Thursday, June 30, 2011
En Rachâchant
Recently I caught up with the Straub-Huillet short film En Rachâchant ('82), which is wonderful in its simplicity. (The embedded YouTube video I'm including here has no English subtitles, though the intrepid digital explorer can find her own subtitled copy. Otherwise the primary thing to know is that the child, Ernesto, decides he doesn't want to stay in school because learning things there isn't worth the trouble. He remains stubborn.) Mitterand = "a gentleman," a butterly pinned in glass = "a crime," a globe is a football as well as a representation of the earth ... am I wrong to react to this, initially, as a sly, Ivan Illichesque treatment of school as a site of ideological confrontation?
Deadlier Than the Male
Lately my bottom-of-the-barrel consumption has been Spike's Deadliest Warrior. For those of you who have not sampled this program (available streaming on Netflix or also on Spike's own website), the premise is that two prototypical, unlikely, and mostly historical combatants (say: viking vs samurai, pirate vs knight) are put into a hypothetical battle. Though the shows always culminate in a simulated live-action "face-off" between each of the contestants, the bulk of the running time follows specialists from either side demonstrating their weapons. A computer simulation runs a thousand virtual battles to determine "the deadliest [meaning: deadlier] warrior."
The most repetitive and unimaginative trash-talking and punditry pads out the program. Think something along the lines of, "Oh man, that samurai sword is intense. It will definitely kill you [i.e., if you are standing there being passively sliced by it]. But the chainsaw just has too much power. Gotta give the edge to the chainsaw." I believe Noam Chomsky once indicated that the general public is presumed to be a bunch of chumps, but if you listened to something like a call-in radio show about local sports, you'd hear people volunteer intelligent commentary. This may have been more true in the past than it is today. I wonder if sports punditry - which these days is just beyond idiotic, as with mainstream political punditry - might operate with similarly sinister effects on public culture. Discourage people - The People? - from ever even thinking about strategy or tactics, which of course is what sport still offers the spectacularized public an opportunity to do ... so that the only end a person will end up ever being encouraged to achieve is selling labor in order to obtain and maintain the opportunity to eat and sleep.
At any rate, in Deadliest Warrior we see what happens when puerile but admittedly fascinating questions - like could an Apache defeat a gladiator? - are posed. (Let's recall for a second that Guy Debord was a great student of war and martial matters.) The show has a curious feature in that, when it pits like weapons against each other - such as the mid-range ones - it does it only by separating them and tabulating data based on what each weapon does to an inanimate object like a pig carcass or forensic gel torso. (If the software the show uses does anything more complicated than this, we are not informed of it.) Does even such a childish question as this show thrives upon require such dissembling? This show simply cannot conceive of actual conflict, but instead can only run on the engines of simulation, of R&D execution. It may be "totally rad" to see a katana blade slice through an entire swine, but the consistently evaded question is exactly what the show vocally promises. Who would win? Which weapon actually wins?
Not that one should ever expect that a show like Deadliest Warrior would deliver what it evokes. I just find it interesting how baldly - and yet unconsciously - the film divorces itself from its actual premise. I've plenty more episodes to go, but have yet to see a single woman on the show. I am no expert on Spike and its demographic-marketing strategies, but this channel is still gunning for the heternormative dads-dudes-and-bros market. (Right?) It seems, at first, strange that they don't even offer the spectacle of "hot babes" as with boxing, professional wrestling, and mixed martial arts. But perhaps it's an illustration of the separation between men and woman that war is supposed to engender - war is man's domain, and woman is man's repose. (So bellowed Nietzsche, if I recall.) In any event, a show like Deadliest Warrior promises a certain appreciation of violent, macho effectiveness while in fact nullifying this very thing. Not from a feminist perspective, mind you ...
The most repetitive and unimaginative trash-talking and punditry pads out the program. Think something along the lines of, "Oh man, that samurai sword is intense. It will definitely kill you [i.e., if you are standing there being passively sliced by it]. But the chainsaw just has too much power. Gotta give the edge to the chainsaw." I believe Noam Chomsky once indicated that the general public is presumed to be a bunch of chumps, but if you listened to something like a call-in radio show about local sports, you'd hear people volunteer intelligent commentary. This may have been more true in the past than it is today. I wonder if sports punditry - which these days is just beyond idiotic, as with mainstream political punditry - might operate with similarly sinister effects on public culture. Discourage people - The People? - from ever even thinking about strategy or tactics, which of course is what sport still offers the spectacularized public an opportunity to do ... so that the only end a person will end up ever being encouraged to achieve is selling labor in order to obtain and maintain the opportunity to eat and sleep.
At any rate, in Deadliest Warrior we see what happens when puerile but admittedly fascinating questions - like could an Apache defeat a gladiator? - are posed. (Let's recall for a second that Guy Debord was a great student of war and martial matters.) The show has a curious feature in that, when it pits like weapons against each other - such as the mid-range ones - it does it only by separating them and tabulating data based on what each weapon does to an inanimate object like a pig carcass or forensic gel torso. (If the software the show uses does anything more complicated than this, we are not informed of it.) Does even such a childish question as this show thrives upon require such dissembling? This show simply cannot conceive of actual conflict, but instead can only run on the engines of simulation, of R&D execution. It may be "totally rad" to see a katana blade slice through an entire swine, but the consistently evaded question is exactly what the show vocally promises. Who would win? Which weapon actually wins?
Not that one should ever expect that a show like Deadliest Warrior would deliver what it evokes. I just find it interesting how baldly - and yet unconsciously - the film divorces itself from its actual premise. I've plenty more episodes to go, but have yet to see a single woman on the show. I am no expert on Spike and its demographic-marketing strategies, but this channel is still gunning for the heternormative dads-dudes-and-bros market. (Right?) It seems, at first, strange that they don't even offer the spectacle of "hot babes" as with boxing, professional wrestling, and mixed martial arts. But perhaps it's an illustration of the separation between men and woman that war is supposed to engender - war is man's domain, and woman is man's repose. (So bellowed Nietzsche, if I recall.) In any event, a show like Deadliest Warrior promises a certain appreciation of violent, macho effectiveness while in fact nullifying this very thing. Not from a feminist perspective, mind you ...
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Tree of Life
Though I haven't revisited The Tree of Life, as I still hope to, it's been stewing in my head for several days now.
Brad Pitt is probably as good as he's ever been. The hands-on-lovehandles machismo he played to comedic effect in Inglourious Basterds here re-emerges as the performance of midcentury masculinity. A rough Don Draper (with a dash of Single Man's Colin Firth, or maybe that's just midcentury modern home design talking), he embodies the marriage of a certain tough minded, indelicate approach to the world (similar to the materialist Sean Penn character in The Thin Red Line) and the Mortimer Adler / modernist self-improvement endemic to a certain class in the period. Pitt's pouting lip and jawline, his gruff voice - these things glimpsed so many years ago in Legends of the Fall come out and are used to tremendous effect here. There's no essential distinction between Pitt's performance and the father's "performance." Or as the doc says in WR - Mysteries of the Organism, you don't have a body, you are your body.
I'm still thinking about the way The Tree of Life situates its women characters. Jessica Chastain's silent, strong, long-suffering wife: is this a theme of the film, or one of its symptomatic conventions? I think it may be some of both. We see here one of cinema's great arguments against patriarchy - that it's neither beneficial nor eternal. That much is clear. The question remains, for me, as to Tree of Life's self-awareness with regard to how it uses its male/father/female/mother figures. I suppose that what we have, in a certain sense, Malick's own examination of a loosely autobiographically informed childhood. It's tricky to try to tease out what might be meant as historically specific and what might be meant as trans-historical. Because I can certainly see how one could watch The Tree of Life and roll the eyes at parts, since the gazing-through-trees aspects might suggest the nuclear white 1950s family as the transcendental milieu, the natural context ... rather than a more strictly, more contingently historical one. On one viewing I'm not sure if the film has really delineated, one way or the other, how it might mean to finesse its viewers' reception of this family microcosm: universal or particular?
The esteemed Peter Tonguette takes the film to task for its departures from classical storytelling craft. But I don't know how fair this is. Can one think of a film released by a Hollywood studio that more explicitly marks out the fact that its aims - whatever those might be - are not at all those of crafting a clear story with minimal spatial ruptures? Peter suggests that The Tree of Life often feels like a trailer for itself. I think I understand precisely what he means but I'm not sure it appropriately applies to this film, where the editing indeed departs from many fiction cinema norms but is nonetheless an extraordinary achievement. More than any other Hollywood-released film I've ever seen, The Tree of Life reminds me of the likes of not only Nathaniel Dorsky but also Gregory Markopoulos. The editing rhythms gun for the proprioceptive, the kinaesthetic, rather than the cognitive fundaments of a narrative. I also think that, in the middle, most "story" heavy section especially, the editing is highly evocative of memory. Instead of being efficient, images and actions overlap, we feel them more than understand them; they create a surplus without actually telling everything. Granted, this is not how an economical, 1940s-style Hollywood film typically operates. But given Malick's track record and the themes of the film, it's a more than reasonable way to produce meaning and sensation through cutting. All this may, indeed, prove frustrating to some viewers - because the film suggests that there is a clear and compelling story "lost" in the editing.
Now, one doesn't have to love Terrence Malick's work. And just because one likes the '70s films need have no bearing on reception of the more recent titles. Even so, as Richard Neer's brilliant recent piece on The New World indicates, the editing patterns and sound-image relations that characterize later Malick are by no means just pretty or picturesque but in fact rather dense, sophisticated, and intricate. This does not mean they are somehow above all critique. Yet this is why I'm puzzled by Peter's objections - of all the potential skeptical approaches, is the best (or even the tenth best) to chide the film for "failing" to edit in such a way as to clearly and economically convey narrative information, as if this is the only criterion by which a film can or should ever be edited? (Is Stan Brakhage a bad editor as well? Do Bunuel and Dali's cuts fall short too?)
These are still just mostly initial thoughts ...
Brad Pitt is probably as good as he's ever been. The hands-on-lovehandles machismo he played to comedic effect in Inglourious Basterds here re-emerges as the performance of midcentury masculinity. A rough Don Draper (with a dash of Single Man's Colin Firth, or maybe that's just midcentury modern home design talking), he embodies the marriage of a certain tough minded, indelicate approach to the world (similar to the materialist Sean Penn character in The Thin Red Line) and the Mortimer Adler / modernist self-improvement endemic to a certain class in the period. Pitt's pouting lip and jawline, his gruff voice - these things glimpsed so many years ago in Legends of the Fall come out and are used to tremendous effect here. There's no essential distinction between Pitt's performance and the father's "performance." Or as the doc says in WR - Mysteries of the Organism, you don't have a body, you are your body.
I'm still thinking about the way The Tree of Life situates its women characters. Jessica Chastain's silent, strong, long-suffering wife: is this a theme of the film, or one of its symptomatic conventions? I think it may be some of both. We see here one of cinema's great arguments against patriarchy - that it's neither beneficial nor eternal. That much is clear. The question remains, for me, as to Tree of Life's self-awareness with regard to how it uses its male/father/female/mother figures. I suppose that what we have, in a certain sense, Malick's own examination of a loosely autobiographically informed childhood. It's tricky to try to tease out what might be meant as historically specific and what might be meant as trans-historical. Because I can certainly see how one could watch The Tree of Life and roll the eyes at parts, since the gazing-through-trees aspects might suggest the nuclear white 1950s family as the transcendental milieu, the natural context ... rather than a more strictly, more contingently historical one. On one viewing I'm not sure if the film has really delineated, one way or the other, how it might mean to finesse its viewers' reception of this family microcosm: universal or particular?
The esteemed Peter Tonguette takes the film to task for its departures from classical storytelling craft. But I don't know how fair this is. Can one think of a film released by a Hollywood studio that more explicitly marks out the fact that its aims - whatever those might be - are not at all those of crafting a clear story with minimal spatial ruptures? Peter suggests that The Tree of Life often feels like a trailer for itself. I think I understand precisely what he means but I'm not sure it appropriately applies to this film, where the editing indeed departs from many fiction cinema norms but is nonetheless an extraordinary achievement. More than any other Hollywood-released film I've ever seen, The Tree of Life reminds me of the likes of not only Nathaniel Dorsky but also Gregory Markopoulos. The editing rhythms gun for the proprioceptive, the kinaesthetic, rather than the cognitive fundaments of a narrative. I also think that, in the middle, most "story" heavy section especially, the editing is highly evocative of memory. Instead of being efficient, images and actions overlap, we feel them more than understand them; they create a surplus without actually telling everything. Granted, this is not how an economical, 1940s-style Hollywood film typically operates. But given Malick's track record and the themes of the film, it's a more than reasonable way to produce meaning and sensation through cutting. All this may, indeed, prove frustrating to some viewers - because the film suggests that there is a clear and compelling story "lost" in the editing.
Now, one doesn't have to love Terrence Malick's work. And just because one likes the '70s films need have no bearing on reception of the more recent titles. Even so, as Richard Neer's brilliant recent piece on The New World indicates, the editing patterns and sound-image relations that characterize later Malick are by no means just pretty or picturesque but in fact rather dense, sophisticated, and intricate. This does not mean they are somehow above all critique. Yet this is why I'm puzzled by Peter's objections - of all the potential skeptical approaches, is the best (or even the tenth best) to chide the film for "failing" to edit in such a way as to clearly and economically convey narrative information, as if this is the only criterion by which a film can or should ever be edited? (Is Stan Brakhage a bad editor as well? Do Bunuel and Dali's cuts fall short too?)
These are still just mostly initial thoughts ...
Friday, June 17, 2011
Historiography (I)
"A structure belonging to modern Western culture can doubtless be seen in this historiography: intelligibility is established through a relation with the other; it moves (or "progresses") by changing what it makes of its "other" - the Indian, the past, the people, the mad, the child, the Third World. Through these variants that are all heteronomous - ethnology, history, psychiatry, pedagogy, etc. - unfolds a problematic form basing its mastery of expression upon what the other keeps silent, and guaranteeing the interpretive work of a science (a "human" science) by the frontier that separates it from an area awaiting this work in order to be known. Here modern medicine is a decisive figure, from the moment when the body becomes a legible picture that can in turn be translated into that which can be written within a space of language. Thanks to the unfolding of the body before the doctor's eyes, what is seen and what is known of it can be superimposed or exchanged (be translated from one to the other). The body is a cipher that awaits deciphering. Between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, what allows the seen body to be converted into the known body, or what turns the spatial organization of the body into a semantic organization of a vocabulary - and vice versa - is the transformation of the body into extension, into open interiority like a book, or like a silent corpse placed under our eyes. An analogous change takes place when tradition, a lived body, is revealed to erudite curiosity through a corpus on texts. Modern medicine and historiography are born almost simultaneously from the rift between a subject that is supposedly literate, and an object that is supposedly written in an unknown language. The latter always remains to be decoded. These two "heterologies" (discourses on the other) are built upon a division between the body of knowledge that utters a discourse and the mute body that nourishes it."
(Michel de Certeau, from the Introduction to The Writing of History)
(Michel de Certeau, from the Introduction to The Writing of History)
This and That
Whose Life Is It Anyway?: the narrative construction is both sharply professional, deeply felt, and bathed in too-much, too-soon pathos. (The vase the falls and breaks?) Lightning, at certain points, provided a clear illustration of the pathetic fallacy. But overall I liked the way the film uses weather, glimpsed from inside through windows. It was neither remarked upon by characters and music for "mood," most of the time, yet remained quietly and open-endedly expressive.
If they make The Hangover, Part 3, it should simply be called Ken Jeong's Hangover. I would still see that. Otherwise, what's the point?
I took down a post I made on The Tree of Life for a couple of reasons - mainly because it wasn't really ready to be posted. I think I just absent-mindedly hit "publish" and directed my attention elsewhere. Normally that kind of slip doesn't bother me since I rarely revise posts extensively, anyway. But when I noticed it some hours later, I realized that what came out was a lot of unnecessary and mean-spirited snark, not to mention a straw man argument that was more a heuristic device for me to get to a particular rhetorical space than a "position" I had intended to put out into the ether. It was my way of working through certain ambivalent feelings I have toward a lot of, hmm, extratextual questions. Elusive Lucidity is a public notebook, not a polished journal - but it's also not open mic night for every little slice of its author's brain. If anyone read my earlier post and rolled their eyes (as I would have done myself), mea culpa. For the record, I loved the film and think it is incredible on a lot of levels, though I do have some reservations, and will probably still post something on it after my thoughts and feelings ripen.
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If they make The Hangover, Part 3, it should simply be called Ken Jeong's Hangover. I would still see that. Otherwise, what's the point?
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Dame Maggie sure seems immortal, sometimes.
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I took down a post I made on The Tree of Life for a couple of reasons - mainly because it wasn't really ready to be posted. I think I just absent-mindedly hit "publish" and directed my attention elsewhere. Normally that kind of slip doesn't bother me since I rarely revise posts extensively, anyway. But when I noticed it some hours later, I realized that what came out was a lot of unnecessary and mean-spirited snark, not to mention a straw man argument that was more a heuristic device for me to get to a particular rhetorical space than a "position" I had intended to put out into the ether. It was my way of working through certain ambivalent feelings I have toward a lot of, hmm, extratextual questions. Elusive Lucidity is a public notebook, not a polished journal - but it's also not open mic night for every little slice of its author's brain. If anyone read my earlier post and rolled their eyes (as I would have done myself), mea culpa. For the record, I loved the film and think it is incredible on a lot of levels, though I do have some reservations, and will probably still post something on it after my thoughts and feelings ripen.
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Random Gripe
I don't know what's more irksome, Cisco's "the human network" or American Express' "the social currency."
Scribbles
(Colossus: The Forbin Project, dir. Joseph Sargent, 1970)
Serge Daney dit: "The word “power” came at one moment, synchronically with Foucault... We can say that our cinephilia helped us to go forward. For a cinephile, the power of the cineaste, even if it’s really imaginary, is out of proportion socially and real in regards to what he manipulates as material. Therefore, we see a moral preoccupation which comes back to Bazin, which is to evaluate films not really on their aesthetic quality but in ethical terms. It’s a period when we speak of “direct.” Then there’s a third period when, from the idea of power, we moved to the realization of the power of media. Power today is the new management of media which is a problem on which the Leftists have been nil, pre-historic, with the exception of someone like Baudrillard. But let’s say that, in general, Marxist reflection on media is nil. This is a little bit the Mattelart period. From then on we saw how we could re-interest ourselves in cinema, in films that were coming out, to become once more a film review while being a little bit ahead which consists in recognizing that film is one piece in the more general game of the media and that we can’t disassociate them. To approach these media, everything we learned before 1968, in psychoanalysis for example, is helpful." (h/t, of course, to Kino Slang)
Daney's suggestion about leftist or Marxist reflection on media seems both true and untrue - maybe less true now, some decades after he made the claim. Still, there's a barb that remains: we haven't come very far. Especially when Michael Moore and Slavoj Zizek seem like very tenable "choices" for significant portions of what we'd call, I suppose, a "progressive" public. Some tentative postulates -
- Culture always involves trade-offs.
- This doesn't mean that the complexity, richness, and nuance of culture at any time and situation equates to the proposition - or excuse - that culture is always "too complex" to make any political judgments about it.
- That said, judgments can come from puritanical positions as well as non-puritanical positions. The puritanical positions hold virtually all sway in society. "False choice in spectacular abundance, a choice which lies in the juxtaposition of competing and complimentary spectacles and also in the juxtaposition of roles (signified and carried mainly by things) which are at once exclusive and overlapping, develops into a struggle of vaporous qualities meant to stimulate loyalty to quantitative triviality. This resurrects false archaic oppositions, regionalisms and racisms which serve to raise the vulgar hierarchic ranks of consumption to a preposterous ontological superiority. In this way, the endless series of trivial confrontations is set up again, from competitive sports to elections, mobilizing a sub-ludic interest. Wherever there is abundant consumption, a major spectacular opposition between youth and adults comes to the fore among the false roles - false because the adult, master of his life, does not exist and because youth, the transformation of what exists, is in no way the property of those who are now young, but of the economic system, of the dynamism of capitalism. Things rule and are young; things confront and replace each other." (Debord, Society of the Spectacle, section 62.)
- It seems important to reject an overly simplistic "false consciousness" model when it comes to a population's consumption of media, and their affective, social, and political relations to media. At the same time, it seems foolish to overlook the possibility that no deception is happening anywhere, when probability deception is occuring more than almost anything else.
- Anyone looking for a simple formula that consigns, to ethico-political statuses, a particular "kind" of film - art film, auteur film, slow film (like slow food?), "popular" film, popul-"ist" film, people's film, mise-en-scene films, avant garde film - is probably wasting his or her time. (Cf. bullet point one.) The Cahiers du cinema "categories" from that famous editorial are intriguing, perhaps useful for analysis, but in fact a clumsy way to start going about political analysis of cinema, let alone media more broadly. (Still, it is a start, which is more than most can ever say.)
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Pixar Thoughts
If perhaps at one time after their invention as something other than "small adults," children couldn't wait to access - illicitly or not - the pleasures of adulthood, American culture has by now fully entered the inverse situation. It's adults grasping for fantasy, wonder, splendor, who don't simply elevate low forms to respectable heights (like the comic strip form into the graphic novel) but come to value young adult fiction and texts alongside, even in place of, "adult" culture. Thankfully the mania for Harry Potter has died down enough that one can express skepticism towards its merits, publicly, without the tar-and-feather gang emerging from out of nowhere. It's still in force for Pixar, I think - though I think that by now, the cinephiles who don't expect to get much out of Pixar's movies simply steer clear of them. Perhaps it's wisest this way.
The Pixar product has usually struck me as a little too pitch-perfect in its wide-eyed (though expert) conventionalisms - really, a hyper-Disney. This is a mark one can hit a little too well, in fact; affectation is the cancer of whimsy and self-aware humor. (It's a line drawn in American TV comedy all the time: Parks and Recreation tends to skirt on the acceptable side of this line, and has additional merits, whereas I've never been able to shake the bad vibes I get from the NBC Office, which is of course very similar in form and tone.) It can be grating to keep hearing about how amazing the Toy Story films are, mainly because a substantial amount of the acclaim seems to be a really good consumer review - 'this is new, and it pushed my buttons.' There's a formula to Pixar appreciation: express fascination with the dexterity of its use of technology (not soulless like those Final Fantasy movies), then wax gee-whiz about the deep moral lessons and emotional textures the film imparts. This gets to the heart of the problem: it's not, of course, that I take issue with treating animation seriously. I don't even take issue with treating "cartoons" (the commercial, juvenile, formulaic things) with care and attention. It's simply that "the culture of Pixar" (or the culture around it) has fashioned a particular way of treating these films seriously.
It's this ingrained analytical toolkit towards which I'm most resistant. I'm not a heartless person, and in fact I think that sentiment is an underappreciated tool in the array of artistic effects (this upper-middle and just-plain-upper cultural bias is probably largely a more unfortunate holdover from modernism). So the techniques in films like Monsters, Inc., Wall*E, and Up - extremely faint but definite echoes of a Fordian way of dealing with on-screen objects, time, and memory - do indeed move me. And I even take pleasure from the fact that a film as unrelentingly sad as Up is somehow targeted toward children. What I do also appreciate about Pixar is, because of their privileged place within the mainstream film industry, is that they're able to go ahead and be what most products in the culture industry are far too timid to be - a little lopsided, a bit risky in terms of narrative formula, willing to take their time in parts (this is an aspect of modernist aesthetics I wholeheartedly encourage). This all exists in addition to, and in conjunction with, the often annoying conventionalisms and predictable affectations the films possess. I'd love to see a kid who's not "cute," a landscape that's not "breathtaking" ...
The Pixar product has usually struck me as a little too pitch-perfect in its wide-eyed (though expert) conventionalisms - really, a hyper-Disney. This is a mark one can hit a little too well, in fact; affectation is the cancer of whimsy and self-aware humor. (It's a line drawn in American TV comedy all the time: Parks and Recreation tends to skirt on the acceptable side of this line, and has additional merits, whereas I've never been able to shake the bad vibes I get from the NBC Office, which is of course very similar in form and tone.) It can be grating to keep hearing about how amazing the Toy Story films are, mainly because a substantial amount of the acclaim seems to be a really good consumer review - 'this is new, and it pushed my buttons.' There's a formula to Pixar appreciation: express fascination with the dexterity of its use of technology (not soulless like those Final Fantasy movies), then wax gee-whiz about the deep moral lessons and emotional textures the film imparts. This gets to the heart of the problem: it's not, of course, that I take issue with treating animation seriously. I don't even take issue with treating "cartoons" (the commercial, juvenile, formulaic things) with care and attention. It's simply that "the culture of Pixar" (or the culture around it) has fashioned a particular way of treating these films seriously.
It's this ingrained analytical toolkit towards which I'm most resistant. I'm not a heartless person, and in fact I think that sentiment is an underappreciated tool in the array of artistic effects (this upper-middle and just-plain-upper cultural bias is probably largely a more unfortunate holdover from modernism). So the techniques in films like Monsters, Inc., Wall*E, and Up - extremely faint but definite echoes of a Fordian way of dealing with on-screen objects, time, and memory - do indeed move me. And I even take pleasure from the fact that a film as unrelentingly sad as Up is somehow targeted toward children. What I do also appreciate about Pixar is, because of their privileged place within the mainstream film industry, is that they're able to go ahead and be what most products in the culture industry are far too timid to be - a little lopsided, a bit risky in terms of narrative formula, willing to take their time in parts (this is an aspect of modernist aesthetics I wholeheartedly encourage). This all exists in addition to, and in conjunction with, the often annoying conventionalisms and predictable affectations the films possess. I'd love to see a kid who's not "cute," a landscape that's not "breathtaking" ...
De Toth in the Landscape of Dreyer
A minor crime film helmed by Andre De Toth (but even those are always worthwhile) from 1957, Hidden Fear is a US-Danish co-production. Periodically the scenery (urban or natural) shakes up the familiar blackmail/procedural narrative. The films of De Toth comprise what should be one of the prime exhibits for auteurist cinephile analysis - working mainly in the crime and Western genres, never amassing a great deal of recognizable power, the director seemed to gravitate toward similar premises and plotlines. This isn't so much a matter of creative authority as it is, more likely, workaday affinities. It was what he was good at, what he earned a proven track record in. In the mode of production he was working in, De Toth would not have been able to "birth" a top-down relation to his material, in the same way that (say) Hitchcock was able to establish his presence with the far-reaching authority over his content around the same time period. Nevertheless, again and again, De Toth's movies feature world-weary characters in a network of distrust, lightning-fast betrayals, and haunted memories. Important actions happen quickly, startlingly (like when a heavy pulls a gun or the hero pummels a mug), but the narratives themselves never feel rushed: think of the long spaces finely suggested by the waiting in Last of the Comanches and Day of the Outlaw.
The Living and the Dead
"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." (Karl Marx)
"[Tradition] is the democracy of the dead." (G.K. Chesterton)
"I don't fuck everything that's dead!" (Sandra, played by Molly Parker, in Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed, 1996)
"You're going to die screaming ... and I'm going to watch." (Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight [Renny Harlin, 1996])
"[Tradition] is the democracy of the dead." (G.K. Chesterton)
"I don't fuck everything that's dead!" (Sandra, played by Molly Parker, in Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed, 1996)
"You're going to die screaming ... and I'm going to watch." (Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight [Renny Harlin, 1996])
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)
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