Recently Seen

A big difference between Paul Blart: Mall Cop and a lot of Judd Apatow stuff is that the former has a good time with 'mall culture' and its space (like Romero's Dawn of the Dead), while the latter just figures it as a form of contemporary naturalism.

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That said, I have been persuaded recently, finally, to watch with Freaks & Geeks (I'm not quite finished with the entirety of its run), which Apatow had a hand in. It is as amazingly good as most stuff bearing his name is just grimace-inducingly bad.

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For the first or second time in a decade, I've seen five Best Picture nominees before Oscar night. Unfortunately this is the year they extended the field back to ten. (Would you like my rundown? Avatar: eh. Hurt Locker: eh. Inglourious Basterds: some strong elements. Up in the Air: some strong elements, fine middlebrow cinema.) Just today I watched District 9 and it's quite something. Stupid, sure. But also clever. Both 'anti-apartheid' and 'blatantly racist'? You bet. It's one of those films designed to be "read," "interpreted," whose ostensible progressivism can really be taken in any number of ways. It's nice that non-whiteness doesn't necessarily, ultimately signify irrationality, mythicism, etc., here ... though that's the take-away from certain isolated scenes. At the same time, there's a tone to the critique, as though multicultural liberalism is the blind flaw and enemy of humanity, the worst and weakest of (codedly white) militant liberalism (which is good, well-meaning, sane). There's a line to be crossed that situates criticism of "liberal" policies not anymore from a progressive standpoint but rather from the standpoint of downright hatred, opposition, fear. (Comedian Louis CK, whose stand-up I've also been sampling recently, exploits this very line.) The best thing about District 9 is the savvy with which it plunders generic codes (surveillance footage, handheld cameras, allegorical sf) as well as the sense of humor it maintains throughout, and the fact that the narrative never totally succumbs to a central conflict theory, but rather feels 'on the run.' The freedom in this respect is kind of breathtaking. I would say it's the best film for the adolescent male demographic featuring CGI bug-aliens since Starship Troopers.

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Shutter Island, maybe my favorite Scorsese film in 15 years, is a bit like David Fincher's Panic Room: shallow, genre-bound, beautiful, trying (successfully in my case) to play and tug upon deep-seated feelings. I liked it much more than I expected, and probably a bit more even than Roman Polanski's very fine, quite beautiful anti-Blairite film The Ghost Writer. (Polanski's is a serious genre movie with actual political commentary; Shutter Island is openly a 'mere' entertainment—and I wouldn't dispute that label—that is nevertheless vastly more intelligent than most pro critics ever grant mere entertainment to be.) One problem is that everyone expects or hopes the culture industry product they like to also align with their political sympathies on some level, and to express their political (dis)tastes. Sometimes this is the case, but not always, and rarely is great art (especially when we deal with cinema) distinctly aligned with a viable political critique. (It exists in the off-spaces; its operationalized in its afterlives through real people in real contexts.) Especially as politics change but a film is not as open to rearticulation in the same sense that a play is (or even a novel, perhaps?).

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The last multiplex-type film I saw that was roughly as bad, as bored with itself, as cynical, as The Wolfman (Joe Johnston, 2010) was Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009). Though the latter, at least, had Robert Downey, Jr., in its corner. Iron Man 2 is probably going to be absolutely awful, but ... the first third of Iron Man was quite decent, the only worthwhile blockbuster superhero cinema I know from the past ten years, aside from the first half-hour of Batman Begins (fascistic-militaristic but at least openly, interestingly so) and the first two Spider-Man films (Raimi delivers minor plastic fun). OK, I didn't bother to see Watchmen, readers let me know if this is a serious omission on my part.

Shyamalan Notes

In my head the template for Shyamalan's career is George A. Romero's masterpiece Knightriders: a film, a genre film, that is baldly ludicrous on its face ... and yet taken so seriously that it arrives at a certain admirable, mesmerizing intensity. But wait—can't zealous, solemn, deliberately meaningful genre films be a buzzkill (to say the least)!? Of course, of course. Obviously. But I'd say there are two broad kinds of elevating seriousness open to the mere genre entertainment. One is externalizing, communicative: communicating above and around the trappings of "genre" or "entertainment" to impart a series of messages or postures. (The sort of genre film that tends to win awards & critical hosannas.) Another is internalizing, an invitation down a rabbit hole.

Shyamalan often works on both registers, I think it should be admitted. The most ferocious critics of Signs, for instance, focused on the cheapness of its New Age nondenominationalism, the gracelessness (or unconvincingness) with which it peddled its "signs" and coincidences. Quite guilty! At the same time, the singlemindedness with which Shyamalan pursues his themes and expresses his stylistic tics also has its virtues. I don't know that I'm very interested in making (or reading) a case for Shyamalan as "auteur" that identifies his consistent themes, as these are, in his case, merely obvious, repetitious. But the way Shyamalan (consistently) constructs timing, line delivery, perspectival planes, the "weight" of the image (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, in one of the very best commentaries on MNS I know, says "When the camera is stationary, it isn’t resting, it’s bolted down.") ... these things are fascinating, and possessed of an integrity of their own.

I can understand why someone would say Shyamalan's cinema is ultimately bad. I wouldn't even necessarily disagree with them. But I can't understand anyone saying they can't see anything of authentic and rare interest in Shyamalan's cinema. None of Shyamalan's work is as good as Knightriders; but aspects of it are far above 90-95% of what else is getting made in Hollywood. There's the intensity of focus, the sheer glee in working with 'restricted' elements (e.g., color palette), the willingness to create nonsensical stories and premises with ordinary heroes (Shyamalan's people aren't ubermenschen or anything of the kind, whereas a Bruckheimeresque blockbuster is populated by gifted experts of mind & flesh).

No Comment (Almost)

This isn't new, but it was new to me when I came across it recently. The chairman of Mensa International apparently chose these ten TV shows as his favorites, or the best ones, or something like that. I reproduce the list and its justifications, holding back all I want to say, except to point out that for good television it is apparently crucial to have "repartee" and "science."

1. "M*A*S*H" – It had smart repartee and was so much more than a comedy.

2. "Cosmos" (with Carl Sagan) – Sagan was able to communicate something extremely complicated to the layman and do it well, and that’s unusual for a scientist at his level.

3. "CSI" — The way they use science to solve their programs is intriguing to viewers.

4. "House" – Again, it’s high level type of show; it’s the personality that makes it a winner, plus it deals with science.

5. "West Wing" – You had to pay attention to stay up with it. The repartee was fast and furious and you needed a fairly high level intelligence to keep up with it.

6. "Boston Legal" – It’s primarily because of the characters. The story lines are okay, but the characters are incredible and the writers give them great dialogue.

7. "All in the Family" – The show dealt with social issues before its time and was on the forefront of trying to show people’s feelings, beliefs and the complexities of personality, in both a serious and comedic way.

8. "Frasier" – The repartee was sensational; the main characters were very good. Even though they portrayed people who were likely of high intelligence, they also showed their weaknesses.

9. "Mad About You" – It’s a personal favorite, I loved the characters and the back and forth. It was very smart.

10. "Jeopardy" – It’s about the only game show that really tries to test people’s intelligence. There’s very little luck involved, and there are few game shows like that. I don’t watch it all that much honestly, but from what I’ve seen it tests more than knowledge, it tests intelligence too.

Butterflies

"Is this what a Nostromo sequel would look like, shot by Pedro Costa?" (Danny Kasman)

"Surreal, absurd and sad—all hallmarks of a Lav Diaz film—Butterflies, and indeed there are actually butterflies, is all the more haunting in that it seems to be foreshadowing a real-life event—the killing earlier this month of Canadian-Filipino film critic Alexis Tioseco and his partner Slovenian film critic Nika Bohinc, likely by people they knew, but were not wearing masks." (Wise Kwai)

These low-constrast images are fascinating. I kept thinking, 'These shots seem so simple, so obvious, and yet I can't recall a film that looks to have been made quite like this.' Roaring white noise in the background will give way to dead silence from shot-to-shot; roosters crow all around you in one take; motors and traffic. Murky depths everywhere. Beautiful, ugly, picturesque, mundane: this video is balanced on a knife-edge.

The plot of Butterflies Have No Memories, such as it is, reveals itself slowly and obliquely. There's a dead-and-gutted mining town. A Canadian woman, Martha, comes back to this place, where her family used to live in its industrial heyday. She tries to socialize with her old friends and family employees, who are too busy with their own problems & the getting-on-with of life. No time or inclination for idle nostalgia in a home they've never left, a privileged past they've never romanticized. Some of the villagers concoct a plan (with different levels of moral feeling) to kidnap Martha. From there the film goes even deeper into an abyss. Somehow Butterflies Have No Memories seems to be both in the vein of novelistic, richly structured moral exposé and as well in the "slow," "meandering," small-s surrealist paradigm of contemporary festival cinema.

I do not expect this to be the last time I write on Lav Diaz's work ...

Hurting

Some potential reactions to The Hurt Locker:

A. "This movie is metal, bro."
B. "This movie is about how soldiers experience contemporary warfare as metal, bro."
C. "This movie is metal, bro, and it was directed by a woman."
D. "This movie is about how soldiers experience contemporary warfare as metal, bro, and it was directed by a woman."
E. "This movie is about how soldiers experience contemporary warfare as metal, bro, and it was directed by a woman, and I am vaguely cognizant that there are, like, kickass gender implications at play."

Obviously there are additional, and different potential reactions to The Hurt Locker, but I'd be lying if I said that I didn't pick up some of these vibes from hearing about the film, which I recently caught up with on DVD. (Eh, it's so-so.) But why is it that so many people feel compelled to express their affection for Bigelow primarily through the prism of her being, essentially, a tomboy, and then relating this 'praise' as though patting oneself on the back for it? (As one piece of evidence: Rob Nelson's comments in the current issue of Film Comment, where he writes, "Note to Marc Webb, Todd Phillips, and Oren Peli: Kathryn Bigelow is a more muscular director than all of you combined." One might as well be saying: Yeah! Let's make fun of them nancy-boys! It's OK to do so because we've snuck in under the umbrella of gender equality!)

Isn't this really just a symptom of the sorts of thinking we should be moving beyond? Yes, Bigelow is a quite talented director. Some people consider her one of the preeminent directors in Hollywood today. She is also a woman, and there are not so many of those directing films (and doing a lot of other empowered jobs) as one would think there should be. And one could count on one hand the number of women filmmakers in Hollywood who might be granted, in public and critical discourse, the status of "authorship" and, what's more, a respected authorship, over her films. So indeed it's important to discuss gender, like genre, with respect to a lot of Bigelow's movies. Including The Hurt Locker. At the same time, hasn't she been around, doing her thing, long enough for people to have come up with better ways of understanding her than (implicitly) by strict analogy to one of the tough female action heroes in one of the films helmed by either her or her infamous ex-husband!?

Paramutual

It should go without saying that if Elusive Lucidity is anything beyond a 'public notebook,' which is the author's main intention for this site, it is a club where one of the few dues to be paid is to be open to the art of Jerry Lewis. It's not so much that Jerry Lewis is a particular personal favorite, but rather that he's a lightning rod and litmus test. I'd wager that, chances are, if you like this blog at all, you probably are also a believer in films like The Ladies Man, The Errand Boy, and Cracking Up (aka Smorgasbord). Or you're open to being a believer.

At the same time, cinephilic nostalgia is no fun unless one has some leeway in recontextualizing it. One of the great things about The Errand Boy (1961; all b&w screengrabs in this post, save one obvious one, are from this film) is how beautifully, cheerfully it skewers a company image. For reasons of both professional development and personal leisure, I have been watching—indeed catching up on!—a lot of television in recent months, and my sitcom of choice the past month or so has been NBC's 30 Rock, a few big notches below the best of Tashlin's or Lewis's satires on the big workplace, but very much in the same family tree ... and also very, very funny. (Let's recall that the great, brutal critiques of, say, Frank Tashlin were still very much part of their system, and part of a certain sanctioned tradition of industrial self-criticism and parody. The greatness of Tashlin, as well as his student J. Lewis, is not that he fomented a revolution but that he so robustly, so sharply pulled off greenlit critiques when they could have been otherwise bloodless.)

Disdain for commercial and managerial nomenclature. "... the distinguished firm of Fumble, Fidget & Fuss ..." (The Errand Boy) / The Sheinhardt Wig Company (30 Rock).

"The real: nothing more than a thing to put film on." (The Errand Boy)

"Gods did not create man; man created the gods." (Fritz Lang, as 'Fritz Lang,' in Contempt)

"Fritz, that's wonderful for you and me, but do you think the public is going to understand that?" (Jack Palance's producer to 'Fritz Lang' in Contempt)

"Ya just liked what ya saw ... and you believed what ya liked" (Magnolia in The Errand Boy)

"It doesn't pay much." "But at least the hours are lousy!" (The Errand Boy)

Locations

Biarritz: a beach town in France (in the south of the Bay of Biscay) where old Dodsworth's younger, sad wife is unfaithful to him, and where Delphine in Rohmer's Le rayon vert goes in search of a good vacation (=something to cure her blues ... love?). In Biarritz, in the cinema, one finds sad romance. Maybe not even romance: Baise-moi was shot, in part, in Biarritz ...

Delirium

Quote of the Day

"In fact, a critique of formalism needs to render inadequate an implicit distinction in much current theory between form and content. Using the codes of narrative and realism, a film like Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969) will be said to be recuperated within a reactionary tradition, while a film like Godard's Ici et ailleurs (1976), which is self-reflexively "about" the ways it can be about the PLO, will be said to be progressive at a more advanced level. But no human practice is a collection of formal codes on the one hand and contents ont he other: any particular practice, any textual system, is a combination and mutual displacement of elements into a new semiotic arrangement whose elements cannot be extracted except in an artificial and distorting way. A wave good-bye in a film derives its meaning not only from the social connotations of waving but also from the place of waving in the semiotic practice in the specific text of the film. Z, for example, is not a film with the same old cinematic forms presenting a new content to the necessarily same old end or effect, but a unique text in which the meaning of elements exists in terms of their place in the text where it is impossible to isolate elements as content or form. To take a more immediate example, while a television show like All in the Family used, and repeated, many of the available specific codes of television storytelling (for example, consistent screen direction; definable beginnings, middles, and ends) and so could be said to adhere to an old system of representation, the very introduction of new elements—even if they are elements nonspecific to television (for example, the image of the bigot, the working class accent)—changes that old system; the presence of a new accent on television, for example, becomes part of the textual system, gives the show part of its meaning in a way that is not distinguishable as content or as form. This, however, is not to claim that this new textual system, simply by being new, is in any way inherently subversive of the old. Every message, by not being some other message, is again a differance, a meaning which differs (is like the preexisting) but differs (is unlike the preexistening); the effect of any partcular semiotic arrangement is never given in advance to a text by its adherence (or not) to prior codes, but can only exist in relation to the specific interaction of that text's codical arrangement with other codes (specific and nonspecific) and in the relation of the specific textual system to the whole social semiotics of an historical moment."

—Dana Polan, The Political Language of Film and the Avant-Gard (1985)

Single

If you Google image search A Single Man, and different combinations ("Colin Firth," "Tom Ford"), you'll see that stills don't crop up quite so readily—no, it's a panoply of aspect ratios, media screengrabs + publicity images, photographs from the set. At one moment I'm tempted to say that it's impossible one could have anything of interest to say without knowing a few things about how & why this movie was made; and then, I reverse, and I think that all of the important things about this film are immediately evident.

Possibly the most impressive feature fashioned wholly out of cologne ad aesthetics since Vittorio De Seta's 1966 Almost a Man (Un uomo a metà), I wouldn't say A Single Man is a masterpiece. But. It's much better than I would have ever expected it to be. I don't just mean pretty production design + good performances, although this is part of what constitutes the film's appeal. I think that A Single Man utilizes its painfully fashionable production design to interesting ends (one), and that it also bears mature witness to a certain cultural value system that would have been very easily to distort, parody, and dismiss (two).

What's lost, what's at stake, here? The historical conflict in Tom Ford's movie isn't the progress of gay rights—queerness is taken for granted as a fact of life—but cultural decline across generations. The high (and connotatively aristocratic) seriousness that underwrote camp sensibility is here viewed in its recto expression: seriousness, simply. Colin Firth narrates to say that it takes time for him to become himself in the morning. This could easily encroach upon the more heavily-trodden paths of mere masquerade—the same thing employed/parodied in Far from Heaven. But Firth's character, Prof. Falconer, isn't a social outcast hiding his "true" self—though self-fashioning is part of his identity (as it is for all of us). Falconer is, as a queer man of privilege, taste, and intelligence, privy to the masquerade in which we all partake. The painful part of his life is not a limit on his "self-expression," but rather all the rude and cruel impositions that a heteronormative standpoint would otherwise have one believe are reserved only for the normative elect. (Isn't your male lover really just a substitution for something else? -No.)

So what is interesting about A Single Man is that it deals, nostalgically, for a period and context of queer repression but the film does not even begin to define queerness by that very repression. The repression, its threats, are real; there are rules of seduction and of domesticity which one must perform for the sake of safety; but there is not a negative essence serving as the root of all non-normative desire, affection, love.

The team that designs Mad Men was behind the look of A Single Man, too. But where the acclaimed television show gets a lot of its kicks from pointing out how backwards the era was in the full view of something called Progress, A Single Man is rare because it doesn't valorize the ethos of 1960s "revolution" mythology—that is, the short navel-gazing rebellion of middle-class youth against their bourgeois parents.

Quote of the Day

"The so-called literary process of the epoch, studied apart from an in-depth analysis of culture, amounts to a superficial struggle of literary schools, and in modern times (especially the nineteenth century), amounts essentially to an uproar in the newspapers and magazines, exerting no essential influence on the great and real literature of the epoch. The powerful deep currents of culture (especially the lower, popular ones), which actually determine the creativity of writers, remain undisclosed, and sometimes researchers are completely unaware of them. Such an approach does not make it possible to penetrate into the depths of great works, and literature itself begins to seem a trivial instead of a serious pursuit."

—Mikhail Bakhtin, "Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff"

Image of the Day

Missing Olson

I remember reading, somewhere, that Charles Olson used to have a class on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at, say, 3pm. He'd arrive promptly on Tuesday, begin lecturing in god knows what sorts of crazy-erudite-obscure ways, and frequently keep the class late. Then, a number of the students would come out with him afterwards to the steakhouse across the street, where they'd dine & drink, continuing the discussion until the place closed, at which point they'd repair to Olson's shack, more students knocking off, the survivors remaining to continue the conversation all through the night. They'd keep talking until just before 3pm the next morning, when Olson and his most ironlike students would saunter back towards the classroom, launching into formal Day 2 of that week's lecture.


(Could anyone hook me up with the source of this story? I believe I read it online somewhere but can't seem to find the recollection ... )

Summerdays

(Because it's wintry cold where I'm writing this ...)

s | l | o | w | d | o | w | n

"Godard, through his experience with A Woman Is a Woman, seemed to learn that if color was to function thematically, he would have to extend the length of single shots and slow down his camera movements to allow the viewer adequate time for concentrating on the composition of colors."

—Paul Sharits, "Red, Blue, Godard" (Film Quarterly, '66)

"The "techniques" of such films are so apparent, so obtrusive, that they may easily be assumed to be "advanced," "modern," "new." It's perfectly true you don't come out of an older movie like Renoir's La Grande Illusion, or Flaherty's Man of Aran, or Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night saying, "What technique!" Nor do you come out of a concert by Serkin exclaiming about his technique—you're thinking of the music. But those who adore Jose Iturbi always say, "What technique!"; what else is there to respond to? And the comment—which means how fast he can play or how ostentatiously—is not so very far from the admiration for Antonioni or Torre Nilsson or Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc (though they are generally admired for how slow they can play)."

—Pauline Kael, "Are Movies Going to Pieces?" (The Atlantic, '64, here)

"[M]y second response is to ask what we mean when we call a film slow—an adjective that's frequently pejorative, even when it's used in relation to films by Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, F.W. Murnau, Ozu, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Jacques Tati, among others."

—Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Is Ozu Slow?" (here)

Efficient narrative in film is commonly tied to a thriving industry: 1930s-40s Hollywood, 1980s Hong Kong. But there are different registers of speed even in commercial film: popular Indian cinema had its own rules that it learned to operate through, but single films may not seem "efficient" to those who aren't used to a three-hour masala movie. And with old Japanese films, like a Shimizu whose breeze you might underestimate, you've got the occasional weird object that seems short and slight, simultaneously leisured, looming, overpowering. Not just efficient, but economical—getting the most out of the fewest means. And not solely narratively.

There are films that exude a certain grace, and these oftentimes take more time than they may seem like they should: the noodlings of (in Hollywood) The Strawberry Blonde or Donovan's Reef, films whose "central conflicts" eventually dissolve like cotton candy, triumphant moments for anyone who just gets bored by relentless focus on dramatic efficiency above all else. (It'd be more tenable if there weren't the same handful of stories just wafting!) Or there's reliable Béla Tarr, who (like Tarkovsky or Rohmer) is willing to wait ... not for a conflict to fade away, but for something else to appear.

Slow? Slooooooooow. Well, I can understand Pauline Kael's crankiness (quoted above), understand it much better now than say 10 years ago when I was not even a young turk (just aspirant), and The Modernism Was the Message (man). Whatever merits we can ascribe to Kael, I don't think, though, that she ever really knew what to do with cinema. Consistently she reinforced certain conventions about quality; her only real innovation, if we can call it that, was to ease the minds of her middle-class readers that it was OK to like all the trash, the movies, the movie-movies, the sheer wondrous Technicolor movieness and razzmatazz. You could love it, cherish it, but don't take it too seriously.

(And, abstracted like this, it really isn't bad conclusion. Just all in how it flows. Popular-critical discourse has taken its liberated shamelessness from Kael, but not her old-fashioned foundations. Not really.)

So what's in a slow film? Well, in a context it might be ineptitude: the (bad) film that put the producer's butt to sleep. This is so in an industrial system whose overall vigor, we've proposed, tends toward efficiency. (Not to say the ruthlessly efficient, nor the solely efficient.) Unavoidable slowness crops up in cross-cultural exchange, too: pacing issues that may not smoothly translate. This is often tied to deliberate slowness as a strategy: critical, countercultural, estimable (prestigious), privileged, and so on among a number of possible reasons. The slowness of the more austere 1960s art films, particularly as compared to the slowness of predecessors in the art film (Renoir, Carné, earlier Bergman, earlier Fellini); the slowness of certain North American avant-garde films; the slowness of so much international festival cinema today. These films assume the privilege of slowness because they can: they are produced and circulated in contexts that will not necessarily punish their slowness as ineptitude. Yet, when they come onto the marketplace to compete—the very turf of the industry!—they are weighed and judged lacking. It's this tension that makes deliberate slowness and issue at all, a form of confrontational tastes. To the eyes of John Doe, replaceable movie reviewer of whatever entertainment shill website got shafted with a screener of The Man from London, the pace of Tarr is very possibly a provocation. (And it can be a wall that prevents further penetration into the work.) To the eyes of Jane Doe, upmarket festival-hopper and dedicated cinephile, the pace of Tarr can be a privilege, a refuge. (And it can be a portal that invites her to stop thinking about "the pacing" as "the pacing," but rather as what else it could be, do, or mean.)

It takes a gift to appreciate the range of registers that I've represented here as a crude polarity. It takes a greater gift still to understand them as something more complex than a dialectic. It takes zero effort to internalize the mindset of the film industry's products as one's core criteria for value. It takes only barely more effort to displace those criteria with Criterion Collection-sanctioned modernism.

"Judging by David Bordwell's quantitative analysis of Ozu's films, which appears as an appendix to his Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 377), Tokyo Story is probably not Ozu's slowest film. We learn from this chart that there are 1371 shots in I Was Born, But... and 786 shots in Tokyo Story, whereas There Was a Father (1942), which I'm less familiar with, is the surviving Ozu feature with the smallest number of shots, 353. Moreover, whereas the average shot length of I Was Born, But... is four seconds and the average shot length of Tokyo Story is more than two and half times longer, 10.2 seconds, the average shot length of There Was a Father is 14.8 seconds. I'm somewhat skeptical of how many generalizations can be reached through this kind of quantitative analysis, especially when it encompasses silent as well as sound films and when the presence of intertitles alters our sense of what a shot consists of. But one could at least surmise from Bordwell's figures that Tokyo Story is typical of Ozu's late manner without necessarily representing an extreme."

—Rosenbaum, ibid.

"More remarkable is the number of dialogue titles, which make up between 24% and 44% of all shots. This would be exceptional for an American film of the 1920s. Other Japanese films, particularly Mizoguchi’s, are heavy with intertitles, but Shimizu took the trend somewhat farther. The preponderance of dialogue titles may owe something to the presence of both American and a few Japanese talking pictures at the time, which justified more spoken lines."

—David Bordwell, "Pierced by Poetry" (here)

Talking, talking, talking. There are certain perversions that are nevertheless understandable. Watching silent films (pre-1927 narrative movies I mean) silently, for instance. Kael, who disdained what she perceived as a slowing down, a paring away of material in these new "art films," failed to do what she was presumably best at, i.e., put her finger on the root of pleasure. All she could surmise was that it was a kind of pretentious or immature status anxiety, at root, that caused one to enjoy bad and come up with ways to call it good (or boring --> interesting). Sure, status enters into it. It always does, even with the most "popular" expressions of our modern culture. But I think that the very real pleasure of the leisure afforded by slowness, and all the modernist difficulties (or fetishizations of foreignness) are different: a repose, or a welcome challenge, or simply a bit of variety.

Additionally, the impulse to slow things down is built into the apparatus of cinema to begin with: to still, and to make visible, what has gone by too fast; to give ourselves time to look over something. Rather than a pompous undermining of "the movies," it is, at least in part, a very honest exploitation of one of the oldest and most compelling problems of this thing cinema.

Don't ever listen to someone who tells you what the movies are "for," what they're "good at," because they're lying, and they're probably trying to sell you something without concern for whether you need or want it.

"Some days, uncertain about what to do, Shimizu would shut down the shoot and take people swimming."

—Bordwell, ibid.

Don't Feed the Poor

Rec

So there are some terrific, and terrifically weird, things about Bloody Movie (aka Terror Night, 1987), helmed by Nick Marino and an uncredited Andre De Toth ... such as its proposition that Old Hollywood acts out its resentment upon an age which has (mostly) forgotten it. A dashing adventure movie star of "the late 1920s," Lance Hayward, murders trespassers on his estate (largely forgotten, and passed over to the gov't in the film) by echoing his cinematic exploits from sixty years prior. Two younger people in the film are great fans of his movies, which they undoubtedly saw on television. (The character, Hayward, bought up the rights to his movies and then sold them to television in 1958.) Bloody Movie also features an impromptu lesson about nitrate film, and footage from a bunch of old movies, including Alexander Nevsky (or a film that looks incredibly close to it).

Clipping

A final association. It seems like a joke, but it is not: Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, two old pals of the pre-Nouvelle Vague Left Bank group of filmmakers, are today great fans of certain very slick American TV shows. Where Resnais' taste runs to Millennium (1996-9) and The X Files (1993-2002), Marker goes for the likes of The Practice (1997-2004), Deadwood (2004-6), Firefly (2002-3) and The Wire (2002-8). The maker of La Jetée and Level Five (1997) sets us straight:

I feed my hunger for fiction with what is by far the most accomplished source: those great American TV series... There is a knowledge in them, a sense of story and economy, of ellipsis, a science of framing and of cutting, a dramaturgy, and an acting style that has no equal anywhere, and certainly not in Hollywood. (2003: 37)

Two men in their eighties, watching their favourite series on DVD sets and computer monitors, in their separate homes, just as once they watched certain Hollywood musicals (An American in Paris is remembered) together in London, during their collaboration on Statues Also Die (1952). In Resnais‟ lovely 1956 essay-doco about the Bibliothèque Nationale, All The Memory of the World (which contains the immortal credit to "Chris and Magic Marker", no doubt for the use of his "Petite Planète" travel guide to Mars!), there is a moment which is in fact pure musical, pure Kelly/Donen/Clair/Lubitsch: three workmen deliver the day's journals to the library, marching in synchronised steps... But what is there in these modern American fictions of gruesome death and forensic detection, alien invasion and paranoid conspiracy, that attracts our two Eternal Modernists?

The American television program that makes me flash onto Marker the most is Crossing Jordan (2001-7), about the investigative work of autopsy experts in a city morgue. Like many shows of its ilk – about profilers, vice cops, psychic detectives – Crossing Jordan often builds to grand dramatic recreations of crime or murder scenes that are in fact more like visionary projections: our inquiring heroes suddenly walk around inside images of the imagined past, sometimes magically animating still photos, computer schematics or police sketches in order to do so. This is interesting enough already as a cultural phantasm, but Crossing Jordan, in particular, brings this taste for revivification, this remembrance of things past or "time re-edited" (as The Case of the Grinning Cat puts it) to an especially urgent and poignant point. So many of its plotlines, large or small, are precisely about reconstructing, in a flash, the life-stories of largely anonymous people: children, the homeless, loners, ordinary folks either below the radar or entirely off the map of society's record of itself. And the flash that matters most, the pivotal moment for Crossing Jordan, is the exact moment of death: how someone fell, was hit or shot, how long their body has been left to decompose; and what history can be read once the body is scanned for its surface marks and then opened up to its archaeological and geological levels of trace-experiences...

(Adrian Martin, "Crossing Chris: Some Markerian Affinities," available here & already cemented onto anyone's list for film-related essay of the year)

Egads

What struck me upon revisiting Germany Year Zero is how fast-paced this 73-minute film is overall, and yet how drawn-out the final sequence feels. Defining 'final sequence,' that is, as either Edmund's long walk or even his exploration of the ruins ...

More to come on this and other Rossellini films soon.

Shooting the Chutes