Sunday, May 29, 2011
Nail Clippers
It's probably best to preface any pithy commentary on Jean-Claude Carrière's The Nail Clippers with a link to David Cairns' own pitch-perfect (and pithy) write-up on the same, a few years back. What I like about this film, in addition to the obvious pleasures of its Phantom of Liberty-style, vignette surrealism, is the spareness of space - the soundtrack picking up the emptiness behind a closet door or an empty drawer.
Both Sides Now
“Hawks' films have shown a remarkable consistency (which is also a tedious monotony) throughout his long career, with the paradoxical result that though his films are full of American cliché they are also identifiable as the work of an auteur. He has all the insidious convenience of typicality; his individuality is in his flawless typicality. In his perfection, there is, undoubtedly, an authentic sophistication – if that implies that he has made decisions about the importance of human moods and meanings. Yet, if sophistication means humanity, variety and subtlety, then his films are generally simpler and more facile than their nearest comparisons. Thus his Scarface is simpler than Wellman's Public Enemy, his A Girl in Every Port is a sardonic counterpoint to Tay Garnett's Her Man, his 'satires' are innocuous compared to Wellman's A Star Is Born, his Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is eclipsed by Wilder's Some Like It Hot. But if 'sophistication' means a sardonic attitude to humanity, a deadpan humour which, under the pretext of toughly controlling emotion, also all but denies it, then the very limitations of his films enable these tensions to emerge more sharply.” (Durgnat, Films & Feelings, p. 82)
Monday, May 16, 2011
Recently Seen
The Shadow Box (Paul Newman, 1980) - The videotape material seems a little undercooked, simply "there," when it could have been developed into something with more thematic/aesthetic resonance, à la Egoyan. But an intriguing enough effort, because it tries to do a lot with a little - noticeably finite actors and sets, a little stagebound, but it looks like someone was at least paying attention to the colors of props and costumes, for example. (Thanks to M. for supplying me with a copy a few years back ...)
Blues in the Night (Anatole Litvak, 1941) - Depression-era bonhomie along with a pair of shots that encapsulate an entire century of white commercial popularization of black music in America.
From Paris with Love (Pierre Morel, 2010) - These days Travolta, like Jimmy Fallon, needs roles that allow one to laugh at him in order to stay bearable onscreen. From there, a film that uses him well will build off of the humor of the premise itself, like From Paris with Love does - making Travolta a brash hick with a scarf way too fashionable for his station. The film, like Taken, has a million things wrong with it ... but the EuropaCorp formula is depressingly efficient at hitting certain pleasure buttons. I cannot lie. Still, as much as I love the Transporter movies (and District B13) I wonder if the EuropaCorp stable has an artiste, making masterpieces - like MilkyWay has main man Johnnie To producing superb film after superb film (whether modest or grand in scale). Luc Besson, whose work I do find fairly enjoyable and somewhat interesting, doesn't cut it by comparison. Anyone else? I'm all ears since I've basically mentioned at least half of the EuropaCorp films I've even seen ...
Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) - My ambiguous feelings toward this film can, in many ways, be summed up in how the cinematography captures the actors' blemishes and imperfections. I appreciate the impulse to bare the body - not in terms of nudity, but rather as a matter of the body as a "machine" that excretes, sweats, wrinkles, etc. But the idea seems to go nowhere; it's not motivated by aesthetics, nor politics (god forbid an amalgam of both). Really this just summarizes my disappointment with the vast majority of the whole Apatow school of comedy. It's not that I don't value the abstract goals - "deep" gross-out comedy - it's that Apatow (whether he's a writer, director, or producer) seems to mostly get behind projects that just pale in comparison to the Real Thing ...
The Harvest (David Marconi, 1992) - I saw this mentioned by a facebook friend a while back (h/t NDC), and out of curiosity I checked it out. The 1990s were a really rich time for a particular type of cinema that almost nobody talks about - low-budget films that may be "independent" or "genre" or a little of both, that may have enjoyed a stronger life on cable than in theaters. The qualities of The Harvest include its slightly ingenious plot construction, which is intelligent - there's more New Rose Hotel here (inviting the mindfuck, thematizing it, developing it) than there is Vanilla Sky (taming it, killing it, burying and disavowing it).
Blues in the Night (Anatole Litvak, 1941) - Depression-era bonhomie along with a pair of shots that encapsulate an entire century of white commercial popularization of black music in America.
From Paris with Love (Pierre Morel, 2010) - These days Travolta, like Jimmy Fallon, needs roles that allow one to laugh at him in order to stay bearable onscreen. From there, a film that uses him well will build off of the humor of the premise itself, like From Paris with Love does - making Travolta a brash hick with a scarf way too fashionable for his station. The film, like Taken, has a million things wrong with it ... but the EuropaCorp formula is depressingly efficient at hitting certain pleasure buttons. I cannot lie. Still, as much as I love the Transporter movies (and District B13) I wonder if the EuropaCorp stable has an artiste, making masterpieces - like MilkyWay has main man Johnnie To producing superb film after superb film (whether modest or grand in scale). Luc Besson, whose work I do find fairly enjoyable and somewhat interesting, doesn't cut it by comparison. Anyone else? I'm all ears since I've basically mentioned at least half of the EuropaCorp films I've even seen ...
Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) - My ambiguous feelings toward this film can, in many ways, be summed up in how the cinematography captures the actors' blemishes and imperfections. I appreciate the impulse to bare the body - not in terms of nudity, but rather as a matter of the body as a "machine" that excretes, sweats, wrinkles, etc. But the idea seems to go nowhere; it's not motivated by aesthetics, nor politics (god forbid an amalgam of both). Really this just summarizes my disappointment with the vast majority of the whole Apatow school of comedy. It's not that I don't value the abstract goals - "deep" gross-out comedy - it's that Apatow (whether he's a writer, director, or producer) seems to mostly get behind projects that just pale in comparison to the Real Thing ...
The Harvest (David Marconi, 1992) - I saw this mentioned by a facebook friend a while back (h/t NDC), and out of curiosity I checked it out. The 1990s were a really rich time for a particular type of cinema that almost nobody talks about - low-budget films that may be "independent" or "genre" or a little of both, that may have enjoyed a stronger life on cable than in theaters. The qualities of The Harvest include its slightly ingenious plot construction, which is intelligent - there's more New Rose Hotel here (inviting the mindfuck, thematizing it, developing it) than there is Vanilla Sky (taming it, killing it, burying and disavowing it).
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
"I Buy Forever"
I took another look at the great film Docteur Chance (F.J. Ossang, 1997) the other day, for the first time in a few years. This time I felt the urge to read it - very faintly - as an allegory of capitalism. Here: the re-emergence of certain techniques of 1920s French avant-narrative, filtered through punk, and emplotted within a story about living with copious resources ... all on the precipice of its own destruction. There's even a scene where Angstel goes to the docks, the substrate, the big boxes (yes, those big boxes Noel Burch and Allan Sekula made their movie about, which I've yet to see). "No future," like the Sex Pistols say.
Cheers.
Cheers.
Friday, May 06, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
Railway Journey
"the limitations of the camera itself are also used innovatively, Martin is using a hi-8 consumer camera that has a built in auto-iris, the camera struggles to expose high contrast images, between strong highlights et deep shadows causing the iris to open et close continuously. Martin uses this restriction creatively, he renders the pulsing dilations et contractions of the iris as a rhythm, a heartbeat, but it also has a blinking quality, like a sleepy eye, slowly opening et closing, the intervals getting longer, slower, heavier, before finally remaining closed. ... Martin significantly rotates his continually moving/train-tracking images, reorienting the horizontal nature of the landscape/horizon so that it becomes vertical. in doing so he makes the images flow upwards, as if they are streaming out of a film projector." (m.d'd!) (apologies for inconsistent coloration in this quote - a blogger bug, I think)
"The nineteenth century's preoccupation with the conquest and mastery of space and time had found its most general expression in the concept of circulation,which was central to the scientistic social notions of the epoch." (Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey)
"Responding to the journal’s publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s newly published photographic motion studies, Marey writes: “I was dreaming of a kind of photographic gun, seizing and portraying the bird in an attitude, or, better still, a series of attitudes, displaying the successive different motions of the wings…” The technique Marey has in mind, of course, is the “proto-cinematic” technique he would come to call chronophotography: the depiction of movement in successive instantaneous photographs. What he was dreaming of amounts to the ability to shoot a bird, not to kill it but to capture its living, vision-confounding motion and convert it into legible, fixed image sequences. The passing into obsolescence of older meanings of “flicker” thus marks a contemporaneous shift in the way movement and time could be viewed. Since the bird’s incomprehensible flying movements have become reducible to a number of arrested instants, its body ceases to move. Once it had been seized over and over, cinema proved it could bring the bird back to life, so to speak, by spinning the image sequence back into motion." (René Thoreau Bruckner, in a brilliant essay)
"There are good reasons to use transportation as a foil to our symbolic model of communication. For most of human history, any definition of communication that separates symbolic action from movement is nothing more than an anachronism. Writers interested in the history of the idea of communication have often noted the associational connections between transportation and communication that held sway until late in the nineteenth century. As both [James] Carey and John Durham Peters point out, in previous moments, communication meant - among other things - transportation, movement, connection, and linkage. "Steam communication" was travel by train, and a door could form a "communication" between a house and the outdoors. At some point in the nineteenth century, the words "intercourse" and "communication" also traded connotation with one another. ... Even our central terms for symbolic action gesture toward a concept of communication as a subspecies of movement. "Metaphor" comes from the Greek for "to transfer" or "to carry." "The word metaphoros ... is written on all the moving vans in Greece," writes Bruno Latour." (Jonathan Sterne)
Raya Martin's short film Track Projections intrigues because it draws out a rhetorical connection to film - and to filmed time/space - even while it was shot on video. The bulk of the film consists of sideways "tracking shots" from a train window, and their abstract, running verticality recalls a Brakhage. (In the more pictorially recognizable passages, it's like early Brakhage, but at times it resembles the later hand-painted works. But I've all ready spent too much time comparing this film to Brakhage.) The blinking & flickering, which the first author quoted above has noted, suggests the effect of a celluloid flicker though we may not see it projected on film.
This is not to say that Track Projections masquerades as a film or that it erases the distinctions between film and video technology - instead it's a feature of the film's rhetoric, it gestures toward film, and to a whole technology of segmented, standardized movement, celluloid strips & train tracks, and not just the "illusion" of photography carried over into chronophotography, but also the "illusion" of continual time, produced through the fragmentation effect of individual frames (seen, or unseen, as flicker). For Martin, perhaps, these illusions are in fact allusions, part of the repertoire of techniques to incorporate or evoke ...
Track Projections (Raya Martin, 2007)
"The nineteenth century's preoccupation with the conquest and mastery of space and time had found its most general expression in the concept of circulation,which was central to the scientistic social notions of the epoch." (Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey)
"Responding to the journal’s publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s newly published photographic motion studies, Marey writes: “I was dreaming of a kind of photographic gun, seizing and portraying the bird in an attitude, or, better still, a series of attitudes, displaying the successive different motions of the wings…” The technique Marey has in mind, of course, is the “proto-cinematic” technique he would come to call chronophotography: the depiction of movement in successive instantaneous photographs. What he was dreaming of amounts to the ability to shoot a bird, not to kill it but to capture its living, vision-confounding motion and convert it into legible, fixed image sequences. The passing into obsolescence of older meanings of “flicker” thus marks a contemporaneous shift in the way movement and time could be viewed. Since the bird’s incomprehensible flying movements have become reducible to a number of arrested instants, its body ceases to move. Once it had been seized over and over, cinema proved it could bring the bird back to life, so to speak, by spinning the image sequence back into motion." (René Thoreau Bruckner, in a brilliant essay)
"There are good reasons to use transportation as a foil to our symbolic model of communication. For most of human history, any definition of communication that separates symbolic action from movement is nothing more than an anachronism. Writers interested in the history of the idea of communication have often noted the associational connections between transportation and communication that held sway until late in the nineteenth century. As both [James] Carey and John Durham Peters point out, in previous moments, communication meant - among other things - transportation, movement, connection, and linkage. "Steam communication" was travel by train, and a door could form a "communication" between a house and the outdoors. At some point in the nineteenth century, the words "intercourse" and "communication" also traded connotation with one another. ... Even our central terms for symbolic action gesture toward a concept of communication as a subspecies of movement. "Metaphor" comes from the Greek for "to transfer" or "to carry." "The word metaphoros ... is written on all the moving vans in Greece," writes Bruno Latour." (Jonathan Sterne)
Raya Martin's short film Track Projections intrigues because it draws out a rhetorical connection to film - and to filmed time/space - even while it was shot on video. The bulk of the film consists of sideways "tracking shots" from a train window, and their abstract, running verticality recalls a Brakhage. (In the more pictorially recognizable passages, it's like early Brakhage, but at times it resembles the later hand-painted works. But I've all ready spent too much time comparing this film to Brakhage.) The blinking & flickering, which the first author quoted above has noted, suggests the effect of a celluloid flicker though we may not see it projected on film.
This is not to say that Track Projections masquerades as a film or that it erases the distinctions between film and video technology - instead it's a feature of the film's rhetoric, it gestures toward film, and to a whole technology of segmented, standardized movement, celluloid strips & train tracks, and not just the "illusion" of photography carried over into chronophotography, but also the "illusion" of continual time, produced through the fragmentation effect of individual frames (seen, or unseen, as flicker). For Martin, perhaps, these illusions are in fact allusions, part of the repertoire of techniques to incorporate or evoke ...
Track Projections (Raya Martin, 2007)
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Humanoids
The story goes that Creation of the Humanoids (1962) was Warhol's favorite film. If Warhol himself had teamed up with Alain Robbe-Grillet to film a SF screenplay by a bright, nerdish 18-year-old, they might still not have dreamed up something quite so fierce or so stolid, so marble-slab-cool (but filled with bright colors). The beauties of this film come from both being ambitious but also not at all trying to court any real standards of modernism (i.e., modernist critical taste) in nevertheless producing a quasi-modernist end product.
It "manages to be both ridiculous and sublime, often simultaneously, in its view of what it means to be a human being." (Peter Nellhaus)
"To be a Warholian film means to be concerned with boredom and automation. And for a film to be concerned with boredom and automation means not just that the film addresses boredom and automation as themes, but that it engages with or reveals boredom and automation in presenting itself to the viewer and through this process, 'the meaning goes away.' As a Warholian film, The Creation of the Humanoids is, then, not just a film that represents an evacuation of meaning, but one that performs it." (Chris Fujiwara)
It "manages to be both ridiculous and sublime, often simultaneously, in its view of what it means to be a human being." (Peter Nellhaus)
"To be a Warholian film means to be concerned with boredom and automation. And for a film to be concerned with boredom and automation means not just that the film addresses boredom and automation as themes, but that it engages with or reveals boredom and automation in presenting itself to the viewer and through this process, 'the meaning goes away.' As a Warholian film, The Creation of the Humanoids is, then, not just a film that represents an evacuation of meaning, but one that performs it." (Chris Fujiwara)
Friday, April 08, 2011
Quote of the Day
"In 1961 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recruited Charles Hitch of the think-tank RAND Corporation as his assistant secretary and undertook to streamline the Department of Defense through the use of systems analysis. Before long, the defense personnel and methods filtered out of the Pentagon and into the civilian parts of government, not only on the federal level but on the state and municipal level as well. In 1964, California governor Pat Brown called upon that state's aerospace corporations to use the new methods to study such problems as transportation, waste management, poverty, crime, as well as unemployment among California's aerospace engineers, and the systems analysts responded enthusiastically to the call, confident that with their computers and space-age techniques they could solve any mere earth-bound problem. Convinced of the superiority of their formal methods over the "conventional" approaches of more experienced and knowledgeable specialists - and, as critic Ida Hoos noted, mistaking their ignorance for objectivity - the systems analysts appropriated all of reality as their legitimate domain, the social world as well as the physical world. Perhaps no one epitomized this new breed better than Jay Forrester, the electrical engineer who is credited with developing the magnetic core memory for the high-speed digital computer. Forrester moved on to pioneer the new field of "systems dynamics," which he applied, successively, to industrial, urban, national, and, finally, global "systems." "The great uncertainty with mental models is the inability to anticipate the consequences of interactions between parts of a system," Forrester explained. "This uncertainty is totally eliminated in computer models." Whether the "system" is an industrial process, a manufacturing plant, a city, or an entire planet, its operations are ultimately reducible to a set of "rate equations" which become "the statements of system policy." "Desirable modes of behavior" are made possible, Forrester insisted, "only if we have a good understanding of the system dynamics and are willing to endure the self-discipline and pressures that must accompany the desirable mode.""
(David F. Noble, Forces of Production, p. 55)
(David F. Noble, Forces of Production, p. 55)
The Riddle of Steel
By Night with Torch and Spear (Joseph Cornell, 1942)
Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)
Thursday, April 07, 2011
It's Only Tashlin
It's well-known that Frank Tashlin's career started in cartoons. This beginning is often thought (not wrongly) to have affected the way he treated his live-action images as plastic, pliable, either immaterial or too material. The more I see or revisit Tashlin the more impressed I am at the ways in which the content and feel of his films actively engages with the borders and institutionalized ancillaries of (certain definitions of) cinema - animation, television, advertising, performance ...
"Are Video Games Art?"
I keep seeing this debate - not only in the film & media blogosphere, but in that too. Are video games art? On occasion the defenses of video game art read like uninspired recuperation. Perhaps even more off-putting are pronouncements from those who would wish to be cultural conservators. "Video games can not be art, because art is ..."
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Aesthetics is so fragmented and bracketed off in "our culture" that the aesthetic experience itself becomes secondary (at best). The age of the spectacle is highly aestheticized, no doubt, and aesthetic considerations have cleared out political questions. ... Strangely enough, when it comes to activities and objects meant for leisure, one confronts a range of false moves. For instance, if one has taste, one is supposed to honor the aesthetic object. This is on the basis of its aesthetics alone, presumably. Whether it's a Fritz Lang film from 1953, or Rembrandt painting, or Heian scroll. Its pleasure is the pleasure of enlightenment, improvement, distinction. The valorized aesthetic object may bravely emerge from & struggle against something so ghastly as a material, commercial context (ripping free of it like a Little Engine That Could). But it is never to be equated with same. In fact the visible traces of efficiency amidst shoestring means is a sign of pride, a sign that some creator has "made do" despite limitations. But this is not, actually, aesthetic appreciation. It is in fact the aestheticization of the material contexts from which an object comes.
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Stephen Dwoskin once wrote - and I'm sure I've already quoted this half a dozen times on this blog - that in a period when so many were torturing themselves with the question, "What is cinema?", Raymond Durgnat would, figuratively speaking, just show up at the movie house and say, "This is!" I admire the impulse. A major part of why I admire it is because it does not presume to know.
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The answer to the question, "Are video games art?" will either remain a deadlock, or the object of video games as art will be recuperated and become common sense to later generations. But I cannot side with the group who assume the position of aesthetic guardians, contra video games, for the main reason that they seem to possess knowledge of what art - Art? - is and thus can proceed deductively. Neither, though, am I convinced by the "logic" that states that anything that people enjoy must be acknowledged as art lest the naysayer be elitist. (This too, if more implicitly, presumes that art - Art? - has a stable definition which can be known ... and its necessary & sufficient conditions can be met through inductive means of popularity and widespread pleasure.)
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I don't even play video games. But I would be most satisfied if this debate were kicked out of the house and people started devoting the same energy to questions like, What's happening in these video games? What do they provide?
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Monday, March 28, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
The Lights
The flicker of a moving image has long and diffuse history. Occasionally it has been put to use as an aesthetic effect or even a weapon - as the deliberately exaggerated by-product of early cinema's non-standardized frame rates. A feature of the historical deployment of the flicker effect has been its implicit reliance on the editing of frames - different colors, white/black, 24fps. As a result, because of the 3:2 pulldown, it's difficult for video versions to approximate the precise effects of Arnulf Rainer or The Flicker or N:O:T:H:I:N:G. Less specific to the material of celluloid, however, may be the aesthetic suggestion of the blurring of lines between image and formlessness, or between image and pure light / pure dark. Colors or light bleed into an image, aestheticize it despite "identification" or "story" by pulling it outside those realms and denaturing it.
Some of the rare images in Paul Sharits' flicker work depict violent or sexual acts. Sharits' films, and techniques, were not meant purely for their powers of provocation, however. He indicated on numerous occasions his desire to use cinema to enhance consciousness.
"In his flicker films, Sharits disrupts this process. He replaces the consecutive phases of action with solidly colored or black or white frames . The effect is literally dazzling . The viewer sees often violent bursts of light whose color and intensity are functions of the speed at which the colored frames and the complementary colors of spontaneously induced afterimages change. The oscillating colors not only foreground the pulsing light beam, they also reflexively remind the viewer of the physical limits of the frame and of the surface on which films are projected." (Stuart Leibman)
For Leibman's description of effects to make sense, of course, so much depends on this "viewer" glazed with modernist theory before the white screen. But perhaps we can talk about the impulse to produce such effects. What directs audiovisual creators to devise and deploy the flicker effect? In one respect it might be a push towards a total, consuming aesthetic vision. For Sharits, a mandala to "end war"; for today's pop artists, the mock-sublimity of an expression too big to fail (or too big for execution, craft, to even matter).
"Want you to see everything," sings Rihanna in "All of the Lights," the Kanye West track released a few months back. Enlisting the vocals of a whole slew of pop singers (Elton John, Alicia Keys, La Roux, etc., etc.), the track is a bit monstrous in size, slightly indeterminate in direction. This isn't simply a wall of sound, it's a wall of celebrity persona. The video, by Hype Williams, uses numerous bright flicker effects that destabilize the images (if they ever were stable) from any purely "functional" role, like telling a story, or creating a mood through mise-en-scene alone. The images flirt with pure color, they appear to filter into and out of one another, they heighten the sense of color within some of the shots. So many flashing lights - actually that phrase is, of course, the title of another Kanye West song. Probably someone better versed in Kanye Studies than me could say how deep this trope runs ...
... I think this is particularly fascinating for a guy like Kanye West - the tropes of education that run throughout his work, "can't tell me nothing," even the way Taylor Swift called him "an innocent." West: yet to be informed, yet to be instructed, yet to be enlightened. Weighed down by the necessity of enlightenment, West associates these themes in his lyrics - pain or trauma, with education and illumination. "Cop lights / flash lights / spot lights / strobe lights / street lights."
"In 1945 a Western force greater than electricity descended on the Japanese arkheion. The atomic assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States unleashed the heat and light of atoms, which threatened not only the Japanese archive but the "mansion called literature," the literary archive. It threatened to destroy the trace, to destroy even the shadows." Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), p. 25 (for Adrian)
(Still from Radiohead's video for "House of Cards," made without cameras.)
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Realization
A problem in thinking about taste hierarchies is the impulse for the reformed elitist to wish to embrace the low, popular, mass, vulgar, etc., and yet - in the process of vocal exculpation - recuperate these objects for the high. Specifically, the low objects are (re)integrated into a kind of high grammar. One of the privileged instances of this is the heroic mythos of the Cahiers du cinéma critics, who "realized" that Hitchcock and Hawks could be spoken of like Racine or Shakespeare.
They realized it. Apologies for the very poor Derrida imitation, but let me suggest that my deliberate use of this word (to realize) is meant to convey something of the double meaning that is buried in this mythology of taste. The evident meaning of this "realization" is a recognition and subsequent acknowledgment. But what it actually entails is the making real of a value judgment. The Cahiers critics put these ideas into circulation.
The recuperation of the popular artist for high tradition (Shakespeare is the ultimate example) is, itself, an "always already" excavated gambit for anyone who wishes to defend the legitimacy of a particular, relatively contemporary piece of popular culture. "Dude, you don't think Two and a Half Men has a particular type of genius? You dismiss it just because tons of people watch it? Well look, Shakespeare was popular, too." Substitute Harry Potter or any number of objects for Two and a Half Men. The logic at work here is that, time and again, prevalent elitist tastes have been shown to have "wrongly" dismissed or at least unfairly pigeonholed popular works of their era. We see it over and over again. Shakespeare, Hitchcock, Guiding Light. "It's an objective pattern, don't blame me if I'm a little further ahead of the curve than you are. It's history ... but as logical and predictable as a science experiment!"
I don't propose that a rigid, reductive high-middle-low scale is any better than this operation. For my part, do bring on Bourdieu, and while you're at it bring on White Chicks. (Coherence and reason are great things when discussing particularities. But I neither require nor desire my own tastes to be subordinated to the laws of coherence or logic.) But I do think this rhetoric of realization has survived too long as a truism, a crutch, a replacement for thought, and a lazy & unearned badge worn to denote anti-elitism. And it's always convenient to pose as an anti-elitist in terms of cultural tastes when you exist in the heart of capitalism. The signification of tastes is indeed a political question, but perhaps more politically pressing is when that question comes to eclipse any & all others as the only political question.
They realized it. Apologies for the very poor Derrida imitation, but let me suggest that my deliberate use of this word (to realize) is meant to convey something of the double meaning that is buried in this mythology of taste. The evident meaning of this "realization" is a recognition and subsequent acknowledgment. But what it actually entails is the making real of a value judgment. The Cahiers critics put these ideas into circulation.
The recuperation of the popular artist for high tradition (Shakespeare is the ultimate example) is, itself, an "always already" excavated gambit for anyone who wishes to defend the legitimacy of a particular, relatively contemporary piece of popular culture. "Dude, you don't think Two and a Half Men has a particular type of genius? You dismiss it just because tons of people watch it? Well look, Shakespeare was popular, too." Substitute Harry Potter or any number of objects for Two and a Half Men. The logic at work here is that, time and again, prevalent elitist tastes have been shown to have "wrongly" dismissed or at least unfairly pigeonholed popular works of their era. We see it over and over again. Shakespeare, Hitchcock, Guiding Light. "It's an objective pattern, don't blame me if I'm a little further ahead of the curve than you are. It's history ... but as logical and predictable as a science experiment!"
I don't propose that a rigid, reductive high-middle-low scale is any better than this operation. For my part, do bring on Bourdieu, and while you're at it bring on White Chicks. (Coherence and reason are great things when discussing particularities. But I neither require nor desire my own tastes to be subordinated to the laws of coherence or logic.) But I do think this rhetoric of realization has survived too long as a truism, a crutch, a replacement for thought, and a lazy & unearned badge worn to denote anti-elitism. And it's always convenient to pose as an anti-elitist in terms of cultural tastes when you exist in the heart of capitalism. The signification of tastes is indeed a political question, but perhaps more politically pressing is when that question comes to eclipse any & all others as the only political question.
To the End of TV
In the dismally undercooked film Legion (Scott Charles Stewart, 2010), the coming apocalypse is in one instance signified by an emergency broadcast signal on an old TV. "This is not a test," it reads. It's got to be a test, concludes one character. No - but if the emergency was real, wouldn't there be instructions for us? asks another. Perhaps. The film indicates at one point that, in parts elsewhere, crypto-government forces are reaching critical mass to fight the god-zombies.
In this film, God can shut off TV transmission, send a storm of billions of flies, but cannot send a bomb into a roadside gas station. (The roadside gas station out in the desert: from Detour, Ace in the Hole, Red Dawn, the first two Terminator movies, the Tremors franchise, etc.) If you've read Meaghan Morris' "Banality in Cultural Studies" (here) you may recall her anecdote of a television newsflash in Sydney about how "something has happened" in Darwin - or to Darwin. But, initially, the startling thing was that no information had come from Darwin. The city, which it turned out was hit by a cyclone, had stopped communication, and this was the certain marker of disaster. "This was not catastrophe on TV - like the Challenger sequence - but a catastrophe of and for TV."
The television set is a portal to the electro-ether that soothes a nation. TV transmission operates like antennae of the social imaginary. When it - it, not any particular TV set - malfunctions, one may conclude that the shit has hit the fan.
In this film, God can shut off TV transmission, send a storm of billions of flies, but cannot send a bomb into a roadside gas station. (The roadside gas station out in the desert: from Detour, Ace in the Hole, Red Dawn, the first two Terminator movies, the Tremors franchise, etc.) If you've read Meaghan Morris' "Banality in Cultural Studies" (here) you may recall her anecdote of a television newsflash in Sydney about how "something has happened" in Darwin - or to Darwin. But, initially, the startling thing was that no information had come from Darwin. The city, which it turned out was hit by a cyclone, had stopped communication, and this was the certain marker of disaster. "This was not catastrophe on TV - like the Challenger sequence - but a catastrophe of and for TV."
The television set is a portal to the electro-ether that soothes a nation. TV transmission operates like antennae of the social imaginary. When it - it, not any particular TV set - malfunctions, one may conclude that the shit has hit the fan.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Apologies
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The Lawless
If you have not read Andy Rector's beautiful, compelling reflections from a few years back on Joseph Losey's The Lawless, you should do so. (This work is available to stream on Netflix now, at least in the US. It's not very long, and it is very good.) Losey's film is in many ways similar to the roughly contemporaneous Ace in the Hole (also set out West, in the sticks), but while it is less ambitious than Wilder's excellent film, The Lawless seems deeper and more cohesively critical in some ways. I will springboard from Andy's comments into some of my own notes.
-The rigorous framing of the police who are only rhetorically good; they let real brutality and distortion happen always.
A representational strategy the film employs: most of its cops are presumably "decent folk," and The Lawless depicts them early on as being a number of reasonable individuals with a bad apple or two in the bunch. Intriguingly, this representation mirrors the function of the police themselves in the social body depicted, i.e., superficially benign (and indeed perhaps benign almost to a man), but systematically complicit with the mob lawlessness which seeks to enact revenge upon Paul (Lalo Rios) - an imperfect kid caught in a bind. The effect of this is a beautiful, subtle perversion of the general model, which valorizes individualism and thus individualized action, causation, culpability, etc. The Lawless grants as much but contextualizes it - "just doing my job."
-The cut from Lalo Rios taking a shower outdoors to the white privileged kid taking a shower in a comfortable bathroom.
We see the latter character first in silhouette, I believe. Paul though is silhouetted later in the film, at the police station, after they've taken his fingerprints at a desk - and in the same shot, courtesy of shadows on the wall, we see his mug shot being taken.
Though I do think the film positions his behavior as sincere - perhaps he's a so-called "liberal communist" avant la lettre? The shoring up of the system is not laid at the feet of his supposed character fault, but rather at the incongruity of his liberalism toward a good cause when it fails to link up with the proper destructive/reconstructive mechanisms against the system. Again and again, The Lawless outlines individualism's dead ends - despite all manner of faith & good works ...
I am constantly impressed again with the flexibility and strength of classical Hollywood cinema - the malleability of its codes and the way that these codes could be applied to ends highly antithetical to what is generally presumed to be Hollywood's product. (This presumption may be correct in everything except its range across the films themselves.)
And again, I would stress here that the film does not dwell on the individualist wrongness of this "positivist Capra hero" (an apt description). Burning leaves in October - an uncontroversial existence? - these aren't illicit desires in themselves. It is the use of these desires in a context which renders them as a screen against more pressing, ultimately damaging concerns which The Lawless criticizes.
Yes, this is a brilliant scene - in part for how low-key it is, demonstrating something about Larry's "character psychology" but also of political consciousness in general, the way it is so quickly effaced or repurposed into uselessness in the face of social niceties. Though we do live in an age when manners seem to matter far too little, their convenience as an occasional shield to political (i.e., politicized) interpersonal confrontation is still to prevalent a function.
-Gail Russell's strong moral/political-bearing character. Such a character is not unconventional to Hollywood films of the time but hers stands out in performance and absolute clarity of the political lines she demarcates. Russell's actual personal/professional life during the shooting of LAWLESS is even more devastating, and constitutes a story worth looking into
She's amazing in the film. Her character does fall into a certain line of anglicized Hollywood tradition - a romantic interest; pale eyes - but she's still a superb character, and her existence is notable for the perhaps shocking (shocking!) presumption that there were women who were politically active, knowledgeable, committed, etc. (Not simply "won over" because their boyfriends blazed a trail.)
... and tracking it down, thanks to Netflix, is very easy. Just as it was possible - not easy, but possible - make films like The Lawless in classical Hollywood, the system allows for the regurgitation of yesterday's politically critical products. (The Lawless is less an A-list film than V for Vendetta or Children of Men, but its politics are far better.)
With THE LAWLESS's politics as a film intact, through his account we can already see some irreversible degradations that went on in industrial Hollywood. If THE LAWLESS is a product of a group of people who represent something that has been lost in the US today (Losey, springing from the same lively and progressive artistic/cultural atmosphere as Orson Welles that once existed in Winconsin early in the 20th century; and Daniel Mainwaring, springing from an honest journalistic tradition, now almost completely gone, where it remains it is ghettoized), and who in all sincerity tried to expose the rottenness of certain aspects of America, we mustn't forget that THE LAWLESS was still a product.
Yes, and what sad state of affairs has befallen latter-day Wisconsin? Exeunt.
-The rigorous framing of the police who are only rhetorically good; they let real brutality and distortion happen always.
A representational strategy the film employs: most of its cops are presumably "decent folk," and The Lawless depicts them early on as being a number of reasonable individuals with a bad apple or two in the bunch. Intriguingly, this representation mirrors the function of the police themselves in the social body depicted, i.e., superficially benign (and indeed perhaps benign almost to a man), but systematically complicit with the mob lawlessness which seeks to enact revenge upon Paul (Lalo Rios) - an imperfect kid caught in a bind. The effect of this is a beautiful, subtle perversion of the general model, which valorizes individualism and thus individualized action, causation, culpability, etc. The Lawless grants as much but contextualizes it - "just doing my job."
-The cut from Lalo Rios taking a shower outdoors to the white privileged kid taking a shower in a comfortable bathroom.
We see the latter character first in silhouette, I believe. Paul though is silhouetted later in the film, at the police station, after they've taken his fingerprints at a desk - and in the same shot, courtesy of shadows on the wall, we see his mug shot being taken.
-The father of the privileged kid as well-meaning only insofar as his wallet goes (shoring up the system in the process)
Though I do think the film positions his behavior as sincere - perhaps he's a so-called "liberal communist" avant la lettre? The shoring up of the system is not laid at the feet of his supposed character fault, but rather at the incongruity of his liberalism toward a good cause when it fails to link up with the proper destructive/reconstructive mechanisms against the system. Again and again, The Lawless outlines individualism's dead ends - despite all manner of faith & good works ...
-The long (dare I day Straubian) pan across the quarry where Rios is being hunting for something he didn't do - beginning on the back of the farmers head and going in the opposite direction from the idealistic newspaper man trying to find Rios before the police do - a dialectic shot if there ever was one.
I am constantly impressed again with the flexibility and strength of classical Hollywood cinema - the malleability of its codes and the way that these codes could be applied to ends highly antithetical to what is generally presumed to be Hollywood's product. (This presumption may be correct in everything except its range across the films themselves.)
-The newspaper man's gestus. Ciment says he's a positivist Capra hero who realizes he is wrong. His stopping to admire the smell of burning leaves in October (representing nostalgia for small town America) in contrast with marred human relations all around him.
And again, I would stress here that the film does not dwell on the individualist wrongness of this "positivist Capra hero" (an apt description). Burning leaves in October - an uncontroversial existence? - these aren't illicit desires in themselves. It is the use of these desires in a context which renders them as a screen against more pressing, ultimately damaging concerns which The Lawless criticizes.
-The very Brechtian gesture of the match that the newspaper man lights for the callous and sensational newspaper woman's cigarette as she dictates lies to her paper, saying that Rios had no "remorse" in his eyes, all she could see was "cruelty". This gesture of the newspaper-man's is in contradiction to his moral position in the scene prior. The lighting of the match is an action showing that the newspaper man has not put into action his consciousness of complicity (which the film is so good at laying bare,media/career wise) and it's like the opposite of the fish-wrapping scene in NOT RECONCILED (Straub) where Schrella REFUSES to dine with a still-fascist democrat by having his lunch wrapped up and leaving.
Yes, this is a brilliant scene - in part for how low-key it is, demonstrating something about Larry's "character psychology" but also of political consciousness in general, the way it is so quickly effaced or repurposed into uselessness in the face of social niceties. Though we do live in an age when manners seem to matter far too little, their convenience as an occasional shield to political (i.e., politicized) interpersonal confrontation is still to prevalent a function.
-Gail Russell's strong moral/political-bearing character. Such a character is not unconventional to Hollywood films of the time but hers stands out in performance and absolute clarity of the political lines she demarcates. Russell's actual personal/professional life during the shooting of LAWLESS is even more devastating, and constitutes a story worth looking into
She's amazing in the film. Her character does fall into a certain line of anglicized Hollywood tradition - a romantic interest; pale eyes - but she's still a superb character, and her existence is notable for the perhaps shocking (shocking!) presumption that there were women who were politically active, knowledgeable, committed, etc. (Not simply "won over" because their boyfriends blazed a trail.)
Know that THE LAWLESS is a film directed by a man who studied Fritz Lang and worked with Bertolt Brecht. Know that an argument could be made for it as a Marxist film, made within Hollywood, and after the HUAC purges no less (courage). That its screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (sometimes credited as Geoffrey Homes) was "greylisted" and yet fought for his blacklisted comrades. Somehow Losey went on to make several more politically advanced films within Hollywood, THE PROWLER and a remake of M among them. And know that you must track it down...
... and tracking it down, thanks to Netflix, is very easy. Just as it was possible - not easy, but possible - make films like The Lawless in classical Hollywood, the system allows for the regurgitation of yesterday's politically critical products. (The Lawless is less an A-list film than V for Vendetta or Children of Men, but its politics are far better.)
With THE LAWLESS's politics as a film intact, through his account we can already see some irreversible degradations that went on in industrial Hollywood. If THE LAWLESS is a product of a group of people who represent something that has been lost in the US today (Losey, springing from the same lively and progressive artistic/cultural atmosphere as Orson Welles that once existed in Winconsin early in the 20th century; and Daniel Mainwaring, springing from an honest journalistic tradition, now almost completely gone, where it remains it is ghettoized), and who in all sincerity tried to expose the rottenness of certain aspects of America, we mustn't forget that THE LAWLESS was still a product.
Yes, and what sad state of affairs has befallen latter-day Wisconsin? Exeunt.
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
While We Work (2)
An extra note here, to help clarify things. (When I'm as obscure & perhaps obtuse as in my previous entry, it's mainly because this is where I first sketch out some of my ideas. I've not refined them for myself, let alone for you, hence the rambling sentences and unclear thought.) This evening I got home and ate a snack, and Rudy was on TV. I watched the last ~20 minutes. This too is a film that basks in working class comforts, nostalgia for old days - home and factory job and nice town. (Riding the bench for Notre Dame can be a boyhood dream.) And it struck me then, a rephrasing of the phenomenon that I was trying to hint at before: this particular brand of working class nostalgia, which is not new, is possibly shifting its tenor, in new films or new viewings of old films, from being nostalgic to being faintly utopian. (Even if the films themselves are not politically or thematically utopian.) This is to say, we see reflected along the edges of filmic fiction the conditions of precarity which make this fantasy of an older working class life & culture (complete with its various other baggage, like nostalgia for whiteness in some cases) appear not simply as a lost origin, but as a sociopolitical arrangement which now looks pretty damn fine ... and unattainable. This is a way of experiencing, in the background, the demise of even the imperfections of a welfare state as now beyond our grasp. Maybe.
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