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

Budd

This scene had me in stitches:

Image of the Day

Omnipresence

"Kingdom of shadows," "phantom empire"—what could we get out of the suggestion in such terms that kinoland could be ruled? Obviously cinema is (among other things) a place or apparatus for fantasies of knowledge and control. Obviously, too, there are a wide range of fantasies, a lot of different kinds and objects of knowledge, modes and objects of control. To move across space, to unify time, to choose to reveal oneself only when one needs to (and even then, remain an enigma, like an Internet cookie that can't be deleted) ... this is one possibility.

"Acousmatic, specifics an old dictionary, "is said of a sound that is heard without its cause or source being seen." We can never praise Pierre Schaeffer enough for having unearthed this arcane word in the 1950s. He adopted it to designate a mode of listening that is commonplace today, systematized in the use of radio, telephone, and phonograph records. Of course, it existed long before any of these media, but for lack of a specific label, wasn't obviously identifiable, and surely was rarely conceived as such in experience. ...

"To understand what is at stake in this distinction [between visualised and acousmatic sound], let us go back to the original meaning of the word acousmatic. This was apparently the name assigned to a Pythagorean sect whose followers would listen to their Master speak behind a curtain, as the story goes, so that the sight of the speaker wouldn't distract them from the message. (In the same way, television makes it easy to be distracted from what a person on-screen is talking about; we might watch the way she furrows her eyebrows or fidgets with her hands; cameras lovingly emphasize such details.) This interdiction against looking, which transforms the Master, God, or Spirit into an acousmatic voice, permeates a great number of religious traditions, most notably Islam and Judaism. We find it also in the physical setup of Freudian analysis: the patient on the couch should not see the analyst, who does not look at him. And finally we find it in the cinema, where the voice of the acousmatic master who hides behind a door, a curtain or offscreen, is at play in some key films: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (the voice of the evil genius), Psycho (the mother's voice), The Magnificent Ambersons (the director's voice)."

(Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman, pp. 18-19)

Le testament ...

Dr. Cordelier's testament, an audio recording whose narration announces the final reel or two of Renoir's quite excellent Jekyll & Hyde telefilm (1959). Might reels have a certain significance? The film was shot according to television methods, with multiple cameras. Renoir conceived of this project as "amphibious." He came to French television here during a stage of post-WWII Europe where the marketplace was changing, and the industrial cinema was looking for more cost-effective means of reaching its audiences. Evoking, if not thematizing, a technological shift, Le testament du Docteur Cordelier expands the late 19th century recording principles (indexical traces) into an unsettling, explanatory acousmetre (the testament, voiceover, of the good Docteur). From the localized audio reel to the power of broadcasting, imagined as the privilege and corollary of omnipresence.

An episode of The Outer Limits, "O.B.I.T.," (1963), directed by cult favorite Gerd Oswald ... In the opening shot: the camera dollies over to a hand uncannily like that of M. Opale, the Mr. Hyde of Renoir's film.

The hand of the man behind O.B.I.T.

M. Opale

In both cases, the hair on the back of the hands suggests the enigma of these otherworldly humanoids: an otherworldliness whose fantastic origin be in outer space ("O.B.I.T.") or the body electrochemical (Stevenson/Renoir). But it's a charmingly corporeal, earthy kind of clue.

The secret of science, as depicted in Cordelier and "O.B.I.T," might as well be a religious or fantastical secret. And when its truth is revealed, unveiled, as it comes to be gradually over the course of both works, it presents the picture of knowledge without imparting it: we (and the other characters) do not really know how Cordelier conducted his experiments, or how the Outer Band Individuated Teletracer operates. It's beside the point. We've been brought face to face with a technological sublime in each case, one that has immense and terrifying ramifications for the way people interact with one another. A common feature to both storylines: the horrifying appeal of impunitive disguise.

Jeff Sconce, in Haunted Media, compares the O.B.I.T. to something reported in Life, 1964: the Tanner Electronic Survey Tabulator (T.E.S.T.), apparently a truck equipped with technology that infiltrates surrounding homes to see if the television sets are on, and what channel they're tuned in to. The power of surveillance, in the service of TV ratings!, plays upon all manner of paranoid and not-so-paranoid fears. But even more than the fantasies of surveilled victimhood, what about these images of omnipresent vision as outright manifestations of the role of victimizer?

The Scorpio Killer to Dirty Harry when he's making him run all over San Francisco with a yellow duffel bag: 'I'll be watching you. Not all the time ... but you you won't know where, or when.' It's a popular trope. Yes, yes, Bentham, Foucault, panopticons, all that ... yet what about the appeal of being the enforcer in the center of the panopticon, the fellow with the megaphone who can potentially see and know all around and yet not be seen? (And is this not also the appeal of the disguise about which nobody knows, and through which one can exercise one's maladjusted Hydelike fantasies?) It is commonplace to bring up Foucauldian riffs on governmentality, and the figure of the panopticon, as though one is constantly raging against this machine, against power. But I wonder if we read this fascination (with the problem, and with the turning of a minor point in Foucault's entire body of work into one of his calling-card "themes") as itself a symptom, or a fantasy. A repetitive denunciation under the terms of tu quoque.

When one looks at a character on the O.B.I.T. screen—it's a matter of honing on bioelectric signals—one sees a close-up of that figure as though on a television screen ... though their clothes transmit across space to the screen (for reasons of television decency), all other props do not. A woman smokes a cigarette that does not show up on the screen; a man reads an invisible newspaper. These kinds of limitations serve as trace elements of a reality principle which strengthens the fantasy. It's a trope in cinematic depictions of invisibility: throw paint, slime, or flour on the invisible figure, and its outline will be revealed: the Achilles heel of the sheer power of invisibility. I think we would be right to recognize, in intellectual fascination with the panopticon a certain attraction to its sadistic powers—and, further, the possibility of masochistic contours to kino-aided fantasies of being, seeing all, and imparting this information to our voyeuristic victims as we see fit. (Even when caught, Cordelier and O.B.I.T.-villain Byron Lomax seem powerful.) Something or somebody is always implicitly presumed to watch us watching, and a sign of our limitation even in sensory omnipotence, even in our spatiotemporal privileges, is the boundary of a certain pleasure range.

(This principle that one must be unclothed for invisibility to truly work, does set up the invisibility joke that has gotten me to laugh the hardest: an episode of South Park where Cartman tiptoes naked across a stage in front of the whole town, convinced he's an unseen ninja.)

I believe Gerd Oswald fled Germany in the late 1930s but was younger than Fritz Lang or several of the other Germanic émigrés of the time, and did not start directing films until the mid-1950s. He directed more than a few Outer Limits episodes, and Conrad Hall was the cinematographer on this episode and over a dozen others—working also with the directorial likes of John Brahm and Byron Haskin. "O.B.I.T.," so starkly designed, a rich mine for the inventive poverty (or simply uncertainty?) that marked various audiovisual practices whenever they were being pioneered. Poverty Row, television studios. There are shortcuts borne of resourcefulness and there are shortcuts borne of cynicism; for quite a long time cinephiles have presumed the latter cynicism to pervade all but a few premium-channel exceptions of television (without even looking, really looking, the kind of generous looking studious cinephiles might give to films maudits). Thus TV is the bad object, the snotnosed younger sibling of cinema. But Renoir and Rossellini didn't think so. They (and not just they, not just "slumming" greats from cinema) helped to explore a continent whose riches are even more sketchily, unsatisfyingly mapped out than that of the celluloid cinema.

Outer Band Individuated Teletracer. The acronym suggests death, which is of course what cinema either tries to escape or fantasizes about escaping. Or so it's been said.

Pawns

"[T]heories are only made to die in the war of time. Lilke military units, they must be sent into battle at the right moment; and whatever their merits or insufficiencies, they can only be used if they are on hand when they're needed. They have to be replaced because they are constantly being rendered obsolete—by their decisive victories even more than by their partial defeats. Moreover, no vital eras were ever engendered by a theory; they began with a game, or a conflict, or a journey. What Jomini said of war can also be said of revolution: "Far from being an exact or dogmatic science, it is an art subject to a few general principles, and even more than that, an impassioned drama."

"What passions do we have, and where have they led us? Most people, most of the time, have such a tendency to follow ingrained routines that even when they propose to revolutionize life from top to bottom, to make a clean slate and change everything, they nevertheless so no contradiction in following the course of studies accessible to them and then taking up one or another paid position at their level of competence (or even a little above it). This is why those who impart to us their thoughts about revolutions usually refrain from letting us know how they have actually lived." (Guy Debord, In Girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.)

Shimizu

It can be fantastic when you're watching a profoundly refined, gentle, light film about a Japanese resort and then, pow, you're hit with an image—something seemingly effortless, but powerful, like blind masseurs crossing a short bridge, or a woman climbing forty stairs up a woodland hill. Counterpoint to these arresting images and moments, these perfectly achieved layers of tone, slowly, you realize something of your own limits as the nuances and dynamism of the film's gaze upon society become clearer, as well.

(The Masseurs and a Woman, 1938; Ornamental Hairpin, 1941.)

Continuing ...

"In France, the cinema emerged as a massive and collective training for death.—

{"To preserve, artificially, [the] bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life." (Bazin, "Ontology")}

—The scientific program of the Station Physiologique was to investigate highly practical matters: to find out the maximum weight a man could support, the maximum length a man could walk, and the "best," i.e., the most economical, way to put a foot on the ground to move forward. Here "man" precisely means "soldier," and indeed all of Marey's actors were on loan from the French army. This also explains why the first slow-motion films made by Lucien Bull are visual studies of the ballistics of bullets, shells, and human bones exploding. These visually sublime films, made mainly between 1903 and 1912, between a war lost and another largely conducted for revenge, are the first real action films.

"In France, the invention of cinema as a technique for de-composing movement is clearly inscribed in a "history of the social control of the body," as Marta Braun, following Michel Foucault, has written so well. This is an almost unknown phenomenon that has not yet been thought through in terms of original sin, but which constitutes, however, a kind of original unconscious repression that contemporary experimental cinema is now beginning to question." (Nicole Brenez, "The Secrets of Movement")

Deslaw/Gance

Space & Time

The impulse to break down (so as to better, more rationally understand something) is maybe rooted in a highly irrational fantasy—a fantasy of control, even?—whereby time & space are subject to one's magisterial whims. To satisfy the demands of (mere) conjecture, old spacetime must subject itself to manipulation by one of its own subjects ... lèse majesté on the level of physics, a political problem easily extrapolated from (or echoed by) form.

I. A problem in the history of cinema: who can lay claim to this majesty? ... I feel that Nicole Brenez uses the word, "magisterial," as a common adjective.)

II. Another problem in the history of cinema: who can lay claim to the authority of a massed vision?

Image of the Day

32 Line

Year's End

Best 20th century relics I saw this year? Before all else, A-number-one, The Best of Ernie Kovacs (2-disc DVD), and then such treasures as Senso (Visconti, '54), Beware of a Holy Whore (Fassbinder, '72), Talking to Strangers (Tregenza, '87), Metropolitan (Stillman, '90), Le Cri du hibou (Chabrol, '87), Berlin Horse (Le Grice, '70), Das Kino und der Tod (Bitomsky, '88), Treasure Island (Ruiz, '85), Dirty (Dwoskin, '65), Sur un air de Charleston (Renoir, '27), The Phenix City Story (Karlson, '55), and various others.

Some honorable mentions for favorites from the Aughts that I only caught up with this past year: Eros (2004, Antonioni’s segment most of all, but Wong’s is a strong honorable mention; Soderbergh’s is the dud in the bunch but, at least, cute), Histoire de Marie et Julien (heartbreaking, no?), Triple Agent (another beaut from a New Wave master I only, sheepishly, just saw recently), Cantico das Criaturas (Miguel Gomes, 2006), and perhaps also Young Adam, which had the virtue of both seeming inevitable, neat, elegant and being completely unpredictable, meandering, organic.

I don't know if I saw a great 2009 film, but that's largely because I saw not-that-many films. If one's counting Two Lovers then I'd argue there was at least one masterpiece released commercially in US theaters this past year. (Assayas maybe has a claim as well...) The most sublimely idiotic 2009 release I saw was Law Abiding Citizen. Again, though, I saw relatively few new films, as usual.

Below: images from my '09 viewing. Some are reminders of impressive films or good scenes; some are striking images; some just indicate the workaday aspects of watching lots and lots of a/v material ...

Quote of the Day

The endless stream of detailed studies filing past the eye, unread and undesired, sometimes gives one the longing to hold a diatribe on the limits of what is worth knowing. But it is only one's own feeling of not being able to master the whole world of history that inspires such annoyance. The frontiers are not in the material itself, but in the way it is used. The most parochial historian with a small group from whom his theme constitutes a vital question forms a full-fledged historical cult. Outside that small group his subject evokes only a very weak interest, if any. With a better treatment of his minor question the frontiers of its significance will expand to a broader circle of interested persons. On the other hand, an all too detailed treatment of a "generally important" subject can easily kill the question's significance for most people.

—Johan Huizinga, "The Task of Cultural History"

Recently Seen

I.

The International is one of those vaguely inter-multi-transnational Hollywood affairs that trafficks in crossed borders, easy access, and cheaply suggested local color disguised as cosmopolitanism. Like Babel (which I still haven't brought myself to watch all of), Syriana, Michael Clayton, or The Interpreter, it's this weird mush that purports to be a bit smarter about The System than other Hollywood films. (I don't want to knock those films by grouping them together: the ones with Clooney have merit, perhaps Clayton particularly. More than just particularly if your name is Sallitt.) But virtually every character in this film, The International, is an absolute idiot. What is offensive about feature films that expose a vast system of corruption, violence, and intrigue is that they so frequently throw in successful mid-career positions characters who somehow have made a fine go of it, professionally, without ever having learned the facts of life about how their institutions work ... all the while retaining their commitment to 'truth,' 'justice,' etc. And the films try to reap a great deal of their pleasure from the extended frustrations of this Crazy Woild where such ideals matter not. (Again, Michael Clayton is something apart here, and if I recall, Syriana does boast that fun scene where the lawyer throws a tantrum and explains that "corruption is why we win!") One of the merits of The International is outlined by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: "The International is made by people who believe they know how the world works. The end credits sequence, the most essential in recent memory (and this is at a time when the end credits have taken on the role of "exit music"), confirms this: we see the events of the film unfold as they would in newspapers -- just the sort of stuff that would get a paragraph or two in the business pages of a major daily."

II.

Taken, which I first saw a while back, has been playing a lot lately on HBO/Encore (part of the cable package that comes with our apartment, an appreciated component of the rent when Curb Your Enthusiasm comes on). Literally, it seems that one out of every 2-3 times I channel surf, Taken is playing. It was a big hit for not much money, and an English-language "Europudding" movie. Have you seen it? It's gloriously bad, but rewarding inasmuch as it's a well-oiled machine of a revenge narrative. (And I cherish good payback narratives.) The key is to make Liam Neeson an absolute dolt ... except when it comes to his job, in which case he's both a genius and blessed with good fortune and loads of free time. He tries to rescue his sweetly innocent spoiled brat of a daughter before the window closes (correct down to the last minute) before she's "lost" forever. First it's indicated that her being lost is literal, that authorities won't be able to track her down, and she'll be in a limbo of Europe's floating world of white slavery. (Extreme, but...) As the plot moves on, however, everything becomes a race against time to prevent her defloration at the hands of a slimy, shady underworld kingpin. Where The International strives to be "smart" (smart like the readers of USA Today), Taken is satisfied with being merely functional.

Hypothesis:

One frequent difference between prestige films and genre films today is that the former put the force of their aesthetic weight behind the establishing shots, the sweeping vistas, the longer takes, the décor. The latter work with the cut because they rarely have a budget, or an imagination behind the camera, to do something really interesting with sets, props, and people. Consider the Guggenheim shootout in The International, which is not about form or even feeling, but about the imagined presence of a gunfight in this place (just like Istanbul, Milan, and so on). While Taken, too, acts as a bit of a tourist brochure, its "good parts"—the parts I nudge my fiancée to look up for when she's around and I'm channel surfing—are about swift cutting, the kinetic visceral satisfaction imparted by a swift motion, a thud on the soundtrack, the utility of a series of quickly timed cuts.

III:

James Cameron isn't the King of the World so much as the King of the Bad Middlebrow Sublime. And I, occasional acolyte of Ado Kyrou, do try to look for the sublimity in "bad" films. Cameron indeed has the makings of a respectable genre artist at work in the industry: just imagine if the man behind The Terminator had been in the studios in 1951. Unfortunately he exists in the blockbuster age, which gathers him into the spotlight and then celebrates him for a lot of the things that are both quintessentially "him" (as powerful author-figure) and monumentally stupid. (He's not permitted, or at least not encouraged, to be a termite.) Aesthetically, Cameron hits his highest points, and they're only minor, when he's working on a modest scale or he doesn't take his something too seriously. Avatar takes itself very seriously, but it's also such a brazenly shameless Frankenstein monster of 10 or 20 other movies (Starship Troopers, FernGully, Cameron's own Aliens, various Miyazakis, Dances with Wolves, et cetera) that I kind of enjoyed it anyway. It's a bit of an inversion from Romero's masterpiece Knightriders ('81), which is a ludicrous concept played so seriously that a certain beauty of the images and purity of (il)logic emerge. Avatar is so ridiculous, but so emphatically, colorfully so (and well-composed as 3D; as an exercise in space I preferred to it Coraline), that the completely pointless action-adventure hippie "theme" doesn't necessarily impinge on the purely kinetic Epcot aspect of the spectacle.

I'm tempted to locate a copy of Vachel Lindsay which, scandalously, I don't own, to continue here ...

Image of the Day

Never Hurt

Image of the Day

I have found a photograph that gives me a new goal in life. This is something that I want to achieve when I'm an old man with a beard. (It's Edward Gorey.)

Formulas

Margin Notes on Culture

Some say that the profound appreciation of beauty is one of the only true good things we ever experience in life and that, fleeting but real, it makes life otherwise bearable. This seems a workable maxim, insofar as who would contest that taste is important to those who say it is important? One should not spend too much time worrying about proper taste, however. This is one of the problems with "seriousness" and its stranglehold upon culture (kulchur?). Lightness, leisure, unstrained, ideally—should anyone doubt that there is a problem when we have to work very hard, harder than anything else, to attain "culture" ... and we bear the visible marks of our hard work, on top of that? Funnily enough is in bad taste to feel more than mild or passing anxiety about "good taste." The anxiety may be a necessary part of the learning process but one must work to neutralize it, rise above it, in order to actually live well, and to appreciate beauty most appropriately. (Now the question arises as to what appreciation of beauty is "most appropriate" ...)

I'll Show You What You Are

Image of the Day

The Art of Persuasion

Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960): a film about statecraft as the articulation of bureaucracy, a matter of public relations and, once we get down to it, persuasion. Lippmann-like technocracy comes up against the mess of implementation. It's an interesting film, to me, for its topic alone; but the treatment, too, is interesting. The surveilled lands, the problem of looking out, the space of a river island and visibility on the hill, amidst corn and weed ...

Image of the Day

Animal Love

One of the oddest eddies of State Fair (Henry King, 1933) is a passage where Will Rogers' giant pig Blue Boy locks eyes with a prize sow, camera lingering in medium close-up on presumably aroused swine.

VHS Decay

From the ending of Decision at Sundown (Budd Boetticher, 1957)