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.

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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.

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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?)

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Tintoretto, The Slaughter of the Innocents (1582-1587)

Mantras

The bourgeoisie have far more interesting lives than the members of the socialist state apparatus. Members of the socialist state apparatus are desperately, helplessly enthralled by the goings-on of the would-be bourgeoisie (or the "creative class"), so much so that when they lean forward, fascinated, with headphones on, surveilling, they must bolt upright like good commie German workers when their subordinate comrade comes in to take over on the shift. The socialist state apparatus lies and deceives by repeating mere truisms and demanding adherence. The socialist state apparatus destroys the spirit of its people. The socialist state apparatus cracks because of the good or guilty consciences of some of its number, who have heard the call of the demos and must respond in earnest. (The liberal democratic capitalist state does not lie, cheat, steal, or demand fealty.) Deep down, Man wants Freedom. You cannot chain the human spirit.

More shallow, less nuanced, but more honest, more intelligent in its superficial operations: another film about the threat of home invasion, Panic Room.

The Lives of Others has the negative virtue of avoiding certain cliches about the Iron Curtain: that all life behind it took place in grayscale (it's a visually pretty, bold-colored film), that one was constantly at the mercy of all amenities that are in short supply. (An old instructor of mine once pointed out how a scene in Tarkovsky's Mirror is in fact a joke at the expense of Soviet plumbing...) In The Lives of Others, our central victim-characters go to parties, have friends over, they have sizable book collections, roomy apartments, smoke and drink. Indeed, this negative virtue is simultaneously an added bonus. For how better to communicate the threat of devilish Stasi surveillance in 2006 to Western arthouse audiences than to make the sympathetic characters put-upon creative class types? (Keep in mind, too, that our present decade sees '80s retro in vogue.)

Wall

"Whenever they talk about photography, the majority of [Jeff] Wall's commentators discuss the transparency and its light box installation, to make the point that this has been borrowed from the society of the spectacle and in a reflexive and critical manner turned back against it. Few commentators have veered from the scholarly, interpretive use of the artist's numerous allusions to classical compositions drawn from the history of painting, and have little to say about why the fact that he works in photography should allow him to maintain the same relation to his sources in Manet and Caillebotte as Manet did towards his sources in Watteau, Le Nain, or Velázquez. Admittedly, Wall's art prompts scholarly, iconological readings of this kind, which in turn yield a wealth of meanings, including and particularly social ones. This is what has attracted commentators with a background in the social history of art to his work; they find, in a contemporary artists, a mirror of their own attempts at a sophisticated reading, both scholarly and politically aware, of the 'painting of modern life' in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was very honestly confessed by Thomas Crow in an excellent article on Wall. The artist would confirm the revenge of the social history of art (and of Panofsky) over modernist-formalist history (and over Wölfflin) by producing the painting of modern life which history has not produced."

—Thierry de Duve, in Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), p. 28.

Colors of Another World

Jack and Rose—not that Jack and Rose, they who rue the iceberg, but another Jack and Rose.















Everything in The Ballad of Jack and Rose is so lush. Breathtakingly picturesque. I'd love to live in this setting with them (as I would with Michel Lonsdale's pad in Munich). At the same time, two things. First: this is a community without any body odor. Plucked eyebrows and just-so bobo green livin'? It's a collaborative Ralph Lauren/Martha Stewart spin on the Woodstock's afterlife. (It's also downhome Americana-style magical realism: see also John Duigan's excellent Lawn Dogs, or for a less flora-choked approach, Steven Shainberg's Secretary.) Thank the gods the characters are at least shown to glisten with sweat. Second: the movie is thematized so as to be about its own utopic allure, that utopia's own Lauren/Stewart superficiliaties. It may not reach profound conclusions, but it's also not stupidly unaware. This self-criticism comes in the form of Daniel Day-Lewis's Jack, sure, and his various realizations or admissions of his own failures. But we are also treated to a layer of Breillaterie here, and Camilla Belle is employed as la vraie jeune fille. (Belle acquits herself just fine here. Is it a performance that asks a lot of her, though? I don't want to make a snap judgment but my gut instinct is that she wasn't pushed.)

For the purposes of those who haven't seen the movie, but would prefer no spoilers: The Ballad of Jack and Rose, written and directed by Rebecca Miller (Day-Lewis' wife and Arthur Miller's daughter), is about an ailing hippie father raising his beautiful adolescent daughter on an island off the coast of New England in the 1980s. The superb Catherine Keener puts in a performance as the father's girlfriend who brings her two sons to live with the father & daughter. There's a hint of incestuous feeling that makes the film more interesting than it would be without it; there's an air of liberal hand-wringing, too, about the failures of '68 and all that it entails—as though the middle-class, blue-state "lifestyle" is a good enough compromise in light of the counterculture's shortcoming's in morning's cruel light. To be clear: I do not claim that the latter is the position of Miller, only that it's an element in the film overall, and to which I suppose she and her collaborators bear an ambivalent relationship. There are always films made about the impossibility of revolutions. Tragedy, rather than comedy, is the narrative line which enlivens futile hopes.

I don't remember it well, but in the late '90s I really liked a mawkish (sincerely, unapologetically mawkish) Hollywood film, What Dreams May Come. Robin Williams traverses the afterlife, parts of which look like his wife's brightly colored paintings. Perhaps only semi-intentionally, this film communicates something about the libidinal, familial, even traumatic dimensions of fantasy, a fantasy for the beautiful (happiness a contract: 'beauty the promise of happiness'). It would be interesting to see these two flawed but highly personal, highly emotionally invested films side by side, look a little closer at them.

When Jeremy Blake's wife left this world, he too fell into all the colors (letting big blue take him).

Bare

"But, of course, cinematic nudity circa 1961 was not quite innocent (i.e., nude) enough, and we cannot fully fetishize clichés of lost innocence where innocence was still suppressed, as it was in Wishman's previous Hideout in the Sun (1960, above), which, filmed in Nude-arama, falsely promised viewers an "escape to a modern Garden of Paradise where Nature's sun-kissed daughters walk forth in all their natural beauty!" This was a bizarre cultural-historical moment when cinema's gradual assault on decency could only pretend to salaciousness, when sun-kissed daughters could, in fact, walk forth in only some of their natural beauty. True, the naturally gravity-resistant breasts Wishman displays are anatomical marvels compared to today's stuffed, synthesized concoctions, and Nude's women are happily liberated from the brassiere manufacturer's contrived cleavage. But the lunar sunbathers' Sears & Roebuck panties dispel any whiff of lost Edens, while the astronauts' fixed foil codpieces, secreting the crux of virile privilege, ensure that the very notion of nudity remains so alien that it literally and forever belongs to a different heavenly sphere."

—Andrew Grossman, "Between Nudist Morality and Freudian Realism!"

Please forgive the quotations-heavy posting of late. One must get back into blogging like one gets into a frigid lake: either slowly, cumulatively ... or all at once. I'm taking the former approach. Some of these threads will find themselves woven into material over the next few weeks.

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Fully Visible

"Thucydides gives a detailed account of the Peloponnesian War, which was a particular event. But this particular event is the only phenomenon in which the nature of human things or of human life becomes fully visible because in it the peak of Greekness, and therewith the peak of humanity, becomes fully visible; we see the beginning of the descent. We see the limitation of the peak. For war, or movement, is destructive. And that particular movement which is the Peloponnesian War is destructive of the highest. The biggest rest finds not its culmination but its end in the biggest movement. The biggest movement weakens and endangers, nay, destroys, not only power and wealth but Greekness as well. The biggest movement leads very soon to that unrest within cities, that statis, which is identical with re-barbarization. The most savage and murderous barbarism, which was slowly overcome by the building up of Greekness, reappears in the Peloponnesian War. The war brings murderous barbarians into the the midst of Greece as allies of the Greeks engaged in fratricidal war. Thracians murder the children attending a Greek school. The Peloponnesian War reveals the extremely endangered character of Greekness. Original kinesis, original chaos, comes into its own. It reveals itself as the permanent basis of derivative rest, of derivative order, of derivative Greekness. By understanding the biggest unrest Thucydides understands the limits of human possibilities. His knowledge is final knowledge. It is wisdom."

—Leo Strauss, "Thucydides: The Meaning of Political History"

(for Alex)

Charge!

Quote of the Day

"And here we can fully apply what we established earlier: if a set of socio-political configurations such as apartheid, for example, are conditions of existence of the economy and capitalist accumulation, then the economy cannot be constituted as an object separate from those conditions since we know that the conditions of existence of any contingent identity are internal to the latter. What we find, then, is not an interaction or determination between fully constituted areas of the social, but a field of relationl semi-identities in which 'political,' 'economic' and 'ideological' elements will enter into unstable relations of imbrication without ever managing to constitute themselves as separate objects. The boundary of essence between the latter will be permanently displaced. The combinatorial games between hypostasized entities—the 'economic,' the 'political,' and the 'ideological'—remind one most of the economic abstractions which Marx described as 'an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are social characters as well as mere things, do their danse macabre.' This does not mean, of course, that an area of the social cannot become autonomous and establish, to a greater or lesser degree, a separate identity. But this separation and autonomization, like everything else, has specific conditions of existence which establish their limits at the same time. What is not possible is to begin by accepting this separate identity as an unconditional assumption and then to go on to explain its interaction and articulation with other identities on that basis."

—Ernesto Laclau, "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time"

Ch-Ch-Changes

Just an announcement. I've been in New York since August 2001, and I will be leaving New York in August 2009. I've had eight great years—the longest I've ever spent in one place, and I consider NYC home. And I'll post more about that later this summer, I'm sure. Life will see me land on Chicago's North Side or thereabouts, once again as a full-time student, pursuing a PhD in the Screen Cultures department at Northwestern University, a place which (in addition to the film & media scholars) has a number of heavy-hitters (to cite a few) in political and social thought. I'm quite excited.

Chicagoans, past and present: I'd be more than happy to hear advice about restaurants, neighborhoods & apartments, the repertory film scene, bookstores (especially since the Seminary Co-op is going to be a hike), videostores on par with Odd Obsession or Facets, or how to cope with ungodly Midwestern winters. I do know Chicago a bit already, as my fiancée hails from the area and I've visited maybe 10 times, but it's a big town so I'm all ears.

Scratchpaper

Caught up in 'the game,' games, ratings games (media competition), emergent audiovisual formulations of aggressiveness (a loss of civility, the elevation of competitive aggression's manifestations over formally contained friendly rivalry). Bursts of rage. Deterministic antagonisms.

Spectator sports are a huge part of the social experience of the cinematic age. The fact of spectatorship according to bound rules, persistently reiterated, insists upon a particular truth-claim about how humans behave, particularly as they behave under pressure. More and more precariously, above the chasm of hellish anarchy, we cling to the brutal comforts of a socioeconomic system that has the privilege of defining (including obliquely) its alternatives.

Scouts

A revolutionary on the run goes to a new land where he, wielding powers, wreaks a bit of havoc. So it goes. So it may go.

Excursions into the vast wasteland may follow.

Desire of the Analyst

Readership, have you withered away? I don't blame you. I've been so boring here for such a long time. Last autumn was busy & stressful for me and I expected that much. Less prepared was I for the stress and exhaustion of more recent months. But things have been turning out just fine, and I think that new content will work its way back onto EL more often the near future.

*

Recently watched the first two episodes of In Treatment (HBO). Interesting here how savvy the show assumes its viewers to be with certain aspects of therapy. But this familiarity comes across as a matter of textual reading more than of any intimate knowledge of psychoanalysis as a discipline. One recognizes, and delights in, the subtleties and red herrings of the process because one is steeped in an easily-worn knowledge and irony of the conventions of not only texts but their interpretation.

WB on BB

He created works for the dramatic stage and the opera, presenting his pieces both to the Berlin proletariat and to the bourgeois avant-garde of the western sections of Berlin.

* * *

Epic theater moves forward in a different way—jerkily, like the images of a film strip. It basically operates through repeated shocks, as the sharply defined situations of the play collide.

* * *

Each of these short acts demonstrates one thing: how ineluctably the reign of terror now swaggering before nations as the Third Reich is subjecting all human relations to the rule of falsehood.

(All passages from Benjamin's "The Land Where the Proletariat May Not Be Mentioned: The Premiere of Eight One-Act Plays by Brecht" [1938]).

Quote of the Day

"You are endangered more by your desire for community, even if it be the apocalyptic community of the revolution, than by the horror of loneliness that speaks from so many of your writings. To be sure, I am willing to stake more on that horror than on the metaphors you use to cheat yourself out of your vocation."

—Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin (May 6, 1931)

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I'm Still Predictable

James Gray makes movies that feel like the last movies ever made; films that were destined to be and to feel obsolete; his cinema is so good it makes virtually everyone else in Hollywood or Indiewood appear amateur. It's not that I really believe this—but I like the films so much that it's a thought that bubbles up sometimes.

* * *

Obsolescence is part of the charm not only because Gray is making "old-fashioned" movies, or because movies like these are rare in multiplexes. His virtues are classical ones, in the bigger scheme of cinema; appreciating him is a Lukacsian endeavor rather than Brechtian. His appeal is textual, which is not to say that there aren't fascinating allusive and intertextual qualities here: for instance Two Lovers nails its loose but pungent deployments of Rear Window and Vertigo, if you ask me—the citations are neither pretenses for meta activity, nor are they banking on loaned-out gravitas. (Even if one were both cynical and unappreciative of Gray, one would be foolish to say he freeloads off of Hitchcock or any other filmmaker, for the simple reason that if he needs to appeal to older texts for weight and mythology, he feels supremely comfortable gesturing towards Greek tragedy, opera, Dostoyevsky: if it's authority and status he's after, Hitchcock is small fries...) The Hitchcock blonde is also the shiksa goddess is also the shrewd portrait of moneyed upbringing is also a specter (the final scene) is also ... i.e., Gray works all of his thematics, all his allusions, all his textual levels into a cohesive multi-layered pattern with dexterity most directors would, must, should envy.

* * *

James Gray and whoever else was involved in casting Gwyneth Paltrow understand something essential about getting good performances from her: it is vital that one, at least in some way, works against the assumption that she is a wonderful, charming presence. Gray makes her a slightly obnoxious, loopy, fidgety rich girl and she's actually fantastic in the role. Joaquin Phoenix, too, could have delivered an insufferable performance (the role was ripe for it), but he balances all the necessary tics & mannerisms with a constant unfolding of a self—unraveling layer after layer of "character."

* * *

"Behavioral beauties."

* * *

* * *

And still the money flows. Constantly flowing around the edges, under the surfaces, sometimes right before our very eyes.

Internal Systems

Once in a while I get to go out and see films. Happy to see, lately, a program of work from the 1970s by Coleen Fitzgibbon, who has been showing these at various festivals and other venues in recent years, with the advocacy & preservation work of Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder helping her along.

Fitzgibbon is interesting, among other things, for having been a woman in the hardcore structuralist cinema scene. (There were not so many women making films in this idiom, as Fitzgibbon hereself testified.) And she said of Internal Systems, her 45-minute magnum opus, that back in the 1970s when more people were interested in this kind of rigorous experimental cinema, part of her incentive was: "You want structural film, I'll give you structural film!" Internal Systems (it also goes by Internal System, which is what is listed on the title card) is nothing but the recording of projector light, modulated according to mathematical adjustments to the camera's F-stop.

Pictured here is a frame from Restoring Appearances to Order in 12 Minutes, a 10-minute (!) film showing Fitzgibbon cleaning a big filthy sink. Eye-popping was Time Magazine (1974?), shot with a microfilm camera, an issue of Time from front to back, complete but in fragments.

Systems

"A code is a deliberately established, killed context."

—Mikhail Bakhtin.

Paranoia is a useful, malleable thing because it can work as an allegory with innumerable and immediate applications; paranoia is not simply a thing produced or maintained by our zeitgeist: it is a formal feature, too, which is constructed as a result of other processes.

(Self-critical question: when has 'ideology critique' itself served as a form of paranoia?)

The wheels keep turning ...

Technology

From the Onion: Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

The Best Buy featured here is in my neighborhood. If you look near the guy's left elbow, down the sidewalk, you can make out a street cart (where they sell hot dogs & knishes).

Not that I've been able to devote much of myself to EL lately, but I assure you that this, too, in its own humorous way, will be woven into something larger and more substantial ...

Been Thinking

(This is not an argument in images; this is a scratchpad for for some signposts around which one may do some studying ... which may eventually lead to an argument.)

Film History

A tangential post-script to the words below. I am often wary of giving the impression that I think that Hollywood was better (at everything) in the past, and is now nothing more than an imitative shadow-machine of its former self. I think that commercial cinema, in Hollywood or elsewhere, exists as a combination of truths and lies that come encapsulated along the terms of a "contract" (probably could use a better word here, but it would need unpacking: later maybe) between the minority who produce and the populace who view these products. The terms of this Hollywood/populace negotiation are themselves constantly being re-negotiated. In juxtaposition to whatever lies Hollywood told in the past, our present perspective gives us historical views of what the films did not necessarily lie about, but which are being covered over today. I think Hollywood had a lot more honesty about certain aspects of class and poverty until roughly 20-30 years ago; these aspects were able to come through with relative honesty because illusions about these things were not included to the same extent or in the same way in the ideological projects of classical and 60s-70s Hollywood. It is a matter of looking at our cinematic past—which is still living today, as these films are still "products" for the populace—obliquely, and understanding through the vantage points of structural shifts in the system how films (texts/products) come to say things that they were never initially intended to say; how they say things that may not have been noticed before.

This is not a matter of finding subversive or countercultural (in a broad sense) meanings built into films, which is a different issue. It's a matter of finding the things that a system did not take the care to lie about or stylize—at least not in the same ways as they finessed other things which we now clearly, in allegedly enlightened manner, see for ourselves. The negotiation of businesspeople, creators, and technicians to audiences crystallizes into specific film texts. Studying the changes in producers/audiences in tandem with the study of textual/generic/authorial productions gives us a better understanding of the long history of a commercial cinema, the history of the choices offered to every type of player at different points in the game.

Yo, Rocky

Yesterday being one of those days where one needs to take things slooooow (know what I mean?), I came upon the last half hour of Rocky and the first half hour of Rocky II on AMC, that once-estimable channel. I have gone on record arguing that Rocky IV is a telling crystallization of certain liberal-militarist public sentiment (or hegemony) but I don't recall if I've ever written a word about the other films in the series. (And I didn't see Rocky Balboa.) I don't want to argue in favor of the Rocky movies; I don't think they're underrated. But I do think that the first two movies exhibit some small virtues that were once common in popular film, and are now exceptional.

White ethnicity, that is, working class 'whiteness' that is markedly separate from WASPishness within that larger category, seems to get no play in movies anymore. (I welcome counter-examples: this is my impression, not a categorical claim to fact.) Irish kids from Southie seem to be the rare exceptions; but semi-literate neighborhood wiseguys (Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Greek) trying to make a buck? Puh-leeze. To represent a character like this today, I feel, one would need to forestall him having charisma, and one would try to tie all his intelligence to his literacy. But Rocky is the kind of people marked by slang, local dialect, streetwise ways of not only of communicating to other people, but of conceptualizing one's own relationship to other sentient beings. The scene with the realtor in Rocky II is entertaining for this reason. Of course American English is becoming ever more standardized (but not more beautiful or learned) and we are impoverished for it, though it suits the new business mold and its functions in global commerce, where various Englishes must cohere to aid transactions.

(Let's recall, too, that Andy Rector's blog is called Kino-Slang, and he explains why in one of his very first posts...)

The entire Rocky series is a fairytale but its roots are in the working-class everyday. It's a story about proletarian self-improvement, the kinds of things about which Jacques Rancière sometimes writes. Contrast this with Good Will Hunting, which is also about proletarian self-improvement, but on a much more fantastic level. The scene in the Van Sant film where Matt Damon tells off the ponytailed grad student by overwhelming him with knowledge is pure wish-fulfilment. The janitor-bricklayer asserts himself over the upper/middle-class guy via mastery of the area conventionally held by the latter. Rocky himself jumps into the wealth, too, but it's through a different route: work hard, keep your head down, and if you get lucky, you get lucky. Will Hunting, in the Clinton '90s, first holds a job where he cleans floors at MIT—of all the places to clean—and then when he quits it, he can work construction. Bills aren't a problem. Rocky Balboa, on the other hand, aspires to a desk job (and its concomitant financial security) which he can't get, and must beg around for menial labor in the recession '70s. He gets a job hauling beef and promptly loses it for reasons of budget. Choices are made, in Rocky and Rocky II, on the basis of a dream, sure, but also in light of setting food on the table; the latter in the contemporary-liberal "working class" Hollywood fantasy is more likely to be excised from the picture, replaced with pap about realizing one's true potential, etc.

One more thing: the scene in Rocky II where Rocky's got to read off of cue cards while he's filming an ad for aftershave. "It—makes—me—smeel mainly." When he's chastised for misreading, Rocky yos his way into a defense: 'Does this stuff smell manly to you? In my opinion it doesn't smell very manly.' This is something vestigial, and something which I feel like I never see in commercial movies these days (and perhaps not in culture more generally, as refuge from billboards and big box stores is, in America, the privilege of the rich only): working-class incredulity towards advertisements and commercialism. This is different from the middle-class activism against these things, which is often couched in terms of renunciation of an omnipresent vermin on our quotidian existence, a blight on the life we deserve. Working-class incredulity comes from the perspective of the little guy knowing full well he's on the losing end of a rigged con; it's more pessimistic, maybe defeatist, but has a harder core because it's not necessarily a "political" cause.

A Great and Mighty Walk

Rupture

"Even philosophy succumbed to the "terrorism" of innovation. When French philosophers began to look for an insurance policy against the greatest possible ill—fidelity to the past, the repetition of dépassé philosophies—one of their inventions was la rupture épistémologique. This miraculous concept made it possible for the communist Althusser to be an old-style aparatchik on the one hand and, on the other, one hundred per cent innovative, almost as much so as Marx himself, since Althusser was the first to take full measure of the prophet's innovative genius.

"The psychoanalyst Lacan pulled exactly the same trick with Freud. Very quickly, however, one single rupture épistémologique for all times and for all people seemed paltry. Each thinker had to have his own, and then the really chic thinkers had several in a row. In the end, everybody turned themselves into a continuous and monstrous rupture, not primarily with others, but with their own past.

"This is how inconsistency has become the major intellectual virtue of the avant-garde. But the real credit for the tabula rasa school of innovation should go to Nietzsche, who was tired of repeating with everybody else that a great thinker should have no model. He went one better, as always, and refused to be a model—the mark of genius. This is still a sensation that is being piously repeated today. Nietzsche is our supreme model of model-repudiation, our revered guru of guru-renunciation."

—Catty words from René Girard ("Innovation and Repetition," 1990) hip through sheer squareness, "radical" through Roman Catholic traditionalism.

"I Slipped"

If you haven't seen Once Upon a Time in America then you may want to skip these brief lines. I'm not discussing a serious narrative spoiler, but those who prefer carte blanche should look away.

*

When Dominic meets his fate he tells Noodles: "I slipped." These words, which appear to quietly haunt Noodles for the rest of his life, blindside us. Like an iceberg set upon our Titanic, they come unbidden to catch us unawares—extraneous to plot development and not even immediately applicable to pathos, "I slipped" is like a perpendicular insertion into the linear progression of time and the narrative. Of course, Once Upon... is not a linear film and its conceptualization of time, memory, history, and diegetic reality is like a Möbius strip (and in this it has a common overarching feature with another great philosophical genre film of the time, Videodrome). There are many such perpendicular insertions, touches which seem to come from out of "nowhere," but which make prevent any such sleek gangster movie. This movie spreads outward, and more on that aspect in the future. But like icebergs and Titanics, the iceberg was always there first, and our own shortcomings of perception and planning, our habitual shackles, are truly to blame: the iceberg may appear out of the mist but it does not come to be out of the mist. So when Dominic says, "I slipped," we get a split second that's easy to accept, but hard to assimilate. For a moment the narrative line morphs into a sturdy horizontal cross-section of these big concepts, "America," "youth," "masculinity," "violence," etc. Almost all such narrative treatments of these kinds of Big Issues in film appear clumsy, shallow, obsequious next to Leone's film.

Time means something different for this moment; not a narrative time but an intrusion, a pause on narrative chronology to reflect upon the underlying experience that burns off the moment we comprehend a narrative through-line. What kind of cross-section here? Actually Once Upon a Time in America is not at all a cross-section of America, or of children or men, or of American Jews or New Yorkers. Its handling of all these things tends toward the narrow and specific, the personal, and if these are ever elevated to generalized principles (anecdotal, nostalgic, exemplary) it is only because the children's narrative, at the very least, is the one sure aspect of the story organized under the sign of memory. When one looks back one has to come up with ways to make sense of the fragmented and stylized slivers that comprise our private, experiential histories.

Hence "I slipped" means a lot of things. It tells us something about the miserable and admirable courage of these hustling street kids; Dominic, too proud to admit he got shot, but too close to death to be proud consciously, has to blurt out something that comes to mind—anything that might save face in front of his pals. It's the sort of explanation that comes to a sleepwalker's mind when she has been awakened; those of us who have been in this position ourselves will understand the weird explanations (neither lies, nor false, evasive but naked) that come to the lips, and we may fancy a guess that this is the sort of last hurrah of Dominic's experiential self we see. Of course: he slipped.

Image of the Day

Tomorrow's Clerks

The strong and stable institution is that which can sustain dissent from within—like the strong body that can withstand bacteria, viruses, and other toxins more readily than a body with a weak immune system. The exceptions are pyramidal institutions whose structures are made to allow for a downward cascade of authority (corporations, militaries).

Though I am aware that the New York Times tells me little of consequence, I read its content anyway. Some of it. Like some of you surely did, I read Fish's self-satisfied write-up of Frank Donoghue's book, The Last Professors. I get the same bewildering discomfort reading accounts like Donoghue's as any other young academic does. So if the liberal arts as we know them are in jeopardy (and boy do they always seem to be in jeopardy!) how do we humanities scholars survive?

The great university systems of the modern world existed within power structures which were national, protected and differentiated in both cultural tradition and laws of the state. The universities existed under the dominant paradigms of the system which enveloped them, and as with all capital, resources, and intellectual manpower, the game is rigged in favor of the owners. The great civilizations always maintain some activity for the advancement of leisure and learning. In some of these civilizations these activities are codified and restricted so that a great deal is the prerogative of the elite classes of people.

If tomorrow's age (which is already underway today) is that of transnational capital, will tomorrow's haven for dissent from within—the space it allows for a scholarly spirit of disinterestedness—be sustained by these very corporations and their for-profit institutions, operating through webs of virtual space and "global cities" and English (or some other lingua franca)? And I wonder if, as a corollary to this, the future of a strong liberal arts (or equivalent) education will revert to the privilege of a few or will remain viable on a relative mass scale.

More broadly: will that very scholarly spirit of disinterestedness remain or will it evolve into a new and unrecognizable thing altogether (i.e., in less optimistic words, die out)?

Saying Something

"... I can't tell you how the president handles the question of health insurance in America. But on the issues having to do with us he has a very clear worldview. Like Arik, he has a loathing of violence; a loathing of everything having to do with terrorism and the use of force. And he has a loathing for untruthfulness and for failure to carry out commitments. He doesn't accept the Middle Eastern political style in which you come and say something and then forget what you said. From that point of view he is very American. He doesn't tolerate nonsense. He can't stand the Middle Eastern jabbering with nothing underlying it."

—Dov Weisglass on soon-to-be-ex-President Bush. (Hat tip to the Colonel for the link.)

And by this time next year, will many of us forget our prior derision of simplistic Republican moral binarism (and a hypocrisy towards violence), and expound rational Democratic programs for humanitarian militarism in all pockets of the world in order to reach the exact same goals, i.e., the "spreading" of "democracy/peace/freedom" from our glorious bag of tricks? I wonder if there will be, can be, anything short of our economic downfall to prevent this.

Margin Notes

"[A]esthetic form is not, as it is sometimes presented, a sort of line drawn around the emotions which we experience in art, rendering them orderly and harmonious. It is part of the very texture of these emotions, which can be fast, light, kaleidoscopic, childlike, spontaneous, while typifying mature adult configurations and contradictions."

—from Raymond Durgnat, "The Fantastic Voyage" (1972)

"I am not sure what Clint's politics are now. The right has disowned him and the left still does not know what to do with him. When The Gauntlet came out 30 years ago, I thought: this is an action movie that doesn't behave itself and seems unlike what has come before. People finally realized what a great film it was in the 1990s. I think Gran Torino and Changeling will be respected properly in about 10 years when other movies start being as brilliant. ... What is amazing is that Eastwood has made the two best political movies of the year since neither movie simply confirms the political biases of its spectators, but complicates them, challenges them, and ultimately leaves them strengthened. They are not the liberal-docu-porn that so many documentaries are. ... [Recently] just listening to NYC friends gush about their enjoyment of the most recent documentary they saw—I often think their mantra has become: “No I haven't done any community organizing, but I saw the documentary.” It is not that this problem is new: it is at least as old as De Sica—the artful rendering of social horror/decay to give aesthetic pleasure. Some documentarians are beginning to look at themselves at the same time that they are looking at the world, and questioning the rules about both the well-made documentary and that when filming they must document and not intervene in what they are filming."

—Brian Dauth, selected comments, The November 3rd Club


Some words to keep in mind in general, but with respect to Gran Torino: surely. It seems to me like everyone talking about this film is worried about whether it's intended to be funny or elegiac, whether we should feel OK about laughing at all the non-PC language (nevermind how that language is used and contextualized, which is close to unique), or how successfully it "deconstructs" some single earlier movie icon and ethos (inevitably Dirty Harry). In the end we embrace what we think are attitudes of knowingness and skepticism and yet we just keep fussing over the proper stances to take towards any given object.

A Pantheon for England

Though I have checked out Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England from the library several times, it is only this current go-round (where I am giving it a good thorough read) that I've paid much attention to the appendix of lists in the back. I'm not sure how I'd overlooked it before. At any rate the short appendix ends with a personal (how personal?) pantheon that Durgnat proposes for British cinema. He explicitly labels it a "first draft" and has drawn only from the films in his own index. Presumably he put this together in the very late 1960s or very early 1970s. The book, A Mirror for England, deals mainly with middlebrow British cinema from 1945 to 1958 (or from the end of WWII until the appearance of Room at the Top). But it branches out in terms of chronology and genre, as one would only expect from Durgnat.

Compounding upon Durgnat's own idiosyncrasies as a critic, it's interesting as always to see how great minds of the recent past have characterized historical developments and aesthetic achievements ... i.e., when they've done so in ways that have not been taken up as dominant paradigms or conventional wisdom. Durgnat (like the 80%-anti-Nouvelle Vague Noel Burch circa 1960, or Manny Farber who chose a humanistic Kurosawa [!] film to exemplify termite art) surprises. Who would have thought, for one thing, that this most insightful critic-advocate of Powell & Pressburger would consign all Archers' films (or Powell's individual works) to only the B list? (Could we surmise that he upgraded them in subsequent decades?) And it's difficult to dismiss Durgnat's embrace of what we think of as boring and mildewed middlebrow classics (1950s Asquith?); Durgnat was on the front lines for underground film and animated cinema, and wrote beautifully about "low" genre films (even when he didn't necessarily argue that they were artistic masterpieces, he accorded them greater attention and respect than many of those who do). This isn't like Judith Crist or other "respectable" older movie critics whose postures where that of the shepherd but whose opinions were those of the sheep.

Durgnat's tastes represent an alternate example, a robust one, for where debates and assumptions in film culture might have gone. It is this excavation of somewhat "off," even alien taste cultures that has fascinated me in recent months. I am trying to recalibrate my own eyeballs to this; starting to do things like thinking in terms of Positif as opposed to Cahiers (for example), and to rearrange the dusty old furniture that's accumulated in my brain (in general). Time to open up windows, add on a few new wings to the house, and rejuvenate things so as to retain the good things of my earlier cinephilia (and larger assumptions about art), but recontextualize them as necessary.

(Oh, and apparently Britain's greatest director was the American Mr. Losey! A nice reciprocity given how canonically Hitchcock is regarded as Hollywood's greatest director.)

* * *

'A First Draft Pantheon' - I've added the directors names & dates from the IMDB, my memory, and Durgnat's own filmography; feel free to let me know if I've made mistakes in my haste.

("drawn from all British films mentioned in the index")

A. MAJOR MOVIES

Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)
Blind Date (Joseph Losey, 1959)
Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
The Browning Version (Anthony Asquith, 1952)
The Citadel (King Vidor, 1938)
The Criminal (Joseph Losey, 1960)
Chance of a Lifetime (Bernard Miles, 1950)
The Damned (Joseph Losey, 1963)
The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960)
Give Us This Day (Edward Dmytryk, 1949)
Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)
The Gypsy and the Gentleman (Joseph Losey, 1958)
The Happiest Days of Your Life (Frank Launder, 1950)
Heavens Above (John and Roy Boulting, 1963)
Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, 1935)
How I Won the War (Richard Lester, 1967)
I'm All Right Jack (John Boulting, 1959)
It Happened Here (Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, 1966)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Richard Hamer, 1949)
King and Country (Joseph Losey, 1964)
Knave of Hearts (Rene Clement, 1954)
The Leather Boys (Sidney J. Furie, 1963)
The Little Island (Richard Williams, 1958)
Live Now Pay Later (Jay Lewis, 1962)
The Long and the Short and the Tall (Leslie Norman, 1960)
Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959)
Love Me Love Me Love Me (Richard Williams, 1963)
The L-Shaped Room (Bryan Forbes, 1962)
The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951)
Men of Two Worlds (Thorold Dickinson, 1946)
Millions Like Us (Sidney Gilliatt, 1943)
Next of Kin (Thorold Dickinson, 1943)
A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker, 1958)
Nothing But the Best (Clive Donner, 1963)
Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947)
Orders to Kill (Anthony Asquith, 1958)
Passage Home (Roy Ward Baker, 1955)
The Plain Man's Guide to Advertising (Bob Godfrey, 1962)
Poor Cow (Ken Loach, 1967)
Private's Progress (John Boulting, 1956)
The Queen of Spades (Thorold Dickinson, 1949)
Reach for Glory (Philip Leacock, 1961)
Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
Road Sweepers (Michael Ingrams, 19?)
Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)
The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film (Richard Lester, 1960)
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960)
Secret People (Thorold Dickinson, 1951)
The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)
Sewermen (Michael Ingrams, 1957)
The Singer not the Song (Roy Ward Baker, 1960)
The Skin Game (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)
The Sleeping Tiger (Joseph Losey, 1954)
Sparrows Can't Sing (Joan Littlewood, 1962)
Tell England (Anthony Asquith, 1930)
Thursday's Children (Lindsay Anderson and Guy Brenton, 1954)
Time Without Pity (Joseph Losey, 1956)
Tramps (Michael Ingrams, 1958)
The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1967)
Waterloo Road (Sidney Gilliatt, 1945)
Woman in a Dressing Gown (J. Lee Thompson, 1957)
Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968)
Yesterday's Enemy (Val Guest, 1959)

B. IMPORTANT MOVIES

The Angry Silence (Guy Green, 1960)
Battle of the Sexes (Charles Crichton, 1959)
Billy Budd (Peter Ustinov, 1962)
Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947)
Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)
The Boys (Sidney J. Furie, 1962)
Brides of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1960)
Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)
Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1949)
Carry On Nurse (Gerald Thomas, 1959)
Children on Trial (Jack Lee, 1946)
Circle of Deception (Jack Lee, 1960)
Coalface (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1935)
Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1928)
Cry the Beloved Country (Zoltan Korda, 1952)
Dance Pretty Lady (Anthony Asquith, 1932)
David (Paul Dickson, 1951)
Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden, and Charles Crichton, 1945)
The Do-It-Yourself Cartoon Kit (Bob Godfrey, 1961)
Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1959)
Dunkirk (Leslie Norman, 1948)
The Edge of the World (Michael Powell, 1937)
Everybody's Nobody (John Sewell, 1966)
The Family Way (Roy Boulting, 1966)
Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings, 1943)
The Flying Man (George Dunning, 1962)
Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, 1940)
Guns at Batasi (John Guillermin, 1964)
Guns of Darkness (Anthony Asquith, 1962)
The Heart of the Matter (George More O'Ferrall, 1953)
Hobson's Choice (David Lean, 1954)
I Know Where I'm Going (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945)
Industrial Britain (John Grierson, 1931)
The Intimate Stranger (Joseph Losey, 1956)
Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963)
The Kidnappers (Philip Leacock, 1953)
Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings 1941)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962)
The Love Match (David Palthengi, 1953)
Love on the Dole (John Baxter, 1941)
Man in the Moon (Basil Dearden, 1960)
Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1934)
The March to Aldermaston ("Under guidance of committee comprising Lindsay Anderson, Chris Brunel, Charles Cooper, Allan Forbes, Derrick Knight, Kurt Lewenhack, Lewis McLeod, Karel Reisz, Elizabeth Russell, Eda Segal, Derek York, 1959)
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950)
Night Mail (Basil Wright, 1936)
Oh Mr. Porter (Marcel Varnel, 1937)
Old Bones of the River (Marcel Varnel, 1938)
Once a Jolly Swagman (Jack Lee, 1948)
One-Way Pendulum (Peter Yates, 1964)
Our Mother's House (Jack Clayton, 1967)
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
Polygamous Polonius (Bob Godfrey, 1960)
The Pumpkin Eater (Jack Clayton, 1964)
The Rake's Progress (Sidney Gilliatt, 1945)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Refuge England (Robert Vas, 1959)
Revenge of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1958)
Rich and Strange (Alfred Hitchcock, 1932)
Rise and Fall of Emily Sprodd (Bob Godfrey, 1963)
Rotten to the Core (John Boulting, 1965)
Sailor Beware (Gordon Parry, 1956)
Sapphire (Basil Dearden, 1959)
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1936)
The Stars Look Down (Carol Reed, 1940)
The Stranglers of Bombay (Terence Fisher, 1959)
Summer of the 17th Doll (Leslie Norman, 1959)
Tales of Hoffman (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1951)
Term of Trial (Pester Glenville, 1962)
They Drive by Night (Arthur Woods, 1939)
They Made Me a Fugitive (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947)
The Thief of Baghdad (Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan, 1940)
This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963)
Tiger in the Smoke (Roy Ward Baker, 1956)
Together (Lorenza Mazzetti, 1955)
Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1962)
Tunes of Glory (Ronald Neame, 1960)
Up the Junction (Peter Collinson, 1967)
The Valiant (Roy Ward Baker, 1962)
Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961)
The Way Ahead (Carol Reed, 1944)
The Way to the Stars (Anthony Asquith, 1945)
Whisky Galore (Alexander Mackendrick, 1948)
Windom's Way (Ronald Neame, 1957)
Yield to the Night (J. Lee Thompson, 1956)

C. "The category below this would include delightful, interesting or erratic movies, such as, Genevieve, Hamlet, Lawrence of Arabia, Passport to Pimlico, The Wicked Lady, etc."

Vision Quest

What makes Dominic tick?

Efficacy

"Not even all human affairs are objects of deliberation; thus no Spartan deliberates about the best form of constitution for the Scythians; each of the various groups of human beings deliberates about the practical measures that lie in its own power."

—Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (in Bk. III, 1112a)

At issue from some weeks back is whether Barack Obama should be respected or esteemed for being a conduit of popular will (or particular articulations of sentiment among the popular demographic). Alex, being the well-read and thoughtful commentator on political issues that he is, challenged me on this point and asked why we should esteem a leader for giving in to the demands of others. (Discussion here.) For weeks I have let this question sit on the back-burner (or maybe a back-back-burner) and yet I think if I had a strong and sound response it would have come to the fore more readily. As it stands I think I only have a partial response that needs tempering and revision. So either Alex is correct in his thinking, or if he is wrong it is not because I am right (or that I am yet right). I'll continue to think about this.

What lies in the power of the American electorate? Relatively little, on a federal level. But the electorate can pick its officials. Obama ran a campaign based famously on "change," and of course everyone who got behind him knew that the referent of this term had its roots that ran well outside of partisan politics. Of course it was partisan too. My point is that its popular appeal was not merely partisan. This was not solely a change from 'Republican' to 'Democrat.' Obama's campaign captured the speech, the votes, the labor hours, of so many millions of people because it represented a change to Washington culture in general. Certainly we cannot realistically expect Obama to deliver a sweeping transformation; nevertheless he was elected and given such a rapturous welcome by so many because of his symbolic negotiation of the office of the presidency:

"But ultimately, this race is not about Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John McCain. This election is about you—the American people—and whether we will have a president and a party that can lead us toward a brighter future." (Here.)

I do not believe that Obama was refusing to play politics when he made this appeal—from one Time Person of the Year (Barack Obama) to another (You). He and his campaign knew exactly what he was doing, and a popular opinion so cultivated, so "played," is not an opinion that can be trusted for decisive and long-term policy. Nevertheless I think that what is at stake with this office is the issue of electoral efficacy. Obama must show himself to be a conduit of populist demands (or make a convincing illusion of it, which may or may not prove easy, we shall see). If he does not honor these terms of his electoral triumph, then I fear that no amount of Lincoln & King invocation will keep history from flicking him aside in a few more years.

Gran Torino

Nobody makes movies like Clint Eastwood. I do wonder who decided on the title for Manohla Dargis' review. It's a decent review, I think basically attuned to what Eastwood's doing (no small feat for a critic these days), but the review's title ("Hope for a Racist, and Maybe a Country") is awful, and I think it misses the boat on a lot of what makes Gran Torino interesting and special.

Year's End

Normally I include some lists at year's end—a casual reflection of what I saw, and what captured my imagination. But this past year has been my weakest film-viewing go-round in several years, and it included an abnormally large proportion of (a) second or third viewings, and (b) 'humiliation' films that I probably should have seen before 2008 anyway. So I wouldn't be able to give a very fun list with regard to old films. And I barely saw anything worth noting among new releases. This is not a reflection upon the year in cinema; it says everything about my own life and schedule and the fact that the whole second half of this past year has been a cramped and hectic one where I gave up much ground on my cinephilic duties. I did really like Jia Zhang Ke's 24 City, which is a notch or two below his masterful Still Life, but still pretty impressive ... and I think it probably counts as my favorite of the small number of 2008 world premieres I've seen.

What I will do, however, is give a few words on a film that I've chosen from what I saw during each month of this calendar year. These are not necessarily the best or most interesting films I saw in each given month. They're only meant to to pique curiosity, direct attention to interesting films, or perhaps vent a little snark.

January - Dr. Caligari (Stephen Sayadian, 1989) - Surprisingly there's little of interest that Googling brings up on this cult director who has a captivating style all his own. I'd love to see his other films, whether erotic expressionist comedy cult fantasies (1980s) or all-out hardcore pornography (1990s).

February - Lo foo chut gang / Tiger on the Beat (Lau Kar-leung, 1988) - I watched this (on VHS) because I recognized the name of the veteran HK action director. What I remember is Chow Yun Fat cracking a dozen raw eggs into a big glass and then cheerily downing the whole thing. There are also scenes of cops in their underwear out in the streets.














March - Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978) - I saw this sitting beautiful and inviting film with very esteemed company at BAM: an unforgettable culmination to an excellent weekend.

April - Fast Workers (Tod Browning, 1933) - The theme of this minor Browning, a non-horror film, is that "the lady is a tramp." All ladies, really. Still: the movie cuts hard and fast and I continue to remember the unusual tactility of the way it depicts high rise construction.

May - Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007) - 2001: An American Apparel Odyssey.

June - The Frighteners (Peter Jackson, 1996) - A fairly good and solid, though maligned and forgotten, SFX genre film. I had not long before read Michel Chion (on sound and on, well, 2001) ... and something about Chion's way of analyzing films seeped into my head as I watched this and for a few hours I was convinced I would write something substantial about all the interesting little things this modest movie does.

July - When Willie Comes Marching Home (John Ford, 1950) - Olaf Möller has the best word on this: "whoaaaaaaaaaa." It's not top-drawer Ford but his well material is the stuff to make other directors envious.

August - Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008) - In the same month that I fell in love with Anna Faris' amazing performances, what good fortune to have found a comedic run to rival Smiley Face. Penelope Cruz completely owns this movie, which I think is dismal for the aggregative running time without her presence. But when she's on the screen ... "jeen-yoos"!

September - Pictures at an Exhibition (Chris Marker, 2008?) - If you watch this and/or if you read Borges' "The Library of Babel" and feel moved to tears, then you are a kindred spirit. There is something simultaneously sad and tempting about the unfolding of information into infinity, spreading out across time and the cosmos, and the fact that we can contemplate going down those rabbit holes ...

October - W. (Oliver Stone, 2008) - The most pointless movie of the year? I couldn't say but I suspect it's in the running.

November - Trop tôt, trop tard (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1981) - The NYC cinephiles—and beyond!—made it out to this "standing room only" screening of a very bad 16mm print of the Straubs' demanding but also hypnotic and beautiful film.












December - Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984) - For years I have put off seeing this film because I told myself I'd watch it on the big screen. After a number of missed chances, however, I finally bit the bullet and got a DVD. I have liked Leone films a lot before but this is a different level altogether: one of the very greatest movies ever made. With the exception of the casting choice of Elizabeth McGovern (which to me strikes a solitary and unnecessary dissonant chord in the whole giant opus) this is a blemish-free tour-de-force moving forward on all fronts.

I am not certain that I can think of another film that so completely marries classicism with modernism; cinema's dueling inheritances of literature, drama, painting, photography, and (hmmm) probably also the chalky residues of 20th century philosophy of mind; ironic skepticism with spectral, heartbreaking romanticism (in this its peer is Kubrick's best film, Barry Lyndon). I confidently felt this film would be a true achievement at the moment I realized Leone was going to let the phone keep ringing. This is a facility with symbol and metaphor that reclaims them for the cinema. That is, all the rich holdings that lit., painting, etc. have bequeathed to cinema simultaneously have acted as weights and shackles—to the point where it becomes somewhat embarrassing to even speak of metaphor or symbol because that channels back into the pre-cinematic prison house. In its handling of time, its evocation of memory, its transcience across space, the phone is resolutely "cinematic." At the same time there is absolutely no point in praising the employment of that ringing phone if one does not understand what it does, what it means. As far as I know there is a dearth of critical, analytical work devoted to exploring the frontier-space next to conventional and philistine wisdom in this endeavor. There are those who would believe it's all a matter of "form supports story or theme" (a sterile, boring, and wrong premise); and the alternative would invest itself into meaning without recourse to a pre-arranged system or to the invited stigma of "formalism."

(If I am not making much sense it is because I have not yet finished clarifying my thoughts!)

In 2009, I think & hope, EL will shake things up in its own humble nook of the film blogosphere by presenting some counter-arguments, some re-evaluations, and some cross-disciplinary reflections on the medium, the other media, and the world. For the sake of the readers of this blog, all of you whom I appreciate very much, I will do my best to make these further investigations interesting, provocative, informative, enjoyable, and fruitful.

Happy New Year!