Images #1

Image of the Day

(By Lee Russell, 1940)

The Illustrated Man

Extract

Judd Apatow is like a clumsy cartoon elephant, laughing at his own flatulence & drunk to the point of being painfully sentimental, trampling over piles of money he's made. Though he doesn't necessarily know it, Mike Judge is like this elephant's put-upon zookeeper, trying to explain why the beast behaves like he does. Both are 'poets of contemporary America,' if we understand that the America in question involves endless strip malls, traffic jams, prolonged adolescence, dismal wage (and salary) slavery, needless sexual frustration, McMansions, Mom's basement, and a constant casual interface between folks who do illegal drugs, folks who do legal drugs & folks who say they don't touch either.

Question, Answer

Victims or Masters?

On the Huffington Post, just a hair under half the readers who participated in the informal poll endorsed the multiple choice option (to the question, "Is It Acceptable Behavior To Interrupt A Reporter During A Live Report?"):

Absolutely not. If a journalist is doing a report live from a scene, they should be allowed to do their work without being shouted down or interrupted.

Indeed. This "absolute" right (the identification with the media, and with government) is where one draws a line between the left who conceive of actually-existing state power and its scaffolding as 'We,' a magisterial prerogative upon whose sanctity no mere peon can encroach for any reason ... and the left who conceive of it as a tool, at best, and a potentially dangerous one in addition. Obviously I have no political affinities with those who attended this "Values Voter" conference. Even so. The relation of these reporters to the people at the event strikes me as the relation of an imperial functionary toward provincial burghers. The latter, far from "shouting down" reporters, and trying to prevent "word" from reaching the public of "their event" (alternately insisted upon by the press as a matter of media rights & a matter of self-interest that the values voters are too stupid to recognize: ahem, media's noblesse oblige), at least showed decent manners in these clips.

What Does He See?

A Taste of Madison Avenue

I have recently watched the first season of AMC's much-acclaimed Mad Men. There are many compliments that can be paid to this show, compliments I endorse, but first I would like to express that I share more than a little empathy with the Siren's verdict:

"Such laughs as "Mad Men" affords are tethered to hindsight--"We never indulge in such sexism/racism/anti-Semitism/homophobia now, and even if we do, we sure don't smoke."

Back in those Good Ol' Days, something like clothing was considered valuable if it was durable, classic, if it lasted. Today, you can still get good custom tailoring, but a lot of expensive clothing is simply cheap. Fashionable: merely fashionable. The same sort of thing applies, just a bit, to the case of Mad Men. Very fine, very professional production values. Such good ones that they deserve more than the faint praise I'm giving them here. At the same time I feel like they're being used to hide a certain fundamental cheapness in the film's manner, a mercenary and cynical (but, due to the show's success, perhaps not inaccurate) understanding of its' viewers' minds. In the first episode, when new secretary Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) is being shown the ropes by Joan (Christina Hendricks), the latter explains as she unveils the "new technology" (an electronic typewriter) that it looks complicated, but they made sure it's easy enough for a woman to use. (It's missing a rimshot, which of course would be tasteless, but that's all it's really missing. The show provides a surfeit of moments like these.)

Who wouldn't, shouldn't grimace at this undignified gesture toward the enlightened viewer's very ... enlightenment? 'Ah, they were so sexist, so myopic, so unhealthy, so milquetoast, so closeted, so repressed, so hypocritical, so lacking in self-awareness.' And in 50 years the popular art of tomorrow will no doubt disparage us in ways that are unfair and self-congratulatory. C'est la vie (in an idiocracy). For one thing: Mad Men is good, but it's not even close to Tashlin's critiques. It remains exquisitely tasteful, on the surface, and ultimately middlebrow. Therein lie a few of the problems.

I use the term 'middlebrow' with a bit of a damning connotation, I admit, but only to continue to discussion, not to stall it. I have tried to understand just what it is about the middlebrow that causes some of us to struggle. Here, it's not that I think 'middlebrow' as an end result is the issue, but (if anything) the path that leads to the issue. Let me suggest one diagnosis: the reason middlebrow culture is tough for some of us to take is because it sets the bar for humanity too low, but then expects us to hover precisely at the height of that too-low bar all the time. Middlebrowism is fiercely intolerant of both the gonads & of magnificence. Of course, that's a harsh judgment that needs some leavening. Let's keep in mind that Raymond Durgnat wrote his great book A Mirror for England on the middlebrow British cinema, specifically to defend it even; and something like The Sopranos, which I'm also catching up with on DVD, may be a tad upmarket, but remains thoroughly middlebrow too. And it's excellent. Bertrand Tavernier is, or was, a middlebrow arthouse favorite, but Dave Kehr and Carloss James Chamberlin are two critics who've backed him, and most directors in this world surely haven't made a film as good as either The Passion of Beatrice or Capitaine Conan. The list goes on.

What strikes me in the current Age of Quality Television (not like Norman Lear's 1970s, or the classic days of old Ernie Kovacs, who's still better than anything on television I've seen, as well as most things on the big screen) is the relation to the symbol. Because we are, presumably, detached post-existentialist quasi-ironic consumer-viewers, in the 21st century (the convergence century), we cannot always take a symbol. So this is how tasteful narratives—I suppose—develop symbolism now. They take something and then make it an object of explicit or implicit contemplation for one or more of the characters. Recall: the geese in Tony Soprano's pool (season one), or in Mad Men, the pigeons & their relationship to meek wife Betty in the episode titled "Shoot." Wary of what we'd recognize as a symbol, cautious of a con job or of the exposure of stunted faculties from our high school lit courses ("in The Scarlet Letter the A symbolizes..."), we tasteful viewers demand not to be confronted with any overt symbol, but to treat them obliquely. The characters themselves bear a relation to a symbol ('birds'), ponder out loud or through their behaviors the significance of such birds ('freedom'?). Nobody then is forced to make an interpretation they take too seriously because the act of interpreting is oblique—it's for them, not for us.

How unaware they are, right?

Image of the Day

(From The Cube, directed by Jim Henson, 1969. Yes, that Jim Henson.)

Light 5

There is in a lot of Kiarostami an explicit theme at work regarding the bridge between communication and perception—for a message to be received, apprehended, can be difficult enough between two people. When these attempts at communication, or more simply communion (e.g., between a person and his surroundings), extend beyond the immediately, physically present, Kiarostami's overall thematic notes the frail limits of things like cell phone reception, electricity, even a pure concept (like 'urbanity' or 'ennui'). Confrontations between concepts, like 'urban' and 'rural,' 'developed' and 'backward,' are not reiterations of a city mouse meets country mouse schtick at all, of course. The crutches, the scaffolding: this is part of Kiarostami's object, part of what he's describing. In ABC Africa, we come full circle, to Mother Nature: who can forget that lightning?

Forever

At the root of every reminder of something which we must never forget there is a concern that we will do precisely that. Individuals' memories are fickle things, and people if left to their own devices will stubbornly form their own ways of forgetting and remembering. If a social unity is to be maintained or finessed out of the harnessed memories of people, we need images and narratives around which to harness everyone.

Light 4

"I think of an unforgettable vision of darkness I once had when I took a friend from Tokyo to the old Sumiya teahouse in Kyoto. I was in a large room, the "Pine Room" I think, since destroyed by fire, and the darkness, broken only by a few candles, was of a richness quite different from the darkness of a small room. As we came into the door an elderly waitress with shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth was kneeling by a candle behind which stood a large screen. On the far side of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the color of that "darkness seen by candlelight." It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes."

—Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (trans. Seidensticker & Harper)

Tolerable Cruelty

"This movie is not a meditation on anything."

—David Cairns (here)

All historical investigation will reveal skeletons in the closet. Wicked, shameful skeletons in deep, dark closets. No expansive society with clean hands ever survived long. When viewed from the proper historical distance or perspective, however, no injustice retains its resonance forever. This is not my own ethical opinion. But injustices, however great, have a tendency to be forgotten as time moves on.

Imperializing peoples (and not only they) have long been fascinated by violence. Reveled in it. We Americans may be deeply uncivilized on the whole, but we can point to ourselves and say to our credit, at least, that to the individual our fascination with violence is nowadays more invested in mediated and manufactured images than in presence. Is this not some form of "progress"? Torture & executions have been public entertainment in other times and places (indeed including some spots of our own history). By and large, however, American tastes for real violence now are effete, squeamish, highly conditional. Which is not to say that we are not still cruel, or that (bare minimum) our State is not still cruel and wicked. It is.

The Holocaust represents for us a certain limit, an abyss, a chasm or a reminder which History has thrown us. It is evil incarnate; it is the reminder against "relativists" of what evil is. We are taught this way from a very early age. In the Land of the Free, it is even a matter of legal concern if you want to name your child the wrong way. Not that I mention to protest; I simply desire that we openly acknowledge, for a moment, the implicit boundaries set by our ways of delineating right & wrong, permissible & forbidden. To make a statement or artwork about World War II, at least on the European front, is ultimately then to make a statement about the Nazis, which means to make a statement about the Holocaust. This is the doxa. These are the standards that ultimately frame all such things in public discourse. So if you make a quasi-grindhouse movie about a Jewish-American death squad terrorizing Nazi-occupied France, you've volunteered yourself into the crosshairs of gods know how many people with very insistent and very legitimate concerns.

Quentin Tarantino has an incredibly unphilosophical mind, and this is both his strength and his problem. Not even in his most mature work (Jackie Brown) does he really question anything. The root of his cinema is pleasure, a deeply tactile, visceral, and memory-based pleasure for which, presumably, there are no limits worth abiding (in quantity or quality). Tarantino's conception of pleasure is, however, not unsophisticated. One may argue that it lacks refinement, polish, even the rudiments of taste; but it is self-evidently complex, I think, and it is based on attention to details. (People can debate whether they're the right details, of course.) The opening credits of Inglourious Basterds, before the quasi-Leone opening (a decent sequence), are one of the best parts of the film. A procession of fonts & sizes on the title cards—it's lovely. Tarantino is someone who cares about such "peripheral," "paracinematic" stuff. One of the few, but it's this sort of thing that may appear to future observers as witty or even inventive after this chapter in the history of media convergence/(divergence) is written. The culture that lasts is always a culture that remembers the past in some way. Hermetic novelty will die a pitiful and lonely death (and most of the time it may even deserve this fate). In this opening Leone-like sequence, the SS detective and "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) mentions the incredible lengths to which people will go when they abandon dignity.

Therein lies the key to the film; the key to Tarantino.

He has no "dignity," in a certain sense. Or, as the great Mr. Cairns says in the quote with which I've opened this post, this film is not a meditation on anything. Indeed, we may want a meditation, but do not (will not?) get one from Tarantino. Maybe some of us who liked Jackie Brown were led to believe he was capable of one, and that the Holocaust—i.e., the limit which leads to modernity's very abyss!—would coax this dignity out of him in spades. But no. Instead he makes a childish, violent, and irreverent film that receives as much derision as appreciation from the people who comprise this thing "film culture." Why? Well, it's tricky (treacly?)—but while every good film critic is probably a bit of a moralist, not every good film critic is a good moralist. And not every good film critic has the best perspective on things moral, or how they relate to art, to cultural production in its broadest sense, and to the history of style, affect, posture. I do not claim that I have the best perspective, myself. But I do think that maybe I've found hints of the proper trail in the woods, so to speak.

The problem that makes an insignificant but engrossing entertainment like Inglourious Basterds a "problem" at all is that some of us may wonder why such a film is (a) an event, and (b) something which speaks to others, including others we may otherwise respect, even though it seems odious. (In all honesty, I enjoyed the film and am probably among these latter, problematic folks more than I am the concerned citizens.) Well, to answer (a) with a short answer—it's that we live in the society of the spectacle, and the de facto composition of our "critical apparatus" that contributes to such a thing. As for (b), it returns to the question of dignity. Not all cultural production is dignified, and (as with technology) if it's both possible & profitable to do something, it's probably already accomplished or in the works. Entire film industries are predicated on capitalizing not on the bad tastes of the masses so much as the undignified allowances of these masses. I consider myself a semi-dignified young man, and maybe I'd even allow myself to be described as slightly educated ... but I have no illusions that I am above undignified pleasures. I do not mean to state that I, anti-elitist, am "one with the masses," but more precisely, that I, semi-decent person, am nonetheless fascinated by indecent things. And art, broadly defined, always supplies such things. In a broken society these things are integrated in such a way as to function problematically. The "myopic" sort of moralist-critic does not hold these negative capabilities in mind, and is, perhaps, confused when a major motion picture commands respect (i.e., from the establishment press, the box office, etc.) while not respecting the commands of our social rules of decency, dignity, and order (i.e., it goes there but ... is that really necessary?).

There is much more that could be written—that I could write—about all this, but a few things are clear: that we still are not so stable when it comes to how we conceptualize taste; and that we do not have good outlets for our indecent energies, let alone our critical faculties for same. If we are to point fingers at Tarantino for his indiscretions, his breaches, it may behoove us to point those same fingers at the culture which produced Tarantino, gave him money to make his films, produced an audience that would see it, and produced a community of writers & commentators who would earn money and/or attention in commenting on same.

Old man: "I don't understand the point of this long scene."

Old woman: "I don't either ... but what the hell."

—A couple who were sitting in the same row as me during the tavern sequence.

(I scribble these notes in near-immediate effusion, a few hours after seeing Inglourious Basterds, and may well reverse or criticize my own initial impulses tomorrow. Lately, quick responses to films seen have been at a premium on EL, so I figured that if Tarantino's latest could draw out some words, I should write them.)

Light 3

Stills from Miguel Gomes' exhilarating Cantico das Criaturas (2006) - a film with Clare of Assisi as a character.

Light 2

... For the form cannot desert matter, because it is inseparable from it, and matter itself cannot be deprived of form. But I have proposed that it is light which possesses of its very nature the function of multiplying itself and diffusing itself instantaneously in all directions. Whatever performs this operation is either light or some other agent that acts in virtue of its participating in light to which this operation belongs essentially. Corporeity, therefore, is either light itself or the agent which performs the aforementioned operation and introduces dimensions into matter in virtue of its participation in light, and acts through the power of this same light. But the first form cannot introduce dimensions into matter through the power of a subsequent form. Therefore light is not a form subsequent to corporeity, but it is corporeity itself.

—from Robert Grosseteste, On Light (trans. Clare C. Riedl)

Light 1

Television began to appear in the writings of Italian artist Lucio Fontana just after he returned to Italy from his wartime home in Argentina in April 1947. At first it did so incidentally, to exemplify the mutual influence of art and science, which he believed occasionally placed art ist s in ant icipation of technological developments. Indeed, from then on (and despite the fact that regular television broadcasting only recommenced in Italy seven years later, at the beginning of 1954, a full year after its German counterpart), the medium that sends light through space played a fundamental role in Fontana’s artistic conception of Spatialism, which centered on a turn from illusionist to actual space. Faced with a television medium that was still out of reach, Fontana, like Götz, turned to painting, but unlike the German painter’s largely mimetic strategy, the Italian artist’s profoundly transformed the old medium.

...


Moreover, the architect Luigi Moretti, in a 1953 essay that hailed Italian television as a platform for the arts, reproduced examples of RAI’s experimental transmissions up to that point, including a studio production of Macbeth, a show covering famous jewelry, and, most importantly, two “luminous images in movement” by Fontana.30 The photographs are stills of moving light being filtered, at least in one case, through one of the buchi, Fontana’s signature works initially made from paper and then from canvas, respectively pierced from front and back with a stylus to create punctured surfaces. It appears that the one buco partially visible must have been handled like a screen to animate light in space and to project it onto a wall. This surely is the “new aesthetics” of “luminous forms crossing through space” that Fontana had called for the year prior in his Technical Manifesto of Spatialism. These spots and trails of light in frozen motion are likely the remains of a flickering, abstract light show that was part of Fontana and his peers’ Spatialist transmission.

—Christine Mehring, "Television Art's Abstract Starts: Europe circa 1944-1969" (October 125)

"There is much to repay."

As many of you have probably heard, Philippine film critic Alexis Tioseco and Slovenian film critic Nika Bohinc (they were a couple) were murdered recently in Quezon City. I didn't know either of them personally, though I once had a bit of e-correspondence with Nika, who was lovely.

Some words from Gabe Klinger on these two people.

A remembrance of Alexis from Noel Vera.

There is also Alexis' letter to Nika which was a major piece of film criticism (here).

May they rest in peace - and we shall gather at the river.

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.

Image of the Day

Government

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

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

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



























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

Quick Decisions

Surveillance

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

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

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

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

Image of the Day

Screencaps of Isabelle Huppert are taking over EL!

Back of the Eyelids

Part one:

Part two:



Solar Beats (Patrick Bokanowski, 2008)

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

Real Time

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

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

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

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

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

Image of the Day

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.)