All Possible Worlds

If it were possible for me, I would make films which, apart from entertaining the audience, would convey to them the absolute certainty that they DO NOT LIVE IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS. And in doing this I believe that my intentions would be highly constructive. Movies today, including the so-called neo-realist, are dedicated to a task contrary to this. How is it possible to hope for an improvement in the audience and consequently in the producers when every day we are told in these films, even in the most insipid comedies, that our social institutions, our concepts of Country, Religion, Love, etc., etc., are, while perhaps imperfect, UNIQUE AND NECESSARY? The true "opium of the audience" is conformity; and the entire, gigantic film world is dedicated to the propagation of this comfortable feeling, wrapped though it is at times in the insidious disguise of art.

—Buñuel (via - thanks for this, Andy)

The proposition that we live in the best of all possible worlds is not, in itself, a political salve or a refutation of action. It could mean, of course, that our seemingly "imperfect" world provides the requisite conditions for the coming of, say, tomorrow's less-"imperfect" world. Deciding precisely what is or is not possible (not constructing possibility but deciding where to draw its borderline) is a problem for politics. Or 'the political.'

Buñuel made films which skip back and forth along this tipping point to better frame human behavior, to ask which of our mores are "ours," why we may call them that ...

Suppertime

Frantic Notes

I'd never seen this one before, actually. (Spoilers follow.) Film begins and ends after the completion of a 'long journey' in which Harrison Ford and Betty Buckley are exhausted, drained, in the back seat of a car. Similarly, the film is also bookended by incapacitated women: Betty Buckley (just tired) and also Emmanuelle Seigner (expiring), who are in some sense the same woman. The replacement of the missing wife by a newer younger model is clear; the film presents uncomfortable and humorous situations in which Seigner is assumed to be a Parisian fling for Ford's vacationing doctor. (Infidelity aside, Frantic operates on principles compatible with some great I Love Lucy episodes...) The problems, for Harrison Ford, originate with the actions of these two women (this one woman) in his life, and so at a certain level—though not "the ultimate level"—this film is an abstract essay on man's difficulty in dealing with woman. Buckley leaves (abandons) Ford when he's in the shower; Seigner doesn't follow directions to the letter and it is her mix-up with suitcases that embroils everyone else in this fiasco. Of course, the problem really doesn't originate with the women: for Ford could easily have popped his head out of the shower to hear his wife, and Seigner left an entire suitcase, rather than the Statuette of Liberty, in the locker because she was intimidated by a clumsy man who was following her conspicuously.

Frantic, if it tells us anything of practical value along these lines, illustrates that perception and miscommunication bear problems in transmission, in the in-between. The imago of Woman finds itself composited of these (masculine) anxieties about opacity, unreliability; but examined experience reveals something else. Seigner's/Buckley's shared identity is underlined by the fact that they both wear a red dress for part of the film. This is stressed both visually and verbally. There is also no indication given that Buckley sees her double as a "threat" to the matrimonial union. While everyone else in the film who sees Seigner seems to assume an affair, the wife asks no questions and voices no concern. They are like sister-wives in their one and final embrace, where Seigner's black leather jacket conceals much of her red dress as well as her fatal, bleeding wound. Would it be a stretch to say that here's a lightly-worn conceit about women & menstrual cycles that takes the alleged sexist-scopophilic origins of "the male gaze" and just plays a game with it?

(Side note: where Panic Room is built upon domestic fears of omniscience, even inside one's own home, and has an aesthetic that moves toward this end of the spectrum, Frantic is about isolation and limitations to one's perception and knowledge, the fear of being outside one's own domesticity. [Note the bewildering shot when Ford wakes up and sees, or thinks he sees, the Statue of Liberty. Ah, yes, the Seine has one too. A tiny replica of which was revealed to be the film's MacGuffin or Whatsit in the previous scene. Polanski makes images that have multiple axes of significance.] Frantic is founded upon what one fails to know, the speed and quality of knowledge that can be acquired about a desired and mysterious object. I should go further down this path in the future ...)

Nice touch: when the breakfast trays are brought into the hotel room, Harrison Ford puts one in its place and then walks across the top of the bed (without causing any coffee or juice to spill); an aside on the comfort of the hotel beds?

Who else ends their films like Polanski does? He strings out conclusions, stretches them like an accordion, makes them yield their mysteries in full abundance. If the "classical" film narrative usually seems a bit pat, a way of tidying up all the interesting things that have happened in the film (Sarris makes this point somewhere; probably many others), Polanski is the rare filmmaker who makes his climaxes and denouements truly rich. Rather than the compression of all themes and loose ends into a neat bow, he achieves narrative resolution (of a sort) amidst all sorts of new or varied tonal brushstrokes. Unafraid to introduce new flotsam and jetsam, new colorations, into the mix even as his film is in its final reel. Sometimes what emerges are the manifest articulations of submerged content, subtext; betrayal, secrecy, marital infidelity (all that was hidden becomes visible as something plain all along). There are some Polanskis I haven't seen in some years (Chinatown, Repulsion, What?), and some that I still haven't seen at all (Knife in the Water, The Pianist) ... but every Polanski I can think of takes this stance toward finishing up a story. Bitter Moon has a glorious, beautiful, powerful ending.

Exit

On August 26, 2001, I came to New York. On August 13, 2009, I left. There was art to be seen. I attended some film screenings. I went to a few dazzling places (some public, some less so.) The revels included some drinking. Many excellent meals. New York is a city for walking, and to fit in one must know how to walk there. I took to the walking, I'm told, right away.

In college I lived in Manhattan. Afterwards, I was a Queens man, living in the southeast corner of Astoria that rubbed shoulders with Long Island City, Sunnyside, and Woodside. Around the corner from my apartment, I did laundry at the 24-hour supercenter which shared building space with an Indonesian mosque. On my last night out in the city, I went to Little Pepper in Flushing, at the end of the 7 train, and there we ate lamb with cumin, enhanced pork, lotus root, mapo tofu, tea smoked duck, and dandan noodles.

All the photos in this post were taken in the spring or summer of 2009.

Onto other things imminently.

Jacques & Julia Hoc Fecit

Anyone at all going to make a case for the new Julia Child movie? Because I'd like to go into it, when I get around to it, optimistically. (Suggested reading here.)

New Flesh, Old Flesh

What does modernism offer? Long live something, maybe not it ...

Macunaíma can help us out.

I'm not being cryptic here (honest). There's nothing to decipher. Just ask yourself what these images mean to you, how they make you feel or what they make you think about. Maybe it's nothing at all like what I'm thinking. How does our "visual culture" (whatever that may mean) treat space, and not only space, but all that which is within it. All that which constitutes it, in fact. Rocky Balboa punching beef in a factory (or, say, Texas Chainsaw Massacre meathooks) tells us about something, gives us a piece of a puzzle, just as Antonioni's brilliant Red Desert does. What really does happen to our flesh? Animals' flesh? The entire sustenance industry? How is it presented back to us? How can we get back to the body, assuming we're alienated from it?—which we are, if we identify with or conform to the externalities depicted by the likes of (much) Antonioni, or any other artist who turned a cool eye on the bourgeoisie.

This Videodrome remake will almost definitely be the worst film ever made. (A few postures we might like to see embraced: to find a better balance between the serious & unserious; to be grumpy but not snarky [a truly Herculean feat for today]; to be able to scrawl a few lines down without worrying if in this particular instance anyone follows you, simply because the point is to record for personal posterity, and to share in the interest of lighting up someone else if at all possible, sparked by the words & connections & images ...)

P.S. Here's an off-the-cuff proposal for nobody. A full three-day weekend programming bill - Friday & Saturday: Rivette's Out 1 ('noli me tangere'), Sunday: Robert Kramer's Milestones, Coleen Fitzgibbon's Restoring Appearances to Order in 12 Minutes, Pere Portabella's El Sopar, and Sara Gómez's De Cierta Manera.

Classical Movie Magic

Over a period of time 'the genius of the system' becomes so ingrained into children of the spectacle that authorial flourish (rather than systematic turnover and internal development) eventually renews this 'genius.' What people come to recognize and perhaps cherish in classical Hollywood, its genius classicism, never disappeared but found expression under new conditions, such as via an author who grew up imbibing this systematic thing but related to it, tried to recreate it, via personal dimensions. This is what people refer to when they refer to Spielberg, for instance. I wonder if a lot of the blockbuster mentality, or the "degraded" nature of so much front-and-center commercial cinema in general, is not to some considerable extent traceable to the aspirations of media creators towards their own memories, and relationships, of the earlier studio magic--which, because production/distribution conditions changed so drastically in the 1960s/70s, now became the prerogative of self-aware mavericks (McCain-style) and Svengali figures.

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.