores that side of their existance."

There are a lot of Bergman films I haven't seen. Empirically I can't be certain that John Simon is wrong; or he may be wrong but at least in the ballpark. Yet nothing I've seen by Bergman suggests he gets at "the totality" of human experience. He certainly seems to register with thoroughness on one certain plane or approach to cinema, to Art. But I feel safe in saying he doesn't ever offer what Brakhage offers, or what Godard offers.

And [Bergman] never shied away from the great, tragic truths.

Strange how those people who most valorize concepts like "the great, tragic truths" never bother to illuminate or even suggest what these truths are. Let's call a spade a spade here--bereft of further elaboration, this statement almost always means, "my own deepest fears, desires, convictions of any and all kinds were affirmed by this artwork." Too timid to invoke I in this context, the commentator projects his feelings onto the totality of humanity.

He was a man who loved women, and sometimes resented them, which comes with the territory. In all his films, women figure as importantly as men, and often more so. He understood them and empathized with them; he was horrified by Hitchcock, whom he perceived as hating them. The uncut version of Scenes from a Marriage may be the profoundest movie treatment of man-woman relationships ever made.

Always it is with these encomia to male directors who are vaulted into the stratosphere for paying attention to half the population. The same sentiment behind, "This director [always male] understood women better than any other." Mizoguchi was a incredibly great director; Ophüls was an incredibly great director; Bergman may have been an incredibly great director too--do we give them a trophy or a jello mold, do we base our estimation on their greatness on our recognition of their basic attention to women? Yes, it's a political good for filmmakers to go against a few patriarchalist grains, but why must praise of this practice so often come steeped in paternalistic language ("resenting" women comes with the territory of "loving" them--sheesh)?

He also understood and loved actors as no other director did. (Renoir, in a couple of films, approached this.) He had been, briefly, an actor, and all through his life directed theater, where the actor-director relations are closer than in film. Importantly, he had a kind of resident company of film actors on whom he could rely, and for whom he tailored his screen characters--only Kurosawa had something vaguely resembling it.

When all else fails, assert without explaining. "Understanding" actors, "loving" them--this is such a cliché; I know because I've used it plenty of times in the past myself. It's lazy. For the record, more than Kurosawa had something "vaguely resembling" a company of stock actors who interacted with the filmmaker. You would think that some Weekly Standard intern would send a note to Simon pointing out this glaringly obvious fact. Simon's opinion may be that the likes of Ford, Altman, or Ozu did not use their "resident companies" as well as Bergman--but Bergman was hardly unique in this regard.

Unlike most directors, Bergman wrote most of his screenplays himself. There he exhibited his superb command of dialogue, another thing that brings him close to Shakespeare.

On this I am simply curious--does Simon, an erudite individual obviously (if frequently very wrong), speak Swedish?

(via)

Jungle Highlights

"When I go to Sri Lanka-- I mean, I haven't been that many times-- but when I went, it was really difficult, just because of how I dress and what I look like. They go, "Oh my God, she's so Westernized." I have brown bits in my hair, and my Mom was practically on her knees screaming, "Nooo! You have to dye your hair before you leave the house or I'll kill myself!" I'd be like, "What are you freaking out about?" and she'd explain the Tamil Tiger girls have been in the jungle for so long that their hair goes brown, and if you walk out like this, you're going to get shot because people will think you're a Tamil Tiger girl. And I'd be like, [posh accent] "Mom, this is fashion! From England! L'Oreal hair color, like, get with it-- because I'm worth it!"

That's how they knew I was Westernized, because I'd be brave and I'd walk to the shops. And they'd be like, "No no no-- you just don't do shit like that around here. Get off the bicycle and quit it, 'cause you will get killed." (via)

I don't yet have an iPod (gasp) and I haven't bought a CD in forever, so I haven't actually bought her new or older stuff yet, but I've been watching/listening to M.I.A. videos on YouTube constantly for the past couple of weeks. I first heard her music from the Dosa Guy back in 2005 ("I like her voice--very sexy").

Family Life

THE GODFATHER
May I suggest an acronym? "The Hollywood Establishment's Glorification Of Downright Fascists As Tragic Heroes Exceeds Reason".

-- Dale Thomajan (via Theo Panayides)

Recently I watched The Godfather (my second viewing, and the first in probably eight years or so). I'm not a FF Coppola fan; I haven't seen everything and maybe I'll love One for the Heart whenever I get around to it, but the "master" who made four of the greatest films of the (allegedly) greatest period of American cinema just does very little for me. So revisiting The Godfather over the weekend, while hardly the painful experience my most pessimistic self had been hardening myself for, was for all intents and purposes a fairly cool three hours. What can I say? I honestly can't say much about the film, one way or the other. But here are a few notes it sparked.

There's a certain stance that Coppola's film takes toward the mobsters that reappears in and structures I think almost every other contemporary American mobster movie (including what I've seen of The Sopranos): a frisson between the comfort and ritual of family life--eyetalians and all their surrogate relatives (and there are always outsiders let in a certain ways: James Caan in The Godfather, De Niro in GoodFellas), the pasta dinners and feisty little grandmas and mistresses and the Church; and the brutal and basically romanticized violence of that other kind of "family life," the beatings and killings, the money movement, the drugs/gambling/theft. The two are frequently played off of each other; no sequence could possibly exemplify it better than the famous Godfather baptism sequence. In fact the baptism sequence literalizes what is often, I think, an unforced, maybe even unacknowledged source of energy and drama in these works--drawing in people through comforts of ritual and familiarity (dinnertime, mundane things like the "everyday" problems of the Soprano family), through certain family values (tribalist, socially authoritarian: everyone from Sonny to Scarface has got to look out for his sister), and then using the credit won in that account to take us "into" the minds of the mobsters--recto capitalist gangsters to the Enron/Halliburton verso. Likewise perhaps there's a basic consumer-pleasing element, a kind of wish fulfilment, in the reverse: that the violence and crime are sprinkled throughout certain reflections of mundane middle-class life. It seems like a perfectly reproducible, workable formula; Scorsese and The Sopranos are compulsively watchable; I wonder why there aren't more mob movies and shows like this.

I type all this in not as a means of trying to attack the likes of Scorsese, Chase, Coppola, etc. There are worthy parts to all their work; but I'm not concerned in this instance with the bottom line of quality obviously, but with the meaning and functions of certain generic (even "authorially" generic) elements in a certain framework. What propels these mob movies forward; why are they so often balanced in this way; is this particular balance of 'family life' perspectives a defining structural feature of the 1970-present mob film?

Exceptions: Abel Ferrara (whose mob films are just of a different order altogether: a different creature) and, at least, the first two features by James Gray (his third hits American screens in October). Little Odessa and The Yards are excellent films that I have watched only once; they are--especially the latter--perfectly fine narrative films, a little Oscar-bait even; they also appeared on first go-round exceptionally smart and clear-eyed about family life, family love, money, mob/metropolitan politics and strings-pulling. I keep meaning to Netflix these two films, analyze them more closely, and write a little about them ...

And one caveat: I have not yet seen Once Upon a Time in America, I always miss it when it comes to the repertory scene here and I really would prefer to see it on the big screen.

Powers of the Invisible

‘Since 1789, ideas alone have constituted the strength and salvation of the proletariat. It owes to them its every victory’, wrote Blanqui (one of those who passed the ideas of 1789 on to the Paris Commune). Abstract concepts were the abc of a militant’s apprenticeship. The notions of proletariat and bourgeoisie, like those of labour power, surplus value, relations of production, etc., that underlie them, are not apprehensible by the senses. Secondly, whether project or myth, the idea of the Revolution as ‘what should be’ is the denial and transcendence of the immediate, the overcoming of the present. Both as logical discourse and as moral undertaking, the socialist utopia demanded an inner break with the ‘stream of everyday life’, an act of faith that mobilized the powers of conceptual analysis to break the accepted social imagery down into elemental abstracts, like ‘exploitation’.

Writing collectivizes individual memory; reading individualizes collective memory. The back-and-forth between them fosters the sense for history by unearthing potentials within the present, creating backdrops and foregrounds; it is fundamental for the idea of socialism. When it is cold outside and the night is long, memory means that we are not alone. Alphabetical memory, as Hegel would put it. Contrasting ‘the inestimable educational value’ of learning to read and write with alphabetical characters, as opposed to hieroglyphics, he described how the very process of alphabetical writing helps to turn the mind’s attention from immediate ideas and sense impressions to ‘the more formal structure of the word and its abstract components’, in a way that ‘gives stability and independence to the interior realm of mental life’.

All the revolutionary men of action I have met, from Che Guevara to Pham Van Dong by way of Castro (not the autocrat, but the one-time rebel), to say nothing of the walking encyclopaedias known as Trotskyists, were compulsive readers, as devoted to books as they were unreceptive to images. A Hegelian would explain this by saying that reading leads to critical detachment, and—given that there is ‘no science that is not hidden’, nor future without ‘rehearsal’ of the past—to utopian anticipation. Abstraction encourages action, as remembrance leads to innovation. The greatest modernizers inaugurate their career with a backward leap, and a renaissance proceeds through a return to the past, a recycling, and hence a revolution. Columbus discovered America in a library, through the perusal of arcane texts and cosmographies. The Ancien Régime in France was overthrown by admirers not of Montgolfier or Washington, but of Lycurgus and Cato. Chateaubriand and Hugo revolutionized literature by dint of Gothic ruins, Nietzsche vaulted over Jules Verne with the aid of the pre-Socratics, and Freud revisited Aeschylus.

The misfortune of revolutionaries is to have inherited a little more than most people. The written word is vital for these transmitters of collective memory, since their analytical tools are forged from its traditions. A legacy of ideas is not automatically transmissible; there are better or worse historical environments for conveying abstractions, just as there are better and worse conductors of electricity. The revolutionary act par excellence starts from a sense of nostalgia, the return to a forgotten text, a lost ideal. Behind the ‘re’ of reformation, republic or revolution—of rehearsing, recommencing, rereading—there is a hand flicking through the pages of a book, from the end back to the beginning. Whereas the finger that presses a button, fast-forwarding a tape or disc, will never pose a danger to the establishment.

--Régis Debray, "Socialism: A Life-Cycle." New Left Review 46. Food for thought.

Free Films

"My conviction and endeavour are dedicated to the hope that film studies in universities do not become a "registration office" administering the corpus imposed by the industry. This means that we have a duty (urgent to the point of becoming an emergency) to seek out and to comment on what I would call "free-films", that is to say, films made outside the industry for ethical, political, economic or purely aesthetic reasons. Nowadays it appears that fewer and fewer films are made by the industry, because more and more films are the same film under different titles--like those in the pornography market. There are fewer and fewer films to watch because there are more and more prints of the same movie on regular screens. ... And nowadays more and more "free films" are appearing because of the moral and political necessity to escape from economic censorship. This is why I will analyse in this paper three modest, unknown, and unique French experimental films."

--Nicole Brenez, Preamble to her paper "The Secrets of Movement: The Influence of Hong Kong Action Cinema upon the Contemporary French Avant-Garde," collected in Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (eds. Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, Duke/Hong Kong UPs, 2005), which I picked up today and which looks to be a really impressive volume, including contributions from Brenez, Adrian Martin, Paul Willemen, Stephen Teo, and David Desser, among others.

Image of the Day

If ...

... things look strange on EL tonight, it's probably because I'll be toying with the settings, trying to upgrade the template (while still keeping the general layout).

EDIT: Whew, I really screwed up some of the font formatting, didn't I? I'll see what I can do to fix it ...

EDIT 2: Messy, messy. I feel like I've tinkered with Elusive Lucidity in a bad way--and it would take hours and hours to conform the hundreds of posts I've made here to look good and ordered. I'm tempted to just apologize, accept readers' alerts for any particularly awful formatting on old posts, and just move on. Hmm.

On Libraries and Galleries

Rough notes.

The sweep of history. All these paintings; all this art; all this culture. All this value.

"Nothing perhaps increases by indulgence more than a desultory habit of reading, especially under such opportunities of gratifying it. I believe one reason why such numberous instances of erudition occur among the lower ranks is, that, with the same powers of mind, the poor student is limited to a narrow circle for indulging his passion for books, and must necessarily make himself master of the few he possesses ere he can acquire more. Edward, on the contrary, like the epicure who only deigned to take a single morsel from the sunny side of a peach, read no volume a moment after it ceased to excite his curiosity or interest; and it necessarily happened, that the habit of seeking only this sort of gratification rendered it daily more difficult of attainment, till the passion for reading, like other strong appetites, produced by indulgence a sort of satiety."

--Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (Penguin Classics, p. 48)

David Teniers the Younger, Duke Leopold Willem Inspects Paintings in his Gallery in Brussels (1651)


"On all sides am I surrounded by a shameful video collection — too many hours are stored in these tapes, too many squibs, too much life. My collection is vast and fulsome: I have little need to watch La Venganza de los Narcotraficantes, but I have it, which is half the battle, and, having it, the battle needn't be completed. I read Walter Benjamin's Unpacking My Library: "The collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories" — I cannot bear to look at my collection anymore, for they represent not films but the squandered hours spent watching them. Revisiting them is a horror, so I shut them away — yet since they contain my essence, my hours, stolen away as a tribesman's soul is snatched by a Polaroid, I am in fact shutting myself away, burying remorseful hours too painfully vicarious to relive. I am an idiot."

--Andrew Grossman

Films--no aura, a single print is rarely that valuable as an item on the market, a videotape even less so, but (especially after home video & the digital age) they can be collected like paintings or other images. A painting by a big art world figure usually costs relatively little but can command huge sums; a feature film usually costs hugely but its price is dispersed among its public. There is no owner of the film as an artwork outside of its material; we are all potential owners of reproductions of the film. On the consumer end of cinema, the genealogy stems not from the commissioner or buyer but the collector. Is film its very own 'museum without walls'?

Eight Meme

Tram tagged me for this and I said I would respond, so, coming very late, here are eight pieces of trivia about your friendly blog author.

1. I'm basically punctual. Generally if I'm supposed to be somewhere at 7:30, I'll show up by 7:25. This applies to where my person is supposed to be at a given time; it doesn't always apply to email correspondence or sending out packages or giving birthday cards. It definitely doesn't apply to responding to meme tags.

2. I was on C-SPAN once. For about two seconds. It was their coverage of the Washington Nader Rally. (I voted Nader in 2000. I have no regrets or shame about this especially as I was in Virginia and not a swing-state.) Michael Moore showed up; Cornel West gave the final (rousing) address of the night if I recall--he showed up late, after Nader got there and spoke. In probably 2002, it was at another Nader-headlined rally, down in the Financial District that I heard Phil Donohue speak and I got quite disillusioned with the Greens and the liberal Democrats (not that I considered myself one of them, but I put a lot of hope in their project--naively). I realized that at its base this was all still capitalism with a prettier face, a self-congratulatory bit of deception of oneself and others. For a few years after this I was relatively apathetic about politics altogether, and certainly I was under the mistaken impression that "the Left" was dead or beyond repair in this era, even though I still called myself "far left" if asked.

3. About ten years ago, my favorite novel was Frank Herbert's Dune. Make of that whatever you will. I never read the sequels although I've always wanted to go back just for completionist reasons. Several months ago I actually took one of those online quizzes to see which famous sci-fi writer I was. Well: Frank Herbert.

4. I don't like driving. Sometimes it's fine. But factor in heavy traffic or city blocks and I hate it. And I've just never been a car person--I don't know much about them, never have, and I don't really care one way or the other. (In the earlier, more insecure years of my adolescence, I had a hard time being "one of the guys" whenever cars came up. I knew fuck-all.) Whenever I leave NYC, life without driving will be one of the things I miss most. A walking city is an optimal one, though not always the best (as we see today here in the Big Apple) when it's raining.

5. I've never had a broken bone. A good thing in theory, but retrospectively I wish I'd at least gained the experience of a broken arm in a cast, having all the kids at school sign it, knowing what it feels like, etc.

6. TV Shows I Inexplicably Love: Just Shoot Me and Bernie Mac. I think there was one other show I sometimes group with these, but now I can't remember which one. At any rate, the point is that I'm half-mesmerized by these two sitcoms whenever they come on (only in reruns these days, I think), and can't ever put my finger on their particular appeal. The first one's kind of shit, I can't even stand David Spade, yet if this ever comes on a TV and I'm nearby, I'm caught in a trance and have to watch it. Wendie Malick is fantastic but I otherwise don't know what draws me to it. Bernie Mac is a higher quality work, but like Just Shoot Me, I don't know what it is that keeps my eyes glued to the screen. (I didn't "follow" these shows when they were on; there are relatively few TV series that really do to me what they are precisely designed to do, i.e., get me returning to see more and more, on a weekly basis. But once these are actually on the screen...)

7. I've lived in six states (Idaho, Kansas, Georgia, California, Virginia, New York) and one other country (Germany). Strangely I wasn't born in any of those places.

8. I spent a summer working at Papyrus. The stationery store. It was my second retail job, and certainly my last if I have anything to say about it. My friend got me the position working with him as a sales associate. It was actually an incredibly entertaining gig for the summer (my last spent living with my parents), all the quotidian retail woes aside. The assistant manager was only a few months older than I was at the time (20) but she looked much older; I found out after she skipped town (on the pretext of her grandfather's untimely death back in Belfast, with $150 curiously missing from the safe) that her boyfriend--who managed a shoe store down the way--was abusive. They also supported a couple of habits. The assistant manager was a fun, nice, unreliable guy who would go out and party on the club scene until dawn, and then show up (late) to open the store sometimes, occasionally passing out in the back room to sweat off whatever pills he'd popped. There was a student, a young Somalian woman, who was torn between trying to adhere to stricter Muslim prohibitions on music and loving the Doors (imagine this tall beautiful woman in a headscarf singing "The End" and swaying around as she restocked greeting cards). That's just a start for the people who worked there. My friend and I probably spent 60 hours a week in each other's company and it never got old; we'd frequently work the same shifts and then go out to one of our places to drink. I think I only saw a total of about twenty movies that whole summer.

Moving on, I'm hoping to get some posts out very soon that have as little to do with yours truly as possible.

The Psychology of Allan Grey's Vision

First two shots of Dreyer's Vampyr--Allan Grey arrives: he's a beanpole, dark slim (casually slanted) vertical lines out of a gray mist. He looks up, sees the sign for the hotel (a pan down reveals the reason for the sign). Tall, thin, vertical Mr. Grey's gaze--if that's what Dreyer's pan down aims to suggest--of course looks up and down before he looks left and right ...

More to follow, eventually.

The Longhetti House (1974, 2006)

Many thanks to my comrade, Andy Rector.