The Firing Squad

More standard-issue words on form, politics, and cinephilia.

The first thing I noticed about Jon Jost's Sure Fire ('90) was the speech, which captures the way (some) people talk in that deep, desert, mountainous American West—something like a cross between the Midwest and a generalized Southern accent. This is the speech of long stretches of highway and mountains, of desolate rest stops, lonely big sky country. (It's the speech of the sort of fellow I imagine Emmylou Harris & Willie Nelson sing about in one of the saddest songs ever, "One Paper Kid"—or, come to think of it, the people in Mikel Rouse's new music opera Failing Kansas.) The camera doesn't show us the characters in a frontal medium shot or close-up for some time; in fact Jost shies away from close-ups and frontal shots quite a bit in this film. I would not stress the case too far, but maybe there is something to be said for a film which emphasizes environment, custom, ritual in dealing with a weirdly, pathetically charismatic hero. The great Tom Blair exerts a lot of raw personal force in a character to whom nobody who pays attention does so because they wish to.

Monologues become positively Faulknerian, and are rendered mournful not only through the content of the dialogue and the speech tones, but also through the spatial relations between characters. Blair sits and instructs his character's wife at length about what she's to do back home while he's away on business: she doesn't listen. The wives speak amidst the ruins. The scene where Tom Blair's son gets his first gun is a masterpiece of surprise & volume. And so on. I'll try to get some screencaps put up here sometime.

The quality of light in this film bathes a lot of the shots—albeit ones I saw on an old VHS—in almost startling white: the air is complicit in the drama, takes it to another world. Subsisting mostly on a diet of standard, and recent, commercial cinema in recent weeks (buoyed along only by dear Anna Faris) I was clobbered in a way comparable to that when you see a true masterpiece, or when you are very young as a cinephile and only just begin to seek out the "different" stuff, revelling in the ineffable and deep novelty of cinema that scoots around outside the comfort zone that has been established for you.

* * *

Above: an image from Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract (1958)

Cinephilia is constantly (mis)understood as a pathology, but in many of the objects of cinephilia itself we see the artistic treatment of this problem. Murder by Contract's is a dehumanized hero (a compelling cipher, unlike the psychologized hero of Lerner's Studs Lonigan). The affirmation of will at the expense of life, as well as the attendant allure of such devotion (i.e., for some people) is the very material of this film, and it is not alone. The hero in Murder is well-regulated by time, appointment, duty; immune to vagaries of appetite—sexual or gastronomic. But he's not above his environment, and his code is shaped by something external to it: we could have a fun parlor game speculating about whether it's his Id, his upbringing, his class position ...

I penned that write-up of Studs Lonigan almost two years ago, and still haven't seen a third Lerner film (but I did revisit Murder by Contract).

And check out the two dissolves:

Without doing a bit of research I was positive that Martin Scorsese knew Murder by Contract well and modeled some of Taxi Driver on that film. (Even if you haven't seen Lerner's film I'll bet you thought the same thing when you saw these screengrabs above!) A single bit of googling reveals as much. It goes to show how maybe the source material of classical cinema has been frequently manipulated, misconstrued. Scorsese is sometimes thought of as a politically centrist or right-leaning filmmaker (for the Catholic content, his choice of protagonists, and/or his support of Elia Kazan, perhaps). But if he's good enough for David Ehrenstein, I'm willing to give the world's most cinephilically fascinating fast-talker the benefit of the doubt. The first step in diagnosing the politics of the film school brat generation, the 'New Hollywood' of the MPAA era's beginnings, might be to trace out not only what their films said and how they related to their moment (what Shampoo says about the Nixon era & gender roles, etc.) but also which cues the filmmakers themselves took from their famously self-aware knowledge of the cinema that preceded them.

Image of the Day

Some Words

My observation of the Spanish War and the rape of the Philippines led me to consider the character of our minor adventures in Samoa and Hawaii; and there I found the same record of chicanery and fraud, implemented by violence. In both instances the United States had acquired possession through revolutions made to order by its official agents. Then I went on to take stock of our continental adventures in the same line. I knew what imperialism meant in former times, what its springs of action were, and what its customary modes of procedure were. My classical studies had thoroughly acquainted me with these phenomena of the old days around the Mediterranean, and I had as yet seen nothing to suggest any essential difference between modern imperialism and the imperialism which I had studied and understood. Thus I was able to read between the lines of standard American historical writing, even such as was dished up for the young in our educational institutions. It was clear to me that our acquisition of Texas was a matter of sheer brigandage, and that force and fraud played approximately equal parts in our acquisition of California. I carried on my survey of American imperialism through the Mexican War, our systematic extermination of the Indians, and so on back into the colonial period; and I emerged with the conviction that at least on this one item of imperialism, our political history from first to last was utterly disgraceful.

—Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, pp. 103-104.

Hence, it should be noted that a conqueror, after seizing power, must decide about all the injuries he needs to commit, and do all of them at once, so as not to have to inflict punishments every day. Thus he will be able, by his restraint, to reassure men and win them over by benefitting them. Anyone who does not act in this way, either because he is timid or because he lacks judgement, will always be forced to stand with sword in hand. He will never be able to rely upon his subjects, for they can never feel safe with him, because of the injuried that continue to be inflicted. For injuries should be done all together so that, because they are tasted less, they will cause less resentment; benefits should be given out one by one, so that they will be savoured more. And above all a ruler must live with his subjects in such a way that no unexpected events, whether favourable or unfavourable, will make him change course. For when difficult times put you under pressure you will not have enough time to take harsh measures, and any benefits that you confer will not help you, because they will be considered to be done unwillingly, and so you will receive no credit for them.

—Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. Russell Price)

The Immigrant

Palin

I doubt I'm the first to say this. My fear about Sarah Palin, from looking at news and from commentary left and right, is not about '08, but about '12. I'm confident that McCain will lose handily in November, but the set-up for Palin now may be for Republicans what the '04 set-up was for Obama and the Democrats. And just like Obama will energize a lot of people outside the party and the older electorate, so will Palin—provided she performs well tonight at the convention. Media-savvy populism in the spectacular age: they're slowly and surely catching onto "grassroots" in ever more insidious ways.

Palin is analogous to Obama in the relationship she bears to her party: not fiercely partisan (as in occupying an established faction) so much as a wave overtaking rotted beachfront property. Same beach, same water, same stuff: yet different. She may be as easy to underestimate as Obama was; and, like him, she is probably just honest, independent, and fresh enough to capture the attention of a tectonically-shifted party base. Don't mistake me: in calling Palin honest, etc., I don't for a second hope to see her in power or the policies she'd propose enacted. If certain rumors are to be believed, she is a cutthroat politician, a very bright and crafty stateswoman (just like Obama is sharp, very sharp). But—I would propose—darlings like Obama and Palin remind viewers/voters of people they've known and admired in real life, to a greater extent than the more massaged images of Biden, the Clintons, the Bushes, McCain, Romney (he's almost like a relic: in an age of comedy & caricature his corporate-religious Aryan perfection sets up jokes well before the late night shows get to him). People still believe in the image but their hunger for "realism" is exerting gravitational pull. Perhaps we're coming full circle from the famed TV election of Kennedy versus Nixon.

The real-real people in national politics (McKinney, Kucinich, Paul) remain on the fringes. The system isn't broken, it works only too well. We're just misinformed as to what it's supposed to do ...

More Faris

Just Friends is a surprisingly bitter movie. Not that it's attitude towards its characters is particularly contemptuous (the Mom, perhaps) but that it's spurred along by deep-seated resentment. As a result the film is a bit all-over the place: part Farrellyesque body comedy, part teen movie sentimentalism, part small town winter wonderland romp (cf. Groundhog Day, Trapped in Paradise, Home for the Holidays). Regarding the seething emotions that justify the entire story, it should come as no surprise that the director was the same guy who "covered" Les Liaisons dangereuses.

The story goes that Ryan Reynolds was a sensitive fat kid in high school, in love with his oblivious, slightly aloof best friend (Amy Smart). He leaves his Central Jersey hometown in shame, and ten year's later he's a slim, charming, vapid ladies' man with a high-paying job in show biz. He's meant to court a manic, untalented, hot young pop star (a slightly exaggerated Avril Lavigne/Ashlee Simpson type) so that she agrees to sign her next record with his company. En route to a romantic Parisian weekend at her insistence, the plain is forced to land in Trenton ... over Christmas ... and Reynolds will visit his hometown for the first time since he graduated from high school. You see where all this ends up going. You probably can figure out 95% of the plot and 75% of the gags simply from this description. (Hint: Chris Klein has a role, too, and he also went from being "not hot" in high school to "hot" in his late 20s.) How tacked-on are the emotional progressions of all the characters, though? Normally in movies like this, which press the sentimental romance button at appropriate times (as this one does), there's at least an attempt to finesse out some kind of an emotional arc. Not here. The only appropriate word to describe the "emotional core" of the bond described to us between Reynolds' protagonist and Smart's object of affection is clusterfuck.

* * *

So why did I really watch this movie? Anna Faris! She doesn't reach the same heights as she does in Smiley Face, but as in The Hot Chick she has a "scene-stealing" presence. (In fact, in The Hot Chick Faris herself plays the "best friend" with romantic inclinations toward her BFF.) Here she plays none other than the pop star Samantha. What makes the performance so rewarding is that she acts as though she were in a movie and she's constantly flummoxed by the fact that the plot is always moving away from her. Her little tics, her movements, her schizophrenic consciousness blurted out from moment to moment. I mean, Faris is making Samantha act this way, as part of the character who knows and acts as if she were in a movie or tv show. It's a level of meta that the rest of the film doesn't really approach.

Scratch Sheet

Right away in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) swindles a valuable four-volume edition of Don Quixote from the collection of a stroke-silenced patriarch. He deals with the book collector's greedy heirs, who wouldn't know what he's talking about when he references the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili but are wowed by his estimation of their father's library's value. The tack Polanski takes here is that of the unbeliever changing money in the temple: literature and the occult have their prices, and their predators and prey. The truth of a thing? Beside the point.

A thought: Johnny Depp and Robert Downey, Jr. are Hollywood's two best fortysomething male stars. (Sean Penn gets mentioned for this sort of honor a lot, but he doesn't really "act" these days, does he? In the normally even-keel Clint Eastwood's most frenetic and frenzied film (that I've seen), Mystic River, Penn spews out his lines too much like tortured poetry. I couldn't take it.) If Depp is indeed to play the Riddler in the next Batman movie, I may actually have to see it—though it's bound to be even worse than the painfully mediocre Dark Knight.

Nolan's Batman films are not very interesting to me, though the embrace he's received from most onlookers suggests he's found his element, so maybe I should just shut my mouth. (The indie filmmakers who debuted in the 1990s have shown that their inexpensive calling cards deservedly land them what they've wanted to do deep down all along: make expensive, accessible pop art. Still, I'm inclined to think that veteran Sam Raimi is doing a better job than Nolan, Singer, et al.) The most interesting Batman scenes Nolan made were the first half-hour (ish) of Batman Begins, which I perversely enjoyed for its almost mistakenly open militaristic-fascistic inclinations. Of course then the film goes back into the safe, muddled waters of the spectacular mainstream, and its follow-up The Dark Knight hardly deviates from this lucrative comfort zone. ("Ambiguity" is the hoped-for interpretation plastered like a salve over the film's deliberately muddled status quo politics, methinks.)

(Speaking of Downey and of superhero films, I still have yet to see Iron Man...)

Back to The Ninth Gate—a good, basic, "termitish" movie. What's not to like? In the blockbuster age it is refreshing when a mainstream film (about rare book collections and the occult, no less) keeps its claims modest, makes no huge gestures by the end. Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, suggests this is a fault. I don't think it is; I like these mainstream genre films that gently stir up huge questions but don't presume to provide summary philosophical answers. The film tickles you, but doesn't scratch the itch: you must look elsewhere, outside the film, to continue the thread. I watched this film years ago, and took another look at it (in about thirteen segments) on YouTube, where I've enjoyed watching several contemporary Hollywood movies over the last few weeks. (Call it a "new media research project" with a team of one.) There's a difference between the ambiguity of a film that is all over the place, over-reaching itself and its own sense of importance, and the ambiguity of a film that never presumes its own high value, that plays its hand close the chest.

Note on a Face

Anna Faris' work in Gregg Araki's pot comedy Smiley Face is a hilarious catalogue of contortions and facial non sequiturs. She lets her eyes get big and her face a little wild, the chin rounding down the gullet with a pouty lip. When you look at, say, Megan Fox in Transformers, no matter what the physical demands of the scene her flawless face remains in the mode of a Calvin Klein ad. Not Faris! With gusto she moves around awkwardly. (Anyone who gets as much a kick as I did out of her rolling "escape" from her car in the parking garage is a kindred spirit.) Is there any other young comedic actress whose tiny movements of facial muscles comprise such a large part of the attraction of the image? The hunch of her back, the tyrannosaurus arms: this unfortunate stoner in Smiley Face had me in stitches.

Will report back if I go through more of the work of La Faris and it proves noteworthy.

Final Image

"Often, at the end of a movie, filmmakers feel the need for some takes of the sky, a landscape, empty streets, and so on. There is no movement in those shots, and the directors could simply film still photographs. But the eye discovers this immediately, because even if there is no movement (in either the subject or the camera) the presence of movement always appears in any filmed image. This play of mobility and fixity is a dwelling-place of involuntary signs."

—Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema

The last image of a film that comes to mind most readily when thinking about this excerpt is that of João César Monteiro’s Vai-e-Vem, where our hero's eye (and heart?) stop.

Image of the Day

Manny Farber, 1917-2008

This one hurts. When Raymond Durgnat died, for instance, I was still just discovering his work. But Farber's Negative Space was re-issued around the same time that my cinephilia really started to kick into high gear, and perhaps no single collection of film criticism & reviews has been more important to me. I have more to say on this, but it won't be ready tonight or even this week. A few words, though, from the man himself:

The virtues of action films expand as the pictures take on the outer appearance of junk jewelry. The underground's greatest mishaps have occurred in art-infected projects where there is unlimited cash, studio freedom, an expansive story, message, heart, and a lot of prestige to be gained. Their flattest, most sentimental works are incidentally the only ones that have attained the almond-paste-flavored eminence of the Museum of Modern Art's film library, i.e., GI Joe, Public Enemy. Both Hawks and Wellman, who made these overweighted mistakes, are like basketball's corner man: their best shooting is done from the deepest, worst angle. With material that is hopelessly worn out and childish (Only Angels Have Wings), the underground director becomes beautifully graphic and modestly human in his flexible detailing. When the material is like drab concrete, these directors become great on-the-spot inventors, using their curiously niggling, reaming style for adding background detail (Walsh); suave grace (Hawks); crawling, mechanized tension (Mann); veiled gravity (Wellman); svelte semicaricature (John Farrow); modern Gothic vehemence (Phil Karlson); and dark, modish vaudeville (Robert Aldrich).

—"Underground Films," 1957

It's easy to "dissolve boundaries" between the "false dichotomies" of "high and low." But Farber understood that truly dissolving boundaries doesn't mean consuming anything and everything with abandon (anyone can do that with ease, and The System prefers you to do it that way) but rather approaching art with a set of practices, time-tested, to make sense of certain configurations of the cultural terrain. Farber's main interest, of course, was neither in being a "cultural critic" nor in connecting his formal analyses to deep sociohistorical currents. Nevertheless his criticism is amenable to these projects I think.

I'm pretty sure I've blogged this before, but: here are his deliberately small-scale "best films" of 1951 (a year-end list I've always liked precisely for its colorful and tenacious resistance to received wisdom): Little Big Horn (Charles Marquis Warren), Fixed Bayonets (Fuller), His Kind of Woman (John Farrow), The Thing from Another World (Hawks/Nyby), The Prowler ("Joe Losey"), The People Against O'Hara (John Sturges), The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise), The Man Who Cheated Himself (Felix E. Feist), Appointment with Danger (Lewis Allen—in his piece, Farber or the editor incorrectly cites this as Background to Danger, which is a Raoul Walsh-helmed Bogart film from 1943), and the honorable mentions: The Tall Target, Against the Gun, No Highway in the Sky, Happiest Days of Your Life (a truly hilarious British boarding school film! -ZC), Rawhide, Excuse My Dust, The Enforcer, Force of Arms, The Wooden Horse, Night Into Morning, Payment on Demand, Cry Danger, and (Farber can't remember the title, but it's) A Hound for Trouble. I've only seen a handful (and not yet the Fuller). Anyone seen them all?

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

New Yorkers: see it! You've a few more days! If this vital film generated in the media even a tenth of the impassioned discussion and rapt attention that The Dark Knight has received, I'd feel optimistic about a lot of things. John Gianvito has delivered a very simple, resonant film, pared down—but he has also done something quite fascinating with the direct sound, and produced a commentary on humans' place in the natural world that, in today's Hollywood releases, only Terrence Malick can even engage with on equal terms. (Danny Kasman here; of course Andy Rector and David James are big fans.)

(P.S. I'll be gone, mostly at least, from the Internets from Wednesday to Wednesday.)

Food Politics

I think it's pretty apparent that agribusiness is a massive problem, that processes like pasteurization and homogeneization (which had localized benefits, sure) are proving detrimental in the long run, that starving nations exporting food is a problem, and so on. Global food politics, on the very largest and the very smallest scales, are fucked up.

But let's not talk about all that. Let's in fact assume, overall, that no deep changes need be made to our assumptions or our thinking. There's no reason we can't have baskets of fresh tomatoes every day of the year, we still need "realistic" and "economically feasible" competitive prices for our staples, let's not have relationships with or proximity to the animals we eat, let's continue to think of calories as nuisances, that refined sugar and processed foods are just fine, etc.

So instead let's talk about bobo organic consumers, the types who go to the $30/entree Slow Food-endorsed restaurants in their bohemian chic neighborhoods, the ones who won't let Junior eat sugar or red meat, the ones who love "ethnic cuisine" and are likely vegan, vegetarian, macrobiotic, or in any case finicky. (They won't sit down and eat a Big Mac, fercryinoutloud.) They like yoga or pilates and vote Democrat or Green though they also probably have a lot of money if they can afford all that organic, locally-grown produce. So from here on out let's filter all discussion of food politics (and opposition to the many harms and shortcomings of food industries) through the opinions and experiences of this small privileged subset of food consumers. Let's telescope onto the entirety of food politics the concerns, the opinions—and also the foibles, the shortsightedness!—of this class of people.

Let's basically discuss generic opposition to the giant problems in the food we eat, how we grow it and process it and ship it, how we relate to it, in terms of these trendy foodie bobos.

The Good Liberal and "the Left"

Howard Hampton recently in Film Comment (on May '68 and cinema), like Stephanie Zacharek in the NYTimes on Godard (and the new Brody biography), puts in a torrent of barbs and jabs against "the Left," which is, naturally, painted as self-absorbed, dreamily unrealistic, artistically bankrupt, and responsible for horrific occurrences in China and Cambodia. A reader wrote in to Film Comment responding critically to the conservative tenor of Hampton's piece. The author responded himself with some fine, fine advice about what was earth-shakingly wrong about "the Left," and what "it needs to do" if it's going to be a force for social change to which people might warm up. (More on that point shortly.) The tropes for this kind of rhetoric are readily apparent and are taken loosely from Susan Sontag's description of the CP-controlled Soviet sphere of influence ("fascism with a human face") as well as Bush-supporter Tom Wolfe's "radical chic" epithet. Few things seem to arouse the ire of liberal American intellectuals as much as radical leftism—perhaps "Islamofascism." If the US government and its corporate benefactors-beneficiaries dislike something, all they have to do is insist that it is a thinly veiled form of fascism. As a result, decent, well-educated Democrats will be sure to hurl contempt, disdain, and sarcasm at such forces with much more tenacity than they will at, say, actual fascists and contemporary descendents.

In his response to Allen Keating-Moore's letter, Hampton lays down the law:

"Let's be clear: a revolution is not a beatific movie in which pretty actors shoot blanks; it's not a garden party of philosophy seminar or some poetic-romantic affirmation of Idealistic Youth. We're talking about an armed insurrection aimed at overthrowing the state, a ruthless struggle where terror, death, and coercion are the order of the day."

Yes, indeed, let us be clear. If we are not clear, it would seem that Hampton is of the camp who feels that terror, death, and coercion are not the order of the day under the state and the system we currently have.

No violence.

No terror.

No ruthlessness.

No coercion.

The heartrending, irrational justifications of the Good Liberal go like this: because there is relatively little violence, terror, or direct and perceived coercion in the life of a middle-class American, there must be relatively little violence, terror, and coercion in the entire order that enables this life. And (this is a quite obvious assumption of Hampton's) because hordes of middle-class Americans are not signing up for "the Left," it is unthinkable that the popular masses in any part of the globe could ever align themselves with "it," could ever express themselves through "it," could ever feel like "it" was something pluralistic and non-dogmatic that they might "want to join." For some people, "the Left" is not a club that must make itself attractive to prospective members. The fact that pockets of privileged Westerners have, in modern times, been naïve in their support of some leftist movements (or what they [mis]understood to be genuinely popular insurrectionary struggles against oppressors) is no reason to disparage "the Left" in its entirety or to whitewash the crimes of an order which is destroying our planet and immiserating most of our species.

"If the Left today really wants to get serious about being a force for change instead of a calcified form of political Scientology, it's going to have to outgrow its reflexive nostalgia for murderous absolutism, its superheroic fantasies of revolution-by-artistic-proxy, its smug propensity for not only making but valorizing the same mistakes, and do a better job of imagining a pluralistic, non-dogmatic society that ordinary people might conceivably want to join--one good place to start looking could be Alain Tanner's 1976 film Jonah—Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000."

Tanner's film is an impressive one, no doubt. Full of good cheer, good times, a progressivism amidst loved ones and comrades. But the question remains—just which "Left" are we talking about? That's a rhetorical question of course, because the mainstream liberal intelligentsia only seems to allow this one monolithic image. Oh indeed: Which left?

The smug tree-huggers?













Those who are "nostalgic" for murderous absolutism?













Those who doubt the benevolence of the market economy?









Those dandies who mistake art for action?










The dogmatic anti-pluralists?









Shouldn't we be thankful for the upholders of liberty—the liberty to live under capitalism?









The Good Liberal is conditioned not to conceive of a "revolution" outside of certain boundaries, certain regulations. The Good Liberal is conditioned to think of "the radical Left" as embodying all the same coercive and authoritarian structures that most self-identified leftists in history have fought against. The Good Liberal worries about poverty and social justice, but nevertheless aligns himself with the state and corporate forces which do everything in their power to disrupt, fragment, and fashion popular social movements—many of which designate themselves as being on the Left, some of which designate themselves as (yes) communist, socialist, or anarchist—against their own domination, exploitation, and hegemonic conscription.

I would wager that Hampton, like Zacharek, like many (probably) liberal people, dislike George W. Bush, believe his administration and the Republican Congress and the Supreme Court have made a real mess of things. I would wager that Hampton would have no beef if, asked right now, his feelings on the Chipko women, the slaves who fought back, the Chartists and union-organizers of the 19th century, even the Communards. But in their times and places they have been the demonized pipe dreamers, the utopian rabble-rousers and trouble-makers. So I would offer a firm congenial reminder to those who would, could be the allies of "the Left." In forming and maintaining an image of "the Left," of communist revolution, of popular struggle, the Good Liberal must ask himself whose interests he serves by perpetuating this image he criticizes.

If this question is not asked, history will ensure that the Good Liberals of today end up as merely the Goncourts of globalization.

(NB1: I've referred to the Good Liberal with masculine pronouns near the end of my post consciously and with reason.)

(NB2: On the same page of FC where Hampton's letter-response is printed, there is an ad for the Criterion re-release of Pasolini's Salò. Let us remember that it is not simply a "shocking masterpiece" but a deeply political film.)

"I'll Be Seeing You Boys ... Probably"

Near the beginning of 3 Godfathers (Ford, '48), one of the great Christmas movies (and it gets better each time you watch it), our "heroes" ride into town—John Wayne in command, Pedro Armendáriz in support, Harry Carey Jr. as the green recruit, still a little wet behind the ears. It's his comments—his openness to the cordial Mrs. Sweet—that perk up Buck Sweet's (Ward Bond's) ears and spur him from afternoon gardener into sheriff. It's been a nice meeting and visit, but Sweet is the one to get a leg up.

First he puts on his gun,














then his star.














Ol' Sheriff Sweet gestures idly, once, with his cob pipe at the badge, an unreadable smirk on his face, just enough to impart an oblique, unmistakable message. John Wayne (as Hightower) is not amused. No pearly apples & flowers here after all. The communitarian demands of politeness and hospitality have been honored but the signal is given. The law undercuts nicety, the gesture, when it presumes to keep the social balance. Three ride out. Later in the film, the law and custom are honored (sort of) but are in fact undercut themselves by the bonds of community and love.

Question of the Day

If you could chat with Guy Debord's ghost for an evening (assuming that you would, like me, want to), what would you be drinking? You know Debord's would be a parched phantom. Myself, I'd blow a few days' wages on a really good bottle of scotch, possibly some solid bourbon (depends on how long this evening lasted), and a few nice Belgian beers. I imagine the night would produce a monstrous hangover.

Good Times

The fantasy of a better life: good times on a nice afternoon, a wish fulfilled, a dream undeferred (in the immanent deferment of art).

Been thinking about close analysis, and John Ford, among other things. Cultural imperialism, international trade and capital, the character and role of bright colors & period pictures; cruel comedy. More coming before long, perhaps or perhaps not on any of these topics!

Michael Gaines

The other day I came upon the story of one Michael Gaines, in Kansas, who was recently sentenced to 13 years for battery. I'm still trying to ascertain the details but news reports make it seem like the "battery" for which Gaines was sentenced was spitting on two officers in a jail clinic. Gaines is a large and assertive black man, and HIV+. This latter fact prompted fears from the officers upon whom he (allegedly) spat. Like I said, from the news reports: this is the "assault" for which Gaines is being sentenced.

As we know, saliva is not a fluid that transmits HIV. And as any child knows, no person should be locked up for spitting. What has happened here?

I don't know the entire story yet; maybe there's more to it. But the video and the evidence I've come across so far paints a picture of injustice. There's a story here, and one (with the video) of the incident here. The judge in question has a website, and a blog, and discusses the incident here. The mostly Kansas-based press on the incident has been, in my opinion, deeply biased against Gaines. The video has made the rounds on stupid video websites like Ebaumsworld. From my preliminary searches, neither poz nor black media have picked up on this yet (please correct & inform me where I'm wrong).

Perry Anderson Video

(Note: I've deleted my previous post, which I had debated putting up. I feel like my ideas in it weren't ready yet and needed to be more fully fleshed out, moved away from the diaristic...)

Recent Viewing

(includes...)

La France (Serge Bozon, 2007) Two things make this especially noteworthy. One is the musical element, the other is the fact that Bozon is working in a classical idiom, at least as regards mise-en-scène, without resorting to "pastiche" in any robust sense. It's nice to see somebody doing this without playing up the homage/recreation elements.

Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006) Required reading: the first chapter in the first volume of Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema. There's conflict, here, all right, but it's not to be found in the narrative. I wouldn't call it a great work, but I'm flummoxed by all the nitpicking that a film about Africa & globalization that isn't a documentary would have the gall to not have a strong narrative propulsion. Can't things just be interesting because they're interesting? (And I saw this at an outdoor screening, with delicious food, by the East River, so there was plenty to occupy us.)

Go Fish (Rose Troche, 1994) T. Wendy McMillan deserves to be in more films! I can't find any substantial information on her, but she's the black lesbian scholar. She's also at the center of the funniest moment in the film, when she's walking down the street and, slow motion, we hear somebody on the soundtrack yell out a homophobic "dyke" comment. McMillan turns her head, as she keeps walking, and (still in slo-mo) yells back, "Heyyyyy, fuuuuck yooooouu!" An interesting amalgamation of cheap indie narrative with meta-discursive framings, occupying several pairs of shoes (romantic comedy, navel-gazer, queer film manifesto, discussion of queer film manifestos) with an apparent effortlessness that's easy to miss. This was Luc Moullet's choice (for Film Comment) on 'Film of the Nineties,' an unusual pick to be sure, but if you sit a bunch of cinephiles around to watch this you could perhaps get a good debate going.

House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955) Racist imperialist lunacy, no doubt: I don't see a strong authorial response resisting or mediating a pretty bald ideological operation. But the climax, and elements prior, are all Fullerian flourish, and there's enough here to keep the cinephile following along. Girish has written very well on this film's strengths. Moullet again: "The young American filmmakers have nothing to say, Sam Fuller even less than the others. He has something to do, and he does it, naturally, without forcing it. This isn't a small compliment." (Robert Ryan remains, of course, unassailable.)

Quote of the Day

The question of politics and the method of my “shifts” are closely linked to each other. For me, the political always comes into play in questions of divisions and boundaries. I chose the title La nuit des prolétaires for my book on the emancipation of the worker in nineteenth-century France because at the heart of this emancipation was the breaking of the natural division of time that dictated that workers must work by day and sleep by night and have no time left over for thinking. The workers’ emancipation came about through workers who decided to devote their nights to other activities than sleep, to give themselves this time that did not belong to them in order to enter into a world of writing and thinking that was not “theirs.” To take this into account, I needed to break the boundary that is supposed to separate genres—history, philosophy, literature, political science. In principle, my workers belonged to “social history.” In other words, their texts were read as documents expressing the condition of workers, popular culture, etc. I decided to read them in a different way—as literary and philosophical texts. Where others were attempting to read about workers’ problems expressed in the language of the people, I saw, on the other hand, a struggle to cross the barrier between languages and worlds, to vindicate access to the common language and to the discourse on the community. As opposed to culturalism, which sought to restore a “popular culture,” I valorized the attitude of those workers who challenged that so-called “popular culture” and made an attempt to appropriate another’s culture (i.e. that of the “iterate”). The idea of a “poetics of knowledge” that would cut across all disciplines thus expresses a very close relationship between subject and method. La nuit des prolétaires was a “political” book in that it ignored the division between “scientific” and “literary” or between “social” and “ideological,” in order to take into account the struggle by which the proletariat sought to reappropriate for themselves a common language that had been appropriated by others, and to affirm transgressively the assumption of equality.

—Jacques Rancière (interviewed by Solange Guénoun and James H. Kavanagh, 2000)

Throwaway

Real elitism entails, subordinately, forcing other people's leisure to conform to your idea of leisure.

Reference Please?

Readers—a while back I recall coming across a reference to what I believe is a book or an article about race, culture, and environmentalism. I think the title was something along the lines of, "Before It Was Green, It Was Brown"—something comparable to this. I want to say that the gist of the book was that a lot of traditional and indigenous communities used common-sense "green" methods in their everyday life, well before the environmentalist movement as such. But I've been Googling in vain. Would anyone have any idea what I might be thinking of? Or am I just crazy? Thanks in advance.

Les Oignons

Marcel Hanoun is one of the rare filmmakers who tries not at all to define his work in relation to a dominant cinema. As Marx said about the future promising people who would paint (rather than "painters"), Hanoun is—like Jean-Marie Straub and the late Danièle Huillet—a filmmaker who lives. The power structure that most insists upon all cinema everywhere being a cinema for as many people (as large a market) as possible is the same power structure that benefits from the actual institution of this way of thinking about cinema. Thus, people here and there make "small" films, neither exactly amateur nor industrial, sacrificing cosmetics in order to strive in the way of aesthetics.

Je meurs de vivre (1994) is a 52-minute* dialogue-skimpy work about a priest and nun in love. Surely made for less money than a lot of student films, it is nevertheless a very powerful film: deftly edited, economical, with a giant cumulative impact. My possibly incorrect impression is that Hanoun is a political radical and an atheist, but here is another film about believers by (presumably) a nonbeliever that captures and expresses something about the emotions that course through veins, and the behaviors that corral and contain them—or try to.

An amazing passage: a shot of three onions on a plate (like most great representational filmmakers Hanoun attends to the things we ingest), which we then understand that the nun is cutting as we see her face in close-up. (I would guess she is actually cutting those same onions in her close-up.) What we have is an element of fiction, the impression of the nun's tears. At the same time we are shown directly the tools for achieving this fictional effect: the onions which will be cut. But the actuality of the onion-cutting is there, it's both indexically recorded and dramatically performed. What is causing the woman's (character's/actress') tears? We cannot say with real certainty, and this ambiguity is what makes for a palpably felt moment. The long-term internal feelings one carries with oneself over time collide, coincide with the very plain daily activities of life, and become immanent there.

Je meurs de vivre was also listed by Luc Moullet, for Film Comment, as one of his top ten best/underrated films of the 1990s.

* The ending on Hanoun's website, where I viewed the film, seemed quite abrupt but I haven't found any information on whether the running time is actually longer than the ~52 minutes it runs online and that is supplemented (copied?) by the IMDB. If someone has information to clarify things I'd love to hear it.

Hands/Robe/Slippers

“I just couldn’t see Barry again, could I? I’d feel—I’d feel unclean.”

In the mediocre mood-thriller She-Wolf of London (Jean Yarbrough, 1946) the heroine, June Lockhart, believes she is victim of an old family curse—murderous lycanthropy. In one sequence her "aunt" tries to comfort her in the bedchamber after Lockhart concludes she has gone out on another noctural rampage. First she awakens in her bed to see dried blood on her fingertips; she then notices the wetness on the hem of her robe; finally she sees caked mud and dirt on her slippers. Of course it's a blatant signification of menstruation as well as the imposed/reinforced shame of women's biology engendered by our patriarchal culture and our patriarchal cinema. I wonder if, pedagogically, this film could be used as a good example of showing that utterly serious issues can be found in minor films—that "decoding" them neither necessarily justifies a major demolition job on an ideologically illegitimate (or unsavory) artwork, nor does it necessarily underline a supposedly greater complexity or "latency" that ennobles the unassuming artwork. All artworks contain complexity because all artworks are propelled into one's awareness through the discursive borders of human relations.

The film is marked by a premise and set design that John Brahm might have done justice, as he did with a couple of other low-budget Britain-set films I like from the same period (The Lodger with Laird Cregar, The Undying Monster). Somebody—persumably Yarbrough or DP Maury Gertsman—decides to tilt the camera a bit for some "menacing" climactic scenes. But there's no organic or interesting progression to the images and the way the shots come, one after another, the way the themes creep out of each other, grow large through economy of image and totem and audiovisual relations. It's just a bit of cheap technique, and as such the film has the same enjoyable low-key, low-budget charm as most b-movies from the era seem to. But not here the coherence of a Brahm, let alone an Ulmer, who did manage to evoke beyond means (cosmetics) deeper and more complex aesthetic movements.

Fourth of July

What Is Cinema (For)?

To what all can we equate the cinema? For starters: lost causes, mirror images, failures, dream-food, a drug, a certain form of reality, lèse majesté, toadying, bullying, pleading, pornography, a captured sequence of sounds/images that may give a reasonably identical experience to the viewer over multiple viewings, a substitute for action, a displacement of life, a patriarchal funhouse, today's Grand Guignol, faith, celluloid, maybe pixels, beginnings and ends, a two-lane blacktop.

(The more I disregard “dominant” cinema and try to distance myself from it, the more refreshed I think I am in looking at it, finding more clearly its parameters, its strengths and weaknesses. For those movie-mad folks who watch only television shows and feature-length narratives [brought to you by DVD]: don't you ever get bored? Staring at the image of my former self, my adolescent self, that I hold in my own head, I am furious. How, why, did I have no sense of foundations, of supplementation? I was a very smart child and am spending my twenties trying desperately to reclaim some of that freedom and some of that focus, against the obstacles of deeply worn-in damage caused by my teenage years. This is why pedagogy matters to me: I am convinced I, and others, have been robbed of a proper education—I'm hardly using this as a synonym for schooling—and must grab it back by force, inches at a time, before it's too late. Too late for what? What makes it too late? I don't know and yet feel compelled, propelled all the same.)

The suspicion is that the best way to answer the question, What Is Cinema?, is to ask, What Is Cinema For? Which means: for whom is the cinema (and the true answer is complex but this doesn't mean diffuse beyond interpretation); how the cinema got to be; why; how it has developed—all of which is inseparable from the prior question of for whom.

The fundamental issues of cinema & politics are neither content nor form but, underlying it all, ownership and use. They set the terms of debate for form/content; they inform them. Of course I do not mean to say that they replace or displace form/content (though frequently we may find the prior manifest in the latter). Obviously, form/content matter. The playing field has not always been correctly identified, however.

In late 1940s Italy, as in 1960s Brazil, people were hungry, and the powers weren't always able or willing to help, and the films said something meaningful about this hunger, spurred by this hunger. Out of desperation they could reach beauty and intensity and significance. The poverty of means of production eclipsed the merely cosmetic to arrive at genuine aesthetics. (This is why a routine Hollywood production will look "better," "more professional," than Killer of Sheep but Burnett's film is more powerful, more aesthetically gripping and richer, than all but a tiny, tiny handful of Hollywood's finest masterpieces. It's not merely "superior content" or "intelligence"—it is also a clear difference muddied by a common confusion about the references available to us from our word, aesthetics.) Spurred by the recognition of hunger, people like De Sica and Zavattini and Rossellini and Rocha made films—some good, some bad, some masterful. They weren't always produced with pure anti-imperialist money, either. (For shame to expect such angelic origins always!) Still we see the popular, the resonant, quickly co-opted, transformed. To see the "vulgar" pink neorealist film of the 1950s, or the hip-exoticist poverty film of Brazil (like City of God) we must not think them only as products of a perverse, empowered sociopolitical motion, though that they are. We must understand that they are origami, sculpted garbage heaps, reactions as much as appropriations. This is as true of them as it was of the films which they twist and distort and perhaps even mock (perhaps even from the vantage point of the capitalists themselves).

Retro/Nostalgia

* * *

The course of history is merciless but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy ourselves digging around in the sale bin. While I'm generally not a fan of the 1980s revival that's marked this decade in everyday fashion, I really like these two videos (and the songs for them). I've remarked already, once or twice, on the palpable 'videosity' of the Snoop piece: the tracking, the color. Feist's typical low-key choreography captures what can be fun about cheesy late '70s pop, and an ironic or campy latter-day appreciation of it: it's honest and allows one to let loose and be a little awkward simultaneously. Like enthusiastic karaoke of a song you're supposed to be embarrased to even know ... in front of both friends and strangers.

Islands

Walter Benjamin lived for a while in Capri and later in Ibiza. I find oddly resonant the little resort towns and islands (to which I've never been) where so many British and Continental writers/scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century vacationed, which in the age of cinema were obliquely monumentalized in the cinephile's eye by the likes of Godard (Le Mépris) and Welles (F for Fake). The same sorts of places that make a vacation for Garrel's addicts in J'entends plus la guitare are earlier seen in cheap softcore Franco films and L'Avventura and Darling and Il Sorpasso. Pound's Rapallo resembles more than slightly the little Mediterranean every-village where Radley Metzger's Score! takes place.

At the bar one could sip a negroni while reading Proust, staring at cats. When I'm an old man perhaps I could spiff it up to look like this fellow. This is the romantic wish promised by the dreamy part of my self that thinks humanistic activity, and the study of cinema, could ever really be lucrative and alluring.

* * *

“He's a sculptor,” he told me, “an old acquaintance from my travels. I met him in Capri in 1924, in Rhodes in 1926, at Hiddensee in 1927, and recently on Formentera. He's one of those curious people who spent most of their lives on islands and never feel quite at home on the mainland.”

“For a sculptor, that mode of life seems doubly surprising,” I said.

—Benjamin, “Conversation above the Corso: Recollections of Carnival-Time in Nice” (March 1935)

Schoolmasters

Not long ago I finally read my first full book by Jacques Rancière (The Ignorant Schoolmaster). I admit I was a bit wary, not for what I'd already read by the philosopher himself, but from the way he's frequently discussed, his role as the sort of radical French thinker taken up by bobos and artists and impressed humanities grad students: post-Marxist and still "viable" now that we are post the peak of postmodern theory's power. (Or is that a grand narrative? Help!) I think the unfortunate thing about people like Rancière, Žižek, even the late great headscratcher Deleuze is that they don't really piss anyone off. Not really, and not the right people one should want to piss off. I don't use this to paint all of these contemporary philosophers with otherwise the same brush: Žižek is only very intermittently worth reading, whereas Rancière seems to be very worthwhile. (Deleuze has fantastic stuff too, but he's got his limits, as Luc Moullet's sly deflation shows with respect to the Cinema books.) It's more a matter of staying realistic about the alleged radical potential of these figures' works. People sometimes talk about continental theorists like they're talking about indie rock bands. (I admit I've done it myself.) It's a pointless game; it's a form of philosophizing taken from its unsexy envelopment in actual society.

Marx still creeps under a person's skin. His words, his ideas, can rub the right people the wrong way.

The basic argument of The Ignorant Schoolmaster is an echo, refashioned, of Jacotot, a radical egalitarian who tried to demolish pedagogy as such so as to reach the fundamental (equal) intelligence open to all humans. The constantly reinforced division between the learned instructor and the ignorant pupil is stultifying; the point of an emancipated education is not to help people along the continuum of progress but to assume equality as a premise, and to help the pupil realize not the gains that signify shed ignorance but the equal potential which is inborn. The ignorant schoolmaster need not know the subject, only how to act as interlocutor to the pupil who guides herself (more or less). It's an interesting polemic, and as translator Kristin Ross points out, the majority of the text is Rancière subtly mimicking, overlapping Jacotot. Who's ventriloquizing who here? It's a fairly well-written book, a breezy read but also a substantive one.

One of the most important lessons I took away from college about teaching, as a student, was for the instructor to regard the class with forthright, uncomplicated respect for its intelligence. In the context of the system, which is set up with hierarchies and thus hardly amenable to Jacotot's emancipation itself, there is no use downplaying or disguising one's own superior knowledge or even more sharply manifested intelligence. But to tacitly require that student use his intelligence to meet you in the same arena (by wordlessly acknowledging this very intelligence), the instructor takes a vital step in keeping the classroom alive.

(Still to read: Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. That's been sitting on my shelf, beckoning, for slightly too long.)

Summertime

The character at the center of A Summer at Grandpa's, it seems to me, is not the boy but his younger sister, Ting-Ting. At least, she is the one who seems to manifest the intelligence of Hou Hsiao-hsien himself: observant, focused, not always predictable, compassionate but not particularly sentimental, intermittently happy, always subtly searching (and watching). The film doesn't have the "masterpiece tone" of later Hou but there are numerous impressive shots and sequences that exhibit a deep intelligence. Many images, as is by now quite typical of Hou, require elucidation after we're first exposed to them. The highway truck robbery, for instance, takes several long moments of roving camera to insinuate with perfect grace and clarity.

(Taiwanese auteur connection: coincidental and meaningless, I'm sure, but I couldn't help but link the highway robbers' rock-to-the-head attack, not shown in the film, to the brick-to-the-head Edward Yang has one of his neighborhood gang boys suffer at the hands of a rival gang in A Brighter Summer Day. Growing up summers one witnesses painful things.)

Tough to See Him Go

George Carlin (1937-2008) - he'll be missed.

Image of the Day

Plan, La Saline Royal d'Arc-et-Senans (Claude-Nicolas Ledoux)

Sentiment

I desire and I feel the need to live in a society other than the one surrounding me. Like most people, I can live in this one and adapt to it, at any rate, I do live in it. However critically I may try to look at myself, neither my capacity for adaptation, nor my assimilation of reality seems to me to be inferior to the sociological average. I am not asking for immortality, ubiquity or omniscience. I am not asking society to ‘give me happiness’ I know this is not a ration that can be handed out by City Hall or my neighborhood Workers‘ Council and that, if this thing exists, I have to make it for myself, tailored to my own needs, as this has happened to me already and as this will probably happen to me again. In life, however, as it comes to me and to others, I run up against a lot of unacceptable things, I say they are not inevitable and that they stem from the organization of society. I desire, and I ask, first that my work be meaningful, that I may approve what it is used for and the way in which it is done, that it allow me genuinely to expend myself, to make use of my faculties and at the same time to enrich and develop myself. And I say that this is possible, with a different organization of society, possible for me and for everyone. I say that it would already be a basic change in this direction if I were allowed to decide, together with everyone else, what I had to do, and, with my fellow workers, how to do it

I should like, together with everyone else, to know what is going on in society, to control the extent and the quality of the information I receive. I ask to be able to participate directly in all the social decisions that may affect my existence, or the general course of the world in which I live. I do not accept the fact that my lot is decided, day after day, by people whose projects are hostile to me or simply unknown to me, and for whom we, that is I and everyone else, are only numbers in a general plan or pawns on a chessboard, and that, ultimately, my life and death are in the hands of people whom I know to be, necessarily, blind.

I know perfectly well that realizing another social organization, and the life it would imply, would by no means be simple, that difficult problems would arise at every step. But I prefer contending with real problems rather than with the consequences of de Gaulle’s delirium, Johnson’s schemes or Krushchev’s intrigues. Even if I and the others should fail along this path, I prefer failure in a meaningful attempt to a state that falls short of either failure or non-failure, and which is merely ridiculous.

I wish to be able to meet the other person as a being like myself and yet absolutely different, not like a number or a frog perched on another level (higher or lower, it matters little) of the hierarchy of revenues and powers. I wish to see the other, and for the other to see me, as another human being. I want our relationships to be something other than a field for the expression of aggressivity, our competition to remain within the limits of play, our conflicts—to the extent that they cannot be resolved or overcome—to concern real problems and real stakes, carrying with them the least amount of unconsciousness possible, and that they be as lightly loaded as possible with the imaginary. I want the other to be free, for my freedom begins where the other’s freedom begins, and, all alone, I can at best be merely ‘virtuous in misfortune’. I do not count on people changing into angels, nor on their souls becoming as pure as mountain lakes—which, moreover, I have always found deeply boring. But I know how much present culture aggravates and exasperates their difficulty to be and to be with others, and I see that it multiplies to infinity the obstacles placed in the way of their freedom.

I know, of course, that this desire cannot be realized today, nor even were the revolution to take place tomorrow, could it be fully realized in my lifetime. I know that one day people will live, for whom the problems that cause us the most anguish today will no longer even exist. This is my fate, which I have to assume and which I do assume. But this cannot reduce me to despair or to catatonic ruminations. Possessing this desire, which indeed is mine, I can only work to realize it. And already in the choice of my main interest in life, in the work I devote to it, which for me is meaningful (even when I encounter, and accept, partial failure, delays, detours and tasks that have no sense in themselves), in the participation in a group of revolutionaries which is attempting to go beyond the reified and alienated relations of current society—I am in a position partially to realize this desire. If I had been born in a communist society, would happiness have been easier to attain—I really do not know, and at any rate can do nothing about it. I am not, under this pretext, going to spend my free time watching television or reading detective novels.

-- Cornelius Castoriadis (all credit for the excerpt goes here).

I have been skirting a bit in and around Castoriadis this weekend and it's been refreshing. The above excerpt (I have not read Imaginary... so I can't comment on its source) hardly "comes off" in a critical sense. It moves me, though, in a way not unlike that of great religious writers and mystics. When I was younger, a practicing Catholic, my favorite prayer was Thomas Merton's. Castoriadis strikes something of the same rhetorical tone—as though this normative speech instills meaning, via performance utterance, in one's own life, this moment. The acknowledgment of potential failure (Even if I and the others should fail along this path, I prefer failure...) is simply clearheadedness, but it is also a trope, a gesture, whose predetermined rejection makes the enunciating sing. (Castoriadis is doing what I think art often does, as I've said before: he is testifying to our promised lives, our stolen lives.) This all relies on sentiment, of course, emotion. On one hand emotionalism is not a substitute for rationality, it will not replace any other tools for social change we have at our disposal. At the same time, what people would seek to change society in a way that excludes emotion (in both the struggle and the end result) as an afterthought, as mere biochemical pap determined by other instances. (Because if emotions are mere biochemical pap, so is everything else, in which case what is the point?) This can be tricky: can anyone recommend good writings on the emotional content and character of revolutionary social change? There's been a lot of writing on utopianism and the utility of 'the utopic impulse,' but beyond this not much has been springing to mind.

Overheard at Mondo Kim's

Two customers leaving the rental floor a week or two ago ...

Dude 1: "Who directed this, Lumay?"
Dude 2: "Yeah, Sidney Lumay."

I wonder if they were renting Le Network?

Image of the Day

Georges de la Tour, St. Sebastian Tended by St. Irene, 1634-1643.

Hollis & Jonas

"Item: that I do not live in New York City. Nor is it, strictly speaking, "convenient" for me to be there during the period you name. I'll be teaching in Buffalo every Thursday and Friday this coming Spring semester, so that I could hope to be at the Museum for a Saturday screening. Are you suggesting that I drive down? The distance is well over four hundred miles, and March weather upstate is uncertain. Shall I fly, at my own expense, to face an audience that I know, from personal experience, to be, at best, largely unengaging, and at worst grossly provincial and rude?"

—Hollis Frampton to Donald Richie (then of the Museum of Modern Art), January 7, 1973

The indispensible UbuWeb recently put up some fantastic Hollis Frampton material, only to seemingly have taken some of it down just as soon. I hope that in writing a few words about it I'm not violating anything. Included were a video of the Screening Room interview between Robert Gardner & Frampton (which I watched, and had long wanted a chance to watch), a PDF of his amazing writing collection Circles of Confusion (which I hear we might reasonably expect to be reprinted in the near future), and a PDF of a letter from Frampton to Richie, excerpted above & below. The question of the letter is that Richie wrote to Frampton apparently to ask for his blessing & participation in a MoMA retrospective of Frampton's film work, for which he would regrettably not be paid. The world's most erudite filmmaker (alleged) responded that absolutely anyone was free to organize a retrospective via his prints in the Filmmaker's Cooperative, and without his express consent. Frampton goes for the kill in the letter—expertly slicing into Richie more than Richie himself probably deserved (but who knows)—explaining at length the incongruity of everyone's payment but his own, and the fact that he's the one who has to travel at his own expense to reach MoMA for the retrospective should he so participate.

(A few years ago, MoMA notoriously projected Frampton's film Lemon on DV in ambient light, like it was a throwaway installation, a sign of the wince-inducing carelessness or ignorance with which a huge, prestigious museum treats some of its artwork.)

* * *

This evening I saw Jonas Mekas' Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971), which I would have counted as one of my "humiliation" films. I should have seen it years ago. (I'm not just being coy here; it screens at Anthology a few times a year and anyone living in NYC and interested in experimental cinema has no excuse to let it slip by their fingertips for seven years, as I have.) This is one of the greatest films ever—pure, unadulterated heterogeneity! Unstable images, jumpy fast editing, a dreamlike stream of steady focus upon the object. "My Mamma ... waited twenty-five years..." Or to watch footage of Peter Kubelka eating lunch, and holding out his hand at the table to let a sparrow alight on his finger—poetry! There's a difference between becoming drunk on art because the aesthete turns art into life, and using art so that its highest, noblest aesthetic goals become indistinguishable from its simplest, barest use-value: that life and art themselves become mixed, that the practice of making art is in fact a way of living well, not escaping the world by means of aesthetics but burrowing into it via same. Who could fail to be moved by the scenes of Lithuanian family meals, cooked outdoors, or Kubelka & Annette Michelson drinking water from an old stone fountain in Vienna. The images are captured with off-the-cuff straightforwardness: Reminiscences is composed in the key of everyday movements, but it generates beauty from the concordance of its images (the mostly-moving camera, the quick cuts) to its depicted activities, which themselves bear an organic grace to them: Mamma cooking potato pancakes, Kubelka taking the spine out of his fish at lunch.

Speaking of drinking—drinks, they show up a lot, beer (at least I think it's beer) as well as fresh cow's milk, imbibed on the farm with readily apparent enthusiasm. When I got back to my neighborhood I swung by a bodega on the way home and grabbed a big bottle of Ballantine's, the ale of choice for mid-century American artists. It seemed only right.

Mekas' cinema consists largely of "diary films," maybe the world's greatest home movies. Nicole Brenez wrote of one of his more recent works (As I Was Moving Ahead...) that he simply went out and shot beauty—that today nothing is more revolutionary. Definitely to find a quotidian pocket of surpassing beauty and capture some part of it, make it a beacon or a bulwark of life against the onslaught of our destructive world ... it is in a way revolutionary. Art won't ever change the world of course. Not in the way it needs changing. It may however remind us of what we are missing, what we can afford to promise ourselves but do not. It helps us through our days (prescriptively, I prefer a "companion" model of art to an "escapist" one).

* * *

The artist at the margins, or in the sticks, of some more dominant model (geographically, institutionally...) will sometimes produce amazing things not because she is a lone romantic figure but because of the regular ties of quotidian life: community. In fifty years, if the Internet survives in some form, we may all be looking at Jen MacMillan's blog and tracing the connections formed by the New York avant-garde today, the people who are not talked about as enshrined masters, but the everyday shooters & developers of beauty.

* * *

"I'll put it to you as a problem in fairness. I have made, let us say, so and so many films. That means that so and so many thousands of feet of rawstock have been expended, for which I paid the manufacturer. The processing lab was paid, by me, to develop the stuff, after it was exposed in a camera for which I paid. The lens grinders got paid. Then I edited the footage, on rewinds and a splicer for which I paid, incorporating leader and glue for which I also paid. The printing lab and track lab were paid for their materials and services. You yourself, however meagerly, are being paid for trying to persuade me to show my work, to a paying public, for "love and honor". If it comes off, the projectionist will get paid. The guard at the door will be paid. Somebody or other paid for the paper on which your letter to me was written, and for the postage to forward it.

"That means that I, in my singular person, by making this work, have already generated wealth for scores of people. Multiply that by as many other working artists as you can think of. Ask yourself whether my lab, for instance, would print my work for "love and honor", if I asked them, and they took my question seriously, I should expect to have it explained to me, ever so gently, that human beings expect compensation for their work. The reason is simply that it enables them to continue doing what they do.

"But it seems that, while all these others are to be paid for their part in a show that could not have taken place without me, nonetheless, I, the artist, am not to be paid."


—HF to DR.

Concentration

"Recently a new bank building went up in the urban wasteland of downtown Lexington. It is very tall: some thirty storeys. It is a steel skeleton with a glass skin. The top three storeys are beveled with a raking forty-five degree angle (I suppose this must not be called the roof), so that the building seems to be modeled on a plastic kitchen trashcan. That's fine. What I want to ask about is the nature of this building's being. First, I have never looked at this building, which I must see daily, when there weren't workers on a plank suspended by ropes from the top washing it. To wash the second storey they must lower themselves twenty-eight storeys by rope and pulley. I presume this building is to be washed forever, much as the Golden Gate Bridge must be painted forever.

"To comment on this astoundingly primitive idiocy (I mean the word), I must come at it from another angle. Whether from the inevitable disillusionment of middle age or from an accurate perception of reality, I began to notice a decade ago that the spirit of our times indulges in an inordinate amount of gratuitous meanness. Meanness: a withholding of generosity, a willingness to hurt, a perverse choice of the bad when the good is equally available. Journalism proceeds thus: the worst possible light is the one that sells newspapers and magazines. The blinding type we must read nowadays in books is another example: before computer generated-type the various sizes were designed individually, the proportions of smaller type being different from those of larger. Modern type designers draw one font and reduce and enlarge it photographically, not caring that the smaller reductions are anemic and an awful strain on the eyes.

"It is difficult to distinguish gratuitous meanness from greed. The thin wall that is not a boundary for noise, the rotten concrete that collapses on New Year's Eve, the plumbing inside walls that requires the destruction of a house to be repaired, the window that could so easily have been designed to swing around for inside washing rather than requiring a ladder. You can think of a hundred more examples, but whether they are the result of indifference or stupidity is a nice question."

—Guy Davenport, "A Letter to the Masterbuilder," in The Hunter Gracchus, pp. 150-151.

* * *

Davenport wrote that so many of the great American poets and writers and artists lived in the sticks—Olson, Welty, Meatyard, and so on. As is the case throughout the history of civilization, the major cities tend to draw in & product, support, the cultural capital. Benjamin warned that there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. This sentiment can be used as a snappy aphorism but I believe it is one of the richest sentences on the summation of human culture. If major metropolitan centers—the ancient capitals, the new "global cities" (cf. Sassen)—are nodal points, of course a thriving accumulative society provides a material basis in which the identities of 'artist,' 'intellectual,' 'amateur,' 'dilettante,' etc., put down roots. The thriving society may have these bustling nodes but, if indeed it thrives, the sticks themselves will produce and retain noteworthy producers of this cultural product as well. In the time period when Dickens first started writing in London, schooling for children was a massive concern—mediocre educators could make a decent enough living by overseeing a few dozen pupils in a cramped, dirty room. (Allowing for differences in pedagogical philosophy, these schools provided students with lessons in Scripture, history, geography, Romance etymologies--but J.L. & Barbara Hammond's book on the time period quotes amusing records which indicate how much this education was rote, and how easily you could spot its flaws simply by tweaking the schoolmaster's questions to the scrubbed, obedient schoolboy. "Who was David?" "Son of Jesus.") A few decades after Dickens died, Ezra Pound could actually make a living in London by contributing to avant-garde poetry magazines!

Sculptor Forrest Myers discusses his migration to New York, his settlement in SoHo:

"I consider myself a SoHo Pioneer. I came [downtown] in 1962 and they were building the world trade center where I and other artists were living and I actually got run out of there too, they were going to demolish buildings… And so I moved to SoHo and people said why are you going to SoHo there’s nothing there but a bunch of trucks. Well at that time there were a lot of spaces for rent, not only in SoHo, but other places. Artists lived downtown… there were so few artists when I came to New York it was just odd. There were about 400 artists."

Now there are tons of artists, tons of galleries. Plenty of money. Is this saturation? If so, is the saturation of metropolitan centers a sign of cultural decline? (I dislike that word but there's an inherited vocabulary when discussing civilization; I don't consider "decline" a bad thing a priori.) Are still Olsons and Weltys and Meatyards, and Davenports for that matter, making a living in Gloucester, Jackson, and Lexington? How much longer will New York remain the playground of the rich, a place where urban gardens are reclaimed by real estate owners after communities make them attractive, where almost any beautiful and humane block is too expensive for most people to inhabit? In America, places like New York, Chicago, San Francisco present people with great cultural riches. Perhaps though we should be wary when the riches become too great, too concentrated. My city may have thriving "scenes" but almost every suburban place I have visited in recent years looks exactly the same. Speaking as a bit of a nationalist here (which is against my general inclination): what Americans could fail to be outraged at this theft of our people's rights and liberties, this drab enforced homogeneity underwritten by the even greater theft of resources & labor of people elsewhere?

Quote of the Day

Nothing, nothing can keep me from my love
Standing on the other shore.

Not even old crocodile
There on the sandbank between us
Can keep us apart.

I go in spite of him,
I walk upon the waves,
Her love flows back across the water,
Turning waves to solid earth
For me to walk on.

The river is our Enchanted Sea.

-- from "Love Lyrics," in Come Swiftly to Your Love: Love Poems of Ancient Egypt, trans. Ezra Pound and Noel Stock.

Jean Rollin & Political Modernism

(La Vampire nue, 1970) / (WR--Mysteries of the Organism, 1971)

There is a 70-second lateral tracking shot of office spaces in La Vampire nue, about a minute after the shot above occurs, which recalls what Godard was doing in the same time period.

Plus, of course, Maurice Lemaître plays the evil scientist father-figure.

Glimpse of Greatness

A long clip from Robert Gardner's phenomenal Forest of Bliss ('86).

GI, prelude

"Even the objects of the simplest "sensuous certainty" are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit trees, was, as is well-known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become "sensuous certainty" for Feuerbach."

--Marx (and Engels), The German Ideology

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."

-- Ditto.

So, turning from Marx (and Engels), I'm unsure how there could then be ruling ideas if not also, self-evidently, simultaneously, ideas that do not rule (and thus are ruled) ... more on The German Ideology and maybe a few tentative intrusions on the Marx/Derrida debate in the near future.

Bleak Leisure

I have been reading the Hammonds' The Bleak Age, which documents the particular forms of immiseration in 1830s and '40s Britain. Partly it's an account of a moment in the history of leisure, which means it is also an examination of the ways in which misery and exploitation were organized. The same rule applies as always in our industrial saga--masses of people are lowballed for their basic needs (space, air, water, commons, time) and then, when minor concessions are made at the discretion of liberal-minded patrons (and upon the sweat & blood of protesting mobs), the people are instructed to feel grateful for these pittances. In the developed West, perhaps the quickest way to wake certain people up about the horrific situation we are all being led into is to set alarms around the visible ways in which our leisure, our comforts, are being abrogated. At the same time of course is the obvious truth, that we are already in a horrific situation, that our leisure and comforts are in many instances based upon so many enshrined immiserations that we could not possibly just backtrack. This fact has no novelty for much of the world. But how to target the opinions of the fringe bourgeoisie intellectual consumers of which I am myself part? This is the (sub)class who will help cling to and perpetuate a lot of the dangerous ideas; they will help smooth over a lot of the policies and trajectories of our social system. Point out shrinking privileges, first, and then start talking about them more broadly. This is to be a goal.

* * *

In Rivette's Out 1 there are characters who can afford leisure (like the Thirteen?) and those who eke out their efficiency apartment living on the other side. As an historical document Rivette's film is actually pretty fascinating, this period in the welfare state where one could spend one's days making avant-garde theater, according it all seriousness, and not necessarily being a bourgeois figure of leisure. Some are. Michel Lonsdale, who acts/lounges/nibbles his way through Out 1, shows up three decades later in a Spielberg film, Munich, where he plays a secretive weapons dealer (if memory serves?) who lives out an idyllic patriarch's existence on a family villa in the French countryside, like he's the Dreamworks cross of both Guy Debord and Don Corleone. It's hard to make a good case about a complex and playful 13-hour film I've seen only once (twice if you count the 4-hour Spectre); perhaps pointless, really. Still I have been meaning for some time to start writing a few things on Rivette and his treatment of class and history and not only about the more familiar tropes of realism, performance, and conspiracy. I am convinced somehow they mesh together. It's about duration, the leisure of unproductivity, the pleasure of unstructured productivity*, the BUM-bum-bum on the soundtrack that slips you into each episode like a theme song, the world of suggestion embodied in that amazingly (not-)banal final shot. Rivette is essential here.

* Termitish?

Quote of the Day

"I never held very rosy views of this communistic Eldorado."

--Marx to Engels on Flerovsky, 1870 (here).