A-G and the Culture Industry

1.


"At the moment Dialectic of Enlightenment was written, there was no mistake in claiming that film is not an art, for it was not. Far from having gone through the process of autonomisation necessary for it to be constituted as such, until 1940 cinema – in Adorno and Horkheimer's brilliant formulation – was only disguised as art. Initial theories and criticisms of cinema were either apologias or works of prescriptive poetics with the aim of winning social legitimation for their object: arrogating for cinema the status of art by the mere act of speech, while the medium's specificity remained undefined. On the other hand, except in a few cases, production remained within an industrial modus operandi. In fact, even most of the avant-garde cinema of this period was industrial – for instance, German expressionism and the Soviet cinema, the latter in addition directly bound to the political power of government (as happened in the other arts before autonomy and democracy). The sole apparent exception, the cinema produced by the avant-garde artists who settled in Paris in the '20s (what Nöel Burch calls the “first avant-garde”), cannot be considered a full moment of autonomy, insofar as autonomy appears in it (and in its critical apologetics) not as a historical process but as principle and essence, an assertion that falls into a moment of ideological falsehood similar to the one described by Peter Bürger in pondering l'art pour l'art. Moreover, in this moment cinema is not an autonomous art, but acquires the status of art just because it is considered an extension of other arts.


"What Adorno and Horkheimer couldn't anticipate was the impact that the Second World War would have upon cinema and its relationship with society. This ethical break was related not only to the misery and horror endured by the countries where the war was staged, but also to the role played by cinema itself during the conflict, both as an instrument of Nazi-Fascist propaganda (where its brutality exposed what was latent in the “good revolutionary intentions” of the Soviet production system – the dark relations between cinema and State) and as an insensible recording instrument of the concentration-camp horrors. It could be thought that these two issues do not relate to cinema's aesthetic specificity (and therefore, autonomy) but to its social and ideological function. Nevertheless, cinema's 'enrolment' in fascism and its ability to record a human body as a mere alienated exteriority – as no more than another material – were the two faces of the heartless gesture with which cinema indicated to humanity its splitting apart. If Eisenstein had somehow speculated that man might be no more than a line or a point in the plan (and that's one of the reasons why his essays always seem to be about to make an interesting proposal about sense in film), these cruel images didn't even discuss it; they implied it, they assumed the question was covered.

"Hence it is possible for us to understand the importance of Italian neo-realism beyond its immediate social significance. As Gilles Deleuze observes, by introducing a different character, le flâneur this cinema shifts its focus from representation of action to representation of the perceptual experience. And since it could think about any optical-sonic space of experience, cinema, being itself one such space among others, could then become self-conscious (perhaps in more than one sense)."

(source - Hugo Salas, "Material Film")



2.

"yin and yang

You guys in narrative cinema can be the yang, okay! You be the sun, and experimental cinema will be the moon! We are two sides of the same coin. Experimental cinema is NOT the other cinema. We are the other half of cinema! When some of the writers in the media ask, "Where are all the art films? Where are the audiences for art cinema? Where are the next "Antonioni"s? Where are all the women who make films?" We can answer, "Over here! In the yin! Experimental cinema!!!""

(source - Jennifer MacMillan, "Experimental cinema/Narrative cinema 2008!"

... thinking about both of these, and other things.

Desire & Capital Once More

On Men, Women, Theory, the Discipline, and Classical Cinema

"Although the "housewife" was rooted in the social conditions of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, nineteenth-century ideology established the housewife and the mother as universal models of womanhood. Since popular propaganda represented the vocation of all women as a function of their roles in the home, women compelled to work for wages came to be treated as alien visitors within the masculine world of the public economy. Having stepped outside their "natural" sphere, women were not to be treated as full-fledged wage workers. The price they paid involved long hours, substandard working conditions and grossly inadequate wages. Their exploitation was even more intense than the exploitation suffered by their male counterparts. Needless to say, sexism emerged as a source of outrageous super-profits for the capitalists."

--Angela Y. Davis, "The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective," in Women, Race and Class (p. 229)

Davis argues that in capitalism's specific brand of sexism half the workforce is devalued as workers: the 'domestic sphere' of the worker is not paid work. She contrasts this with Masai still living traditionally, and nomadically, whom she saw in the 1970s--the women, responsible as a gender for "domestic" tasks themselves, were responsible also for the construction and transportation of tribal housing. Though tasks might have been broken down along gender lines, there was no question that the women's work was as productive, as valuable, as the men's.




















"All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." Why the girl? Her labor, for one thing--her role--is not valued in the same way a man's is. Why is it that the Western stage that through much of its history forbade women to act has produced in fiction cinema an artform that quite exalts these women-image-commodities? Of what underlying fact is this change an effect? Capitalism. I think the passivity, the to-be-looked-at-ness, that characterizes female roles in cinema comes as a result of larger processes that slanted productive value to one side of a gendered divide, and relegated the "feminine" forms of value to adherence and maintenance of domestic codes: the mother, the wife, the keeper of hearth & home. Whose hearth & home? A man's. The classical narrative cinema surely produced plenty of women who were not mothers, and quite a few who were not wives. But this is beside the point, the issue is not an iconographic one at this level. The issue is one of valuation. The female star is, and is one at whom one looks (rather than the male star, who does, and who does the looking). This "feminine" stasis (i.e., maintenance) is to be appraised by those who can use it. The woman, the female star, does nothing because she is judged to have produced nothing. Her value is as something owned, literally or figuratively, and the (female) star image's value is thus one that contains, reflects, the productive value of the male--the male star, the male protagonist, the male viewer.

By the by. I should state right here that anyone reading these lines who has not read Laura Mulvey's canonical feminist-psychoanalytic article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," from 1975, which was massively influential in film studies and related fields, and was also massively criticized, should go to that link above and do so now. Though Mulvey's very imperfect and problematic piece is now often tittered at by scholars & critics as a mere dusty relic of "Screen theory"--groan, that jargon-ridden, pleasure-killing bad object, right?--there actually remains a great deal of merit, and a great deal of sense, in the article.

It should be obvious that we are speaking in generalizations. Of course not all classical cinema was built around the impending formation of a patriarchal and heterosexual union. (Though a great, great deal was--even the anti-Theory Mr. Bordwell provides empirical data to support this, if I recall.) Of course there were occasionally headstrong female protagonists--doers!--and passive male protagonists. And the rich world of character actors is a veritable Pandora's Box, surely able to complicate or enrich any generalization. What is at stake in this post topic, and in my vaguely Mulveyan take on it, is the comprehension of dominants, and the fuller understanding of how particulars and potentials are grafted, over and over, to stand in as universals. There is a reason why people tend to refer to feature-length movies (which, statistically, overwhelmingly feature heterosexual romances, and men more active than women) as "the cinema," when in fact the cinema is more accurately a technological process used to make optical and perhaps auditory effects on viewers ... effects which may or may not feature narrative, acting, mating instructions, etc. We are speaking of the parameters of form and content as shaped and encouraged by "ideology" (another dirty word from Theory). The other ideological constrictions of cinema are economic in nature, e.g., the way we "date" movies by the year of their release (or their "market birth"), the way the media have traditionally reviewed them (as new products on the market, and thus if it's not a commercial release, a product, then it gets little or no comment). At this point I would like to put the question of women in cinema on the back-burner for now, and move into different territory.

Some empiricists in film studies would argue that we cannot know, or rather, should not try to answer a lot of the questions that so-called Grand Theory addresses. We should look at data--data which can be tested and clearly understood, which can be constructive to a whole community. (And the empiricists and formalists have certain very legitimate concerns, I might add. There are plenty of areas--industrial-economic as well as formal-stylistic--in need of greater nuts-and-bolts research and explication.) Leave the rest to sociologists, cultural historians, psychologists, and the like, they say. A common response to this from those more sympathetic to theory is that empirical or formal analysis can give us data, but the data in themselves are not particularly meaningful, particularly if we are not professionals in the field. (Locating, say, an overall increase in Average Shot Length from 1909 to 1911 is good to know, true. But ... ?)

One must interpret data. And there are many ways to place and frame any kind of data to interpret them. Let's say again that ASL increased between 1909 and 1911, then. (I am not checking these dates, by the way. It's a hypothetical supposition, purely, that may or may not have coincidental relation to the facts.) Anyway.

Assuming we have no problems with methodology or intent, that we just accept the data as is, there are numerous ways to then interpret this quantitative information. We could read this as a result of technology--let's posit that cheap cameras or versatile lenses were manufactured which allowed camera operators to zoom and pan with great facility, and thus the imperative to cut in a scene really was lessened. (This is not at all true, but for our hypothetical case, you understand...) We could look at audiences and reception and surmise the increased ASL was a response to the growth of proper theaters and the decline of early cinema's "variety show" existence. (There is some historical truth to this development, though it corresponds to a slightly earlier timespan.) We could postulate that the new phenomenon of popular screen stars needed greater exposure (thus bringing in a number of close-ups, too, to the tail end of our data set). All these interpretations could be true in our little hypothetical exercise. They all also raise a number of questions. Why were those (fictitious) great new lenses or cameras, developed manufactured in the first place? Why did the nickelodeon rise up (and soon die itself), and what were any of these experiences like, and what did they mean? Why were identifiable/identified early "movie stars" adored so? Interpretation begets interpretation, you see.

We could leave all problems outside of empirical, quantifiable, formal analysis and their most immediate interpretations to the social scientists and neurological researchers. A tiny minority of scholars would not mind that at all. I am sure quite a few more would jump on board if we allowed greater wiggle room for strictly authorial/textual/pictorial interpretations.

But all those other areas--reception, viewer psychology, visual culture, cinema & subcultures, gender, race, class, representation, Karl Marx, the "apparatus," desire, queerness--the things that the excesses of Grand Theory rubbed in the faces of traditionalists in the 1970s onward ... should we really just leave them to historians, psychologists, neurologists, etc.? I think not, and my reason for this is that a lot of people who write about cinema from the perspective of the social sciences, or other "outside" fields, often do so with startling limitations. I trust any of us who read film studies books & journals have come across the occasional work of sociological researchers, say, whose interpretation of films goes by blunt plot synopses alone, or overlooking more (or more exemplary) films in a study because the social scientist may not be much of a researcher in the field, or much of a cinephile. Clearly I would not claim that outside academics sometimes working in the field of film studies are bad as a rule--please! I would only suggest that the better ones are necessarily those with a supple grasp of film form & history, and of competing theories pertaining to the medium. So what I am arguing for, at least as a first major step, is a kind of interdisciplinarity. I am aware this sort of call is one of the most hackneyed kinds of irenic mission statements to exist in academia. I plead guilty! I subject myself to cliché here because I think its application remains an utterly valid goal.

(One needn't be an academic with certifiable academic turf to open your big mouth in film writing only to show how clueless you are--look at how mind-numbing Camille Paglia's thoughts on cinema are, for instance. Maybe not just cinema.)

Which is why I think that the issue of 'Women in Cinema,' and some of the larger questions that constitute it, are not only necessary things to explore, but can't be answered except through theoretical consideration sooner or later. Ideally all good work comprises a scholarly ecosystem. Scholars, critics, students, and anyone else interested are of a good mind to always consider the health and cultivation of this ecosystem.

* * *

Henri Lefebvre wrote, "We shall now tackle everday life from the new angle of philosophy. In the nineteenth century the axis of thought was redirected from speculation towards empirical practical realism, with the works of Karl Marx and the budding social sciences forming landmarks on the line of displacement. In the social framework of freely competitive capitalism Marx concentrated mainly on the everyday existence of the working classes from the dual viewpoint of productive power and illusions to overcome. Notwithstanding the assaults of positivism and pragmatism, philosohpy still directs such inquiries and is alone capable of connecting fragmentary ideologies and specialized sciences; moreover it cannot be dispensed with if we want to understand the essence and existence, the real or imaginary responsibilities, the potentialities and limitations of mankind; and there is no method to equil it in linking and assessing disconnected material. This is because philosophy, though the wide range of its interests, projects the image of a 'complete human being', free, accomplished fully realized, rational yet real. This image--implicit already in Socrates' maieutic--has, for approximately twenty centuries, been refined, revised, opposed, developed and adorned with superfluities and hyperboles." (Everyday Life in the Modern World, p. 12)

And, "I address the philosopher in his own terms. The question is how far can a compendium of compulsions and determinisms (desires--specialized labor--fragments of understanding--biological, geographical and historical compulsions) assume the appearance of a freely created world, projection of something greater than freedom? Philosophers may ignore these compulsions and determinisms when laying down their laws, but in so doing they will not have solved the problem. The limitations of philosophy--truth without reality--always and ever counterbalance the limitations of everyday life--reality without truth." (p. 14)

I am not completely clear on Lefebvre yet, but I think these sorts of sentiments undergird what interests me about the topics touched upon above.

There Will Be Blood

My New Year's resolution to see recent commercial releases more often is off to an OK start. I'm hoping to slowly find my way back into writing something like polished "reviews," but without resorting to quote whoredom or boring formulae like "plot synopsis - breakdown of acting & script - final evaluation." Five years ago, I took seriously the art of reviewing and criticism. Now I no longer feel it's really anything like my vocation, but I want to try to improve myself at it anyway. It will be a process, and there will be awkwardness. People seem to pay more attention when I write about recent films anyway.

So. Paul Thomas Anderson makes very "American" films but he makes them as though he were working in a more European industrial tradition--i.e., as though cinema were (yes) essentially a big and commercial storytelling enterprise, but one had the freedom to make strange, expansive, and unconventionally rewarding narrative films. So There Will Be Blood seems a bit like Griffith, a bit like Scorsese, Peckinpah, Malick ... and it also feels a bit like Visconti, a bit like some of the Soviets. It's not that, as a filmmaker, Anderson always feels like any one of these figures. It's not a matter of expression, per se, but a matter of approaching film storytelling. Anderson is of the kind of school of thought that doesn't seem to conceive of cinematic art outside of storytelling in some overriding frame, i.e., one can digress from plot at will but plot is always the glue or the justification for any sort of abstraction/experimentation.

There Will Be Blood unfolds with such singular force of expression that one may be tempted toward superlatives. Certainly there is much to recommend the film--indeed its confident forcefulness (compare this to almost anything else American cinema is producing: this is one that rightfully demands consideration in the big leagues--I feel it's almost alone in this sense), Greenwood's score, Day-Lewis' utterly proficient (and somewhat out-of-control) performance are all selling points. It's the kind of film that Pauline Kael surely would have written an almost-rave for, pointing out its "excesses" and "shortcomings" and loving it all the more for not having so hedged its bets.

Still. I'm not convinced the film is more than half-baked, conceptually and thematically, and I feel as though Anderson were really sure of how he wanted to say something meaningful but spent less time on the meaning that supplied that ... meaningfulness. To be clear: I'm not lodging a "style over substance" complaint, exactly, but rather suggesting that PTA knows only partly what he wants to say, and knows perhaps way too well how he wants to say it. I'm pretty convinced that Anderson is an artist who wants to Say Something; less convinced that he's accomplished at following through on those very terms. Perhaps it's a case of "we can spot our own"--when I was a teenager with my own fairly routine movie geek obsessions, and I harbored my own filmmaking dreams, I would often obsess about how my future movie masterpieces would be, and get intoxicated on their imagined affect while paying little heed to real thematic, philosophical, aesthetic elbow-grease. Paul Thomas Anderson sometimes strikes me as someone who never entirely grew out of this stage--the need to tell truths but the rush to sometimes not think them through--and via charisma as well as intelligence & talent, gets away with it.

It is easy enough to boil down most fiction works to a bland message, thereby casting them in suspicious lights. (It's a neat, and cheap, tactic if you're trying to deflate someone's favorite film: "Oh, Film X merely says Boring Platitude Y. Big deal.") In the case of There Will Be Blood, the bland message probably has to do with the violent symbiosis and competition between religious communities and brute primitive accumulation as the crux of American society. Or, to put it more obliquely, the two major power-entitities in American history and their dialectical co-existence. I don't want to be rhetorical when I suggest that, for me, the film's substance is nevertheless too facile, too underdeveloped, to sustain the sureness of its elocution. Where are the roots of Daniel Plainview's entrepreneurial spirit? The roots of Eli Sunday's evangelism? How can one depict a major social and historical clashing without really depicting them socially or historically? Malick's Days of Heaven (which came to mind more than once) may lack PTA's sociohistorical ambitions but, I think, its treatment of class, of work, of mores is more intelligent all the same. Likewise Visconti's The Leopard (which also came to mind, more strangely) shows the way a society is produced and reproduced, rather than simply performing some isolated conflicts. Am I too, oh, Lukacsian here in my demands? Perhaps. But I can't shake the conviction that these are fair terms on which to address There Will Be Blood.

*

Theatrical Woes: unprepared to cope with near-record January highs, the Union Square Regal 14 kept its theaters--or at least the one I was in--unbearably hot. It was at least 80 degrees F, and stuffy (and crowded). I expect and can deal with such discomforts, from time to time, at a place like Anthology Film Archives. At a corporate multiplex, though? No way. If I am to pay twelve bucks for a Tuesday night movie I expect to be comfortable. Also, the guy who sat next to me was texting with abandon all throughout the film, and he had one of those combo-phones with a big bright screen. (I'm too timid, or "polite," to ever ask anyone to put the distracting light out in a situation like this--I figure that if they're too dense to suspect others might not appreciate it, there is a higher-than-average chance they'll cause problems if confronted about it.) Then he and his date left the movie with maybe 15 minutes left.

Jottings

Ennui. Is it just me, or is it the case that--when it's not filmed in black-and-white--it's filmed with a lot of warm colors? I am not willing to put money on this as a quantifiable assertion, mind you, but hear me out at least and let me know if you ever feel the same phenomenon I'm trying to put my finger on. I'm thinking of Antonioni in color, of the moral back alleys in some parts of Ferrara and Scorsese (or Cassavetes' Chinese Bookie), of Last Tango in Paris, of the dry Italian landscape in Gianni Amelio (or at least the few Amelio films I've seen). Whenever long takes are meant to indicate a crisis, it seems like a good idea to put reds, pinks, yellows, oranges, and tans into the the mix. I think this may be the case because despite all other "minimalist" adornments within our accepted signifying codes, the warm (womblike? honeyed?) tones cue us in to a problem. A shorthand for the notion that 'something is not right,' not quite in the same way that Pedro Costa means it though ... but something potentially pre-political, pre-intellectual, insofar as we're talking about artistic intent. (If a color scheme is indeed "womblike" shouldn't that take us to the moment of our very first "trauma," at least according to some interpretations?) Perhaps the formula is a sense of ennui, directionlessness, stagnation which is treated with warm colors when the subject matter is mixed with very powerful drives: of violence, greed, sexuality, frustrated kindnesses (the kindness of Amelio's heroes), of something with one Dionysian foot and one Christian one. Perhaps it is meaningful that all of the examples I've just listed above (without premeditation) are Italian or Italian-American. At any rate, if red-and-black and fast cutting are generally meaningful of a very intense cinema, a cinema of intense energies (like those sexual or violent), could this be like the long-take stretched-out mellowed sustain of the same kinds of "notes and chords"? See also this older post.

Overturn the Cars

Above is a fun, loose lineage of some things I have been thinking or reading about: Paris Commune barricades, 1871; a Renault tank from WWI; overturned cars on the street from May '68 riots; Sartre addressing workers at Billancourt, the major Renault factory; Sartre and Godard, May '68; a still from Godard/Gorin's Tout va bien, based on the Renault/Billancourt strikes; a still from Themroc, wherein Michel Piccoli stages his own private Commune (and gets the State angry at him for his troubles). While the images may be offered as there for your casual perusal, and are not of course a serious or profound argument of any kind, they are pointing towards serious questions. The automobile has played such a major role in modernization and, as such, it has been a locus for some of the defining characteristics of our modern dilemma--industrial pollution, consumerism, fossil fuel geopolitics, mobility & travel, labor exploitation and labor-management disputes. Car culture and cinema culture, or more broadly modern travel and modern media (both of which have necessitated certain innovations in commodification and perception), deserve some more vigorous conceptualization and application in history, cultural studies, film studies ... or if the literature is ample (a possibility), then I would like to find it and read it.

A reading list for myself: Kristin Ross's Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (working on this currently); Wolfgang Schivelbusch (various); Jonathan Crary's Suspensions of Perception.

Some films to think about and maybe see again: Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962), To Catch a Thief, La Jetée, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Playtime, Godard from '67 to '76, Red Line 7000, Sex and the Single Girl, The Big Mouth.

Some films to see: Un homme et une femme (Lelouch), mid-60s John Frankenheimer, more European co-produced pulp/spy/mod movies.

This is just a beginning. I would welcome suggestions on things to read and watch with regard to changes in economics, culture, consumption, perception, and aesthetic reimagination in the postwar era.

On the New, or Second, Life

When Jack Nicholson's Locke enters the hotel room and finds "Robinson" (his double) dead on the bed, we actually see his reaction, his gaze, before we see Robinson's (faceless) corpse. Later in the film, when Locke reaches his room, another hotel room (his "terminal" hotel, his destination in a sense) we see Locke looking before we see the person at whom his look is directed. Yet again we do not see the initial face.












The death is not Maria Schneider's this time, though she is the object of Locke's gaze: in his bid for a new life Locke has assumed the role of death (he's wearing the "dead man's shoes" so to speak). But the doubling that Locke initiates has repercussions that continue into the world beyond him--like the doubling of the woman figure. He doesn't, obviously, "create" either woman. But his actions now link them, provide them with a particular relationship beyond that of simply having a contact in common.












"When the souls arrived at the light, they had to go to Lachesis right away. There a Speaker arranged them in order, took from the lap of Lachesis of number of lots and a number of models of lives, mounted a high pulpit, and spoke to them. "Here is the message of Lachesis, the maiden daughter of Necessity: 'Ephemeral souls, this is the beginning of another cycle that will end in death. Your daimon or guardian spirit will not be assigned to you by lot; you will choose him. The one who has the first lot will be the first to choose a life to which he will then be bound by necessity. Virtue knows no master; each will possess it to a greater or less degree, depending on whether he values or disdains it. The responsibility lies with the one who makes the choice; the god has none.'" When he had said this, the Speaker threw the lots among all of them, and each--with the exception of Er, who wasn't allowed to choose-picked up the one that fell next to him. And the lot made it clear to the one who picked it up where in the order he would get to make his choice. After that, the models of lives were placed on the ground before them. There were far more of them than there were souls present, and they were of all kinds, for the lives of animals were there, as well as all kinds of human lives. There were tyrannies among them, some of which lasted throughout life, while others ended halfway through in poverty, exile, and beggary. There were lives of famous men, some of whom were famous for the beauty of their appearance, others for their strength or athletic prowess, others still for their high birth and the virtue or excellence of their ancestors. And there were also lives of men who weren't famous for any of these things. And the same for lives of women. But the arrangement of the soul was not included in the model because the soul is inevitably altered by the different lives it chooses. But all the other things were there, mixed with each other and with wealth, poverty, sickness, health, and the states intermediate to them.


"Now, it seems that it is here, Glaucon, that a human being faces the greatest danger of all."


--Plato's Republic (Book X, 617d-618c, trans. Grube rev. by Reeve)

Year's End

I've got to keep the tradition alive, and don't think I'll have time to craft a post tomorrow. So here's the diaristic, quick-and-dirty breakdown of the things I liked, as a cinephile, in 2007.

Film Events of the Year: Abbas Kiarostami retrospective (MoMA); Out 1 (Museum of the Moving Image); Pedro Costa retrospective (Anthology).

Somewhat Unclassifiable Amazing Experience of the Year: ENIAIOS IV (“Nefeli Photos”), Reel 2 (Gregory Markopoulos, 2004) shown at NYFF Views from the Avant-Garde … new film, old film, fragmentary screening—whatever it was it was one of the absolute peaks of my cinematic experience in ’07.

‘Humiliation’ Awards—the Five Masterpieces I Most Should Have Seen Years Ago That I Finally Got Around to Catching: Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975), The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), and El Dorado (Howard Hawks, 1967). OK, the last one maybe isn’t quite a masterpiece by my reckoning, but it’s very good, and I still should have seen it eight or ten years ago. The first four would definitely have spots on my year-end old films lists …

Recent films—in no real order—more or less, here are some favorites that I could not have seen in New York before 2007: Tachigui—Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters (Mamoru Oshii, 2006—possibly my ‘film of the year,’ whether ’06 or ’07), Juventude em marcha (Pedro Costa, 2006) and The Rabbit Hunters (Costa, 2007), Quei loro incontri (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 2006), Espelho Mágico (Manoel de Oliveira, 2006), Pitcher of Colored Light (Robert Beavers, 2007), Respite (Harun Farocki, 2007), Correspondences (Eugène Green, 2007), Le Voyage du ballon rouge (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007, a gorgeous and gentle commercial film), Hide (Christoph Girardot and Matthias Müller, 2006), and We Own the Night (James Gray, USA). I also caught up on DVD with Volver (Almodóvar) and Miami Vice (Mann), among big 2006 releases, and liked them both a lot, especially Volver. (I like both Pedros.) Probably a few others I’ve overlooked. Without double-checking, I can’t remember if The Wayward Cloud played in NYC before 2007, but it mostly restored my faith in Tsai—I had a crisis after Goodbye Dragon Inn …

And a ‘took them long enough’ award for distribution, this year, goes to: Fah Talai Jone / Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000). Special thanks to Jit Phokaew for connecting me with some of the colorful 1950s Thai films it evokes …

Funniest line of the year seen in an older film for the first time: “I feel like a pig shat in my head!” (from Withnail & I)
Funniest line of the year seen in a newish film: “I’m-a come at you like a spahder munkey!” (from Talladega Nights) … or … “Call them shells” (from Hot Fuzz)

I Don’t Feel Guilty About This Pleasure: The Transporter (Yuen/Leterrier) and The Transporter 2 (Leterrier). But yes, I know the films are bad. And fantastic.

Educational Film Award (Ahem): Correction Please, or How We Got Into Pictures (Noël Burch, 1979)
Much Better Than I Expected (Older Films): Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965)
Much Better Than I Expected (Recent Films): Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

Cribbing shamelessly from Olaf Möller’s/die Mannschaft’s ‘Eleven Friends’ mandate, I present here favorite older films (since that’s what comprises the bulk of my viewing) seen at home and in the world. One film per filmmaker. I’ve excluded Out 1 because it was specifically mentioned among the ‘events’ of the year (likewise the Markopoulos), but I have included my single favorite (newly-seen) Kiarostami and Costa films. I don’t know how exactly to explain the skew towards 1968-1977 films in my repertory list. Weird year, I guess. And surely there is a lot of gray area between these films and my 'humiliation' list. (The difference is that the humiliations are things I should & could have seen before I even graduated from high school.) Both lists are in very roughly descending order.

Eleven Friends on Home Viewing Formats

Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)
Il general della Rovere (Roberto Rossellini, 1959)
The Parson’s Widow (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1920)
Knightriders (George A. Romero, 1981)
Cronica di un amore (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950)
Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983) (hat tip to Andy Rector)
Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1968)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, 1998)
Él—This Strange Passion (Luis Buñuel, 1953)
Iracema – Uma Transa Amazônica (Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, 1976)

Terribly Underrated: Steaming (Joseph Losey, 1985)

Eleven Friends at the Rep House

Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)
Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970)
Homework (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989)
No Quarto da Vanda (Pedro Costa, 2000)
Sicîlia! (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1999)
Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973)
Hapax Legomena: (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
La Hora de los hornos (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968)
Isabelle aux dombes (Maurice Pialat, 1951)
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri, 1970)
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973)

Criminally Underseen (tie): Shabe ghuzi / Night of the Hunchback (Farokh Ghafari, 1965) and Furtivos (José Luis Borau, 1975)

I've been neglectful this past year of ... a lot of silent cinema (1910-1930ish), catching up on various unseen films by certain really key European women filmmakers (various by Varda and Akerman, any Shub or Ottinger, recent Breillat), keeping up with my Bollywood, tracking down more Ritwik Ghatak, and seeing more Italian genre films. And I've got a triple bill I must watch at home soon (inspired by Adrian Martin)--about which I hope to post in the very near future.

Resolutions include trying to see new releases on a more regular basis (and even write reviews for them--something I think I've forgotten how to do); try my best to stick to one book at a time and finish it off quickly; get my hands dirty with Stanley Kubrick again. Plus there will be some improvements to the blogging. I hope.

Happy New Year!

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)

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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.)

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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).

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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."