Chickenscratch on Public Enemies

Not the the most interesting of his movies, but still, Michael Mann for all his flaws remains working on a stratum that leaves him with few peers in the heart of the American industry (Eastwood, Gray, Malick if he counts, a couple others maybe). The Fordian-style (or Hawksian, if our model is Only Angels Have Wings) device used in the plot here, the emotionally-imbued token ("bye bye blackbird") showcases one of Mann's limitations. In its final incarnation, its final appearance in the film, Mann schmaltzes things up a bit with music. Why? Why not trust the images alone?; not to say that music is verboten, or that Mann's films previously have not done wonderful things with the interplay with sound & image (think of the club scene in Miami Vice). It's moving, but it's moving in a cheap way. Mann is a filmmaker operating on all cylinders, a massive presence, but what's so maddening (and part of what's also so fascinating) about him is how in some ways he's one of the most fearless, intuitively gifted directors in the world, and in others he strikes me as a factory foreman, churning out stale conventions.

Miami Vice remains my favorite Mann film this decade.

Despite my reservations about Public Enemies, I do think that criticisms about the film's failure or decision not to "delve into" the psychologies of these people, these legends (a complaint voiced succinctly by the estimable Aaron Graham here, if I don't misrepresent his case) miss the point. The subject matter, a fine dovetail with Mann in general, is about a certain superficiality, which is not to say a lack of artistic depth, but the location of that depth in all the spaces between people, people as apparitions moving around, or as nodes in, a network "in the air." The figural dimensions of human beings in Mann are phantasmatic, mysterious, he doesn't much strike me as a corporeal (or perhaps more precisely: a kinesthetic) filmmaker. These are not characters who have psychologies, they are psychologies. They are not bodies, they have bodies. Maybe.

*

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky here: "He's always worked on location. Back then, he'd start with something at least partly real and make it feel completely artificial, completely plastic. I recognize Lake Michigan in Thief, but only the way you recognize a triangle or a square. What I see first is a color and a line. Images that sort of scuttle themselves, marooning the viewer. (It's possible to also think of a roster of ferrymen, directors who use the film to row the audience out to a certain place and then bring them back in time for the end credits: Shirley Clarke, Eric Rohmer, Yueh Feng, Charles Burnett, David Mackenzie, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Aleksandr Sokurov. These directors should not be confused with kidnappers like Santiago Alvarez or gallery guides like Peter Greenaway.) But something happened around Heat. Aesthetics gave way to ethics, imagery to images." That's a very intriguing sequence of insights, and that parenthetical is a veritable call for further investigation.

Image of the Day

Image of the Day

(by Kiarostami)

"We haven't been curious enough."

(Braque, 1908)

(Cinq femmes, a Picabia "nudie" - 1941-1943)

A screen capture from Michelangelo Antonioni's contribution to Eros (2004), The Dangerous Thread of Things. Also: Cézanne's mountains, a photograph by Jeff Wall whose title I've forgotten, of course the toe-sucking from L'Âge d'Or, a bit of Oliveira's Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo, even Straub & Huillet. A pastoral poem, of sorts, transformed multimedia frenzy (as Mr. Keller has suggested).

Words to read here and here.

Something About Antonioni

Both Rudolf Arnheim and Basil Bunting cited Antonioni in circumstances that indicated his 1960s work was the rare highlight to grace cinema after 1930. Arnheim, who looked upon the widespread use of color cinematography as a decline, cited Red Desert as one—the only?—example of color cinema that was developing the artform. Bunting, when asked by the poet Jonathan Williams to name some films that were genuine artworks to stand the test of time, cited after the likes of Clair, Chaplin, and Griffith ... and (paraphrasing) 'the middle section of Blow-Up, before it becomes a bore.'

Tinseltown Stoics

Hollywood's old heroes knew (or learned) how to take losses in stride. The Hawskian hero just needed a chance to do a job. If they worried too much about status they'd, presumably, get themselves in binds, like some of Sturges' dreamers (Christmas in July) or do-gooders (Sullivan's Travels). Wartime changed things; estrangement appeared where once was togetherness. Adventure films in exotic locations, for classical Hollywood, were also a way of spinning yarns outside of history. Once, the old commercial cinema suggests to us (via its partial parentage of theater and vaudeville, of middle-class entrepreneurs and traveling picture shows), people were like this. Termitish activity onscreen suggests something about a history never announced as history.

"Who's Joe?"

We all know, they all know, exactly who Joe is.

The difference is in how his phantom operates amongst the still-living. How is he "presenced," how is he acknowledged (including by means of non-acknowledgment)? The hard truths, personal pleasures, and basic lessons of lifetime are etched into older faces. This much is for certain, if compare commercial American cinema today to commercial American cinema fifty or eighty years ago: there were much more interesting faces and bodies back then. No question. It's not an issue for Hollywood today because Hollywood is not interested in depicting real bodies in any substantial or interesting way. The concern is not, never was, one of "realism." Classical Hollywood practiced its own stylizations in its representation of the human body. But they were far more open, back then, to the range of body types. Each type or manifestation (lines on a face, curvature of the upper body, grace or lankiness, eyebrows, teeth) screamed or whispered or hinted at character, ancestry, knowledge, opinion, in short, a locus of personalized history. A frozen-shut catalogue engagingly flipped through, given many short glimpses, by means of "performance."

Joe: the missing personal presence(s) that help structure one's life.

Once Joe was an indication of who you know, what you lost externally and gained internally. Then Joe becomes the guy who took your job, way off somewhere else; the guy who spurned your advances; the analog crew member on the film set (unglamorous and UNSEEN). Personal history, crystallized in "characters" who were woven into larger still historical-social patterns in old Hollywood film narratives, slowly, creakingly gave way to psychology, which itself structured narratives. The deep ethos of Expressionism was extracted and slathered like margarine over the top of the Hollywood machine. (Real butter got itself thrown out in favor of the cheaper substitute: "too fatty, not good for you," experts assured us.) Under the guises of modernism, personal style, whathaveyou, this particular principle of aestheticization undermined one of the more interesting, though I hesitate to say dominant, features of classical Hollywood, particularly its brand of very wide appeal. Now Hollywood appeals to "everyone" because it offers carefully constructed products meant to do so (let no fool tell you that Hollywood is "stupid," "meaningless," "pointless" for it is all too shrewd, meaningful, and pointed). Hollywood even engages political conflict in its quest to trump it; last year I presented a conference paper on this topic, reversibility, wherein films courted controversial interpretations by cleverly appealing to multiple sides of a sociopolitical conflict (e.g., The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, 300, etc.). A murdered friend was once a layer added to a catalogue of experiences, including miseries and tragedies; soon it becomes a catalyst for narrative action because the character had been a clean slate of personal history: fully formed, like Athena, they emerge on-screen, ready to be "given" their character by means of some goal, some wound. (But these films do not pursue modernism in this case, do not tend to examine characters as constructions of word, image, plot.)

I wonder: would a dominant consideration of older Hollywood be that it focuses on A story, in relation to its characters, whereas newer Hollywood tends toward THE story? The bildungsroman is a narrative of character definition that can grow out of the "one-among-many" approach; perhaps it has something to do with post-WWII baby boom, the rise of youth/teen culture, and the later increase on the youth demographic to sell tickets, that this appeal to singularity and solipsism drives into the heart of American commercial cinema? Not a satisfactory way to situate the problem, I admit; but neither a set of topics I'd like to give up on ...

So Many Options

Disco Will Never Die

(for Girish)

Watching The Last Days of Disco on Hulu earlier, my second time after a decade had passed*, I very much enjoyed, and was most surprised by, the sense of timing. Time, and timing, are too rarely brought up by cinephiles and critics. Whether in evaluative or descriptive terms, the dimension of temporality seems to be a rarefied artifact of cinema (despite the fact that all cinema must exist in time): we can speak of the timing of a comic gag, or narrative/dramatic pacing in the style of Syd Field (that's for PWC). Certain long-take masters like Tarkovsky may invite us to think of the image in temporal terms. And people are hardpressed to discuss His Girl Friday and certain other films without at least acknowledging the fast pace of action and diction. Still, specific instances of what happens "in" a cut, of how a series of images flows, sometimes beg for unpacking, for savoring, on the level of time every bit as much as of space.

About an hour and a half into The Last Days of Disco, Alice (Chloe Sevigny) is on a coffee date with Des (Chris Eigeman). They are discussing their mutual friend, and Des' potential romantic rival, Josh (Matt Keeslar). Stillman is a connoisseur of facial tics and body language, both in screenplay but also in images: as Des nonchalantly trashes his lunatic buddy's good name, a fair amount of the image focuses on Sevigny's face, catching her reactions (which are subtle, constrained). Des tries to snort coffee after he has just questioned Josh's mental stability; cut to a cup of coffee, and there's another meeting, this one between Alice and Josh. The time between cuts is uncertain, but also unimportant. What I mean is that the specificity of this particular cut may not be so important. The gestalt is masterfully clarified by moment-to-moment obscurities. Stillman arranges a dramatically clean ensemble storyline, but unlike, say, Neil Labute in the contemporaneous In the Company of Men, the quotidian lunches, dinners, nights out, etc., are not subordinated to rather grim schematics. Stillman gets his yuppies to breathe, to pulse, to contradict themselves.

(Muriel Spark's narrator Fleur Talbot, in Loitering with Intent: "Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes ...")

Stillman is utterly merciless towards his characters, giving no quarter when it comes to showing their flaws and shortcomings. Their "life," though (and Stillman's "generosity") comes in how he stitches together this group portrait. Part of this has to do with his deft handling of time:

in terms of the characters' sketchily but sophisticatedly evoked relationship to their pasts (days at Harvard, Hampshire, Sag Harbor; frequently connected, in these yuppies' cases, with parochial privilege),

in terms of their cramped, barren, predictable quotidian time (office work, nights lived for the weekends) reflected by their living spaces and offices,

in terms of their their slower, only aspirationally linear experience through post-college professional life (a title card like 'spring'), announcing progress made, visible, but never felt in the making,

in terms of cuts that leave us stranded from moment to moment before an image, periodically unsure of whether we have been pushed forward to the next shot in a scene, a new scene, a montage sequence. I think Roger Ebert promoted the advice, or something like it, that in a good film you can tell how much time has taken place between shots. I don't think this is true at all. Stillman is an example of a director, here at least, who uses these mild and continuous indeterminacies to make palpable the progression of time.

Like Linklater or Hartley, Stillman invests his speakers with a distinctive cast of speaking. Like a great deal of independent film of this generation, there is dialogue devoted to the analysis of pop culture, dropped titles and names as cultural capital, a sort of generational/class code drawn upon like a fund, at times: to lubricate conversation, to cement or clarify a relation (Wild Kingdom), or alternately to sow discord (The Lady and the Tramp). Stillman (in contrast to, say, Tarantino, whose method is very different) makes explicit the social fabric in which this kind of analytical savvy is embedded. But where Tarantino imagines savvy people in pulp roles, the interplay of fiction/fantasy/genre and particular codes of realism, in Stillman (at least Last Days of Disco) it is the experience of this pop culture that is important, and important to depict, not the mixing of codes of reality and unreality. That's why the jokingly climactic "disco will never die" speech is ironic for its speaker as well as for us, and simultaneously touching.

In summary, a very impressive film, and one that I remember liking but surely didn't understand at all when I saw it ten years ago.

* This is the only Whit Stillman film I've seen, I must admit, though that will be remedied soon enough.

Decay (II)

So that which rots and ruins is still in the process of a cyclical production of 'new' from the old. In some cases these processes can be beneficial, even enriching for us (such as in fermentation). The experiences of yesterday (cinephilia's countless deaths, which will continue on in new forms until we are calling it something quite different than cinephilia) are still the sediment of today.

Decay

Every thing fashioned from the remains of innumerable other things. The world, bustling, does not care about novelty even though it does nothing but produce it, produces nothing but countless old novelties in fact.

Looking idly for quotes by Buñuel, I find he said (apparently) that "Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese." (He also lamented "the decline of the aperitif.") John Ford, vis-à-vis Ward Bond's snobbery, said, "Ward’s father was a coalminer—which is a very honorable profession. My father was a saloonkeeper—which is even more honorable."

The conservative anarchist Albert Jay Nock wrote in his memoirs, recalling a Brooklyn childhood: "A few Germans lived among us, one named Kreuter, a little brisk old man, a great friend of my father, and a master hand at making sauerkraut. When he had got a batch of sauerkraut in prime condition, he would bring over a couple of quarts for my father to sample and pass expert judgement on. The discussions were so long and the aroma so pervasive that my mother finally laid down the law that my father and Kreuter should hold their sessions outdoors or in the woodshed. She said she always knew when Kreuter was coming, if the wind was right, for she could smell his tin pail long before he hove in sight. She also declared she could see the fumes of his sauerkraut push up the cover of the pail once in a while, like the action of a safety-valve, as he was proceeding along; but this may have been an illusion of some kind."

Would it be worth spending more than two seconds thinking about "sour aesthetics"? Maybe not, but I at least like the idea.

Cinema that embraces its own material obsolescence in some way: Reble, Mueller, Brakhage, Morrison ... sure. What about cinema that embraces obsolescence on an extra-material scale? Pasolini captured the vitality that animated living ruins; Fellini too perhaps. (Was it an Italian thing?) Rossellini knew a thing or two about the through-lines which characterize culture, the violent or tender rodeo ropings that constrict us, protagonists of our own brief lives, and occasionally cast us off at the end of the whip.

The Times ...

Going way back, the Spartans probably thought they were oh, so modern when they left defenseless infants on wild mountain slopes. So did wealthy Norse mothers who had poor women foster their children, and European aristocrats who employed wet nurses. More recently, as Ann Hulbert chronicles in her book “Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children,” rigid feeding schedules were all the rage in the United States in the 1920s. The next two decades brought an emphasis on discipline. (here)

Indeed, the ancients were surely as interested in being "oh, so modern" as we moderns. This mediocre-bourgeois conversational tone, and a well-rehearsed posture of self-conscious savvy (though not erudition or taste), seems to pop up more and more in the Times pieces that I read. Informality, I generally like; but in these cases it's affected, merely a schtick practiced so much it substitutes for 'authenticity' (becoming the new authenticity and bringing impoverishment in the process). It's aggravating. One can separate the serious from the non-serious by figuring out who speaks without self-awareness solely in terms of status, as well who naturalizes their own trivial concerns for the concerns of all humanity. This was also borne out by the "debate" about bookshelves and displaying books one hasn't read that hit the Interwebs a year or two ago ...

Ton Style

The State Will Control Even Your Respiration

"Totalitarianism is much more than mere bureaucracy. It is the subordination of every individual's whole life, work, and leisure, to the orders of those in power and office. It is the reduction of man to a cog in an all-embracing machine of compulsion and coercion. It forces the individual to renounce any activity of which the government does not approve. It tolerates no expression of dissent. It is the transformation of society into a strictly disciplined labor-army—as the advocates of socialism say—or into a penitentiary—as its opponents say. At any rates it is the radical break from the way of life to which the civilized nations clung in the past. It is not merely the return of mankind to the oriental despotism under which, as Hegel observed, one man alone was free and all the rest slaves, for those Asiatic kings did not interfere with the daily routine of their subjects. To the individual farmers, cattle breeders, and artisans a field of activities was left in the performance of which they were not troubled by the king and his satellites. They enjoyed some amount of autonomy within their own households and families. It is different with modern socialism. It is totalitarian in the strict sense of the term. It holds the individual in tight rein from the womb to the tomb. At every instant of his life the "comrade" is bound to obey implicitly the orders issued by the supreme authority. The State is both his guardian and his employer. The State determines his work, his diet, and his pleasures. The State tells him what to think and what to believe in."

—Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy

Pro-capitalist libertarians describe capitalism, and life under capitalism, in a way something like the Sufi story about the four blind men and the elephant. Libertarians know very well the head of the elephant, from drawings and sensation and books. They do not know anything about the elephant past the neck.

Image of the Day

Government

When I watch a tasteful expose on the horrors of the State, these days, I acquire a new onion layer of respect for a film like Caligula. Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd, not without its strengths and charms (e.g., it nails waspy emotional repression reasonably well), is relentlessly, thuddingly constrained by its faithful application of Spook History to generic conventions. "The CIA" (sorry, just "CIA") becomes merely a cover; history is titillation. At least some films have the decency not to hide it.

During a wedding scene between Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, a swinging camera nevertheless manages to capture a close-up on Jolie's face before moving over to Damon's group. A nice bit of camerawork? Expressive of anything? Or was it just another way of getting La Jolie's face onscreen for an extra moment? A Bay of Pigs fiasco reaction: Matt Damon, soon followed by his assistant John Turturro, walks out onto the beach in his slacks & loafers, gazing out over the water. Damon (who gives a fair performances, and deserves credit in this) nevertheless drifts through this particularly numbing narrative cul-de-sac: a story built around conspiracies and personal agency, but always hemmed in by horror movie conventions: the rival-enemy is quicker, stronger, has greater access to information, appears in the dark on your doorstep. Paranoia without psychology or sociology ... or even the supernatural.

A good movie: Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. (F-i-l-e ... l-i-f-e.)



























There are, at least, books in The Good Shepherd. The appearance of books on the shelves, and books being used, may be a "soft" marker of a certain audiovisual classicism? Maybe, maybe. (Worth figuring, as a tangent: what are some filmic and televisual depictions of what we could call a Gramscian "organic intellectual"?) Onwards ...

Quick Decisions

Surveillance

We have weighed the 20th century on the scales and found it lacking. Bruno Rizzi's The Bureaucratization of the World, too (appreciated by Debord), was suppressed:

There is no doubt about another feature documented by Trotsky, Citrine, Victor Serge, Ciliga and by a host of writers of the most different nationalities and political theories: in no capitalist or fascist country is the proletariat in such bad conditions as in Soviet Russia. There is no freedom of speech, of meeting or of the press. Informing is widespread and the State very much a police State. All these writers are agreed on this: the exploitation of man still exists in the country of the “happy life,” being embodied in the famous surplus value which Messieurs the Capitalists extract from the workers. (The divergences appear only when it comes to identifying who monopolises it.) Another characteristic which must not be ignored is that the State demonstrations are only a grandiose theatrical advertisement, as in the totalitarian States of the West; likewise, the veneration, real or pretended, for the almost deified Leader is equal and perhaps even greater. Hierarchy enjoys great prestige there and servility is pushed to the extreme limit. The population lives in an atmosphere of fear as if the walls could hear and speak; they have a face for the public different from that as a private individual.

A crucial distinction: the population lives as if walls could hear and speak, versus, the walls can hear and speak. In America, some segments of the population endorse a certain measure of police state surveillance. If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about. Nobody would suggest that these apologists for Big Brother in the Land of the Free are not, in fact, genuine, sincere, and possessed of free will as much as anyone else. By and large their endorsements reflect their class experience: the comfortable, white middle class does not generally have a single thing to fear from police officers (or the Feds). Is this because the white middle class commits no crimes? Not exactly ...

I have the windows open because it is a beautiful morning. A chubby bird perches upon my fire escape, ruffles its feathers, looks around inside my room. In fiction this bird could become a symbol of the oppression that exists everywhere except where it is manifest.

Image of the Day

Screencaps of Isabelle Huppert are taking over EL!

Back of the Eyelids

Part one:

Part two:



Solar Beats (Patrick Bokanowski, 2008)

Though very different from Brakhage's work, the films I've seen by Bokanowski similarly seem to manifest around the same crux, i.e., the apprehension or appearance of form (figurality, order) amidst a flux of images that reaches back into the ocular primordial chaos. With Bokanowski this is a more mental process than in Brakhage, perhaps; we see more of the fantasies creep in from out of nowhere. Disturbing, familiar glimpses, scenes that are both figural and beautiful but not coherent. (Bokanowski: at the vanguard of Freudian-Cartesian cinema? Eh, forget it, just a throwaway joke.) If one were to replace the final "trippy" section of Danny Boyle's Sunshine with Solar Beats, one must admit, the Hollywood film would be a wholly more transcendental experience.

Real Time

"Realism (and its children in 'literary fiction') was and is largely a formal and political reaction to the vigour of the 'genre' (avant la lettre) habits/tropes/imaginative power of the long 18th century - their revolutionary verve and critical capacity - rather than, as it advertises itself, and as it has been assumed by the major theorists and historians of the novel, from Auerbach to Watt, the result of a direct adaptation of and attention to social and individual reality, naturally arising in the context of the bourgeois individual emancipation narrative." (Le Colonel Chabert in the days of olde, as Alphonse van Worden)

"Each period uses a particular vocabulary to exorcise the demonds that plague it" (Guy Debord, Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici; if I recall, Debord says somewhere in this book that he was the spitting image of young Philippe Noiret)

In film & media culture, a paradigm unworthy of our further investment (not to say attention), realism versus artifice (or we could say genre). Twist things a bit and a very similar, and similarly unsatisfactory paradigmatic choice (classicism versus modernism) remains. The relationship between sociopolitical reality and the aesthetic is not, nor need it be, a mimetic one. We move on.

In Haneke's La Pianiste, overhead close-up shots of hands playing the piano remind me, just a bit, of the close-ups of hands practicing & performing in Bresson's Pickpocket. Hands, windows to the soul just as much as the face, expressing the full fury of human guile, craft, depth, and violence. The hands pull the triggers, grab the bank notes, commit the crimes; the hand is a synecdoche for the active subject (the aspirant sovereign). Crime shows are a perennial favorite in television fiction, at least in the States and Europe. These can run the gamut from 'realist' to 'fantastic,' every level between, because their deepest recourse is to the law and sovereignty (of whose operations all are cognizant) and because there place in fiction is to reconstitute these things in an artificial way which will draw eyeballs.

(Speaking of crime television, I'd be interested to hear if any readers could be up to supply me with loans or copies of British series Edge of Darkness, Z-Cars, or Red Riding?)