Realism A

The detail. Above: sweat stains on the back of the policeman's shirt after he's just exited the car (in Quick Change, directed by Bill Murray and Howard Franklin, 1990). I would be highly surprised if a "detail" like this were ever allowed to make it into a movie like, say, The Dark Knight, even though gritty "details" - and the posturing that underscores such grit - are a cornerstone of the appeal of the contemporary Genre/A films.

The unremarked-upon sweat stain is the sort of detail that can anchor an image to reality; it might coax us (viewers) to project that reality, to begin or continue to wonder what it is, to hold in our heads a relation between the image & the world. The scenario may be ridiculous or fantastic, but there is a corporeal or sensuous link that remains which is erased by an image scrubbed too clean, where one can't imagine (or is not led to imagine) the feel of cloth upon the body, the humidity and odors of a hot city street, or the taste of a hot dog from a sidewalk vendor. It's the difference, to me, between visions of civilizational collapse as seen in Children of Men and Time of the Wolf: two critical darlings, the former being (in my eyes) a horrendously bad film, and the latter being a quite good one. Part of the difference is that Haneke's movie tries to imagine and think through the sensuous and emotional terrain of civilized people living through the crash, a day at a time. The characters in Children of Men are going through a theme park version of a crash, it seems to me. (More on this particular point in a forthcoming post.)

That these aspects of the world are often jettisoned from cinema is just a fact of its history, and of its continuing practice. The power to ignore all such things and yet still aspire to any sort of realism, a kind rhetorical access to reality, is one level at which cinema operates "ideologically."

Airbungler

Admittedly, I'm otherwise an easy mark for offbeat genre films that look like they're trying to do something interesting. I'll give M. Night Shyamalan plenty of room to stretch. I like, at least on some level, all of his films that I've seen, even the one that I think is still largely beyond redemption on most rational bases (The Lady in the Water). He has bad taste, true, but I don't even feel the urge to hold it against him. I do wonder though if he's reached the point where, between his vocal, loyal fans, and his snap-judgment detractors, there is no longer any room for constructive criticism.

I was the only person in the theater for The Last Airbender - it was a Monday, noon showing and I was killing time because my car was in the shop. So I can't say a sociological word about how it played to "the audience." But I'm curious if my experience seeing this film is how most people feel when they have seen the last few (heavily, heavily criticized) Shyamalan titles. And I do think that here Shyamalan has strayed from believing, himself, in the travails of his characters (thus conveying this conviction to the filmmaking) to assuming that the audience was already on board, so he wouldn't need to do any work at getting them on board. Maybe it's because this wasn't an original screenplay, and that Shyamalan was handling a franchise; I don't know. The film is oriented toward children, and it does presumably have some global market ... so one can almost overlook the simplistic dialogue. Yet ... this movie takes no risks! No risks in trying to show us (e.g.) the chemistry between the pony-tailed fellow and the Northern Water Princess ... yet, at the same time, Shyamalan apparently feels it is necessary to have characters introducing other characters in order to say things like, "The avatar has something he has to say to you." Honestly!? (Regarding belief and risks, see Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's letter to Abel Ferrara...)

I suspect that if one watched The Last Airbender with some Pink Floyd album (or two) substituting for the soundtrack, things would be far more bearable. Even then, the imagery itself is so ridiculous that I was reminded of something I had previously (and charitably) forgotten, the whitewashing of the cast, so that the three heroes are caucasian but the "tribes" they represent are suitably "ethnic." The mismatch is so obvious in the film itself that it's distracting. I'd be more willing to temporarily overlook "whitewashing" as just your everyday Hollywood racism if The Last Airbender didn't make most of its supporting characters and background players "ethnic." But this, and Shyamalan's on-the-record profession of love for vague concepts like 'Hinduism,' or 'Japan,' just makes this film even worse.

My personal bone to pick with a lot of commercial historical, sci-fi, or fantasy stories is that, in trying to imagine a very different world, the film (or whatever) in question almost inevitably makes a few broad-brush changes to our own world, and then sutures up the gaps by making characters behave in utterly recognizable (and often comfortingly stupid) ways. Vocal intonations (and vocabulary/phraseology), gestures, hairstyles, characters' morality and mores, it all seems like such trifling coin to throw in the big fountain of Imagination. What I'd give for a for more movies & miniseries that were actually invested in probing differences, in imagining differences. It speaks to another problem at the heart of realism, and while this post isn't quite about that, it does help further set the stage for more to come here at EL ...

Advert

The film done in the style of a lengthy advertisement (slick, sensuous, frequently under threat of becoming just vapid): after a while I've come to realize that I sometimes like this style, a hard fact to face for the part of me that revels in some other austere cinematic traditions & lineages. Nevertheless: Vittorio De Seta's Un uomo a metà, Tom Ford's A Single Man, strains of a few Pere Portabella films (not to mention a few by Godard and Antonioni) ... I remember the first time I watched Fallen Angels by Wong Kar-Wai (on VHS, shortly after I'd seen Chungking Express), and I failed to realize at first that I was watching the trailer for the film, which oddly ran before the feature on the videocassette ... disoriented by the weirdness of the "opening" of the film, I figured that this was what a more advanced cinema looked like.

The vulgarity of advertising might blind some of us to the fact that advertisements - by necessity - need to exercise a lot of skills necessary in the creation of art in order to effectively communicate. Advertisements that "aren't quite art" may often be soulless or what have you, but a lot of times they look & feel something like art because they have so much else in place - traditions, strategies, continuities, short cuts. When a film takes some of these aesthetics and mimics them (often echoing back through cinema what had been cinema originally a few decades before - echoes of perfume ads that echoed Resnais films) it may be tempting to overlook the style, say that it is merely shallow, not bother ourselves to see if it is, instead, both sumptuous/sensuous and efficient, condensed, intelligently abbreviated.

Which brings us to I Am Love / Io sono l'amore (Luca Guadagnino, 2009), about which I'm still working out my opinions. I liked it a great deal but after one viewing I can't tease apart the evidence as to whether it was simply a slick looking experiment, in the style of a fashionable commercial, that I "bought" ... or if it indeed the style looked slick but held multitudes. Was I duped or treated to a luxurious experience? This film seems simple, bare, austere, but also expensive, magnificent, haute. All as it was surely intended on the surface - but it also seems this way in terms of its symbols, its internal references. What hooked me with regard to this 'cool melodrama' is how subtly or obliquely it registers its dramatic lines. Its subject matter includes processes, manners, perceptions. Where does one stand, how loudly is one permitted to sigh or speak, how is a banquet pulled off (and not just from the receiving end), who does one comfort (and how) in the wake of a family tragedy - these gestures are handled, foregrounded, delicately as in a film by Shimizu, Ozu, or certain John Fords (all directors that are in other respects quite alien to I Am Love). And this is precisely why scenes that would seem to play as self-parody instead work in an almost primal way ... in another context, or filmed slightly differently, Tilda Swinton's Sanremo love scene (for instance) would, should induce howls of laughter. But I find it instead comforting and erotic; the scene where her character tells Antonio her childhood name ("Kitesh. Say it.") is heart-wrenching. Thus I'm tempted to say that if so much of cinema is in fact the result of industrialism and commercialism (the content-output of a ravenous machine), at least in a few cases the most brutally consumerist devices have nevertheless provided the cinema, or at least the privileged realm of the art cinema, with some rather beautiful effects ...

Cup 2

* Germany: the most impressive World Cup team of the past decade? Unfortunate, too, that they had their best 'placement' in 2002, when their squad at that World Cup was the most boring, the least impressive, and had the easiest route to the final (Paraguay/USA/Korea). I feel as though they put in more excellent performances in this World Cup than any other team I've seen in the last two. While Spain may have earned their semifinal victory, and I don't begrudge Spain their Cup, it hurts just a bit to see Germany go home trophyless again when they've found a style that is both stereotypically efficient and exciting, attacking football.

* I was very relieved this World Cup eventually became a somewhat less defensive affair - the Netherlands-Uruguay game was quite fun to watch, for instance. (As was Germany-Uruguay.) That's how games should be played! In fact Uruguay really were one of the class teams of the tournament, such defensive power paired with Suarez + Forlan proved formidable. I wonder how they'll fare in 2014, especially with Diego Forlan highly unlikely to play a major part.

* We had a plane to catch, and as a result we could not stay to see the last 15 minutes of extra time for the Spain-Netherlands final. Our cab driver kindly put on the staticky Cuban broadcast of the match, where I strained to make out what was happening as best I could. Did Spain, with one of the most fearsome attacking squads in recent years, really score so few goals in the competition, and did they really only come from just three players? (And all of whom, of course, will start the next football season at Barcelona.)

Realism (Overture)

I apologize for my absence, readers - matrimonial matters have kept me occupied! On our honeymoon, we went to Mexico where we inserted ourselves fully and unironically into the trappings of traditional tourism: a resort, guided tours, fruity cocktails, a couple hundred photographs.

At Chichen Itza, our (very good) tour guide at one point asked who has seen the movie Apocalypto. Someone in the front said, "Yeah, it's good!" The guide responded, "Well, as a movie, it's OK. As a documentary ... not so good." Whoever exactly mistook Apocalypto for a documentary remains uncertain. Perhaps a few people have. More pedantically and professionally, I wonder why people persist in assuming that documentary equals unalloyed, unimpeded truth. One might like to know that the company which provided this tour, on the bus ride back, showed us a ridiculous History Channel 'documentary' about the apocalyptic Mayan calendar.

As our guide went on to explain, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto made the Maya look "merely" bloodthirsty - and he, i.e. Gibson, didn't mention the culture's astronomy, mathematics, architecture, all of its other good points in the matter of high civilization. This complaint, I feel, is underscored by the idea that an Othered culture can be known and appreciated specifically and primarily for its cultural Highlights Reel, which is to be reflected microcosmically (we presume) in every fragment of that given Culture (TM). It is mandated that the entirety of a culture, and especially the entirety of its achievements that we find valuable, should visibly frame and underscore any fictional representation of this people. Thus the emergence - or relegation - of indigenous American people in Hollywood & Environs to so much stoic, environmentalist finger-wagging. Concern for what you can do for the Other masks a deeper desire towards what the Other can do for you. And the bourgeois liberal wishes to call this representational protocol 'realism.' Not the definition of all realism(s), but merely the conditions for one kind of realism. Hence, criticisms of Apocalypto are underscored by a concern that the film ("as a documentary") is not sufficiently realistic.

If you read a piece like Prof. Traci Ardren's for instance, you will find a few symptoms connected to this complaint. ("But in Apocalypto, no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities.") I do think that Ardren makes some good criticisms, and some of her larger questions which are skeptical towards Apocalypto (is it pornographic?, for instance) are indeed worth asking. But I'm going to use Ardren's short article as an touchstone for something else, a symptomatology of a certain kind of critique maybe. Two facts emerge which may not be immediately apparent.

First, it is intriguing how rarely critics of Apocalypto's lack of realism consider the possibility that the Maya could be done justice in fiction through any route but the obvious genuflection to 'Maya art, science, and architecture.' To do justice to a culture or civilization at all is, innit, to properly depict what we discern are its strengths, its achievements, and its values worth imitating or respecting. The prosocial liberal sees these as the knowledge and technology of the Maya elites. This liberal would not (want to) think of it in these terms, but it is a stance toward an other highly inflected by elitism. However, Apocalypto casts the Maya elite as Others even in its own diegesis; its approach to the Maya is from a lower class - it's part ode to the Jeffersonian yeoman, part appreciation of pagan-natural village life, part individualist idyll-turned-nightmare. I don't claim the film's stance is coherent; and it's certainly a composite of mythologies on Mel Gibson's part. But I am convinced that Apocalypto's ideology, if it can be said to have one, is not at all that of colonialist salvationism. It is, instead, much more like an agricultural romanticism.

The idea that what we see as precious or admirable in a culture could or should be quite different from what a particular character from that culture sees as such in a work of fiction does not always occur to us. (We can see something similar described in this post, which unpacks an incident in the Odyssey which may be mysterious if we do not consider layers of audience, reception, and intention.) And in the case of Apocalypto we have an actual world division, so-called "red state/blue state," grafted onto how we interpret the film based on where we want to see located (and elaborated) the achievements of the political elites.

For Gibson, and for admirers of Apocalypto, it is fitting that the Maya rulers are depicted as bloodthirsty tyrants because to our protagonists and their non-elite perspective, that's precisely what they are! In her piece, Ardren brings up the implications of a fiercely violent movie about the Maya when present-day Maya people face discrimination & worse. It's a valid point, and a much more important concern than simply any entertainment value Apocalypto may provide. But I think it is highly telling that Ardren should read the way the film depicts the elites - decadent, bloodthirsty, unstable, and very much not the heroes of the film - as the way it depicts the entirety of the Maya. Anyone on Gibson's wavelength would instead focus on Jaguar Paw and the villagers as good, likable, stable folk who are caught in a history larger than themselves and victimized by imperial rulers - first, the late rulers of their own ethnos, and then, white rulers from Europe. The prosocial liberal is inclined to see Apocalypto's qualities of tragedy as a condemnation of the Maya people en toto because the Ancient Maya = art, science, architecture, mathematics, astronomy. Passing over these achievements of high civilization, from this perspective, is tantamount to disavowal that they deserve the very title of civilization. But I don't think Gibson or his sympathizers see it this way. I think that Gibson locates the corruption of Maya (or any) civilization at the heart of the State - and any State that would subjugate its citizens in the way that we see depicted in this high-adrenalin narrative is the tragedy.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but the majority of the ancient Maya people don't seem to have had a very good idea of their culture's elite achievements - and if they did, would they have been compliant political subjects? My Chichen Itza tour guide seems to think (and I pretty much agree from my armchair position) that the Maya rulers used the masses' ignorance about mathematics and astronomy to their own advantage. So why would it make sense to have a film that takes place over a few days in the lives of Maya commoners, living outside the confines of a city, that foregrounds an entire millennium of elite achievement? (As opposed to the knowledge of plant and animal life, the rich & complex family structures, the sense of heroism that Apocalypto locates in its non-elite villagers. Apocalypto may still be sloppy, inaccurate, or mythopoetic in these respects, but it does celebrate them and grants them as worthy.) But this is where we can see the logical contradictions at the core of what we might call Putumayo liberalism.

One might say that Apocalypto goes through an awful lot of hard work, including the courting of "authenticity," to make a film that is simply an action-chase narrative with a muddled if sincere thematic framework. That's a spot-on criticism. It is a bit ridiculous for Mel Gibson to have meticulously made this in Yucatec Maya while boasting merely cavalier concern for, say, historical chronology and Mayan representational art. Additionally, though, I wonder if some of the invective thrown at Apocalypto (fair and otherwise) is, in part, spurred by the fact that Gibson - this antisemitic, trad Catholic troglodyte! - is encroaching upon the elite territory of authenticity, guarded dear by the functionaries and clerics of (Enlightenment, Protestant) American civilization. Yes, I wonder.

I said there were two things that emerge from the above complaint. The other has to do with authorship. Despite decades of modern & contemporary debate over authorship which, more workaday concerns of the authorship of fiction seems to proceed along the same old basic assumptions. Some people may roll their eyes over 'Genius of the Author' rhetoric, but I've yet to meet anyone in the world of film & culture writing or in humanities academia who I could actually say provides an example of how to practically get by without the author-function. Of course the question of authorship is historical and systemic, and my pointing out of the failure to surpass authorship despite theories of authorial death is not the accusation of any individual shortcoming, but rather the indication that our individual agency is minuscule contrasted with the webs in which we move socially. This should be obvious, but I want to be clear.

Yet ... sometimes the Author is a perfectly acceptable figure for those who are otherwise "over" authorship, as long as this author is being attacked rather than celebrated. Consider this - Apocalypto, when it has been criticized and attacked by academics, has been laid squarely at the feet of Mel Gibson. (In Ardren's piece, adjectives ascribed to all the other contributors to this film are glowing!) Many people have no problem allowing Gibson 'mastermind' status with this film, particularly if they're critiquing it as a dangerous or reactionary work, which gives credence, or at least consonance, to Foucault's argument that the concept of authorship arose in part from punitive origins. Who is to blame for inscribing this?

More on realism, and I hope in a less roundabout way, to follow. (If you want to read even longer Internet writings on film & realism, the gold standard is, of course, Andrew Grossman - one, two.)

Cup

* I wonder which big club will now sign South Africa's Tshabalala - who looks like a hard-working player, and whose goal against Mexico was a beaut.

* When I was younger I very much bought into 'official,' proselytizing US Soccer stances. These days, I don't necessarily care if soccer becomes more popular in the States (though if it does, sure, great) ... which means I'm bored by the ridiculous commentators that ESPN hires for each World Cup, who are surely instructed to cater to the soccer newbie, but seemingly not allowed to do so in any kind of a sophisticated or agreeable way. The commentary is sometimes worse than the vuvuzelas this year. At the other end, I am still endlessly annoyed by the constant "think pieces" (hah) that come around every four years where non-soccer-loving American blowhards decide they know what it takes to "solve the problem" of "Americans just not liking soccer." The World Cup makes me quite jingoistic every time the USMNT takes the pitch, but honestly, why the hell should anyone care if Americans en masse embrace the sport or not? As long as the matches are readily televised, I myself am fine - and if people have a problem with draws or the offside rule, well, big deal. The sport doesn't "need" to become more popular.

* Bad and inconsistent officiating, which is of course the rule rather than the exception for World Cups. I admit my bias is what has me harping on it, but any neutral observer will grant that the US got horribly treated by Coulibaly in the Slovenia game (both the disallowed goal and the mind-boggling yellow card on Findlay), and also didn't get any favors in the game today v Algeria (another legitimate goal disallowed, plus what looked to be another phantom handball yellow card - on Beasley, this time). Brazil's Luis Fabiano scores a beautiful goal but after having blatantly used his arm to control the ball (but the goal stands, no official notices the handball); Clint Dempsey is swiped hard in the face in the penalty box by the Algerian captain, but again no call; but poor Harry Kewell of Australia gets red carded (one of many harsh red cards in this tournament) for an unintentional handball against Ghana ... likewise Gourcuff's (FRA) and Klose's (GER) excessive sendings-off ...

* As my 'second team' in any international competition is always Germany, I'm glad they didn't end up having to play the US in the Round of 16. That would have been rough to watch, like '02. Some predictions, though, for the eliminations round - Uruguay to surprisingly advance to the semifinals. This is because they've shown themselves to be defensively organized and also deadly upfront (what with Forlan, Suarez, etc.), and should be able to defeat the hard-working, easy-to-like South Korea, and also bypass the winner of the USA/Ghana match. Uruguay will fall in the semis, however, I'm supposing, to either Italy, Netherlands, or Brazil. Probably Brazil. Smart money for the semifinal match-up on the other side of the bracket (I guess, without checking any bookmakers' odds) is Argentina-Spain, and I'd bet that Maradona's side go through to meet Brazil in the final, and that the final four places look like this: 1. Brazil, 2. Argentina, 3. Spain, 4. Uruguay.

* USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! (Actually, though it would be a series of big surprises, it's certainly not beyond the pale for them to edge past both Ghana and then Uruguay or Korea, and then to make the semifinal - that would not be a bad run, considering that once upon a time, US soccer optimistically planned on winning the World Cup by 2010.)

* I'll keep my fingers crossed for the Ivory Coast and New Zealand ... just because ...

P.S. My favorite new soccer site/blog, discovered a few weeks before the World Cup, is Zonal Marking, which in addition to all kinds of fascinating analyses and rundowns, has also gone on record to combat the thoughtless public wisdom that (a) Dunga's Brazil are a purely defensive squad lacking any kind of attacking prowess, beauty, or fun, and (b) that all African teams are "tactically naive" (which I think I heard again today on ESPN before the morning games).

Slow Down

... and speaking of 'slow cinema,' just to put my two cents in ... I have to admit that though I am a "fan" (or whatever) of this contemplative cinema adventure - and though I adore Kiarostami, Hong, Tarr, etc. - I do feel some empathy for people, like Steven Shaviro (or perhaps, I would extrapolate, also Olaf Moeller?), who get a little uncomfortable with the polarization of these taste (sub)cultures. Someone like Takashi Miike deserves his due, too! For I have also sat in on the contemplative films of authors I've loved, as with Tsai Ming-liang in Goodbye Dragon Inn, or Claire Denis with L'Intrus, and thought to myself: 'This doesn't seem rich, heady, risk-taking, or beautiful so much as it seems a bit stale, predictable, hitting only pre-approved notes.' I will go to the mat, anytime, for Tsai and Denis as terrific filmmakers; but if I am honest with myself & you there were also some of their films that seemed to be missteps precisely because they appeared to satisfy the conventions of a mold before anything else. This mold seemed to be the aesthetic/stylistic expression of a highly stratified structure of funding & distribution for an elite minority of audiences.* I mean to effect no posture of "anti-elitism" here, as though attacking the cinema of (e.g.) Carlos Reygadas somehow gave me political street cred. In fact I readily embrace a number of filmmakers who cater to this rarefied pocket of connoisseurs. But I think it is worth noting (again if necessary) that this hierarchy is not at all simply aesthetic or intellectual, that it is bound with actual money and coalesces with certain class positions. And therefore it is crucial to maintain the space in which one can speculate that, yes, these art films cater to an audience and to financial masters too ... if not always in the ways of the more vulgar entertainment industry. And so it is legitimate to suspect that sometimes these slow, contemplative festival films are "playing to their market" just as Twilight and Sex and the City 2 are.

One of the great things about (later) Abbas Kiarostami (whose films after Five I've still not yet seen, though I've seen virtually everything up until then) is just how mischievously he toys with these distinctions, consistently finding a middle line among the viewers who've championed him, and then creating a film that divides them again.

* It should go without saying, I hope, that I mean no disrespect to the many people whose tastes I do respect who like, say, L'Intrus and Goodbye Dragon Inn. I am willing to, sooner or later, go back to these movies and re-evaluate them, and would happily change my opinion if that meant I suddenly loved these particular art films that had initially disappointed me. I'm not trying to argue that any particular title is a bad film, only that one's cinephile card - or taste culture passport - should still be honored if one should be so déclassé as to "raise the question."

Diffuse Cinema

If you've seen the film, or don't care about the substantial spoilers, you can go here and here to read very thorough and clear blog essays about the myriad and wide-ranging implications of, and topics brought up by, Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009). Although, if you've seen the film, and you're a moderately attentive and thoughtful viewer, you don't need to really go anywhere to have anyone unpack the film for you. A clause from early in Kim Dot Dammit's review sums up what a lot of these two pieces are circling around: "the film manages to combine a whole mess of hot topics such as abortion, biotechnology, the reproductive industry, genetic research, cloning, big pharma’s role in late capitalism, maternity, sexuality/gender and so much more into one disturbingly effective film."

This kind of phrasing pops up commonly reviews & criticism, i.e., admiringly listing off the host of diverse elements that a film brings together or brings up. (See, e.g., the Spin review, Feb 2008, of British Sea Power's Do You Like Rock Music?, where the band "touches on the topics of Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr, the great skua seabird, Kevlar, and the flooding of an island in the River Thames.") This listing by the critical observer is always at least somewhat self-aware, because the point is to indicate range by indicating a number of particulars. But I wonder if this gesture can be read symptomatically, too, to say something about the products in question and their own self-awareness.

A while back I gave a conference paper on 'reversible' films, blockbuster cinema that seeks to accommodate politicized readings by accommodating even contradictory ideologies. On a textual level, there is no true interpretation to movies like The Lord of the Rings or The Matrix or even more ostensibly right- and left-wing 300 and V for Vendetta. These films have fluid, if not gaseous, rules for the construction of their allies, enemies, and causes. Their engineering as narrative packages is highly clever and streamlined. In a related way but on a more sophisticated level is another articulation of cinema, what we might call 'diffuse.' The difference - and of course I'm speaking impressionistically and in generalities, and any given film will offer particularities which trouble my categories - is that a reversible film fosters a political position (any number of positions), a spiritual forebear being something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, whereas the diffuse film knowingly revels in the messiness, in the feeling of impossibility of a clear political through-line. It goes into the cul-de-sac, it embraces the ethical, epistemological, sociopolitical clusterfuck. This isn't necessarily apolitical - cousins to this diffusion seem, to me, to be Roman Polanski as well as speculative fiction writer China Mieville (both figures dealing in genre fictions who have serious political intentions). But diffuse cinema, like Splice or District 9 (Neill Blomkamp) or some Arnaud Desplechin, seems to me to deliberately inspire such lists of diverse topical or thematic content as those highlighted above. When the film in question is considered effective, the iteration of such lists is meant to indicate that these nodes are mobilized in rich, weird, perhaps unpredicted or unpredictable, and sophisticated ways.

As a broader practice in audiovisual culture, like (say) "slow" cinema (see here), I think it'd be worth greater attention to this industrial-textual confluence as something which is still sometimes treated as a natural and unselfconscious happening at this moment in cinema/culture, and sometimes treated (perhaps more shrewdly) as a wave whose riders are aware of themselves ...

(P.S. also, some World Cup commentary forthcoming probably sometime this weekend ...)

Image of the Day

Video of the Day

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)

Image of the Day

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)

Image of the Day

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.