Film Socialisme

The socialism of the film is the undermining of the idea of property, beginning with that of artworks... There shouldn't be any property over artworks. Beaumarchais only wanted to enjoy a portion of the receipts from Le Mariage du Figaro. He might say, "I'm the one who wrote Figaro." But I don't think he would have said, "Figaro is mine." This feeling of property over artworks came later on.  (JLG, h/t Craig Keller)

A film that also could have been titled Babel, the relations humans bear to one another here is juxtaposed with the relations that animals (parrots, owls, cats...) might hold for people, the implacability of the animal's gaze, the enigma of sentience.  Ultimately this is a problem for the way a society organizes itself because one must deal ultimately with the impossibility of knowing another, or at least, some other, and nevertheless getting on with such indeterminacy.  The first part of the film takes place on a cruise ship - a possible figural allusion to statelessness (1) (2), and to the crucial distinction that might be placed in thinking about society vs. the state (brought up explicitly at one point in the film, 3).  Godard understands, though, commitment to a state; if one's concern is something like justice, the mass ties of law-geography-commerce-emotion-media that comprise a state are not to be labeled as always and in all situations any one thing.  A difficulty emerges in refusing to think outside of the paradigm of the nation-state as the limit of all sociopolitical organization - the nation-state, the market, and nothing else ...

"If this ultimate determination were a truth valid for every society, the relationship between the determination and the conditions making it possible would not develop through a contingent historical articulation, but would constitute an a priori necessity.  It is important to note that the problem under discussion is not that the economy should have its conditions of existence.  This is a tautology, for if something exists, it is because given conditions render its existence possible.  The problem is that if the 'economy' is determinant in the last instance for every type of society, it must be defined independently of any specific type of society; and the conditions of existence would be that of assuring the existence and determining role of the economy - in other words, they would be an internal moment of the economy as such; the difference would not be constitutive."  (Laclau & Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd ed., p. 98)

A film that could also have been titled JLG/JLG pt. 2, which reminded me in parts of Joris Ivens' masterpiece A Tale of the Wind, a sweeping and yet modest retrospective on long threads of problems which have concerned a filmmaker.  Problems which butt up against each other, frequently - problems of aesthetic representation which sometimes appear to be antagonistic to problems of class struggle or other struggles.  If the promise of wealth redistribution is a fog that permeates contests over social justice, the "other struggles" may clear away such fog by all manner of lights, in the process of their own manhunts alerting those who would wish to flee.

"The unsatisfactory term 'new social movements' groups together a series of highly diverse struggles: urban, ecological, anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, feminist, anti-racist, ethnic, regional or that of sexual minorities.  The common denominator of all of them would be their differentiation from workers' struggles, considered as 'class' struggles.  It is pointless to insist upon the problematic nature of this latter notion: it amalgamates a series of very different struggles at the level of the relations of production, which are set apart from the 'new antagonisms' for reasons that display all too clearly the persistence of a discourse founded upon the privileged status of 'classes.'  What interests us about these new social movements, then, is not the idea of arbitrarily grouping them into a category opposed to that of class, but the novel role they play in articulating that rapid diffusion of social conflictuality to more and more numerous relations which is characteristic today of advanced industrial societies."  (Laclau & Mouffe, pp. 159-160)

Basic, simple film analysis ... which can of course be brilliant ... proceeds from the supposition that an immediately intelligible text yields mysteries upon close inspection which can then be insightfully resolved - or at least proposed - upon even closer inspection.  Thus His Girl Friday becomes a text ( -> His Girl Friday' ) which becomes once again a work of art ( -> His Girl Friday" ).  But why must this model of film analysis apply in every instance, that is, why must a film - every film, each film, every time, each time - subject itself to the demand that it yield its first set of secrets, relations, themes, immediately?  I can think of logical reasons why a person might prefer movies that telegraph their meaning so that we can presume to know their basic meaning by the time of the first reel change, and definitely by roll of the end credits.  But I can think of no logical reason why this must become the standard by which all films everywhere should be judged, especially when the film itself - with its overlapping sounds and texts, its richness of allusion, its diversity of visual registers - seems to indicate to us that, no, it is not that type of movie.  It invites certain forms of confusion, and it invites repeat viewings.  This is not something new for Godard and yet it still bothers people, even those who (one would think) would at least be bright enough to have learned their lesson already.  And yet one reads the texts that comprise the (mainly) thoughtless reception Film Socialisme has received, and the mind boggles.

"Text on screen is the degree zero of disembodied voice."  (Roland-François Lack, "Sa voix," For Ever Godard)

If not through the portal of immediate intelligibility, into depth, how might one construct a case for the worth of Film Socialisme?  One might talk about pleasure.  (A lot of film critics and pretenders to film criticism have acquired puritanical positions with regards to pleasure, so that it must be integrated wholly into a coherent narrative, or at least made "edifying," in order to receive its reward of praise.)  There are a lot of sounds and images of great beauty in Film Socialisme, and may be an incentive to repeat viewing - even skimming, if we acknowledge the fact that so many people are seeing this work on digital files? - so that one can gradually arrive at a more cohesive of what's happening, the way one might with Benjamin's Arcades Project.  One might talk about surface: Film Socialisme is like a web of allusions, connections, contrasts, not "deep" at all in many common, critical senses of the word (for there is no psychological profundity here, as the director himself openly acknowledged).  Its depth, as such, projects into history - trying to sketch some roots for "what is there" (an empty auditorium for a lecture by Alain Badiou, dance floors on a cruise ship, a blonde kid wearing a Soviet Union t-shirt, a YouTube video of talkative cats).  Godard's "material" is outward, not inward.  This is not to say that there's no text here, but I suspect one will find mainly only frustration if one tries to locate a skeleton key for "why Godard did that / made that incomprehensible / doesn't just say what he means" inside the text itself.  The structure is like a lattice: intricate criss-cross patterns whose nodal points are recognizable, but whose overall gist is not comprehensible unless one also notes that which is visible beyond the lattice, between it.  One fills it in.  One might even use Film Socialisme, though it offends some sensibilities to think that a non-instructional film might be utilized for anything other than a night of relaxation.  (Yes, yes, it also offends some other sensibilities that a film might indeed be used for a night of relaxation.)  But perhaps to see what happens one must know how to look.  The pleasurable work begins ...

"If I had to plead in a court of law against charges of filching images for my films, I'd hire two lawyers, with two different systems. The one would defend the right of quotation, which barely exists for the cinema. In literature, you can quote extensively. In the Miller [Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller, 1976 - JML] by Norman Mailer, there's 80% Henry Miller, and 20% Norman Mailer. In the sciences, no scientist pays a fee to use a formula established by a conference. That's quotation, and cinema doesn't allow it. I read Marie Darrieussecq's book, Rapport de police [Rapport de police, accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction / Police Report: Accusations of Plagiarism and Other Modes of Surveillance in Fiction, 2010], and I thought it was very good, because she went into a historical inquiry of this issue. The right of the author - it's really not possible. An author has no right. I have no right. I have only duties. And then in my film, there's another type of "loan" - not quotations, but just excerpts. Like a shot, when a blood-sample gets taken for analysis. That would be the defense of my second lawyer. He'd defend, for example, my use of the shots of the trapeze artists that come from Les Plages d'Agnès. This shot isn't a quotation - I'm not quoting Agnès Varda's film: I'm benefiting from her work. I'm taking an excerpt, which I'm incorporating somewhere else, where it takes on another meaning: in this case, symbolizing peace between Israel and Palestine. I didn't pay for that shot. But if Agnès asked me for money, I figure it would be for a reasonable price. Which is to say, a price in proportion with the economy of the film, the number of spectators that it reaches..."  (Godard, ibid.)

"I will have to make rather extensive use of quotations.  Never, I believe, to lend authority to a particular argument but only to show fully of what stuff this adventure and I are made.  Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.  Allusions, without quotation marks, to other texts known to be very famous, as in classical Chinese poetry, Shakespeare, or Lautréamont, should be reserved for times richer in minds capable of recognizing the original phrase and the distance its new application has introduced."  (Guy Debord, Panegyric)

Typewriter

Frequently as I write, I wish that I had a typewriter to work with.  This is not for reasons of tactility or antiquarianism, though I acknowledge these pleasures have their place.  I want a typewriter because of the cobbled-together habits of my composition & editing style, which are an incoherent - though I imagine not unusual - volleying of typing and handwriting.  Both methods of getting word down boast their own kinds of speed.

See Something, Say Something

"Animal nature, or sexual exuberance, is that which prevents us from being reduced to mere things.  Human nature, on the contrary, geared to specific ends in work, tends to make things of us at the expense of our sexual exuberance."  (Georges Bataille, Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood)

“In Western metaphysics, the spoken or sung word has more authority than the written word.  Voice accords presence – a myth that remains compelling, even though we are supposed to know better: we believe that no one can steal a voice, that no two voices are exactly alike, that finding a voice will set a body free, and that anyone can sing.  This conviction that having a voice means having an identity is a cultural myth, just as sex is human nature but also a myth.  … Voice is a system equal to sexuality – as punishing, as pleasure-giving; as elective, and ineluctable.”  (Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, p. 155)

"A valid meaning is here attached to the word sovereignty, just as to the term entity.  Both do not at all imply that a political entity must necessarily determine every aspect of a person's life or that a centralized system should destroy every other organization or corporation.  It may be that economic considerations can be stronger than anything desired by a government which is ostensibly indifferent toward economics.  Likewise, religious convictions can easily determine the politics of an allegedly neutral state.  What always matters is only the possibility of conflict."  (Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, p. 39)

In the above video we see the effects of recent policy - surely a "reasonable" search, no? - whereby the entire game is based upon the semblance of security.  The state doesn't even try anymore, because it doesn't need to.  This particular quiet outrage, via TSA, is just the latest in the governance of human beings - and those who would defend might say that perhaps some people are just too uptight about their bodies.  And indeed there are a lot of people, men mainly, whose opposition to having their bodies scanned or testicles fondled is expressed in decidedly queer-unfriendly way.  But my own response to this is, Why do we immediately place the onus onto the citizen to accommodate policy?  "Oh, Citizen, you're just too repressed!  Don't be so hung up on bodily privacy!"  This, to me, is specious on the same order as US mimicry of feminist discourse to "justify" the bombing of Afghanistan.  Of course, the state can do whatever it can get away with, but it is worth attending to the outcry, even if it appears to be mired in politics of the body and of sexual feelings (including feelings of revulsion), and even if it is sometimes articulated along Tea Party lines.  To speak out, though, requires reclaiming a certain sense of the voice, and thus requires establishing a certain (public) baseline for one's own physicality, and for one's own sexuality ...

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DS

Notes toward non-appreciation of Takashi Miike's Detective Story (2007) ...

I had the opportunity recently to look at a film I didn't much like, by a director (with a cult following) that I do much like, and wanted to clarify a few things for myself and in the process maybe some of you can also extract something of use.  The source of the problem or schematic I'm working through here is in my own personal history of being once a romantic-formalist but also (I think?) expanding well beyond these strictures.  But it's also a matter of tackling a problem with some practical utility, at least for the cinephile, like myself, who nerdishly logs what he sees and tries to at least vaguely have some mental placement of its overall worth.  In the past, for reasons of temperament, I adhered to a very "humble" approach to seeing films by filmmakers I liked.  If I didn't appreciate the film, I consciously considered that the problem might reside in myself.  (This has something to do, I think, with the Catholicism attached to a lot of early auteurist criticism, and my own Catholic history - playing the devotional role of the penitent viewer is an important part of this, and something that is really crucial for understanding a lot of this thing, "auteurism."  It's also why I balk violently at a lot of snap judgment-style criticism, and never warmed to Pauline Kael.)  This spectatorial humility on my part was not total - I was not afraid to dislike films, even films I felt I was supposed to like.  I was simply caught in a trap of my own making: how to trust myself when I found numerous kinds of pleasure in giving - or feeling as though I gave - trust in the object before me, the film of the other, an(other) film of the auteur?  To me it was a profoundly ethical matter, even if it wasn't a profoundly well-thought one.  And of course it required a prior, and sometimes implicit, judgment beforehand as to which films really deserved this humility and which films didn't. 

But lost in all of this is the richness and importance of the gray area.  The middle grounds - which can be middlebrow, or middling achievements, or compromises, or contradictions, or any number of things.  The ability to see on multiple registers, to see how a film's aesthetic and its politics operate on several levels (not always distinct), and in countless contexts.  Sometimes when one thinks one is seeing clearly, it's not the big or true picture one is glimpsing - but the isolated image of a parlor game.

So a few sketchy comments, which are ultimately for myself, but which I share in case you feel they can be for you, as well.

... the connoisseur's eye frequently doesn't care about "genre" and in fact has perfect contempt for a genre project, though sometimes this is dressed up as faux-proletarian respect for a job of work.  Who cares that Phil Karlson made B-movies, Kansas City Confidential is wonderful and evinces an aesthetic sense that goes far beyond - and will exceed - all such pesky questions as material, industrial context.  It is nice to know that a B-movie is (was) a B-movie, that a cathedral is (was) a product of oppressive religious collusion with state and money, that a Renaissance painting existed in an art market and had patrons ... but these don't tell us anything about the inner meaning of the work.

... though discussing the inner meaning of the work is often a way of drawing facile boundaries in order not to do the more intellectually and (yes, perhaps) aesthetically strenuous job of dealing with the outer life of the work as well.

... and in the vacuum of an auteur's career, or a film movement, justifications come easily when one limits all possible connections down to a few registers (those of the author's own work, or a particular stratification of film culture, or - possibly - something vague called "Zeigeist").

... if one is a romantic-formalist and an auteurist, can one draw the line - practically speaking - between the auteur's consideration of his or her industrial context, and make distinctions as to those who did what they had to do in bad conditions, and those who simply let themselves go to seed, having already felt the acclaim - or given up the ghost?  (If yes: If not through "auteurism," then how does the auteurist evaluate the conditions in which the auteur works?)  To me, Carloss James Chamberlin's article in Senses of Cinema on Nicholas Ray and Bitter Victory is a superb example of a film that considers the performative - and this is also to say the industrial and political - dimensions of a filmmaker's authorship.

... the sleekness of some later Miike may pose the question (and I haven't considered the work diligently enough to have a real answer, myself) that he himself is simply festering in a gussied-up version of his prior, perhaps grittier work.  In such a context, even if one is only partly sympathetic to such a judgment of the work, it's sometimes more difficult to be "won over" by formal patterns or stylistic signatures, flourishes.  For instance, in Detective Story, the palette of gore and the wardrobe connection to Kazuya Nakayama's red-white shirt.  In this kind of context the execution - i.e. the performance of authorship - seems more rote than risked.  This is also why, during the middle of the past decade, I found myself dissatisfied watching certain art films by directors I loved, because I was no longer struck by their invention or their freshness, but instead was impressed by their sense of aesthetic safety.  Elliptical art films on the festival circuit (whether good, bad, or in-between) tend to simply deliver to their viewers precisely what they want, whereas E. Elias Merhige's Suspect Zero is at least taking a few chances, even if it's not a great film ...

... innovation is, of course, highly overrated.  I'm happy to let the next buzzword in aesthetics be something like "sustainability," borrowed from Whole Foods style Green politics.  It's also bad but at least it would bring some new questions to the table that would push aside shopworn modernism (i.e., oftentimes, Enlightenment-Fordism) or fan-centered pleasure-center target practice ... which seem to be the two dominant ways of talking about such things.

... at a certain point I asked myself how small the proportion of "successes" Miike makes would have to be in order for me to no longer consider myself an admirer of his work in general.  I imagine, though, that it could get pretty low.  I was converted from a skeptical position with regard to Miike, and so it's hard to de-evangelize oneself.

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Scribbles

Small things I've seen recently & appreciated - a lot of these are repeat viewings -

• the moment in Friday when Ice Cube opens the cabinet to find some Cap'n Crunch cereal, and lets out a "yeeah" (see it in the first few seconds here).  The vocalization seems poised between the scripted and the unmotivated, between the performance of a private moment and the performance for a camera and a crew.
• the spit fight in Fist of Fury 1991 between Stephen Chow and a thief (see it here).  In Zoolander 2 I hope they augment any further breakdance fighting with spit-fighting.
• Yuen Wah's (the landlord's) hair in Kung Fu Hustle.
• all of David O'Reilly's amazing Please Say Something (watch all 10 minutes here) - I didn't know any of his animation before a peer screened this one recently.
• Eric Balfour punching up a rubbery alien in Skyline - a surreally low-tech moment in a slickly dismal movie that pilfers - without humor, without wit - from various other alien/sf films like The Matrix and District 9.
• the scene when Audrey Hepburn first peers into George Peppard's apartment from the fire escape in Breakfast at Tiffany's, gazing on his passive, sleeping, unclothed body while Patricia Neal leaves cash on the table.  "I understand completely," she tells him soon after.

We Live in a Demography

(Link.)  Strange that a lot of the Republicans' favorite shows are still reasonably popular with Democrats (only three of them earning double digit scores from the quiche-eaters, and two of those are high two digit scores), whereas a lot of the Democrats' favorites are quite negligible to the Nascar tastes - the first five or six shows get middling two-digit scores from Republicans, and are followed by a number of other double digit scores.  According to the survey this breakdown of favorites may be because "Republicans like winners" and self-loathing Democrats are drawn to damaged goods.

My impression is that a significant element separating these two lists is irony, which the Democrat list has in spades: either shows that utilize irony, or double-voicedness, in pretty upfront ways (Mad Men, Parks and Recreation) or whose popularity among a cognoscenti involves ironic detachment (the Kardashians, SVU).  Let me reveal what is already obvious about my own tastes and observe that the one red list program of which I've actually seen a substantial number of episodes, Lie to Me, is in fact a procedural utterly unironic about its use of "science," of techniques.  This fairly entertaining drama is about a consulting firm which specializes in deception detection - they locate and uncover lies by studying universal, inescapable body language and micro-expressions!  Hired in each episode by government agencies, private individuals, or companies, the plots (of course) tend to twist in such a way as to show that the obvious liar is either not lying - or only covering up an even more insidious scandal.  It's a ludicrous business model we see at work here, where time and again Tim Roth & Co. wind up exposing their own clients.  To appreciate this show, and even to stay sane while watching an entire season of it (like I have) means establishing some basic relation to its ridiculousness.  Either one overlooks it because the pleasure of seeing science & technique successfully, wittily implemented is sufficient, or one savors the friction.  Some shows can accommodate this friction, others seem to need the irony (like Parks & Rec).

Not sure we're speaking about a golden age of irony, exactly, but, Henri Lefebvre says: "The great ironist appears in periods of disturbance, turmoil and uncertainty, when the people around him are absorbed in extremely large issues, when the future hangs on important decisions, when immense interests are at stake and men of action are unreservedly committed to the struggle.  This is when the ironist withdraws within himself, though only temporarily.  It is his way of taking stock and recouping his strength.  Back out again in the public domain, he questions whether those involved really know why they are gambling with their lives, their happiness or lack of it, not to mention the happiness of unhappiness of other people.  Do they actually know they are gambling?  Do they know what the stakes really are?  For the ironist the actions, projects, representations and men which confront him are like constellations where distances are more visible than the brilliant points they separate; these spaces he fills with darkness.  The tasks in hand, even the most valid ones, are not enough to satisfy him.  He scans the horizon and tries to weigh up the present.  He is the first to perceive the limits of the interests involved and the chances the tactics in operation have of success (while the people who have conceived them feel obliged to believe in them unreservedly, and never to lose face in front of their supporters)."  (from "On Ironic, Maieutic, and History," Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore)

It could be that the symbolic struggle at work in a chart like the one above is whether or not some of these products deserve irony or are simply granted it via the wish fulfillment and privilege of an educated elite (as a means of consumerist distinction).  And/or it could be that the great red-blue distinction itself - instead of calling for an earnest "purple America" rebuke - needs more ironizing.

The Facebook Movie

The Social Network is a little like nesting dolls, or so I thought at first - but this doesn't seem right because I can't be certain as to which particular film-layer masks or is masked the others.  Is it a Sorkin film?  Is it Fincher's?  (Columbia is the author for all legal purposes.)  Less a bunch of nesting dolls, then, and more like a multi-faceted set of optical illusions.  What, also, is this movie about?  "Human connection," Facebook specifically, the rise of a network more generically, a Will Hunting story minus the uplift, Harvard & Silicon Valley social life?  (An aside - Harvard's Kirkland House is presided over by Tom Conley, a great critic and scholar of cinema.)   In this respect, one can hardly pinpoint an origin to David Fincher but one can say, perhaps, that this is the kind of story - narrative resolution inconsequential, diffuse social reference & meaning - with which Fincher has spent the last decade thriving.

The American Television

(with apologies to Andrew Sarris)

This past weekend I came upon a 1959 letter circulated among interested parties, which concerned the hiring of directors for the second season of The Twilight Zone, giving an intriguing breakdown of potential helmers.  Some excerpts, with format changes and elisions ...

Justus Addiss
Walter Doniger
Robert Florey
Christian Nyby
Montgomery Pittman
Richard Sale 
Robert Stevens 

(I include Mr. Florey's name because I know he is much admired in many quarters; I am dead set against him because I believe he gives actors no help whatsoever.)

...

Here's a list of men of whom I've heard very good reports and whom we should consider

Robert Altman
Jack Arnold
Douglas Heyes 
Phil Karlson
Richard Wilson
Jack Smight

There are several young men, many raised in the Matinee Theatre school, whom I think have done very good work.  They seem to be especially notable for injecting a great deal of life and vivacity into their films:

Walter Grauman 
Jeffrey Hayden
Lamont Johnson
David O. McDearmon
Boris Sagal

...

There are several men still active, who, over a long period of years, have established a reputation as men of great style:

Lazlo Benedek
John Brahm
Arthur Ripley
Harry Horner
James Neilson

Bernard Girard
John Peyser

(The last two names are young men and less dependable then the others; under the discipline by which they do their best work, they are perhaps better than the others.)

Should we do it as a comedy, it might be well to consider the following successful directors:

Rod Amateau
Hy Averback
Richard Kinon
Oscar Rudolph

* * * 

A letter like this shows that they qualitatively grouped directors in the industry, too (and lines between the film and television industry at this point were blurring), albeit not with the same kinds of categories as Mr. Sarris and those who've come after - but definitely according to the characteristics of a director's work (like vivacity) or an established track record in a genre.  It all points to the complexity of artistic input and collaboration that can go into producing some big audiovisual affair.  There are enthusiasts of the moving image who take special pleasure from, say, the John Brahm-directed episodes of The Twilight Zone (or Gerd Oswald in The Outer Limits), regardless of who wrote that episode's script.  I say this not to devolve into the awful parlor game / pissing contest that asks (as though there's an answer), "who is the real author of this object?" ... only to point out the lines which establish an aesthetic, from the viewer's perspective, are unstable and also capable of keying in to official discourse marginally or obliquely, posing unanticipated questions and finding answers neither proffered nor hidden by "the text."  And there seems to be some industrial and historical precedent for this ...

* * *

Season two of The Twilight Zone, episode list with directors.

"The King Will Not Return" (Buzz Kulik), "The Man in the Bottle" (Don Medford), "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" (Douglas Heyes), "A Thing About Machines" (David O. McDearmon), "The Howling Man" (Douglas Heyes), "Eye of the Beholder" (Douglas Heyes), "Nick of Time" (Richard L. Bare), "The Lateness of the Hour" (Jack Smight), "The Trouble with Templeton" (Buzz Kulik), "A Most Unusual Camera" (John Rich), "The Night of the Meek" (Jack Smight), "Dust" (Douglas Heyes), "Back There" (David O. McDearmon), "The Whole Truth" (James Sheldon), "The Invaders" (Douglas Heyes), "A Penny for Your Thoughts" (James Sheldon), "Twenty-two" (Jack Smight), "The Odyssey of Flight 33" (Justus Addiss), "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" (John Brahm), "Static" (Buzz Kulik), "The Prime Mover" (Richard L. Bare), "Long Distance Call" (James Sheldon), "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" (Buzz Kulik), "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" (Justus Addiss), "The Silence" (Boris Sagal), "Shadow Play" (John Brahm), "The Mind and the Matter" (Buzz Kulik), "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" (Montgomery Pittman), and "The Obsolete Man" (Elliot Silverstein).

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Lady in Purple

Well, before I eventually get around to Some Came Running, here's another Minnelli title - but for the immediate purposes of this post I'm wondering about the story of the lady in purple?  She's attending the ballet, I believe, in the first shot, and attending the final performance of the big musical show in the second shot.  Society theater maven?

Demon Lover Diary

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

Cinephile Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Something

 















I.

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


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


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


II. 

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

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

III.

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

IV.

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

V.

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

Bad Object

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


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

(a recent Tom Gunning interview)

* * * 

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

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

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

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

The Artist at Work

Tape

Bells Are Ringing

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

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

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

Video of the Day

Unlived-In

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

Tunnels

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

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

Gaga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *














* * *

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

* * *

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

Right to Left

From a Tiny Little Bird

Believe Your Eyes

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

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

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

Vicious

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

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

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

(Back) across 110th St ...

... down to the Bowery, and beyond.













And then:














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

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

Image of the Day

Tryin' to Make Ends Meet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day

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

Young People

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

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

Why is any of this the way it is?

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

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

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

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

An Addendum on Violence

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

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

Unaccomplished Artistry

Doing some research for some of my own nebulous academic projects, I watched on YouTube (part 1 here) the shot-on-video slasher movie Blood Cult (dir. Christopher Lewis, 1985), which advances the notion that neither craft nor authorship - in at least some senses that these terms frequently take on - need have much to do with the experience of wonderful cinematic art. An inept, unoriginal piece of pure hucksterism, Blood Cult as a mere market burp (see here) nevertheless presents haunting images, powerful compositions, and a quite absorbing trip down the rabbit hole. A lot of it has to do with "video aesthetics," which is mainly why I watched the thing. And you should watch it too, if you are at all inclined.

Quote of the Day

"If the outstanding films are never all visible at the same time until the window of their contemporaneity has closed, it means they are truly contemporary only for a small group of people—critics, programmers, and distributors. (The rest of us are like people looking at stars that appear bright but, in their own real time, may have already gone dim.) And if we indeed have a common agreement that this small group can declare what the contemporary cinema is, let’s acknowledge that the conditions under which they exercise their judgment are usually bad. Programmers see almost everything on DVD—usually in an office, at home on TV, on a laptop—or else, like critics, at other festivals, often at the rate of three or four a day, a rate that pulverizes both discrimination and memory."

(Chris Fujiwara, "To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema," n+1)

Double Identity

A Val Kilmer vehicle, direct-to-video (or, if not, might as well have been), with a title that bears the brute generic beauty of exactly this kind of movie. Vague potential to be misread as Double Indemnity, which might only led to a couple of disappointed, perplexed viewers. It's also known as Fake Identity: less elegant, more to the point, still not entirely "accurate" with regard to the plot. I admit that I only paid half-attention to the film, and I wouldn't call it good, but I admire the fact that it trusts in its audience's either intelligence or inertia enough to withhold exposition of its outlines of the premise until the hour mark. We don't really know who's doing what, who's working for whom & why, and whether or not Kilmer's character really even does have a "double identity."

Step

There a plenty of things to say about the richly formulaic world of the Step Up movies, and the alternately lazy-intense, infuriating-charming stories they tell. Nobody needs to tell me about how these movies are awful because I'm aware of the ways in which they are shallow and mediocre; but in some ways they are wonderful - such as in Step Up 3D's reconciliation scene between Adam Sevani and Alyson Stoner, where the "you got served" logic underlying the dancing* goes to the lavatory for a few minutes, and the logic of the classical Hollywood musical takes over, and a - sincerely sincerely sincerely - beautiful, fantastic dance number breaks out. I guarantee you that this sequence will be better than any scene in at least eight (8) Best Picture-nominated movies this year.

* The pinnacles of the hip-hop dance battle in narrative film, that I know of, are Beat Street's amazing subway battle (the set-up is key, more so than the dancing itself), and Step Up 2: The Streets' fantastic final dance (which Step Up 3D alludes to in its own dance battle scenes more than once, but never replicates, let alone tops). I'm happy to accept nominations for other 'greats.'

To Hear Your Banjo Play

Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, Richard Leacock, Woody Guthrie, Willard Van Dyke, Irving Lerner - amazing, the names and talent that can gather around a 16-minute film from 1947 about the banjo.

Realism: Vagaries of Lighting

Above: a tame/risque scene from the James Cameron potboiler-blockbuster True Lies (1994).

Those who would focus solely on the masters and masterpieces are missing out. (Those who focus mainly the Cameron-type films aren't likely to be regular readers of this blog, so I don't think I need to address them, right?) A major reason why the Great Men / Great Film traditionalists are missing out is because aesthetic excellence is - and must be - always relational. The mountain of dreck & routine justifies, contextualizes the jewels. But even more interestingly, if you ask me, the entire field of a/v culture is more fertile when aesthetic standards are ... I do not say abandoned (how could one even pretend to do this?), but placed to one side for a bit.

At a certain point, who cares if True Lies is an awful film, or an awesome flick, or a "genuinely underrated" something-or-other? More important is how we use it and what we draw from it. I have a mild sentimental attachment to True Lies, this movie having entertained me greatly over 5-10 viewings during my early teen years. So, revisiting chunks of it on Netflix Instant over the last few days, I was struck by the scene above: Jamie Lee Curtis' striptease.

No, not as striptease.

It's the lighting. (And the sound.)

We are to believe that Curtis' character won't recognize her own husband in this dim light - not even his silhouette. I'm sure a cognitive psychologist would be able to explain to me something about vision & expectation, but I'm inclined to believe that a realist direction of the scene - in this light, in this sound - would inevitably show Curtis quickly growing suspicious, and from there quickly discovering the truth. And I'm sure Cameron and whoever was working with him would have been able to develop the interaction in a suitably "entertaining" way if Curtis just ended up recognizing Schwarzenegger. So the question is: why this particular deviation of psychological believability in a film that draws all of its energy from the interplay between the quotidian and the violent-sublime-absurd?

(And the sound, about which I have even less-formed thoughts, is intriguing here too: presumably Curtis does not hear the clicks of the play/stop/ffwd/rew buttons, but in close-up the film indeed replicates them, shows that this tape recorder is a perfectly "normal" tape recorder, not a special digital gadget requiring special CIA-ninja training ... is the disconnect the blatant, and open, jump from realism to fantasy, i.e., realism as a type of fantasy?)

In the videotape of the film I saw the film on multiple times in the mid-'90s, as I recall, the image was darker, murkier: it was somewhat more believable that Curtis wouldn't recognize Schwarzenegger. The YouTube clip above is a little closer to this VHS experience. The more optimal digital future, however, has scrubbed the composition clean - it seems - and at least on Netflix's stream, it seems baldly impossible that Curtis can't just recognize her husband sitting in a chair a couple yards away from her.

How are we to take this series of images? Depending on the level of incredulity one applies to the narrative as well as the medium (and condition of the medium) in which one views the film, the lighting is a marker either of very subtly, deftly coded realism or quasi-realism (if the image is murky and Schwarzenegger cannot be recognized in long-shot by the viewer), or it is a bold divorcement from realism that requires our faith, much like the scenes of Westerns shot in la nuit américaine.

The Moment of Decision

Below: something about the inscrutability of the child actor ("child actor") - the last scene of the first episode of Freaks & Geeks. The character Sam Weir's hopes to dance to a slow song with his freshman year crush look to be horribly, inevitably stunted once Styx's tune starts the rock-out portion ... but there's a moment of beauty around the 2:34 mark here, because it looks like - crucially! - the body decides what to do first, and then the cerebral cortex does, and for that split second John Francis Daley's face becomes a portal into infinity, folks.

Quote of the Day

“I am not a historian; I am a writer challenged by enigmas and lies, who would like the present to stop being a painful atonement for the past, who would like to imagine the future rather than accept it: a hunter of scattered voices, lost and true.”

(Eduardo Galeano,"Words About Memory and About Fire," trans. Mark Fried)

Knots

In cinema there inheres a promise of viewership - as with writing, painting: the medium is a form given to intentional reception as well as to interception. Some films may be said to formally invite or close off viewers in some patterned way (the ‘openness’ of the classical Hollywood commercial text as opposed to austere high modernism, or dialogue-free chase film in distinction to in-jokey film about the film industry). There is truth to this. But a film is a knot of social forces, a note inscribed by actors, propelled into the social sphere - as weapon, encouragement, shelter, admonition …

Different 'discursive shapes' themselves structure an apparently discrete audiovisual object, not only in its production/encryption, but in its 'afterlives,' and in its directionality when released into the sphere as a knot (which is sometimes well before its full release). These shapes describe the cultural reckoning around cinema - not cinema as an entire medium or entity, per se, nor individual films, but in terms of cinema as an agglomeration of myriad strings of knots, beads (strings of types of knottings).