Being There

It is a great tragedy that snark should house virtually any critique of the art world these days.
















Between snark and hagiography, what decent choice does one have? Nothing works now (if it ever did). When Godard & Gorin made Letter to Jane after Tout va bien, their ungraciousness toward Fonda nevertheless posed some crucial political questions: what is the image of concern, and how can the image stand in for the real thing? Is there a real thing or have we only images in the face of the dooming structural monstrosities of capitalism, colonialism, and coercion? As with the concerned public figures analyzed by JLG & JPG, we see again and again the same thing (despite all differences) in Marco Anelli's photographs of Marina Abramovic's performance piece The Artist Is Present. This is the image of the sensitive observer. The emotionally open person. Artists, certainly a lot of artists. (Paco Blancas: "Also, I love meeting people in line. I’ve met a lot of people and have made a lot of new friends, many of them artists, but really all sorts of people.")

Abramovic to her co-present observers: 'let me be your mirror.'

The cultural spectacle of this performance piece, documented by Anelli and disseminated over the Internet for some time now (the run ended on May 31), may be my own mirror, and perhaps I will read into it my own problems well foregrounded before anything else that might concern anyone else. So be it. Still, amidst all these sensitive, moved, moving, tear-stained faces who've gone to sit and be with Abramovic, I notice, also, that so many of these observers indeed have good haircuts (and certainly not too many boring good haircuts). I cannot help but feel that, were I at a party with most of these dedicated observers, I would be invisible to them.

It is a strange and off-putting position - imagining having one's hard-earned nobrow passport denied - subtly denied - because one can't imagine integrating smoothly into a circle. (This circle of artist-observers.) But once my pouting and my sense of entitlement subside, I am left with further musings on the importance of the space-specific or time-specific art. Part of what is wonderful about ephemeral art, and art given to obsolescence or scarcity, is that wrinkles and re-crinkles the smoothness of an enormous, public projective space (i.e., the dream of mass culture as seen in the nightmares of the Frankfurt School). Put as crudely as possible: it makes things less boring by re-introducing chance & difference to the legacies of Fordism, Taylorization, mediation, and spectacle.

Cinema's relation to space-specific and time-specific art is a frequently-overlooked component of cinematic ontology and cinematic possibility - and, with respect to physical decay, what film is. (Though I would reformulate my arguments - which weren't so well-made - and come to somewhat different positions on certain points, I still more or less agree with the thrust of my three posts having to deal with this in 2006 with respect to Sátántangó - 1, 2, 3.) The art-event which, necessarily, some people will miss (like perhaps a film screening) bears seeds of inequality. But at the same time it introduces an awareness - perhaps a cutting awareness, like my own subdued adolescent pouting at not being like the sensitive aesthetes who were able to weep so beautifully, and with such LES-friendly clothing & hairstyles, at being-with-Abramovic. This awareness is of the disguised limitations of our own assumptive privileges, the thought that we are citizens born to a utopia of artistic access. Yet what ever provided us with these illusions? The entire broken system of modernity.

I like the idea of cinema existing also as a network of legends about films no one is any longer able to see, or is unlikely to see, but whose example may nonetheless spur thought & activity. In an Abramovic-like vein is (it seems) Sylvina Boissonnas' Un Film, about which Nicole Brenez has written beautifully:

The producer and leader of the Zanzibar group was Sylvina Boissonnas. She made only one film, simply titled Un Film, in 1969, an absolute masterpiece so singular and emotional that she has forbidden any screening of it. I have had the great privilege to see it; it is the most simple set-up one could imagine. Sylvina herself, wearing a white dress, stands still at the bottom of a round vat with the camera pointed at her at a right angle. The film is made of sequence shots of ten minutes each (the equivalent of a reel) over the course of which tons of water, sand, stones are poured into the vat, burying her for long minutes at the end of each of the shots. For Sylvina Boissonnas, this was an image of pure depression; for the viewer, it is one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema, one in which the author risked her life several times. It was filmed in 35mm. by Armand Marco, a cinematographer who also worked with Godard and the Dziga-Vertov group.

And thus my dissatisfaction with both snark and hagiography. Neither one can deal with difference; neither one can hold the gnawing horrors of that privileged playground, "the art world," at arm's length and still think through, think with the work itself. My dissatisfaction, too, not at all with The Artist Is Present, which I obviously did not visit/see/be with, but perhaps with what I intuit as the usurpation of cultural gnosticism (all its fun, all its unevenness) by the meaningless, instantaneous opinion-mongering of a web-connected context who proffered this entire thing to me as a sensation, prior to all experience. I don't have the experience, but I get the preview and glimpses of the remix.

I'm sure it would have been fantastic with Tracy Morgan, though.

Level 5

"Until we get smellies, like talkies, war films don't exist."

Mad

One of the pleasurable things about Mad Men (season three of which I just started watching) is that as it emerges into what we now think of as The Sixties, the characters and plotlines getting weirder doesn't reek of desperation but practically of historical necessity. Though still impeccably tasteful, the way it navigates its historical touchstones is such that it's basically allowing itself to get "weirder," and more complex. With a degree of awareness I still haven't figured out yet (a lot? a little?), the show very cannily operates according to the dominant mythologies of its time period, and utilizes them shrewdly. Cynically? Perhaps. But by now anyone who's actually devoting precious personal time to watching mass-market media at all, including stuff from the Good Ol' Days, must simply allow for this dimension to, more or less, everything. The reservations I have about Mad Men from when I first took a look at it still apply, but I must give credit to the way the series is indulging in measured, wide-ranging weirdness. And there's a new relation to the 'symbol' (cf. my previous post on the show) that I've noticed by now, this one not literary (like "birds = freedom") but simply a matter of intelligent marketing. Behold, the season 3 DVD cover:

21C Afterlives

"But cinema, being synonymous with culture, forms a history, and a defining aspect of any present is always how it interacts with its pasts." (IV)














A modest and rambling apologia.

In recent months - in many months - I have not said a word about news items like the Greece economy, Middlesex philosophy, Arizona immigration. I have made only the barest of allusions to Thailand. If I have been silent on important political topics, it is not because I do not rate them highly enough for discussion, but because I have needed to reform some of my own thoughts and practices with regard to politics and worldliness. In other words, I am quiet because I'm thinking, and I am hesitant to write because my opinions or my understanding change too drastically and/or too quickly in the moments after I write something. (And in fact, one of the reasons why the film-related writing here is also a bit sparse for quite some time now is because I have been rethinking (my) cinephilia, and the entire audiovisual field, in my own piecemeal way.) Those people who browse EL looking for the fervent left-wing commitment which has marked my writing in the past may fairly be puzzled by these staccato, solipsistic write-ups of barely-known commercial movies like Boiling Point and Suspect Zero. Why have I not even said a few things about the late Lubtchansky? Everything a shortfall. For the disappointed onlookers I can offer no satisfactory explanation. EL was made without credo or program, and directionless it continues.

If there is any small interest in these entries for the socially, culturally, politically-interested onlooker, in particular the onlooker without cinephilia, I can only humbly offer these scratchings as examinations of historical sloughing-off. American pastness, its relation to conflict (personal / political): that's a common theme here in these occasional spurts. (1) What can Betty Grable tell us about war, (why) did anyone think she could, and can we use her figure to say anything at all? (2) When faced with the astonishing vibrancy of a past object, how "new" can it seem? Can a past relation (in this case Maria Montez's influence on certain camp & avant-garde scenes) be resurrected, affectively, by a viewer who's long missed the boat? (3) What names are we circulating for people? (4) Further strains of the history of combat and communication, warfare and aesthetics. And so on ... I experience anxiety that others should feel I have been 'depoliticized.' (The worst moment? A classmate was telling me about a course on revolutionary theory and admitted I was the last person she thought would be interested in it. In an instant, everything I had ever written seemed for naught.) If I'm to be judged, even by myself, I want only to have the correct charge, which is instead that my politics are at present too inward-looking to be effectual.

"Democracy" and "democratic" are often words used in place of thought, which is why you can end an essay or article or a self-defense with some gesture towards greater democracy, and it will appeal to any number of listeners simply because the d-word has almost definitely remained undefined, and can stand in for anything and its opposite, really. The messiness of human conflict (and thus the reality of co-existence) gets the gloss. What I'm trying to do in the offspace of whatever I write is to identify and, as best I can (it won't be perfect) gut out these crucial words that often take the place of thought, and which consequently impede political analysis and discussion when everyone involved may not quite realize it.

And if I can achieve any of this through the help of (pleasurable) digging through the wreckage and ruins of 20th century cinema, of media more generally, of classics, and of art, and of political philosophy, then maybe in the not-too-distant future I won't appear so far off course to those observers who might (rightly) think so.

Boiling Point

I swear I had no intentions of racking up little appreciations of modest, present-day genre films lately. But that's what I'm doing. This time it's Boiling Point - no, not the Kitano film (though that's a really good one) - but instead the Snipes & Hopper crime movie, directed by James B. Harris, from 1993. It's somber, unhurried, and (like a solid B) feels both utterly formulaic and yet experientially absorbing, a new path through the same woods. (Or a new way of walking the same path.)

*

"Boiling Point's central terrain is the hopeless shadow zone of smalltime law and crooks, each sucked deeper and deeper into their own hard-luck tragedies.

"Inevitably, Boiling Point was drubbed by critics, discontented with its lack of thrills and its aura in sour melancholy. That Harris has been permitted (albeit infrequently) by the system to make his resolutely unprofitable movies at all is a Hollywood miracle." (Michael Atkinson, "Genuine B Noir: James B. Harris")

*

"Genuine B noirs in the purest non-reflexive sense of the word, Harris's films are inglorious, pipe-dream-beleaguered gutterdives, with the cheap integrity of bygone pulp fiction." (Atkinson)

*

"The weird dreaminess and forced analogies slow the movie down." (Sragow)

*

"Promoted like an action movie, but there's one problem - this movie has no action!" (Luke Y. Thompson)

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Freedom's Just Another Word

RIP Dennis Hopper - of all the terrific, weird films made around the edges of Hollywood in that magic moment of the early 1970s, I think The Last Movie may be the best one I know. He worked with a lot of interesting directors on a lot of interesting projects, and along the way did some iconic work, of course.

Office Killer

Office killer for Constant Consumer magazine, a factory for the production and finessing of content - director Cindy Sherman here finds an intriguing way to present office space, sad, yellow-brown, "cubicled" even when there aren't literal cubicles in sight. (In a place like this, the sign of having made it is the killer office.)

This movie has a horrible critical reputation (not unlike Suspect Zero, actually), but it too is a bit too hermetic, a bit too imbued with personality, to deserve such quick dismissal. (A moment's Googling finds a handful of appreciative onlookers, however.) Of course "personality" is an amorphous concept and anyway there are plenty of bad films with personality. But (pace hitman Jules) personality goes a long way. The cramped spaces that feel both intimate and institutional, voyeuristic and commonplace, are a rare effect - and I think more deftly achieved, more admirably self-aware, than when Indie takes out its own subscription to Constant Consumer and becomes a catalogue of "things," cf. the near-self-defenestration-inducing antics of Rachel Getting Married. (I think that this tonal balancing act is part of what Craig Keller addresses in quoted words below, and what one can link to various other parts of Sherman's art.) In another direction, i.e. on one facet, Office Killer's closest cousins may be Tom Noonan's amazing films What Happened Was... and The Wife. In certain ways these modest indie films are busy writing a particular sub-history of the present, and are forgotten before they're released (it seems), but live in. Cinephilia lives on just likes these movies, but it's now a modest, downbeat gnosticism. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing for some kind of cinephilia to shed its masculinist obsessions with completion (etc. ad infinitum) and become an utterly decentralized network like in a Rivette movie. Nobody sees everything, nobody knows everything, and the moment gives you glimpses of amazing things.

* * *

All this being said, something's missing, too, in Office Killer. It's a sad film, sad in the same way Fritz Lang's Hollywood noirs are sad, — reasons that have nothing to do with their plots. Sherman's picture, and those of Lang, are films (and remember, now, we're not speaking at all of a 'meta' tone) about their genres, in an elegiac mode, that is, not elegiac about the past and possibilities of their own genres (and, again, now, mind you I don't believe there's any actual thing as 'genres' in pictures, but this distinction is part-and-parcel of the discourses of both the films of Sherman and of Lang, which are rooted in surmising a commercial climate), but about what their own films are not as a result of being formulated within that idiom which their producers ($) or supposed ($) public would comprehend as 'such-and-such set of locutions.'

(from here, as Mr. Keller writes what I imagine, unresearched, is the best that's been written about Office Killer)

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Suspect Zero

Not so easy to find the sort of low-budget genre films today that might make a latter-day Manny Farber rhapsodize ... at least, not without heaps of psychological explications, gilded lily bouquets of atmosphere. The cheap films these days are so often just bloated with self-awareness of their own potential powers. It seems one must inevitably make this compromise. Suspect Zero (2004), starring Ben Kingsley and Aaron Eckhart, is a cheap, "dark" serial killer film, much of it cribbed from Se7en and elsewhere, with all the typicalities you'd expect. The "antagonist" lives in subterranean lairs where his bizarre OCD habits belie some deeper virtuosity, some deeper truth he represents in almost mystical conjunction with our protagonist. (The nature of this connection is soon apparent.) And: Moooooood music. Quick cuts from dark to darker images. This was helmed by E. Elias Merhige, after all, the man responsible for grotesque experimental film Begotten ('91) and Shadow of the Vampire (2000, shamefully, unseen by me), as well as a few Marilyn Manson videos, for crying out loud.

What differentiates Suspect Zero from the mumbo-jumbo it's already fated to half-be, are (1) the sheer material-tactile pleasure the film seems to have in all the suspect's paraphernalia (sketches, numbers, collages); like certain shots in Se7en, when one appreciates the singleminded craftsmanship of Kevin Spacey's re-sewn composition notebooks; this detail extends into other elements of the production design, like an old, worn-in suburban home with a mom wearing tights on her way to a PTA meeting, not (I think) played for "provincial" laughs; (2) there's a pervasive loneliness about this film and its cross-country wanderings, one that really does seem to sketch at something like a dark heart of America. A lot of the standard ominous-mysterious mood plays well because, I think, Merhige is himself a believer in occult/paranormal stuff (if you believe his Wikipedia entry), and respects religiosity in ways that a lot of filmmakers don't. There is a beautiful apropos-of-nothing black church scene where the congregation sings "And He Walks with Me." A lot of foreboding dark cloudy skies: a choice of effects that is dime-a-dozen but here works quite well (the tones, the colors, seem absolutely right in a way that oncoming storms rarely are in Hollywood ... the much-maligned Twister actually seems to me to be a respectable example in this department). Pixellated surveillance-style footage stands in for the psychic flashbacks and flashforwards the characters experience: not an inspired decision in itself, but pulled off with gusto (a b&w close-up of Kingsley has black holes for eyes, deep chasms).

There are bad choices too, hackneyed ones: a character walking down the street in the rain to show the depths of his alienation; Carrie-Anne Moss' character in general is utterly superfluous: she's played merely & blandly as a composite of every thinkable female second fiddle that might appear in a role like this in a movie like this (maternal, professional partner-friend-lover).

In short, though, there's enough invention here, and the film takes itself seriously enough on these modest terms, that Suspect Zero warrants a look from anyone who is interested in the legacy of B-films in today's commercial genre releases. Though everyone's decided (and not wrongly) that Zodiac represents the great American serial killer film of the past decade, and this film is anything but close to that kind of superlative, something like this is worth a few attentive glances from intrigued parties, before it plunges into serious obscurity forever.

Montage

Cobra Camp Sublime

A pristine archival Technicolor print of Universal's Siodmak-helmed camp exotica arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan to play to a few scores of people. I tend to be sensitive (oversensitive?) to audiences laughing campily at an old film, but Cobra Woman is so insistently and robustly itself that laughing at it just makes it stronger. Mesmerizing, possessed of a weird logic all its own, this is a film that is too serious a fever-dream to be anything but taken seriously as just that. (And an entire huge facet of the postwar North American avant-garde now seems more legible...) It is no facile paradox (by which I mean merely an unsound suggestion of paradox) that this is both a bad movie and a wonderful one. The colors in the print we saw, which no images I can find online even approximate, are astonishing.

Bergman Soap

I hadn't seen any of these commercials before.

Wrong

"Who's Joe?" they ask in Only Angels Have Wings. Joe - forgotten - is never really forgotten. He haunts the film, he is honored by people in their own ways, even among a people who do not explicitly honor memory. Poor Manny in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, on the other hand, is precisely the opposite kind of forgotten man: victim of a bureaucratic oligarchy (which is what we live in in the US - not a 'democracy'). Explicitly remembered by those around him, he is quickly made to be missing by the powers exerted by bureaucracy (silence, procedure, leverage). He vanishes for a while, a living phantom.

Kick-Ass

Dear comic-book blockbusters,

If you are going to be 'ironic' about pathos or 'self-aware' about sentimental plot machinations, please do not just immediately, directly, and shamelessly fulfill the conventions you are being 'ironic' or 'self-aware' about. At least pretend that you're going to do something else. Make the effort to fake us out even if it doesn't work. As it stands, one can see the stilted writing on the screenplay page: "Hit Girl smiles wryly as she blah blah blah."

Also, I would appreciate it if one would either be honest about it, or at least do a better job hiding the fact that your film is really a preview for your next film. Bald, shameless promotion in itself is almost refreshing because it's rare ... everyone (like this movie Kick-Ass) has to dress up their bullshit in layers of sonic rapture & slo-mo.

The fact that you made a movie that so deeply involved an 11-year-old girl in bloody violence is, however, commendable.

Cheers,

--Zach

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Live Forever

One of the beautiful things about Brad Neely's vulgar, puerile, hilarious net 'cartoons,' which I've loved for years (!?) now, is how he'll insert subtle hints that there's more to it than lazy, merely adolescent provocation. Highbrow? No. Compex, multi-faceted, carefully made? Yes! Exhibit A - around 2:29 of the Baby Cakes diary #1, you see an image of a scientist testing on a rat in a cage as Baby Cakes talks about living forever ("but I'm leavin' that up to science right now"), and the scientist is a caricature of Aubrey de Grey. Yes.

Sense of Things

"We cannot interpret the signs of a loved person without proceeding into worlds that have not waited for us in order to take form, that that formed themselves with other persons, and in which we are at first only an object among the rest. The lover wants his beloved to devote to him her preferences, her gestures, her caresses. But the beloved's gestures, at the very moment they are addressed to us, still express that unknown world that excludes us. The beloved gives us signs of preference; but because these signs are the same as those that express worlds to which we do not belong, each preference by which we profit draws the image of the possible world in which others might be or are preferred." (Gilles Deleuze, trans. Richard Howard, Proust & Signs, p. 8)

Why did cinema not produce "historical analyses, theories, essays, memoirs" (as Guy Debord asks in In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni)? When Susan Sontag advocated an "erotics" for art in the 1960s (a call-to-arms that would have many a sensuous-formalist gearing up even today), I wonder how healthy any of that would have been. That is, an erotics which seeks only to find satisfaction in its own pleasure - a cinephilia dying that couldn't come to terms with its own obsolescence. This despite the fact that nothing like it ever really lived long. The erotics of a particular mode of elite spectatorship (though this 'elite' is not definitively elitist, nor could it be unduly described, simply, as just marginal) ... this passes, this family resemblance of cinephilias that have nevertheless been quick to forget and quicker to forgive its own common afflictions.

(If someone has sought out Serge Daney's work on television, who among these have done some more to really search out critical discussion of television? Can a given cinephile can take a stance on television that is well-considered? It's worth thinking about.)

The sense of a thing, and the "erotic" attachment to it, when robust does ( - must - ) create an offspace, the field of other possible worlds; myopia reinvests this kind of negativity in a continual reworking of the cinema, so that we find all the answers to all the problems we think we've discerned, located, worked on. But all we've done is bury deeper a certain lack. (This is why that fellow who's chained to the cinematheque quotes: "Cinephilia is a lack of ambition.") Cinephilia is among other things historically marked by a confusion over what's to be found in an image, why we're looking there in the first place.

Quote of the Day

"Currently, for many people in the upper-middle class in the United States and perhaps in other parts of the world, face lifts and the cheaper alternative, botox, have become the norm, a regular medicalized procedure they undergo to increase job potential, gain status or erotic opportunity, and achieve control over their social mobility and class position in a constantly unstable world. If Lily Tomlin no longer has the wonderfully expressive face she had as a comedienne, in Damages her appearance well matches her role as a tastefully coiffed and botoxed rich-man’s-wife. In this show, most of the characters are upper-middle class, so that the actors’ cosmetically worked-on faces fit well with the narrative’s entrepreneurial psychology, one that neoliberalism now imposes on the managerial class: work on yourself, develop yourself, make good choices, take charge of your life—especially in terms of services you can buy.

"In current television and popular culture, there is a significant division between connotative imagery, as in the photos above of actors and public figures, and the televisual narrativization of plastic surgery and other personal “makeovers.” On the one hand, we have that which is merely suggested. On the other, we have shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Biggest Loser, or What Not to Wear which depict how people, often lower middle class or working class, submit to regimens of authority dictated by experts in the fields of fashion, personal appearance, and physical culture. These are disciplinary regimes, as described by Michel Foucault; the shows’ participants are expected to internalize the experts’ norms. Both within the shows and in the eyes of viewers, all the minute aspects of the participants’ bodies are judged, evaluated, objectified, and constantly measured for deviation and conformity. Those on the makeover shows are rehabilitated through monitoring and regulation—both the authorities’ taste and their own internalization of the authorities’ norms."

—Julia Lesage, "Watching for Botox" (here).

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