Martin Walsh on The Passenger

"At one point early in the film Nicholson points out that “we translate every experience into the same old codes.” Whether the line comes from Peploe, Wollen, or Antonioni is not of importance (though I'd bet on Wollen: the emphasis on codes links to the interest in semiotics he has been pursuing for some years). Its importance for our understanding of The Passenger is of crucial significance. On one level, it helps make sense of Nicholson’s desire to cease being David Locke, to adopt a new identity, to escape the tyranny of the co-ordinates of his present existence, to re-open his life to new experiences. However, the way in which David Locke attempts to recharge his life proves fraught with unanticipated, uncontrollable dangers which ultimately lead to his death. The idea of a complete break from the past (as it was for Godard and Gorin in Tout va bien) is shown to be illusory, even self-defeating. Such a radical severance from the structures of one’s identity leads clearly to disaster.

"But an alternative mode, another response is posed within the film, in Antonioni’s handling of the narrative discourse itself. And it is here that a second meaning of “we translate every experience into the same old codes” manifests itself. Antonioni’s narrative is devoted, we might say, to transforming the codes of narrative at work in his discourse even as he uses them. The narrative codes at points are placed against the meanings we infer, conventionally, from the diachronic ordering of the images. An example: David Locke, now Robertson, sits alone in a huge glasshouse, awaiting a rendezvous. An old guy approaches him, Robertson speaks to him. Although he is not the man Robertson awaits, he cheerfully stops to talk awhile, and launches into the story of his life: “One day, very far from here ...” he begins, at which sound and image fade, as if in flashback. They are replaced by the faded greens of a 16mm newsreel, which turns out to be of the public executions on a beach (the new governments attempts to discourage armed robbery). When the sequence ends, we find the newsreel is being watched on a Steenbeck editing table back in a London studio. The real context of the footage is that it was shot by David Locke, reporter.

"In other words, Antonioni feeds us a false tradition: If we read the sequence of images in the way U.S. narratives have taught us to do, if we simply “translate every experience into the same old codes,” the narrative becomes momentarily opaque, refuses to make sense, since it is difficult to invent a connection between the old man and the executions, (unless we choose to read the old man as Locke’s “conscience” visiting him, reminding him of his own past—and even here we can only grasp this possible reading after the fact—i.e., when we know this footage was shot by David Locke)."

(source)

The Moment of Death

My impression is that the general direction of the pans in The Passenger are from left to right, those that don't follow action at least, though I will have to check diligently to be sure. Whenever the camera moves over to an 'abstract' space (a wall, a landscape), ignoring the human figure that had been in the frame initially, it is as though the camera is reading the material of the image it is creating, that is, analyzing its framing as it simultaneously records (L to R). In the scene immediately before the one illustrated below, Locke is stuck in the desert, slumped against his sand-trapped vehicle, and the camera moves slowly away from Locke, even slowing down over one visual patch as though parsing a rough phrase, to read the red desert. It is as though the human has been read out of the material. This is not a revolutionary thing to say about Antonioni, I realize. I'm just reflecting and trying to set up a few foundations off of which to build.

In the shots leading up to the demise of the truck in the desert--before the L-to-R pan that leaves Nicholson's body high and dry, we do get R-to-L actions: a pan that follows the truck itself as it is zooming through the dunes; the play of sand thrown out from under the spinning wheels; the shovels of sand we see coming from behind the vehicle's profile as Nicholson/Locke tries to dig his transportation out.

In the shots represented above, we mostly see a movement from left to right, with Nicholson's body crossing in front of the camera. This is not a literal and schematic application. For example, the images of one and two are the first two shots of the sequence of Locke's return; they are like a soft or weak jump cut, really. Only through the second cut does he pass the camera--"us," readers--and continue in the third shot to the door in shot three, echoed slightly in the camera placement of the final shot illustrated here (which is shown by the last three frames).

* * *

"Like Blow-Up, The Passenger affirms the impossibility of seeing the crime in the present. Here the moment of transition from the living to the dead body is concealed, maintained offscreen through a complex camera movement that traces a hollow space, installs a void in the center of the scene, and empties out vision from within. The camera, and the spectator with it, sees from this groundless position, this invisible space in which somebody is dying. Through a complete reversal of perspective, the vanishing point, the point sanctioning the disappearance of the scene, is being projected all the way back to the viewpoint and even behind it."

--Domietta Torlasco, "Undoing the Scene of the Crime: Perspective and the Vanishing of the Spectator" in Camera Obscura 64, p. 104.

Image of the Day

Qu'est-ce que la Nouvelle Vague?

"I do not think that Chabrol and Truffaut have deliberately sold their souls to the devil, as certain young left-wing critics, and certain young film-makers less fortunate than they, have claimed; they are probably making the films they want to make, but anyone who claims that theirs are any better or, above all, any more "advanced" than, let us say, the highly respectable Diable au corps, is simply deluding himself. It is true that in so far as they choose "serious" subjects--most of their films deal with youth in a far more sophisticated way than Carné's lamentable Tricheurs--they are not disgracing the French cinema and have, in fact, slightly raised the average intellectual level of French films; but it would be pure hokum to claim that these young men are working any kind of aesthetic revolution, for technically--and, above all, poetically--their films are a good twenty years behind the time."

Above is a paragraph from Noël Burch's polemic on (against?) the earliest stirrings of the Nouvelle Vague (Film Quarterly, Winter, 1959), wherein he gives a passing grade to Rivette ("alone among the Cahiers group, [he] seems to have acquired a real mastery of academic film technique" and "has the added merit" of prior journeyman, low-budget film experience), somewhat dismisses outright Chabrol, Truffaut, and much (not all) of Vadim (the exceptions are Sait-on Jamais? and much more modestly, Les Liaisons dangereuses), and of the early short films of Doniol-Valcroze, Godard, and Rohmer, says nothing in what he's seen indicates "that the three features they are now completing are likely to prove very exciting." He eviscerates Camus' Orfeu Negro (had it not "inexplicably been graced with the grand prize at Cannes this year" he would have ignored it altogether). Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'echafaud earns approval but Les Amants is a disappointment ("unbelievably flat" "academic formlessness").

Who gets praised? Well, Jean Rouch, obliquely (Burch mentions in a footnote that he leaves out Rouch largely because that ethnographic master is being treated in another article in the same issue of FQ); Jean-Daniel Pollet (of his short film Pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse: "Although ... formally as banal as Les 400 coups, its ferociously realistic description of a provincial dance hall betokened genuine artistic talent and a real need to create"); Alain Resnais (he praises Hiroshima, Mon Amour very, very highly but also subjects it to rigorous criticism); and most of all Marcel Hanoun (for Une Simple histoire).

*

Saying anything about Noël Burch necessitates designating which Burch to whom you're referring--he refined and reassessed his opinions about things many times over the course of almost fifty years. (Recall that he more or less disowned--though did not try to bury--Theory of Film Practice by the late 1970s.) A polemic like this one has a weird place: it suggests to cinephiles where the discourse "might have gone." For Burch criticizes the Nouvelle Vague, and does it partly from the standpoint of a refined, rigorous, and cultivated person. But he's not a highbrow hack like John Simon: the idea is not about the establishment and maintenance of bourgeois Western Kulcha. The idea is to honor tradition so long as it is useful (he refers to "tried and true" methods once in the essay), but otherwise to try to move forward: a fearless vanguardism whose only true caution is the desire to be authoritative, in order to be victorious. One can see why Burch and his aesthetic system(s) have found marginal acceptance: it's hard. Burch uses terms like "academic" as either damning or vaguely positive descriptors, depending on context: the quick-and-dirty breakdown is that academic artistry is good, or anyway acceptable, when it is a starting point, and bad when it's a goal or a cage. There's a fine balance to be preserved, and in this deployment of terms of evaluation I see for the first time a certain affinity on this point between Burch and another out-of-lockstep, syncretic, left-wing film critic, Raymond Durgnat.

*

I think it is sometimes amazing how the discourse surrounding the Nouvelle Vague has colored popular perceptions--at least outside of France, though I assume also within France (just in a slightly different way)--of the French cinema up through the 1960s. Consider:

"During 12 years, from 1945 to 1957, 167 films, or 20 percent of France's total production output, were shot by only 9 directors, for an average of 18 movies each. It is worth listing all their names so as to perceive better the true nature of French cinema during the 1950s. These are the filmmakers who were supported by producers and to whose movies most of the cinemagoing public flocked: André Berthomieu (30 films), Jean Stelli (22 films), Jean Boyer (21 films), Richard Pottier (18 films), Robert Vernay and Maurice Labro (17 films each), Henri Lepage, Maurice de Canonge, and Raoul André (14 films each). These diectors were all professionals who shared a narrowly artisanal conception of their work. They directed their films so as to maximize their box office takings and thus increase the return on production costs. A complete list of their films would be excessive here, but, needless to say, this state of affairs was not able to permit a renewal of creativity such as could be seen in the ongoing revival of 1950s French literature and theater."

--Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School (trans. Richard Neupert), pp. 18-19

*

A strange question: would we have been able to identify the pros and cons of the new movements of the 1960s? Have the dominant (positive) readings of the New Waves been taken too much for granted, i.e., been accepted too thoughtlessly by my generation? (I for one first approached works of the Nouvelle Vague with nary a skeptical thought in my head.) The question is different now because the film industry is different, the mediascape is different. I'm probably wrong but I feel as though it was easier to be comprehensive on all fronts of cinema--that is, all fronts of what people (cinephiles & civilians both) are talking about--in 1959 than it is in 2007 ...

Light My Fire

Very soon there will be more regular blogging. Very soon I will return correspondence I have let fall by the wayside. I've got a few posts I want to put up before 2007 is over!

It's Friday, Relax a Little

Sylvie Vartan - Irresistiblement

A Quick Note on Rossellini and Realism

There are certain techniques in late Rossellini that seem to be indicators of his late, didactic style--the zooms and long takes, the usually spare settings & props, the use of matte painting. But some of the earlier films, like Giovanna d'arco al rogo, eschew any conventional sense of "realism" for a kind of "kino-literalism" that gets at the reality of Truth, which is I think the object Rossellini chased his whole career. Look also at La Macchina ammazzacattivi, which opens and closes with narration and a hand of God (or the narrator) placing matte models of the island setting out for us--mountains, buildings, townspeople.

Sometimes I think that Rossellini--in general--took on the challenge of the cinematic real not in the same vein as his colleagues and compatriots of postwar Neorealism, but in a way somewhat closer to avant-garde animator Robert Breer: the 'truth' in a false image, the film frame not as a window onto the world but a true window onto "lies" or "constructions."

A Simple Lesson

Understand something: When they vote for him, we must call it a dictatorship. When they vote against him, we must call it a democracy.

Aesthetic Etiology

"In discussing the operation and character of the grid within the general field of modern art I have had recourse to words like repression or schizophrenia. Since these terms are being applied to a cultural phenomenon and not to individuals, they are obviously not intended in their literal, medical sense, but only analogically: to compare the structure of one thing to the structure of another. The terms of this analogy were clear, I hope, from the discussion of the parallel structures and functions of both grids as aesthetic objects and myths.

"But one further aspect of this analogy still needs to be brought out, and that is the way in which this psychological terminology functions at some distance from that of history. What I mean is that we speak of the etiology of a psychological condition, not the history of it. History, as we normally use it, implies the connection of events through time, a sense of inevitable change as we move from one event to the next, and the cumulative effect of change which is itself qualitative, so that we tend to view history as developmental. Etiology is not developmental. It is rather an investigation into the conditions for one specific change--the acquisition of disease--to take place. In that sense etiology is more like looking into the background of a chemical experiment, asking when and how a given group of elements came together to effect a new compound or to precipitate something out of a liquid. For the etiology of neuroses, we may take a "history" of the individual, to explore what went into the formation of the neurotic structure; but once the neurosis is formed, we are specifically enjoined from thinking in terms of "development," and instead we speak of repetition.

"With regard to the advent of the grid in twentieth-century art, there is the need to think etiologically rather than historically. Certain conditions combined to precipitate the grid into a position of aesthetic preeminence. We can speak of what those things are and how they came together throughout the nineteenth century and then spot the moment of chemical combination, as it were, in the early decades of the twentieth. But once the grid appears it seems quite resistant to change. The mature careers of Mondrian or Albers are examples of this. No one would characterize the course of decade after decade of their later work as developmental. But by depriving their world of development, one is obviously not depriving it of quality. There is no necessary connection between good art and change, no matter how conditions we may be to think that there is. Indeed, as we have a more and more extended experience of the grid, we have discovered that one of the most modernist things about it is its capacity to serve as a paradigm or model for the antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the antihistorical.

-- three paragraphs near the end of Rosalind Krauss' "Grids" (collected in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths)

It was after transcribing these words that I surfed the Net, looking for a picture of Krauss to maybe put up with the post, that I discovered it was her birthday today (along with Terrence Malick, the late Gordon Parks, Sr., and also my Dad).

I am trying to wrap my head around Krauss' writing, it still escapes me whenever I think I am about to grasp it. The way I make sense of her writing, the etiological is a type of historical thinking. When applied to aesthetics it is, in some cases anyway, a superior model than the historical modes she rejects or at least moves aside to their more proper place. If we start talking about the idea of, say, the grid as a concept, applied in films (themselves modernity's products, but subject to some kind of anamorphic development of art or literary historical movements, at least pace Jameson, et al., and I think that I agree with this), it doesn't make sense to always read each of a thousand 'grids' as unique products of distinct historical circumstances: as though the grid were always a specially arrived image in each and every film in which it appears as a powerful composition (and thus, sometimes, conceptual) element. More elegant an intellectual model to understand this concept, 'grid,' as a condition, and hence repeatable, explicable, and predictable to some degree. Yes, individual histories exist and are incredibly important; these concepts certainly do not exist, floating around, outside of material histories; but "etiology" pins down the causes and parameters of these works across all these specified histories. That is, etiology allows one to think of totality. This is how I'm making sense of Krauss' words right now. It will require more digestion.

Of course there are different kinds of grids here illustrated by these grabs above. The 'power grid' in Red Desert, represented visually by a row (not a grid) of towers; the aerial reconaissance of Images of the World and the Inscription of War; the computer code fictionalization of Tron; Playtime's humorous modern worker hellhole; the "streets" in The Fifth Element ... one could go on finding examples of varying relevance, just brainstorming. (In all these cases I've singled out, it it's worth mentioning, the primary topic or cause is indeed modernity--in the sense of "newness," not as a specific historicla period--and its concomitant problems.) Below is a vaguely Klee-like screengrab from a work by a young video artist about whom I'll be posting very soon ...

Fake and Dumb

Watching Il Colosso di Rodi (Sergio Leone's first feature) recently, I experienced a shock of some sort of recognition as two childhood favorites of mine were prefigured by this film. The banquet on the island seems an earlier articulation of the one in Enter the Dragon. Several scenes, and the score by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, come off like predecessors to Conan the Barbarian. (Violent movies were part of my upbringing; it was the "adult themes" that I didn't start experiencing until adolescence.) I watched a few of the peplum when I was a kid, though the only title I can ascertain is The Three Stooges Meet Hercules ('62), maybe not quite what most people have in mind when they're talking about the sword-and-sandal genre. At any rate there is something quite beautiful in a film like this--I admire the artifice, the utter inauthenticity.

As I have said before, idiocies bother me much less when the art in which they appear is forthright about them. Two recent-ish sfx films I watched over the Thanksgiving break, Michael Bay's Transformers and Stephen Sommers' Van Helsing, make for an illuminating contrast. Bay's film is knowingly ironic ("I think there's more to you than meets the eye," Shia LaBeouf tells Megan Fox, reimagining the Transformers tag line in, um, a "witty" bit of writing), but it's not actually clever--it's totally conventional, and self-aware only in the most basic and superficial ways. Sommers' film is also stupid, but I find it (kind of charmingly) forthright about this fact. The overpronounced acting, the wooden dialogue, the clear debt the film owes (or homage it pays), visually, to comic books and fantasy illustration ... it's all there to be appreciated as itself (not as camp per se, and not as a film about anything important). It's a certain kind of honesty ...

Comenius/Rossellini

One word, 'autopsy'--direct sight, the apprehension of things through direct understanding. Mostrare e non dimostrare. Adriano Aprà has some fascinating things to say on Rossellini in a tradition drawing from early modern humanism ...

Made at Cinecittà, Sometimes

Of late it has been Italian cinema on the mind. Why? I can't say for sure. I am writing a paper on Rossellini's late historical films, but firstly, I was already very interested in those, and secondly, my return to that topic was more of a result of interest in the larger (national) field than vice versa. I've been watching films that have far more limited reputations than the work of the tried-and-true Italian masters (Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci, and so on--you get the idea). So, I've watched a few half-forgotten 1970s sex comedies (Dino Risi's Sesso matto, Luigi Comencini's rather good Mio Dio come sono caduta in basso! aka Till Marriage Do Us Part), Risi's minor classic commedia all'italiana, Il Sorpasso ('62), a couple others. There seems to be comparatively little scholarship on these kinds of films, small classics or forgotten masterpieces as well as the run-of-the-mill flotsam and jetsam. So much writing on Italian cinema, in English at least, seems to focus on a few major issues (Neorealism, the 1960s art films) and personalities, and I suspect there's a chicken-and-egg issue with regard to the submerged works of the white telephone films, and the writer-directorial(-sometimes-actorly) work of Nanni Loy, Risi, Comencini, Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street aside), Luciano Emmer, Germi, Bolognini, Lizzani, De Seta, Sordi, even Petri and Scola. Even Nanni Moretti is barely represented in our theaters and our home viewing formats! Genre/cult films from the 1960s seem to be on the right track, but I'd like to see more out there in this amazing marketplace where everything is (supposedly) available. I understand that polemics submerged a lot of quality and/or popular classical French cinema, especially pre-New Wave; but what precisely did the same for the Italians?

As I noted in a comment below, I had to miss the recent Pietro Germi (partial) retrospective here in New York, so to an extent the blame falls on myself for not partaking in the bounty. I don't plan on missing much De Santis, though.

On the European Film Review forum there's a fascinating old discussion about certain shifts in the aesthetics of commercial Italian film in the 1950s.

This all said ... if anyone can help me track down a video copy of Rossellini's L'Età del ferro (preferably--very preferably--with English subs) I would be much obliged. I'd love to see it, especially if I could do so in time for the paper.

No Country for Old Men

Part of me thinks that the Orwell quote with which Rosenbaum prefaces his review is really best suited not for "quality" films that are ideologically problematic, but in fact, the outright masterpieces still produced and exhibited within the Hollywood system. The films of which one approves, loves, and yet which still primarily play in commercial theaters and major festivals, and on nice DVDs, acting as cogs and props and diversions and even instruction manuals for barbarism. This puts Orwell's assertion in perspective. It's easy to use the words as a rhetorical device to attack a well-made but distasteful film, and more importantly than the fact that it's easy, it's of limited value. To think politically about the cinema we have to be willing to grapple with those things we cherish: to understand that the art we most love is sometimes the art most complicit. (Rosenbaum does deal with this issue, more cogently than with No Country I think, in his review of The Mother and the Whore.)

The center (and the quotidian): Tommy Lee Jones. The extreme (and the abstract): Javier Bardem. The film's lack of confrontation of these two aspects--experienced by Jones' sheriff as a failure, and not experienced by Bardem's killer at all--is the frustrating thing about this movie, I think, for unsatisfied viewers. (And also, I'd wager, one of the happily accepted mysteries for those who like the film.) Jones can't fathom Bardem but has to live with it; Bardem has no need to fathom Jones. Is Bardem a representation of something other than his own narrative role (as a peripheral figure bearing down upon the center, devoid of psychological, an aestheticized phantom-monster-nightmare)? Is he a repressed social element? Is he Evil? Is he even misunderstood, alienated by the narrative because the narrative form must cast things in terms of protagonists and antagonists? And what is Tommy Lee Jones but someone incomplete: an old man but not old enough (his curiosity drives him but he finds no satisfaction). Is Bardem in fact the thing, the object, that gives Jones ('the human subject') meaning, or at least its promise? If I had more of a psychoanalytic bent I'd offer a few hypotheses on that front. There is a philosophical problem here that prefigures any specific sociopolitical questions (such as that of the American popular relationship to serial killers, or the aestheticization of murder), which is not to say that the sociopolitical questions are of no significance--quite the contrary!--but their working out within the terms of the film is, I think, subordinate to how one cracks McCarthy's and the Coens' very neat philosophical chestnut. It is this philosophical crux, at least as much as, say, the cinematography, which allows everyone in the debate to at least agree that, indeed, this film is "well made."

* * *

Not long ago I checked out a videotape of Jon Jost's Last Chants for a Slow Dance from the NYPL; I watched about twenty minutes before I got impatient with the subpar video (which wasn't horrendous, but as I said, I was impatient), and told myself I'd wait for a screening (or at least a better copy). But upon reflection I think I should have been more stoic. It would make a fascinating counterpoint to No Country for Old Men, I think. In fact I'm a little surprised that Rosenbaum (who puts it on his AFI alternative 100 list) doesn't mention Jost's film in his No Country review--I would not be shocked to hear that it figured into an earlier draft.

* * *

In terms of mood, and feeling, the ending to No Country for Old Men reminds me of the ending to the only McCarthy novel I've read, Blood Meridian. I'd describe both as stasis-in-flux, that is, they both gave me a mental sensation analogous to a dolly zoom ...

Keeping Up Appearances

"After the Liberation, while the Left was attempting to mobilize the masses, the Christian Democrats invested the state apparatus by either protecting ex-Fascist civil servants or occupying the managerial positions in all sectors of information. Mussolini had insisted that cinematic propaganda should never be too intrusive. The Christian Democrats did not forget the lesson. They preserved the Light Institute, founded by Fascism, to make documentaries likely to advertise Italy abroad. But newsreels, whose presentation was compulsory during any film-show, were offered to private companies. Fourteen production companies seized the chance. Since exhibitors were obliged to have a newsreel in their programmes, the product was sold in advance, so that little, if any, investment was necessary. One of the companies, Settimana Incom, tok the lead very quickly and its productions are worth a look. The tone, resolutely optimistic, was based on celebration of a changing Italy. Unlike Fascist documentaries, these films did not romanticise the traditional country. Beginning with a quick glimpse at the past, they stressed the improvements introduced by modern techniques and contrasted old ploughs with tractors or derelict farmhouses with hygienic, modern cowsheds. Emphasis was put on the diffusion of electrical power which made possible new light industries providing cleaner jobs and labour-saving consumer durables. There were also hints at employment for women and at the improvement of the female condition. In short, instead of advertising the government, Settimana Incom attempted to persuade its viewers that things were evolving rapidly and that the best they could do was to make the most of it. The Community Party tried to counter this hidden propaganda by makings its own documentaries. Filming the gloomy multi-storey buildings of Milan and the out-of-the-way villages of Sicily, they argued that the state had failed to carry out crucial reforms and that the price paid for a few economic advances had been dangerously high. These pictures were of course banned in right-wing constituencies but even in the districts that voted regularly for them, the Communist documentaries did not meet with an enthusiastic response because their vision was too critical. Spectators knew that the Communists were right and that Settimana Incom lied. However, being involved in an irreversible transformation from a country of sharecroppers and small shopkeepers into an industrial society, they did not want to ponder over what the cost of the changes would be."

--Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1896-1996 (pp. 85-86)

Image of the Day

Normally my images of the day (which come more like once or twice a month) are aesthetically or thematically chosen, and quite arbitrary except to my own little investigations. But I haven't been touching current events or political matters in recent weeks, and the floods in Tabasco are awful, and I saw this one image from BBC online and felt oddly moved by it, not only as a 'representation of humanity' but as a picture in general. I hope that my choosing this does not communicate to readers a cheapening of the situation, or a consideration of our neighbors' crisis (which is being poorly handled by our government, natch) as a merely aesthetic or conveniently picturesque event.

Unqualified Remarks (Desire--Genre-Style)

Four legs, two legs, three legs--on time and the procession or sequence of desires. Generic desires may change but don't age, do they? Marcello Mastroianni loves nubile Stefania Sandrelli, but the camera shifts and her feet show us where her heart lies. So the channeling of desire goes. (Genres live on--"more of the same"--because desires don't go away, including the desire to see a form implemented, a narrative retold, an itch scratched.) What's a genre? A series of tropes, or (go visit Ryland for more of this) a medium in itself, to be played with and worked out. Insofar as genre exists, and insofar as a genre has rules (e.g., that pomo marketing gimmick that makes me cringe 75% of the time it's used--"this work subverts its genre"), the rules are like those of a game, a sport: we know what we're going in for, there are some things we expect to see, some things we expect reasonably not to see, and sometimes we're suprised, and we're moved or perhaps not, and that's that. We'll partake once, we'll partake again. The rules of genre certainly don't seem to operate like regulations or doxa ...

To and Fro

On some questions of avant-garde film and filmmakers that have floated about as of late.

* * *

"Cinema is a Greek word that means 'movie.' The illusion of movement is certainly an accustomed adjunct of the film image, but that illusion rests upon the assumption that the rate of change between successive frames may vary only within rather narrow limits. There is nothing in the structural logic of the filmstrip that can justify such an assumption. Therefore we reject it. From now on we will call our art simply: film.

"The infinite film contains an infinity of endless passages wherein no frame resembles any other in the slightest degree, and a further infinity of passages wherein successive frames are as nearly identical as intelligence can make them."

--Hollis Frampton, "For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses" (from Circles of Confusion, p. 114)

* * *

Have I written my post yet about how Circles of Confusion is one of the great, largely unsung books on film/photography/art? (It's out-of-print, unless somebody just put it back into print--and copies aren't always easy to come by, which is practically a criminal situation.) As I'm sure I've alluded to before, Frampton was apparently one of the most erudite people ever to work in cinema (er, film); he had Greek and Latin, kept up with developments in mathematics and physics, studied at Ezra Pound's feet, all that. Some reports peg him as imperious and arrogant. Maybe so. But in Circles of Confusion he mostly comes across as charming, witty, mentally flexible. It's as though you've met someone interesting at a party who knows more than you do about everything, but has either the absentmindedness or good sense to not show they know it.

* * *

"Serene Velocity (1970) established Gehr's reputation as a major filmmaker of the generation that began exhibiting works in the sixties. It is a tour de force of interior rhythm with minimal exterior subject matter. Gehr filmed the empty corridor of a university building throughout a night and into the following dawn. The receding corridor registers on the screen as a shiny green field in the center of which sits a darkened square (the doors at the end of the hall). From the corners of the screen to the edges of the central square four black lines converge, almost meeting to form an "x"; they are, of course, the shaded lines where the walls join the floor and ceiling. Furthermore, a series of florescent lights on the ceiling projects a pattern of hot spots around them, which alternate with black lines created by the symmetrical series of doors in the corridor. This combination of light and darkness generates the illusion of a series of black squares expanding from the center to the frame of the film.

"We are never permitted to contemplate this pattern statically. The filmmaker positioned his tripod within the corridor and then proceeded to alter his zoom lens every four frames. At first the shifts are not dramatic. He alternates four frames at 50mm with four at 55mm. After a considerable period the differential increases: 45mm to 60mm. Thus, the film proceeds with ever increasing optical shocks. In this system the zoom never "moves." The illusion of movement comes about from the adjustment of the eye from one sixth of a second of a distant image to one sixth of a second of a nearer one. Although the absolute rhythm never changes, the film effects a crescendo because of the extreme illusions of distance by the end. Furthermore, Gehr cyclically shifts the degree of exposure every frame in the phrases of four. In its overall shape Serene Velocity moves from a vibrating pulse within an optical depth to an accordion-like slamming and stretching of the visual field.

"The temporality of the filming excluded any possibility of human action within the corridor. It is divorced from the realm of experience and re-fashioned in a purely cinematic time and space. One exterior event does leak in, however: by the end of the film dawn has broken outside the corridor. A natural light illuminates the previously dark windows in the central doors, making this severe and powerful film a relectant aubade, in which we are reminded of the extreme distancing from the natural world upon which the film is predicated. This is a very muted form of the interior/exterior opposition Michael Snow made much of in Wavelength, where the very room he filmed became a metaphor for the recording instrument (the English word camera being Latin for "room") at those points when the interior darkened so that the scene outside the windows could be discerned. Gehr, however, undermines Snow's analogy of the zoom lens with a trascendental consciousness. By simultaneously moving both closer and farther away with his lens positions he achieves the uncanny effect of obliterating the (assumed) position of the camera at the starting point. This erasure of the ground coincides with the undermining of spatial and temporal authority in the film: they are all strategies for eliminating the self-hood of the filmmaker from the film and for objectifying the visual phenomenon of the eventual projection."

--P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film (3rd ed., pp.400-401)

* * *

Sitney cites Gehr's program notes from the time in which he writes that film "is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space." (Also on p. 400 in Visionary Film.)

* * *

In the Q&A that Gehr gave at MoMA last Monday, the audience laughed when he mentioned that he went to 'regular,' mainstream, 'normal' films quite a bit. It was an ironic laughter, as though it was hard to believe this straightlaced-looking avant-gardist would spend time at, what, Eastern Promises? The Darjeeling Limited? The Kingdom? Brakhage too was an admirer of "the movies" though (as I've read from Fred Camper) he didn't consider them the same field as what he did. (Brakhage wrote an appreciative essay on A.I. in some relatively recent book on religion & film, by the way.) Perhaps Gehr agrees with the distinction, too, but he was quite unironic when he insisted to the MoMA audience that he really did go see and enjoy mainstream works, that he wasn't cutting them off from his life or cinematic art (that he'd agree that the cinema was a giant maelstrom of many parts, was the impression I got from him).

* * *

Annette Michelson opens part one of her essay "About Snow" (October vol. 8, spring 1979) with the same Hollis Frampton quote (minus the second paragraph) that opens this blog post. After some historical exposition, she writes:

"We are now, I believe, in a position to more fully understand the particular impact of Snow's filmic work from 1967 on, to discern the reasons for the large concensus given to the work honored at Knokke-le-Zoute [i.e., Wavelength] and to answer questions of the following sort: How did Snow's film differ from other recent uses of the long take? Why was it that differences of taste and of theoretical orientation were so promptly reconciled on the appearance of this work? Why, in fact, did it seem to constitute, even at that time, a threshold in the development of the medium so that a critic known for his allegiance to dominant narrative cinema could speak of it as a kind of Birth of a Nation of the avant-garde?

"Snow invented, in the camera's trajectory through empty space towards the gradually focused object on the farthest wall, a reduction which, operating as the generator of the spatiotemporality of narrative, produces the formal correlative of the suspense film. Baudry's text, however, gives us another grasp upon the reasons for the impact of this work and of others that were to follow. For Snow had, in that reductive strategy, hypostatized the perspective construction within the space of cinematic representation, and in so doing he had laid bare the manner in which cinema proceeds from the conventions of painting. He had made visible the way in which "painting is nothign other than the intersection of the visible pyramid according to a given distance, a fixed center and a specific light." He had, in fact, by restoring and remapping the space of perspective construction, reestablished its center, that place which is the space of the transcendental subject.

"Wavelength, then, appeared as a celebration of the "apparatus" and a confirmation of the status of the subject, and it is in those terms that we may begin to comprehend the profound effect it had upon the broadest spectrum of viewers--especially upon those for whom previous assaults on the spatiotemporality of dominant cinema had obscured that subject's role and place. The spectator for whom that place was obscured--and threatened--by the spatial disorientations of, say, Dog Star Man (a space purely optical and a temporality of the perpetual present) could respond, as if in gratitude, to Snow's apparently gratifying confirmation of a threatened sovereignty.

"But Snow was not content to reestablish "the referential norm"; he subjected it--and in this he is, indeed, the follow of Cézanne he claims to be--to constant analytic transformation. Thus the slight, constant movement of the camera within its sustained propulsion forward, the light flares and filters which punctuate that movement, the changes of stock and the final shot which intensifies, in superimposition, the flatness of the photograph on which the camera comes to rest. The depth and integrity of the perspective construction is at every point subjected to the questioning and qualification imposed by the deployment of anomalies as differences within the spatiotemporal continuum."

The Body Breaks

One man filming alone in a corridor for eleven hours overnight, editing in camera, taking--so he says, and why not believe him--only a five minute rest? This is what Ernie Gehr did with Serene Velocity, which I (finally) saw the other night for the first time, in its very beautiful 35mm blowup print. Fatigue? Two kinds--the first is Gehr's, which involves, and as he said himself, when he made the work (in 1970) he eventually lost track of how many frames at a time he would shoot--he would aim for four but slip up occasionally, which produces very subtle shifts in the rhythm that we may not detect consciously but which we likely perceive nonetheless. The other fatigue is the viewer's (maybe). Around 23 minutes in length, Serene Velocity invites a really intense viewer participation. One can stare at--study--the frame almost like it's a rapidly alternating still picture. Or one can enter into the accordion-like, vertiginous horizontal space of the corridor, let oneself feel jolted and transfixed by all the weird and slowly evolving perceptual shifts in this quarter- or semi-flicker film. (I alternated between viewing modes; the lines blurred, predictably.) The immersive properties of avant-garde film are a field rarely tilled: hopefully we can work on this. Optics and other sciences; painting; music; architecture; sex; death and decay; birth and life; poetry; all these things intersect literally or philosophically with experimental cinema as with other cinema. Why not jump in? Poetic cinema has more than two registers ('critique' & 'contemplation'), and if we don't recognize all the possibilities, no wonder it seems like a boring sham to people who don't know what to think about this whole world of films and videos.

Scott MacDonald wrote on this film:

"For many first-time viewers Serene Velocity is infuriating. Given their conventional training, they have no idea of what they are supposed to be seeing, other than a relentlessly repeated shift between two versions of the same space. On the other hand, if they can allow themselves to actually look at the film (certainly one of the first tendencies in many viewers, when confronted with powerfully critical films, is to shut down the eyes and/or mind: One can "watch" the films without seeing them), a set of developments in the seemingly unchanging image become apparent. As the zoom lens gradually moves us back and forth along the hall, the doors, ashtrays, and other details of the hallway move in and out of the image: At one focal length we may see a certain door; a few moments later and a few increments further along the focal range of the lens, the door has disappeared. While all changes in the hallway are created by the rigorous procedure Gehr devised for the camera, near the conclusion of the film we can see, from the light in the glass of the doors at the far end of the hallway, that it's dawn."

This is all true. People are generally conditioned to watch and process moving images in certain prescribed ways, and Gehr's work challenges these habits, and to an extent the onus is on the viewer if they want to appreciate a film like Serene Velocity. But what about the actual benefits of re-training the eye and mind (and sometimes the ear) for these purposes? Are a-g advocates doing it so that we gain brothers in a fraternal cult? Are film critics social workers? (I think actually Pauline Kael made a famous quip charging this in a different circumstance; someone who knows & likes her work better than I do can enlighten me on the exact source, maybe?) Are we here to embiggen the souls of philistines?

I would like to think instead that those of us who advocate for a-g cinema, or specific a-g films, are not trying to reproduce a vanguard to which only a happy few may join (i.e., I don't want to be part of a recruitment campaign for an elite). I would like to think that those of us who watch, love, and recommend these works of cine-poetry do so out of affection and even, in a way, impersonal interest: the field may always be small or minoritarian; that's OK; the room can be small or out-of-the-way so long as the door is open to anyone. And the directions to that room, the advocacy for this kind of cinema, should not be openly or tacitly about building a clique, but about relating certain kinds of knowledge and experience even in an a priori limited capacity.

* * *

My goal: to make this my last post arguing in defense or support of experimental cinema as a whole. I hope, from now on, to simply assume that anyone who reads what I write about (say) Serene Velocity will simply be interested, period, and that those who won't will know when to skip it. To watch a film like this one involves a certain level of "breaking in." But the idea is not to break oneself into being able to watch it, but to know just why--for beauty, love, hatred, people, art--one should wish to break anything down in the first place.

Margin Sketching

Left: Klimt--Schubert at the Piano, 1899.

Paracelsus--16th c. physician and alchemist, whose name supplies the title of an Arthur Schnitzler play that I haven't read. (G.W. Pabst directed a 1943 film also called Paracelsus.) Schnitzler provided the source narratives for two Ophüls films: Liebelei (Germany, '33) and La Ronde (France, '50). More on Ophüls in the near future. As I'm reading currently in Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Holy Roman Emperor (and arts patron, occult observer) Rudolf II moved his court from orthodox Vienna to liberal, tolerant Prague. The hermetic tradition fostered by Rudolf and later Frederick & Elizabeth (in Prague 1619-20) was conversant with Paracelsus, of course.

"[The crisis of language in classical modernism] was usually treated in isolation as an emblen for the aporias of literary modernism in general: the inability to carry on a literary tradition, the difficulty of securing a place for poetic language in a disenchanted world, and the failure to communicate in a way that gives lasting form to the chaos of life. These aporias in turn triggered the fervent desire for transcendence in some hermetic "other" language (Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kafka) and it led eventually to notions of a literature of silence, or more recently, of unrepresentability." (Andreas Huyssen, "The Disturbance of Vision in Vienna Modernism" ... note the use of the word "hermetic," clearly having nothing to do with Hermeticism per se, but a nice congruence all the same.)

(Ruiz recently made a film about Klimt (I have not yet watched it), and of course Ruiz made one of the very greatest films about general obstacles to and breakdowns of communication--On Top of the Whale.)

"Carl Schorske has shown how the newly wealthy middles class of Vienna came to occupy the urban development called the Ringstraße that had been built in the liberal era of the 1860s and 1870s and that is often compared to Baron Haussmann's Parisian boulevards. The Ring was a wide, circular swath of land that had formerly served as a fortification of the old city and its political center, the Imperial Palace. ... The circular layout of the Ringstraße was visually directed inwards, toward the old city center, and thus it still served as a kind of fortification, now in a social rather than a military sense. ... Early cinema in Vienna arose exclusively in the Vorstädte [working class & poor neighborhoods], together with other new forms of mass leisure activities (cabaret, soccer fields, popular gastronomic sites, entertainment parks, etc.). As the Vorstädte expanded quickly into formerly rural areas, rural modes of an oral culture with its illiteracy blended with technologically new forms of urban culture such as the cinema. In a short essay on film from 1921 entitled "Substitute for Dreams," Hofmannsthal explains the success of the cinema in Vienna's Vorstädte by citing the masses' fear of language, particularly in its written form. ... The oral and the visual thus stood against the scriptural, and if one considers further that much of the population influx into Vienna came from the outlying and non-German speaking areas of the empire, one gets a good sense of why the German-language writers felt increasingly embattled, and why language became such a central concern in Vienna and not in Berlin or in Munich." (Huyssen)

Image of the Day

Alessandro Botticelli, Portrait of Giuliano de' Medici (c. 1476-1477)

The Tempo of Breathing While Sleeping

"His films are derived from personal dreams; from the poems, stories and myths of the Greeks; from the overlapping sensations of his thoughts and desires; from the configuration of the homosexual consciousness. They evolve in a time/space of image--image as symbol and as truth--reaching a strong degree of personal sensitivity in the form Markopoulos gives them. They recreate the tempo of breathing while sleeping, rhythmic and intensely delicate and invaded with a personal element. They use formal and precise gesture to evolve a structure of a trance-like density, uncompromisingly and unashamedly displaying themselves and the nakedness of being. A fragile, hypersensitive atmosphere is created.

"Markopoulos' use of driving rhythms, a poetic beat, gives his films an unusual presence. At the same time there is a subtle, yet limitless change in the rhythm, which is often overlaid with verbal synonyms, with symbols and visual metaphors. A pause is followed by a repeat, a swaying back and forth, but each time further out. In many ways the rhythm is like the phrases of a written poem, with the images making the counterpoint and balance and reiterated with the voice. The visual phrases are often accompanied by phrases composed of single frames as alternating image, such as A, B, A, B and so on, fluttering like a butterfly. Markopoulos has said that with Twice a Man he utilized a form of editing which contained everything that he had learned over a period of some twenty years; the inherent possibilities of classic editing according to groups of shots in various lengths. To this form he added a new form in w hich the idea of the classic shot-to-shot was applied to the film itself, i.e. a single film frame to another single film frame and its 'obvious inexhaustible architectural possibilities'. He realized for the first time 'that sense which is inherent in the lyricism of the independent, silent spaces.' A sensation of a pulsing in-and-out rhythm is created, but though Markopoulos uses such a strong and precise formality his imagery remains an esoteric abstraction of the self. What are the right words to describe this? A deep emotional attitude is endless portrayal, apparently within the confines of formality. This formality is related to the Greek model in which calm and solid outer strength allows the innder depth to be revealed. Yet it is not just in the architectural form, but in the mythological form that Markopoulos seeks his realizations. The human conflict, stylized by mythology, becomes associated with his own feelings, and the two combined are made into a film."

--Stephen Dwoskin on Gregory Markopoulos, Film Is... (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1975) pp.158-159

I'll Admit ...

... I'm a bit predictable. I loved it. More later.

Addendum: 'Old Masters' aside, I think James Gray may count as my favorite American filmmaker working in Hollywood right now. Other contenders would probably be people who work on the fringes of the mainstream, Entertainment Weekly-type industry, sometimes but not always making these highly "visible" films (Linklater, Haynes). Gray's three features to date are bona fide respectable ensemble cast affairs, with fine production values, and storylines with themes revolving around family, loyalty, betrayal and revenge, community, ethnicity, and money. In fact if one demands freshness and variety from a filmmaker, Gray may not satisfy: his films are all resolutely New York-centric, all dealing with ties between crime, law, and economic institutions, and developing largely within the confines of Eastern European ('white ethnic') communities. He mines this milieu in the same way Ozu mines the Japanese middle class in his 1950s films, even using a lot of the same actors from title to title (plus Danny Hoch is in this one!), offering variations on a theme.

And while Gray's style may be perfectly in accord with mainstream conventions, even "classical," it's no surprise that they don't make a splash in the multiplexes. In addition to heavy issues, the mood throughout the films is often somber, lonely, claustrophobic. The narratives themselves feel a bit inorganic, perhaps here in We Own the Night most of all--there's a sense of tragedy that renders certain other elements of narrative almost inevitable. These aren't films that "take you into their world" as fully as a great yarn "should," which is not to say there aren't individual sequences which do this (such as one particularly heart-racing car chase in We Own). The films hold you back a bit too; you analyze precisely what's happening because there's a moral metacommentary inscribed, I'm sure, quite intentionally on the texts.

And then the framings and compositions--for example, the visual work that cleaves (in both senses of the word) Joaquin Pheonix's character to and from his father (Robert Duvall) in their first solo meeting, sitting next to each other in a church pew, photographed in shot-reverse shot once they start talking, but if I recall, with each man off-center, each close to the edge of the frame that the other would be sitting in, so that they appear "close" (and indeed are physically close in the diegesis) but unconnected by means of each cut. (And Duvall is facing towards Pheonix in a posture of parental desperation; Pheonix is hunched away.) It's not virtuoso filmmaking; it's simply expressive on the most basic level.

Gray's films are, appropriately enough, composed entirely in grayscale (tonally speaking). Even We Own the Night, which has more of a traditional 'good-versus-evil' structure than his previous two films, doesn't exactly come off as a ringing endorsement of the police force or civic duty. Life is more like a maelstrom and whichever side of cops or robbers the characters are on has less to do with moral qualities and more to do with family connections and the vagaries of the money flow in this underworld on the fringes of Manhattan finance and "spectacular" politics ...

Historical Personage of the Week

John Dee. Why? Because the other day when I called my girlfriend on the phone, I was on my way to the stacks to pick up a few library books on alchemy & hermeticism for some weekend reading (I readily admit that I'm a nerd)--including a book on John Dee. At the time we spoke on the phone, my better half was just about to go into the theater with her parents to see Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Creepy.

Image of the Day

Brueghel the Elder, detail of a print

--I haven't bothered trying to track down a date; preferably one would just go here and surf around and enjoy it.

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

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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.