Demon Lover Diary

Along with some comedic moments, I think the best moment in Joel DeMott's documentary about a schlock horror movie shoot in the 1970s Midwest, Demon Lover Diary, is when DeMott's voiceover narration matches with footage of the schlock director's children playing in the backyard.  As she muses over the irrationality of the enterprise (the director has faked a sick leave from work to make the movie, putting all of his finances into it, banking on the chance that the film will make it big on the Midwest circuit - Detroit, Lansing, Toledo, etc.), the kids are having a grand time playing with a big box, knocking it over, jumping in and out of it.  The asychronicity between sound and image (long take, unpretty childhood wistfulness) makes for a really rich but subtle comment on the crazy play (but - as adults - tortured, worried play) of trying to make commercial movies as amateurs ...

Cinephile Notes

Revisiting Citizen Kane recently (on 35mm!), I felt once again - and for the first time with this film - a tremendous freedom.  A sense of liberation can flood over you when, at a certain point, you are "over" a canonical text, I think.  But "canonical" is not quite the right word here, it's not precisely what I mean.  Perhaps my referent is better described as an object which bears some authority - real because imagined - over oneself. The dissipation of this particular kind of authoritarian aura all of the sudden makes the heavy light; that which has before shackled, now frees.  In recent years, and each for particular reasons, I have also had similarly liberating experiences with The Searchers and In the Mood for Love - films I first went into feeling the urge to love, films I wanted to love but for some reason couldn't, films by directors whose other works I cherished, and films whose sheer stature thus only made my failure seem more difficult ... films that took several re-viewings over the years to find peace with.  One leaves behind any idea of what one should like - and this "should" operates on a lot of different registers, some intensely personal, some purely social. 

Rare is the aficionado of "cinema art" who isn't also a certain kind of performer, enunciating taste in the proper way.  (But at the same time, rare too is the person who is aware of this performance - pointing it out - who isn't himself just a bad, reductive imitator of some ideas found in Bourdieu.)  A performer of good taste in cinema, for instance, will likely hail Citizen Kane but then usually take the slightest opportunity to point out that Welles' later work is even better, richer, or more fascinating.

I should repeat, for clarity's sake, that I am not referring strictly to the mere opinion that Welles' late work is great, but to the practiced enunciation upon proper cues to inform others about this opinion you hold.  I'm hardly suggesting that only "elitist film snobs" do this, either - in fact, anyone invested in film is going to do this in her own way.  It's a way for people who love films to connect, and to find other people who love films in compatible ways.  Some people are jerks about it, regardless of their brow height, whereas some people are really amiable, regardless of theirs.

How can we talk about the fact of this performative dimension of cinephilia without just flattening it into joke about bad faith and film snobbery?  In terms of scholarship and the field of film & media studies, which I'm aware is not where a large number of my readers reside (or have any sympathy for), I would say that I want to see the discussion of art cinema, and of "elite" cinephilia, given the same respectful and nuanced treatment that other subcultures and fan cultures have sometimes been given.  For while a love of austere art cinema & experimental work (Straub-Huillet, or Phil Solomon, or Bela Tarr) may have a certain claim to high status in its objecthood, this work neither confers much real status on devotees, if any, nor does it correspond to the taste cultures of a political economic ruling class.  Being highbrow, rigorous, or visibly "discriminating" in your tastes won't get you much at all in the way of dates, employment, respect, or party invitations.  In the academic world, 'art cinema' and its followers could be well-served by a good faith investigation by (gasp) cultural studies folks.  I think there are some indications of the trend already.

In any event.  Citizen Kane is so ubiquitously celebrated that it's almost a latent, potentially underappreciated film again ... not in general, but amongst the cognoscenti.  (It served as a whipping boy, for instance, for Joel David's wonderful Sight & Sound list.)  The temptation to attack, disrupt, subvert, or ignore "the canon" is sometimes so powerful that it gives greater structuring power to the canon than it might realize.  Kane stands in for all that is "yes, but..." about filmic greatness - "yes, it's great, but..."

The key, I suppose, is to find a way to respect what follows that but... while also remaining radically open to that which we are conditioned (by our own individual taste cultures) to respond to as stale.  It's in continually also interrogating our implicit and explicit distastes that our tastes will find some robustness ...

See Something

 















I.

Composition in depth has, for our a/v century at least, still a lot of murky areas.  In the 1980s in a paper on space in Renoir, Stephen Tifft proposed that the "earliest directors had simply photographed theatrical spectacles from a fixed, central position, as though the spectator had secured a good orchestra seat.  Chafing at the documentary indignity of such rootedness, some directors began to rebel against these limitations by making the shot the basic unit of film language, and exploiting editing to move from one shot to another, one visual perspective to another, thus allowing the spectator to enter into its narrative space with a flexibility and vividness unparalleled in the theatre."  The exhilarating possibilities of moving through space with the camera are commonly tied to a network of sumptuous directors and cinematographers.  Strange, though (... oh but perhaps not so strange, really ...) how the anti-illusionistic practices of modernism and space in cinema often emphasized a lack of shadows, a return to something creators and/or spectators thought of as surface, pure surface.  Think of the bold, big primary colors in Godard.  Isn't there an anecdote about Hitchcock regarding his fascination with the shadowless white walls in the backgrounds in some Antonioni?  Is shadow associated with depth and thus with illusion, and is this why the bright colors and hard lines of so much mid-to-late-century modernist cinema avoided such shadows whenever bourgeois space was to be dismantled?  What of Gorki's kingdom of shadows, where its shadows are only a pretender to the throne?


Perhaps the bourgeoisie owned the shadows as well as Enlightenment.  Only so much left for a Maoist to work with.  Perhaps the only real(ist) shadows are those of the strictly literal emulsion; no represented shadows count ... no lines on the faces of Humphrey Bogart or Chishu Ryu, no depths into which we can be so gauche as to pretend to enter. 


At the same time, if I'm truthful ... thank the gods for something like Grandrieux's Sombre.  Shadow is so important to the history of cinema that critics created a genre out of it (film noir), ex post facto, but I wonder somewhat idly if there has been even less work dedicated to truly exploring shadow and its possibilities than color.  (Even when people discuss composition in depth, and deep focus, the through line seems to be on designated clear spaces, lit spaces, perceptible spaces.)  The suggestibility of the obscure and the deliberately obscured is a wonderful sort of frontier ...


II. 

"Shadow, then, is in the first instance a local, relative deficiency in the quantity of light meeting a surface, and objective.  And in the second instance it is a local, relative variation in the quantity of light reflected from the surface to the eye.  There are three distinct kinds of deficiency, and they emerge clearly in a sixteenth-century diagram drawn after Leonardo da Vinci (fig. 2) ..."

"The role of shadow as an object of perception, then, is bound to be regarded sometimes through issues of good or bad: help or hindrance?  Or better, perhaps, since shadows are a fact, which properties carry information, which are artefacts of the visual act, which are stable and which fickle, which are used in perception and which are ignored - in fact, how to shadows work, not just in the physical but in our minds?  It is noticeable that answers have varied widely according to people's projects and historical epistemes."  (Quotes from the late Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment)

III.

Maybe we sometimes talk about high-key and low-key as though these phrases in themselves conveyed much of significance to ourselves & to other people.  What's a lexicon to convey the three kinds of shadow demonstrated by Leonardo, the shadow of the underside of the nose, the shadow of the upper lip (corresponding to coverage by the nose), the shadow of the angled feature as opposed to that which meets the light straight on? 

IV.

"25. In the cinema we can sometimes see the events in the film as if they lay behind the screen and it were transparent, rather like a pane of glass.  The glass would be taking the colour away from things and allowing only white, grey and black to come through.  (Here we are not doing physics, we are regarding white and black as colours just like green and red). - We might thus think that we are here imagining a pane of glass that could be called white and transparent.  And yet we are not tempted to call it that: so does the analogy with, e.g., a transparent green pane break down somewhere?"  (Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, trans. McAlister & Schättle).

V.

Things to continue to keep in mind: the extended (implied?) depth of the emulsion or the stock or the format / the depth of the profilmic space / the vast range of negotiations and indeterminacy to be found in shadow spaces.

Bad Object

Q: I don’t want to digress too much, but have you seen Mad Men?


A: The quick answer is, for the first time this Sunday. I’m not a television fan. Television doesn’t have a strong visual presence. I’ve only seen one episode, so I don’t want to pontificate on it, but I can immediately see the influence of Douglas Sirk, a filmmaker from the 1950s, in the color schemes. Usually television is pretty boring to look at. And this is definitely rather interesting.

(a recent Tom Gunning interview)

* * * 

How do we define a strong visual presence?  Is it a feature of the light projected through celluloid emulsion vs. that emitting from the cathode ray tube, LCD, or plasma screen?  It would seem like this would be a workable basis on which to differentiate between two different media, 'cinema' and 'television' (if we can even call them media, or consider them as categorically comparable types of media).  But that doesn't seem to be what Gunning gets at in his comment above, because he allows that Mad Men "is definitely rather interesting" to look at.  (It is quality television, art directed into submission and shot on a one camera setup.)  So it can't boil down to a question of technology.  Maybe it is practice?  Television, more concerned in its own technological genealogy with voice and sound than cinema necessarily is (due to the history of broadcasting and its ancestral ties to radio), has less impetus than film to produce a good picture on that tiny, low-res little screen it has.

Yet ... most audiences of yesterday and today seem to care little about pictorial composition, mise-en-scene, editing patterns, etc., in films themselves (in other words they are not connoisseurs of form).  Most of Hollywood's history, despite its domination of box offices much the world over, had only limited reason to attend to visual invention, richness, playfulness, structure, and so on in the way that cinephiles attend to such dimensions.  When the film industry, in contradistinction to cinema, tried some new things, some of these were indeed visual (like widescreen aspect ratios), but some were obviously not (e.g., experiments with smell).  And they were all, fundamentally, gimmicks, even if great films were sometimes made that used these gimmicks. 

But I'm not convinced that cinema has appreciably greater cause to produce what I'll shorthand as "visual wealth" than television does.  After all, when Gunning says that television is usually "pretty boring to look at," couldn't he apply the same standards & judgment to most films?  From the perspective of the connoisseur's eye, I would say, most films are definitely also "pretty boring to look at."  (Either that or we are to be consumed with the passion of photogenie, and presume that virtually all films are at least somewhat interesting to look at ... in which case, aren't television programs, too!?)  And let's please return to the question of comparing these two media - we should define what we might mean when we say "television" and "film."  Is television all that is sent out on the channels that reach our sets?  (So, it can include films, albeit in televisual/video form?)  Does "television" refer to fiction programming produced for exhibition on TV?  Does television refer to all programming produced on TV ... or for video formats?  Is it TV when it's mainly extra web content for a television show, downloaded to a smart phone and watched there?  Is "cinema" film, i.e., a film strip?  Is cinema the artful production of (audio)visual appearances of motion?  Is The Blair Witch Project cinema and Mad Men television, and do we know this because this is how they are primarily distributed or exhibited to us? 

I Love Lucy was shot on film, Michael Mann's recent stuff shot on video...

The Artist at Work

Tape

Bells Are Ringing

A film that deserves more discussion: Vincente Minnelli's some-kind-of-wonderful Bells Are Ringing (1960).  Part of a squeaky (but ever-so-slightly naughty), brightly colored pocket of late '50s/early '60s Hollywood (think of Doris Day in Pillow Talk or Please Don't Eat the Daisies), the theme is communication.  Telephones, answering services, urban anonymity and its talking cure ("Hello!"), code (Beethoven's 10th), name-dropping, typewriting, an entire host of ways to get through to someone end up contriving greater difficulties & subtleties in actually doing just that.  It's not an original topic, but it's handled with some spark here.  I love the moment when Judy Holliday dances the chacha - so as not to forget it - in her red dress before she meets her fella (Dean Martin) for a party, a fine & simple flourish between director and star.  The basement apartment that Susanswerphone calls home is a cousin to the apartment in My Sister Eileen ('55), if I recall. 

But what am I writing?  There's someone who already said things better ...

"Telephony suggests telepathy. When Ella goes to visit Jeff for the first time, it just so happens that he wants coffee and a sandwich to help him kick his alcohol habit, and it just so happens that she’s got both in her bag. A nice piece of womanly white-magic, and all rationally explained because it’s her own lunch, which she daren’t admit, partly because she’s pretending to be chic Melisande. Communication by feeding—the mother, the housewife— in a placidly unpointed antithesis to the swish blind-date dinner. To explain how she can anticipate Jeff’s wishes, Ella has to pretend to be telepathic and psychic, which is the ideal type of communication (indeed, frighteningly so). And telepathy finds its converse in—is it a duet, is it a pair of synchronized solos, and what’s the difference?—"Better than a dream," dreaming and telepathy being a natural pair of intrapsychic opposites."  (Raymond Durgnat, transcribed here.)

Video of the Day

Unlived-In

The most appallingly/appealingly artificial aspect of TLC's Sister-Wives isn't so much as the polished gooberism of the husband (more an image of a 'Hollywood polygamist' than Bill Paxton would ever be allowed to be), but the strangely antiseptic nature of the house in which this family "lives" ... mostly white walls, everything spare and strategically placed, a flimsy illusion of a family home ...

Tunnels

Has anyone ever written anything about the visual-spatial-narrative conventions of tunnels and doorways in sf spaceships? (Not just in spaceships - futuristic subterranean lairs and submarine vessels also work.) I'm thinking here, perhaps not completely accurately, of the Alien franchise, Event Horizon, Resident Evil, Sunshine, the rather good Pandorum (Christian Alvart, 2009), Leviathan, Supernova ... one's running from the villain/monster, trying desperately to beat the imminent closing of a portal, or trying desperately to close portals to cut off the v/m. The convention is about as rote as the fireball or explosion outrun by our heroes; I wonder though if there have been unsung developments or experiments in the form and substance of this particular kind of tunnel-portal chase ...

[Similar networks of tropes in these kinds of films - the mutated future of humanity in yesterday's lost ships; insanity and reckoning with the finitude of the cosmos (see also Contact). Also, the question of esoteric knowledge, e.g., a character knowing Latin in Event Horizon, and another decoding Russian in Leviathan.]

Gaga

In interviews here and abroad, I have constantly denounced America's fetish for small female noses, a phenomenon that may be fairly recent in origin. It seems to belong to the Betty Crocker period following World War II, when domesticity was a primary value and when ethnics wanted to assimilate and become just as bland as the ruling, Protestant country-club class.

Diana Vreeland, one of the great, stentorian dragon ladies of the century, had a granite profile and a will of steel. Who is a better role model for young women today -- Fashion Empress Vreeland or NOW's sanctimonious Patricia Ireland, with her blankly decorous, WASP features and breathy little treacly voice? Vreeland, with her soaring imagination and theatrical flair, was a survivor of those two splendid decades after the passage of suffrage when female power ran the gamut from Martha Graham to Joan Crawford.

While growing up, I was inundated with detestably perky, button-nosed blondes like Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee, who seemed like sticky, walking marshmallows. (As an adult, I learned to appreciate the talents of all three women.) Barbra Streisand's arrival on the scene in the early 1960s was revolutionary: That aggressive beak of a nose, which she refused to change, was the prow of the battleship of the New Woman, whose feisty spirit preceded the feminist organizations that are falsely credited with all the energy, aspirations and achievements of my generation.

My opinion is that a strong woman should have a strong nose. Look at Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Maria Callas, Joan Baez, Betty Friedan, Monica Vitti, Raquel Welch, Princess Diana, Sandra Bernhard, Niki Taylor. Now look at Meg Ryan -- no, don't! Thank God for Heroin Chic, after the Meg Ryan era of Saccharine Snippiness.

I'm concerned about young girls having nose jobs too early and getting stuck for life with unfixably juvenile features. Even Cher, who had a fabulous, haughty profile, succumbed to the social pressure and dully evened her nose out at midlife. Downtown Julie Brown is another fashion victim: She was very striking when first on MTV after emigrating from England but then immediately bobbed her nose. Now Courtney Love has done the same thing and reportedly has had to be dissuaded from a second operation -- the Michael Jackson Surgical Addiction Syndrome.

Actresses are very short-sighted when they over-reduce their noses to get cutesy, ingénue roles. Michele Lee and Connie Sellecca are good examples of handsome women whose forceful, ethnic features have matured dramatically but who are stuck with the teeny-bopper pug noses that won them early popularity. The great roles for adult actresses -- Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Strindberg's Miss Julie -- require strong, assertive noses.

As an Italian-American, my premises are usually Mediterranean. I've always loved the aquiline Roman nose of senators and generals, as well as the sharp Greek nose, extending evenly without a break from the brow, that one sees on ancient statues of the Olympian gods. It's interesting that you mention Gillian Anderson, since strangers often tell my partner, Alison Maddex, that she resembles Anderson's Scully. All the women I've been involved with in a major way have had strong noses; it seems to be one of my romantic motifs.

Until women in the television and film industry come to their senses and stop mutilating their noses, America will be stuck with this bunny-rabbit model of womanhood -- harmless, appealing and hopelessly fluffy. The Woman Who Would Be President knows better: Gov. Christine Todd Whitman may take that Duke of Wellington profile right into the Oval Office. (Paglia)

* * *














* * *

Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over… (Paglia)

* * *

Lady Gaga - who, I think, makes some wonderful pop songs - is "of her age" in a way that the poor provocateur Camille Paglia may not "get" inasmuch as Gaga's whole schtick involves the anticipation of their complex, contradictory, and perhaps overemphasized interpretations (as with reversible films). Aside from the best hooks in contemporary pop music that I know, outside of the New Pornographers & La Roux (not that I'm an expert or even a good pretender to such a thing), Gaga's music and her personality are interesting in that they are aware of the "think pieces" that are to have been written about her. It's not that she's not shallow, or still a mere product of the spectacle, but she's so in a way that deserves a certain amount of credit ...

Right to Left

From a Tiny Little Bird

Believe Your Eyes

"There has never been so much talk about 'the power of the image' since it has ceased to have any. The overwhelming majority of 'images' which have currency on television nowadays are less those which might possess any intrinsic strength than those which represent power and which 'work' for it as 'brand images' work for a company. It is strange that we have needed a war in order to re-discover that the image was also ever a lure (Lacan was interested in animal mimicry, in the eyelets on the peacock's tail and their grotesque manner of 'giving the eye'). A lure meant as a decoy, to divert attention and gain time. Advertising, for example, is less about inculcating selling reflexes than about indicating the power of paying a lot for a space with the sole purpose of no one else occupying it." (Serge Daney, from Cinema-in-Transit)

The old, "naive" realist-belief in an image, or of an image, still resides in the gray area where one isn't sure of what is being faked, or of what might happen: bills & coins flushed down the toilet in The Seventh Continent, footage of pets being (possibly) tortured, moments in which we cannot discern between an actor's emotions and a character's - not simply that we are unable to, but that there is even no hope of an abstract distinction. Fear in the eyes. This takes a certain liberality or magnificence on the part of the filmmaker; it is the artistic counterpart to advertising's own implicit indicating of "the power of paying a lot for a space."

The circus ring, and the caravan of trailers & tents, provide a set of metaphors for cinema to remark upon its own assemblage of attractions - bad films set in or around a circus can be unbearable, unless they're bizarrely, grotesquely fascinating (like with the Joan Crawford vehicle Berserk!); notable films of course like Lola Montes and I Clowns pop up from time to time; and then there's Rivette's 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup, which reserves its footage of in-the-ring performance itself for these dizzying, terrifying moments of uncertainty. (Plus, Sergio Castellito with a suitcase full of plates provides one of the bigger laughs I've had at the movies in weeks.) Rivette is the master of the slow burn, I think because he is also its most dedicated, humble student.

Vicious

"To transform oneself into a corpse, a martyr, or something formless and repellent is not a matter of expiating a collective evil but recalling its existence. These simulated remains do not aim to be hidden bodies (that would amount to making them all over again) but instead manifest as best they can the moral infection that propagates itself beginning with the moment of the Nazi death camps." (Brenez on Ferrara, p. 152)

In White Hunter Black Heart Clint Eastwood, who essentially plays John Huston, in a minor way tries to exorcise the demons or zombies of Nazism through a bit of black humor (see); again and again World War II, and the Holocaust, offer themselves or are offered up as the central pivot against which the cinema measures itself. Recently I took another look at a different postwar Huston - not The African Queen - but Key Largo, which is my favorite of the early Hustons by some margin. (Not that I have quite seen all of them.) A postwar ex-major without home or career finds his way down to the Florida Keys to see the widow of his old buddy & her invalid father-in-law. Their hotel is commandeered by Edward G. Robinson, whose villainous 1930s Hollywood legacy welcomes itself to the home of a certain stance of postwar realism (location shooting and/or its simulacrum, and relatively respectful/liberal "local color").

Heidegger, 1949: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same thing as the blockade and starvation of the countryside, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." (See also Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command.)

(Back) across 110th St ...

... down to the Bowery, and beyond.













And then:














If you compare early sleazy genre films by Ferrara to comparable projects, like the queasily-entertaining Vice Squad (dir. Gary Sherman, 1982), you may see where the differences between the good & the great inhere. Ferrara cuts to the root of an image, a sound, or a desire, like a notable poet is supposed to cut to the root of a sound or a word; his films are intriguing because they rise above being only symptomatic in a rich or sophisticated or enjoyable way. (Though in some contexts, in some conversations, I might well defend these latter kinds of films, too.) Ferrara takes us to a source, to the place where the stream might be redirected, even if only - for now - in our imaginations.

"I don't know why you do it, Walsh. You'll never change the streets." (Princess in Vice Squad)

Image of the Day

Tryin' to Make Ends Meet

(a) media culture places far too much emphasis on endorsement, as though all opinion were ultimately nothing but polemics, and in service of polemics.

(b) though there are certainly "divisive" films or filmmakers I'll "take a stand" on, only a thoughtless person would allow the received imposition of the property of "divisiveness" to force a public all-or-nothing stance on any and every purportedly divisive entity.

(c) which is not to say that contradictions and oppositions don't exist and are not sometimes of exceptional importance, naturally.

(d) as if one person's public stance, in more than a minuscule percentage of instances, has any bearing on anything of importance at all - outside, perhaps, that person's own sphere of acquaintance and intimacy, in which case, "public" isn't always the right word, is it?

(e) in Jackie Brown the face of Pam Grier is a beloved ghost, the haunting of a screen idol, but the film (and her image in it) is not a direct homage but, if anything, an indirect one - an echo, a detachment -

(f) because Jackie Brown (like much of Tarantino, who is not "just" an upgraded video store clerk, though that he is too) is a filmic translation or expression of a particular kind of genre fiction, a Leonard-Willeford realm of writing that is itself a take and a twist on older forms of pulp knowledge.

(g) a dimestore author-psychology observation, to be thrown out but not necessarily accepted: Tarantino likes leisurely long shots, holding the frame (like the final two shots of Jackie Brown) because he is constantly revisiting totemic, imaginary constellations of images and moods from his own experiential, audiovisual past; his work is a form of yearning, which is why title cards and musical accompaniment seem to elicit just as much as care & attention as, say, plot mechanics. If not more. The character of this yearning may be immature, underdeveloped, pointless, or any number of things wanting - and yet, a problem of film culture is that, I fear, some reader too snarkily intelligent for her own good may read that I have even ascribed so noble and counter-intuitive a property as that of yearning to a guy like Tarantino. Because one must "endorse" or "reject."

(h) in the current issue of CinemaScope, Olaf Möller summarizes shortcomings in the scholarship on German filmmaker Veit Harlan by insisting that, of course, not only were his allegedly "apolitical" melodramas hardly apolitical, but his greatest work is often absolutely also the worst, politically and ideologically.

(i) Serge Daney warned of the dogmatism of a question of film critical intervention, in one case, where "the aesthetic criterion and the political criterion are given equal status. We assume that 'if there is something missing on the formal level there must also be something missing on the political level.' We remind those inclined to forget it that 'forms are not neutral,' but this is just an excuse for not investigating their very real content, for not spelling out this content in political terms - we leave that to others." (from "The Critical Function," 1973-1974) Daney, in this piece, also points to the problematic importance of discerning, apparently, what is being said by a film, and how. But in trying to go to the roots to find the strongest and most powerfully effective answers, criticism may paralyze the critic, so that they are "bound to have nothing to say when called upon to make a concrete 'intervention' in respect of particular films."

(j) the abandonment of polemics is not even possible as far as I can speculate, but I do think that to subordinate all thought to polemics is the death of thought, and the death of culture.

(k) it's the small detail, like e.g., Irving Lerner, in whose two great late '50s Vince Edwards vehicles, Murder by Contract and City of Fear, we see some of the through-lines from real filmic "noir" to this later oblique-homage "pulp" almost imperceptibly ... accomplishing the latter by the accumulation of small offbeat details and characterizations, characters noted for their character-ness.

Quote of the Day

"Perhaps one of the last true shills in exploitation marketing, films like Blood Cult and Death Row Diner pulled the wool over many-a-renter’s eyes. Instead of an actual “movie,” take home viewers were scourged by 90 minute blasts of overly sleazy guts ‘n’ boobs, all filtered through the lenses of consumer quality camcorders and 3/4” tape. No-budget producers tapped into a goldmine when they realized that it was cheaper to finance their own productions than license already existing films. And why not? Since a renter couldn’t detect the filming method by its box art, it was too late once they returned home. The $2 had already been spent. Touché!" (Joseph A. Ziemba, Bleeding Skull; see also here.)

Young People

(Image h/t to Andy Rector's Kino Slang post on the film from a while back, in the comments section of which you can read him and Miguel Marías discuss Allan Dwan movies.)

Premised upon the most treacly New Deal propaganda you can imagine, Young People (1940) is a Shirley Temple movie with the superb talents of Jack Oakie and Charlotte Greenwood, playing her adopted parents. The trio is a stage family intent upon giving up the vaudeville life in order to raise Shirley "normally" in a classic American town. However, once the Ballantines get to their idyllic New England town, they quickly and obliviously decide they know what's best for everything, and their first night in - during the town meeting - they side with the town's dynamic "young people" contingent - against the mean, stingy, stodgy old farts who oppose progress. By "progress," the film means that the old folks oppose, essentially, a voluntary WPA-ish program to stimulate the economy in their town: industrialization, tourism, and so on. They oppose this because they are geezers and marms who don't like to have fun, which is really what they need to do in order to implement a more open sociopolitical program in their town, courtesy of a sub-quasi-Wilhelm Reichian solution. Meanwhile, the Ballantine family flips between being utterly charming (for us as viewers) and nosy, boorish 'accidental elitists' (to the old citizens of the community). The moral: Anyone who opposes the New Deal programs - although explicit references to partisan politics or policy in this film are fairly tame & vague - is, obviously, old at heart, blindly traditionalist, pessimistic, no fun, cruel, snobbish, and exceedingly petty.

Why is any of this the way it is?

OK, so the film is addressing children (in part), but why is the political component of the film also motivated by a logic as absolutely simplistic as the standard storyline logic of rebellious young kids vs. old codgers? Young People is utterly devoid of social criticism on even the most basic level: as a political movie, it seems to me, it is entirely a flimsy bit of propaganda for voting (thoughtlessly) in favor of the party which most loudly trumpets what it brings is Progress. Progress, of course, is imagined here solely as economic stimulation by way of government assistance and oversight. (That, and ensuring that the village elders give ample space to the twentysomethings, and also allow the kids of Shirley Temple's age to perform vaudeville routines and not just sappy choir numbers.) There's no such thing as race, class, or capitalism in this world; politics reduces to character flaws, and the way to solve problems is to barge through them - so long as Progress is on your side.

It is not as though Hollywood was incapable of making films that evinced the admittedly stereotyped - but not necessarily wrong, and in my eyes far more sympathetic - code of small towns and tough neighborhoods that you have to earn your place in the community over time, and work your way toward the respect of the citizenry. This is how organic communities work, how they develop and (yes) change - it's partly why John Ford's films are so richly realized, because he & his collaborators know something about how to sketch lively communities (families, towns, nations, all complex networks of interrelation between materiality & mythology). But Young People's political program makes Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman look like a model of both balanced portraiture and cutting criticism. Both objects work under the banner of triumphant progress, but the latter, at least, nods in the direction of slowly built community ties (Michaela Quinn has to get her tooth pulled - unnecessarily - in the first or second episode to earn the respect of the townsfolk), and also provides at least initial awareness of those differentiations of the social body such as class and race.

So again, I ask, why is any of this the way it is? Having done no research toward answering the question, I am still provoked by this movie to ask why, how, for whom it was really working. Did anyone buy its "message" in 1940? Or today?

If I'm hard on Young People here - a bonbon, a Shirley Temple movie, a sentimental musical comedy - it's primarily because it so nakedly portrays something I dislike about the industry and the system which produced it. However. It's also quite an impressive film in many ways. If you look at the camerawork from the opening stage routines here, for instance, you'll see some assured filmmaking. There's a scene where Jackie Oakie rouses Charlotte Greenwood out of bed under the ruse of their having to catch a train - but the five-second reaction shot of her in the bathroom, when she realizes it's a joke and that she's "home" for the first time in her adult life, is a wonderful bit of synergy between actor, director, and editor. Greenwood - what a delightful actress! I could watch her in a film a day for weeks on end, though I think I must have only seen her in five or fewer films at this point ...

An Addendum on Violence

To be taken up after my earlier quasi-defense of Apocalypto. Something occurred to me when I was just looking over On the Genealogy of Morals - specifically the second essay, section 7 (on pain). Of course one can reject Nietzsche's position, and one can reject Apocalypto, but to have a considered opinion for or against the violence in Apocalypto, one needs to address (directly or otherwise) Nietzsche's point about the historical dimension of pain, of the senselessness of suffering, and of the (alleged/conjectured) "cheerfulness" of a life where causing pain was seen as a kind of pleasure. I think that Apocalypto's world is one in which this is quite true, and implicit in the characterizations, cf. the pranks the villagers play upon one another even in the 'idyllic' prologue.

Having said that, of course, I am now more interested than I think I have actually ever been to eventually see The Passion of the Christ, which gives a new and potentially intriguing spin to this particular snuff-bondage passion play. Please note, particularly if you're new to this blog, that I am not endorsing Gibson here, and in fact I believe I am light years too far away from ever influencing anything about his life one way or another. I just think that the weirdos tend to be more valuable barometers & experimentalists than the vast majority of the mainstream folks.