First Impressions

Recently I watched Buster Keaton in Free and Easy (1930), a film I'd never seen before, and which despite its conventionalisms and shaky early sound design (this doesn't strike me as one of the "inventive" 1928-1931 films), it's really quite lovely, and it's so unfortunate that Keaton's career fizzled soon after, as I think he transitions well to a voiced cinema.  Though we can see the ending come from miles away, it nevertheless remains heartbreaking.

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Though the Jackass films are puerile, they are more inventive, riskier, and more philosophically trenchant than most films that get nominated for big Oscars.  (That polemical thrust made, I wish someone would do a Durgnatian Mirror for England-style defense of the middlebrow Hollywood film.  That is, a middlebrow defense from a brilliant, freewheelin', nobrow critic.)

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Pietro Marcello's La Bocca del Lupo (2009) is the real deal - where some filmmakers, even very good ones, occasionally make "festival films" that appear a bit hermetic, a bit predigested, somewhat incapable of really ruffling any feathers, Marcello (like Pedro Costa) comes off to me as more a mere fellow traveler to that world.  (I mean this as a compliment.)  My feeling is that the world of his films bears a robust linkage to the world external to the theater, external to production companies.  And the use of Buxtehude is Tree of Life-level good.

Lazy

Look at these fucking hipsters.  Lazing about in a filthy communal house, drinking cheap beer with their cheerios, cheesy ironic music, mumbling about how their lives have no direction.  No, no - to be honest, I've not been lazy exactly.  Just busy on a number of different projects that haven't come to fruition yet.  But expect to see more here (and elsewhere on the Internets by yours truly) by the end of the month, or early April.

Nineteen Fifty-Five

In memory of the late Damien Bona, I'm posting a list of favorite films from 1955 - which was his birth year, but also in his opinion (and that of many cinephiles, I think), an exceptional year for movies.

The older I've gotten, the more difficult it is for me to play the game of ranked favorites, and I'm eschewing numerical rankings for the more impressionistic proviso that this list is in roughly descending order of preference.  Some films are in need of another viewing (Kiss Me Deadly, The Tender Trap), even desperately so (Lola Montes, Floating Clouds).

The Long Gray Line (John Ford)

Les Maîtres fous (Jean Rouch)

Night and Fog (Alain Resnais)

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)
The Princess Yang Kwei Fei (Kenji Mizoguchi) 
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer)

The Tender Trap (Charles Walters)

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk)

Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles)

Mosaik Im Vertrauen (Peter Kubelka)

Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich)

Summertime (David Lean)

Lola Montes (Max Ophüls)

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray)

Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray) 

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse)

Violent Saturday (Richard Fleischer)
A Bloody Spear on Mt. Fuji (Tomu Uchida)  

The Far Country (Anthony Mann)
Devdas (Bimal Roy)
Two Scent's Worth (Chuck Jones)
One Froggy Evening (Chuck Jones)
Knight-Mare Hare (Chuck Jones) 

The Trouble with Harry (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Phenix City Story (Phil Karlson)

The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder)

To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock)

Some honorable mentions: The Indian Fighter (Andre De Toth), Moonfleet (Fritz Lang), Run for Cover (Nicholas Ray), Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple (Hiroshi Inagaki), Murder Is My Beat (Edgar G. Ulmer), A Man on the Beach (Joseph Losey).

If there's a title you're looking for, and not seeing ... it's possible that I've forgotten a film or two, or would categorize a title in a different year than you might.  It's very possible that I might not have seen a film - skipping over the likes of Tales of the Taira Clan, Mr. and Mrs. '55, Le Amiche, The Man with the Golden Arm, Strategic Air Command, and Shree 420, you should ask me about how life has conspired against me seeing the whole of Smiles of a Summer Night.  (Don't really ask - the stories are boring.)  And of course there's always a chance that I might not be crazy about a film that I've seen but which you might love.

Cleopatra

Recently I have been thinking about Julio Bressane's Cleopatra (2007).  It's a film with a rare kind of tone throughout: it's absorbing and erotocomic, and in its imagination of antiquity it sits somewhere between Straub-Huillet and Fellini.  It looks both lavish and barebones.  Below are some stills to whet your appetite.  (H/t MA.)

The Myth of Film Language

Sometimes in order to clarify things for oneself it's good to go through old problems and old arguments.

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“Hitchcock said this to Truffaut back in the day. You know, when they scream in that shower they’re screaming in Tokyo the same way they’re screaming in Paris. It isn’t the language that’s making them scream. It’s not the words, man. It’s the pure cinema that is effective. And when you’re speaking with the images, and you’re putting those images together, they way they’re supposed to be put together, then you’re speaking the language. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Serbia, or in a fucking igloo with Eskimos. You’re speaking that one universal language, and that’s the language of the cinema. And that’s holy.” (Abel Ferrara)

* * * 

Let us leave aside, first, the nagging problem of the aptness of metaphor.  (Or even the literality of the choice of language to denote what cinema does.)  Can we really call film "a language," or say that it has one?  Is "language" the appropriate word?  Those questions are not quite what I want to consider for a moment.  For even if one thinks of the language in "the language of film" as only a tentative, working solution, there is still something at the heart of the connection - the thing which this metaphor would seek to name.

The idea that cinema equates to stories is not an opinion that holds any weight here.  It is obviously false to anyone who has actually bothered to see a little cinema.  But what about the idea that the representational film, at least, embodies a certain potential for grammar?  (There we go, with "grammar" - another word whose metaphorical appropriateness will raise questions.)  What about the loved (or dreaded) system of continuity editing for instance, as described by Bordwell & Thompson?  If we look at wordless narrative films, even - like Murnau's The Last Laugh or Cavalier's Libera Me - might we not recognize some kernel of truth to this idea, that the cinema operates on a register which we can liken to language?  However problematically?  The idea that cinema could be or have its own language is a positive expression of the negative claim that cinema requires no other language to complete or complement it.

If there is, in fact, language of film it can only and always be provisional and conditional.  One could suggest that each great work of cinema, or each great author, creates its own language - but to posit this is then to retreat away from the universalism, the barrier-crossing potential of film language itself, as a larger category.  We'd then be talking about cinematic Esperanto at best (of which countless examples would come forth), and some of the problems presented by a private language at least.

Maybe cinema both does and does not require other language.  It does not in the sense that one can produce representational cinematic works which  have no "words" in them.  But it does in that cinema is screened for people who themselves have words, and is made by people who have words.  A discursive dimension imbues all cinema with life and is, in fact, what works against the otherwise.  There is no cinema purely of words, just as there is no cinema purely of senses, or of any other oppositional term.  (And indeed to think of them in such terms does require the constitutive or at least mediating presence of words themselves.)  In Claude Faraldo's wordless Themroc, the conceit of a being (being-socially) without language is expressed amidst the decay (destructive and pleasurable, both) of conditions of society. 

And the cinephile's devotion to the language of cinema is also a kind of fantasy.  Such a cinephile professes faith in the idea that the language she does not have is a language that is inessential.  Likewise, the connoisseurship of this cinephile is the central category of appreciation ... from which all contestation about meaning enters a circuit of a purely cinematic exegesis.  I am unconvinced, though, that the words elsewhere and the words otherwise are extraneous or can be neatly bracketed.

From what else would we bracket off "the film" than the very world ...

* * * 

"In a certain way contemporary cinephilia is a cult of the universal surface, one of whose most potent expressions is a particular cinephile practice: Watching films without subtitles including films in languages one doesn't have the slightest clue about (for practical purposes we'll just ignore the problem of dubbing). This practice, cinephilia-mythology-wise, originates with Henri Langlois and his legendary programming dogma of showing everything in its as original state as possible and in the way it's easiest available which quite often meant prints without subtitels. Being close in time to the late silent era also meant a greater general acceptance of the concept of cinema as an art of self-explanatory moving images, meaning that films would generally make themselves understood more through images than through words. Another cinephilia-myth tells of the Nouvelle Vague'ians' problems with English which lead them to look more closely at the pictures and 'feel' their way into the film as they weren't quite able to follow the dialogue. The concept of mise-en-scene has also quite a lot to do with enabling the viewer to make sense of a film without the need to understand its language -- as Rivette had it, polemically: The language one needed to understand in order to appreciate Mizoguchi was not Japanese but mise-en-scene. Personally and equally polemically speaking I think this is utter bullshit but I appreciate the noble sentiment motivating it: the Utopia of an universal language, an Esperanto of the mechano-objectively observed world.

"The problem is: A cinephilia based on the idea/ideal of mise-en-scene is only able to describe a film's 'secondary reality' which is the surface itself ie it can only make 'abstract humanist' sense of the images and sounds and rythms -- its 'primary reality' which is the film's essence in its cultural conditions gets lost, and with it all possibillities for mistakes and misunderstandings, per Goethe the only things that unite mankind." (Olaf Möller, "We Come from Afar and We Will Go Further")

Damien Bona, 1955-2012

The recent passing of a dear friend and mentor, Damien Bona, came as a shock.  He was the co-author of Inside Oscar and the sole author of its sequel, Inside Oscar 2 (among other books).  The stance Damien (and his collaborator Mason Wiley) took toward the Academy Awards is a very instructive one: acknowledging the ridiculousness of the Oscars and yet taking them seriously and enthusiastically as a cultural phenomenon.  I first started to correspond with Damien online, twelve years ago, when he was nice enough to supply this greenhorn cinephile with a copy of Man with a Movie Camera.  The email correspondence continued from then onwards and continued into "real life" when I went to New York for college.  A lot of my own ways of looking at the world, and film, were forged in conversation with him.  Damien was an incredibly kind, generous, warm human being.  I cannot stress these qualities enough; even those who only met him briefly sensed as much.  His commitment to great cinema (favorite directors included Ford, Ozu, Mizoguchi, McCarey, Edwards, Kiarostami, Sirk, etc.), to fighting the good fight politically, to great food and drink, to cats, and to human kindness, serve as an instructive example to all people everywhere.  It is no exaggeration to say that my own life would have probably turned out significantly different had I never met him.  There is much more that I could say, but I'm afraid I might not stop.  He will be deeply missed, and his memory cherished, by myself and many, many others.

Commonplace

Various quotes from others that I've pinned down over the last several months, in hopes of working them into something or other, but I've either deferred the material I've put them into, or just couldn't come up with something big enough ... provocative points of departure, some of them ...

"The films of Philippe Grandrieux pulsate. They pulsate microcosmically: in the images, the camera trembles and flickers so violently that, even within a single, continuous shot, no photogram resembles another. And they pulsate macrocosmically: the soundtrack is constructed globally upon unidentifiable, layered, synthesised, ambient noises of breath or wind, sucked in and expelled, which underlie the entire film and constitute its disturbed heartbeat, returning to our ear when all other sounds have disappeared. In the very beginnings and endings of his films, over the credits, there is nothing but this strangely bodily sound." (Adrian Martin)

"Consumerism is a Calvinist sadist's word for "pleasure". Attacking rioters' "consumerism" is just saying they should have no pleasure.  There is a moralising left willing to forgive the rioters a little so long as what they are doing IS NO FUN. So long as its sacrifice for the commonweal, like these pundits subject themselves to in their commodity consumption. Watching The Wire isn't "consumerism" it's a duty!" (alphonsevanworden, back in August)

"The body of the movie could rethink itself into new forms across a 20th-century history of B-movies, the nightmare responses to the violent, daylight realities of women held at stainless steel ovens to smell cobbler and dream of their men at war." (Gina Telaroli)

"Nevertheless, I do not wish to suggest that we abandon radical political film theory, nor radical politics more generally. Just the opposite. What I would suggest instead is that we might take more seriously the dead-end that radical theory takes in its insistence only on displeasure, which is, as I am suggesting here, always predicated on a claim that truth is an unhappy event. For one, if we abandon the idea that the work of the political is the excavation of truth—and it is tempting not to do so precisely because we are so accustomed to denying the status of truth to any image that offends us—we might be in a better position to see the work that images can do in and for the social, especially as we come to understand the social as something that cannot be, and should not be thought to be, beyond representation. Likewise, if we understand the movement of the social as a process of representation, then we are in a better place to understand just how important it remains to think images politically, but to do so on the promise of pleasure instead of violence, happiness instead of deception. We might begin, then, by thinking about the terms of compromise and recognition rather than identification and interpellation. To proceed in this way is to bring moving image theory even closer to political philosophy, and allow us to both understand and effect change in the social along more peaceable and productive lines." (Brian Price)

"Although Lav Díaz arrives touted as an important new directorial talent, there's scant evidence to support the claim in his two featured films. The eponymous protag of his Dostoyevsky-inspired The Criminal of Barrio Concepcíon (1999) is a naive farmhand who gets involved in a kidnapping that goes violently wrong. This plodding drama, laced with ludicrous English dialogue, is not a total dud - it draws a good deal of strength from Raymond Bagatsing's beautifully understated central performance. Díaz's next effort, Naked Under the Moon (1999), a somewhat Bergman-esque tale about the limits of faith, concerns an impotent ex-priest and his tormented family. A chronicle of agonized morality, it's carved in lead." (Elliott Stein)

This last quote in particular should not, I hope, deceive as though its repetition were my endorsement.  Still, it can be illuminating to look into early reviews of important films or figures before wider critical recognition (and in some cases orthodoxy) kicks in.

Image of the Day

Overlaps

The Star of the Show

(Quotes taken from Raymond Durgnat's "Pleading an Aesthetic Excuse" section in Films and Feelings, presented not as endorsement so much as food for thought.  More to follow on these topics, at some point.)

"In a sense the star is to the public as the sumptuous women of Tintoretto and Veronese were to the nouveau-riche of Renaissance Italy, or as the languorous favoured by the Pre-Raphaelites: in Edgar Morin's words, 'Movie glamour bears witness to the presence of the ideal at the heart of the real ... the archetypal beauty of the star acquires the hieratic quality of the mask. ... The star's ideal beauty reveals an ideal soul.'  Movie glamour is part of the artistic urge which tends, not towards the real, but towards the ideal.  It is the Platonism of l'homme moyen sensuel, for whom 'heaven' is more Garden of Eden than a cloudy realm of sexless angels."

"There are stars without superior beauty - Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler - for glamour is, perhaps, just one over-used facet of the life-force which stars assert as the classical Gods asserted (with Charlton Heston for Mars, Jerry Lewis for Dionysus ...).  Glamour without this streak of life-force can never make a star.  Of all Rank's charmschool girls only those who broke the mould made the grade - Diana Dors (by being brash, vulgar and working-class), Jean Simmons (by the glint of intensity, of Celtic feyness, in her well-balanced middle-class persona), Belinda Lee (after being liberated by an Italian love affair), and Honor Blackman (after donning black leather, high-boots, and topical fetishists' rig)."

"The physical and the psychological interweave: 'Invariably what made them stars' observes Arthur Mayer, 'was some physical attribute or personal mannerism' - he cites, 'John Bunny's jovial bulk, Mary Pickford's golden curls and sweet smile, Maurice Costello's urbanity, Clara Kimball Young's yearning eyes.'  We might add: Alan Ladd's deadpan, Bogart's paralysed upper lip and pebble voice, Veronica Lake's peekaboo wave - far from being just gimmicks, they are more even than iconographic emblems: fans take them as metaphors for personality traits, as lyrical assertions of character.  To see such traits as being, by the literary standards asserted by Henry James, psychologically crude, is only half the story.  The well-loved characters of Dickens and Conan Doyle, or for that matter of Fielding, Richardson and Racine, are no more complex; Dickens endowed his characters with 'catch phrases' corresponding to a visual medium's visual 'tags.'  And what makes an 'unrealistic' star seem, to an audience, realistic, is these feelings of theirs which his personality 'accommodates.'  They are his resonance in him."

...

"The intelligentsia's disdain of the star is motivated by the fact that the public's demands on a star's personality tend to limit the range of his performances.  (There are exceptions: T.S. Eliot was a Marie Lloyd fan, and her range was as narrow as Kim Novak's - or as Mr. Micawber's and Sherlock Holmes's.)  Second, intellectuals like to identify with creative artists, and current dogma has it that stars are witless things who do only what they're told by the director.  This content is often quite false: Lillian Gish contributed as much as any of her directors, Mae West and Burt Lancaster are famous for directing their directors.  In any case, the director works through his actors, just as a painter works through his paintings, and it is the work of art to which we should first respond.  An older tradition of film criticism talked about Bette Davis films (rather than Aldrich, Sherman, Rapper films); James Agate and La Revue du Cinema (the grandfather of Cahiers du Cinema) criticized in terms of stars as much as of directors; and it's a pity that such criticism in terms of stars has been left to the ladies of Films in Review, or degenerated into half-facetious cults by solemn intellectuals gigglingly off-duty.  (Which perhaps explains why slapstick is criticized in terms of stars - but not 'serious' films.)"

Year's End

I haven't really compiled, or been able to compile, a year end top ten in quite a long time.  Perhaps after I've caught up with more titles I can add something.  Usually what I've done, annually, around the 31st of December is to make a list of memorable first time viewings from the year.  Generally, highlights are decidedly 20th century.  But that doesn't satisfy me this year - I could cite incredible things that I only just saw in 2011 (like Garrel's L'Enfant secret on a digital copy, or a print of Raoul Walsh's wonderful Sailor's Luck, or the monumental Eniaios II screening that the Siskel Center showed here in Chicago).  But instead I want to look to the future, and so I'll just write a few words about a few important films from the past year ...

Howls in Favor of Sade Award.  Qu'ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre) (Sylvain George, 2010), which has a rare balance for "political" cinema in that one can discern the virtues of both patience (human and aesthetic) and urgency (in feeling and in policy).  Sadly, few will have seen it.  And I myself can offer little in the way of analysis, certainly not the verbiage I've spilled on Tree of Life, because I've only seen Qu'ils reposent... once, and it calls for greater contextualization than I am able to provide.  But these readings might prove instructive, here and here.

Film of the Year. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011).  I've already written a lot about this film.  No need to keep going now; those who were disappointed (either because the movie didn't tell a clear story or that it allegedly "universalizes") won't find what I write convincing.   It would be interesting to re-read the love letters & hate mail to the movie just to see how they use the name of Papa Malick.  This points the way to the sociopolitical "problem" of The Tree of Life that I do think is worth calling into question but that almost nobody seems to want to talk about. Perhaps this reticence stems from the possibility that it might implicate critics too (gasp! clutch the pearls!) and not just the figurehead of the author. I'm referring specifically to the construction of The Tree of Life as a high romantic modernist work, and the subsequent, cannibalistic critical lineage which then denigrates that moment before it as too naïve, too recherche, too declasse. The underbelly of the history of criticism (maybe just one underbelly) is also a history of fashion, and what one says often carries greater significance for what it strategically leaves unsaid, but communicated, to the right kind of listener. This, I feel, is a problem in a lot of criticism of The Tree of Life but also a problem in the film, itself, this address to a specialized audience. 

Commercial cinema was very disappointing in 2011, though the 2010 festival cinema provided a number of good works filtering, in 2011, into area theaters and the digital domain (like Apichatpong's Uncle Boonmee, Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light, Breillat's La Belle endormie, Hellman's Road to Nowhere, among others).  My favorite genre film, just off the cuff, was probably Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins.

The best (very) short film I saw would have to be Ars Colonia (Raya Martin, 2011).

Recent Commercial Cinema

In the 1982 Milius Conan the Barbarian, Schwarzenegger's musclebound bumbling hero exhibits patience and guile to exact a measure of revenge (the slaughter of his family & his village), only to find - the film suggests at the end - more emptiness and unhappiness.  In the 2011 Conan the Barbarian, Jason Momoa is ostensibly just born a badass.  He doesn't struggle much.  When there is a job to be done he simply knows how to go about it - doesn't appear to need money or time or help (except when his sidekick, a wise and loyal black man who speaks in aphorisms [of course!], comes to his aid unbidden).  Once Conan embarks on his quest to avenge his father (and unlike the earlier film, his mother is not a figure to be avenged) by killing the murderers, the path to the climax is quick and direct.  Easy victory after easy victory, punctuated by one or two narrow escapes amidst impossible odds.  Deus ex machina after deus ex machina.  Sword slashes that would gruesomely kill a man don't even draw blood on him.  We know he's formidable, and the film shows us he's formidable, solely because the narrative seems to require it.  This Conan can catapult a henchman into the roof of his enemy's fortress, even "aiming" so superbly as to target the bedroom of the main villain.  It could all be quite entertaining if only the movie had the proper infusion of wit & levity, and the right kind of self-awareness.  (This is what Van Helsing attempted and failed at, and what perhaps Jonathan Rosenbaum saw in the 1997 Kull the Conqeuror, which I've never watched myself.)   Instead ... well, John Milius, the paleoconservative, in 1982 slyly provides an extremely troubling and almost nihilistic view of patriarchy, religion, and vengeance in his early film (almost against his own professed politics) - which is why the first Conan the Barbarian is some kind of pulp masterpiece.  But this new product is just the re-entrenchment, and reification, of the subject's mastery over the (othered) world around him.

The early Conan the Barbarian fascinates me, as a movie, partly because of its ambiguity with respect to the supernatural - this new one just kowtows toward the supernatural, and it positions its heroic subject as the rightful steward of all this supernatural power, all this prophecy and all these vaunted bloodlines.  Whereas the authority of patriarchy is subtly and perhaps unintentionally exposed as myth in '82, it's reinscribed as gospel in '11.  Or, to put it another way - in Milius' Conan, the "riddle of steel" involves the recognition that there are no gods, no existential certainties, no homelands, no authorities but those established, contingently, through force.  In Nispel's Conan, "understanding the sword" means you do a lot of cool shit until people respect your authoriteh.

Sociocultural notes - the new Conan also features non-white ethnic figures as its first raiders to the Cimmerian village.  (In Milius' film, the counterpart invaders approximate Picts.)  This just goes along with The Lord of the Rings and 300, movies that figure an external social threat by ridiculously blunt markers of nonwhite otherness.  Furthermore, Schwarzenegger's Conan finds his (sad) romantic interest in a fellow professional, a strong and mature woman, the excellent Sandahl Bergman.  This Conan finds his (hopeful) romantic interest in a "pureblood," a young lillywhite nun - i.e., very similar to the ultra-femme character whose advances Conan declines in the 1984 sequel (helmed by Richard Fleischer).  Of course, she's a "strong female character" - in neoliberal 2011 spectacle terms - because she's a little bit snarky and stubborn and haughty and says things like "I take instruction from no man" with the stilted, 20% faux-British accent of contemporary fantasy/historical movies.  She also appears handy with a blade despite no apparent training.  Conan is a "barbarian" because he likes to drink alcohol and kill bad guys and he talks about possessing women - just like an image of the abundantly heteronormative dudes that comprise this movie's market.  His personal journey entails only the acceptance that his pureblood nun girlfriend is tough too - i.e., that women can be tough like him. 

But by framing things this way, the producers of this film, and the cultural shorthand upon which they draw, simply couldn't be sexist, could they?  Could they?

The problem is not the use of appealing female love interests, or even of white heroes and eurocentric iconography per se.  It is rather a matter of what representational strategies are employed and what assumptions these strategies call upon.  So why does a pulp fantasy movie about brawns & revenge, made by an NRA figurehead, during the Reagan years, seem so, so much more radically uncertain about its genre rhetoric (i.e., the value of heroism, love, destiny, authority, etc.) than this 2011 piece of junk?

Similarly, Super 8 is a rather incredible pastiche of late '70s, early '80s Spielbergiana.  The messy boys' rooms exhibit some of the year's finest production design, and the cast of children proves excellent.  (Or maybe by "excellent" what I only mean - if I'm honest - is that they are appealing in a way consonant with the commercial movies of my childhood, rather than the cloying, irritating, wiser-than-thou moppets of present-day cinema.)  But what motivates this movie?  Absent parents & bourgeois "creative class" aspirations.  And while I doubt the J.J. Abrams & Co. want Super 8's viewers to extrapolate practical lessons from the film, one could conclude: "In the face of an evil alien threat [punned connotations possibly intended], all you've got to be open-minded and empathetic, and presumably also a creative type, like a rich Hollywood liberal Democrat perhaps ... and then the destructive, evil alien threat won't kill you."  But, again, it's worth calling into question the shallowness of the monster-movie representational strategies Super 8 uses alongside its skin-deep X-Files-ish anti-fed politics.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is competent in a depressing way: it underwhelms because it doesn't appear disproportionately awful in any one respect, even though none of it adds up to much.  Its premise and outcome are bleak but formulaic, thus robbed of much force.  I haven't looked into any information about sequels, but I imagine the expected sequel will see heart-of-gold chimp Caesar overthrown by the ugly, mottled chimp - a representational strategy, again, that approximates if not duplicates the visual rhetoric of ethnic otherness.  (This is why largely unheralded works like Dante's Small Soldiers or the Spierigs' Daybreakers, whether they're excellent films or something much less, are still intriguing and encouraging in their representational politics.  They trouble distinctions of "ugly [ethnic/monstrous] them" and "beautiful [white] us.")

J. Edgar, like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, neither excels nor fails in any outlying way - though it's a better film.  While not top drawer Eastwood, and full of problems the way that post-Blood Work Eastwood often is, it's the sort of movie I wouldn't mind seeing just a little more of, simply because it approaches things with a measure of seriousness, compassion, and equal parts discretion and curiosity.  When it comes to how to treat the movie, David Ehrenstein has already said it well enough.

Monte Carlo isn't so great, but it's not so bad either - see this review by Ben Sachs.

Stray Thoughts

"Well, to me it's two very different things [film and literature] … I mean there are principles that you can take from one and apply to the other but—no, I really make an effort not to see movies on literary terms, with plots and characters centrally… I try to see them as sound and image, essentially." (Dave Kehr)

Reading this interview with DK from a short while back, I was struck by the above, succinct sentiment.  I've voiced a similar sentiment before, as have a great many cinephiles with a more formalist (and often auteurist) bent.  I don't often make statements like this these days, but at the same time, in the proper circumstances all it takes is someone's snide dismissal of all experimental cinema, or of certain Robert Mulligan films (to name one name) for me to flip on the "sound and image" switch.  Still, there is a massive weakness to this defense and it's strange how formalists seem nevertheless willingly to overlook it despite predicating their taste and connoisseurship on attention to the materials of the medium.  "Plot and character" are simply not parallel, not congruous, not comparable, with "sound and image."  You can attend to one at the privilege of the other; certainly this is the level at which a lot of formalist cinephilia pitches itself polemically.  But 'sound and image' are for cinema what characteristics like words, sentence, diction, or grammar are for the written word.  Concepts like plot and character require perception but also comprehension.  Plot and character are not "uncinematic," nor are they "anti-cinematic," nor are they "cinematic."    The means of narration and emplotment certainly vary from the moving image to the written word, just as they vary from film to film, type to type.  But if they're there ...  Formalist cinephilia can rail against very real crutches & impediments to understanding, but can rely upon its own crutches if the viewer isn't careful, and takes on dogma like a security blanket.  (This last isn't a coded accustation of Kehr or anyone in particular, by the way - that interview was the springboard, it's not a target.)

* 

I've had various kinds of reactions to "mumblecore" movies (does this label mean anything anymore?) ... but I've yet to see one that doesn't cause me to wonder, "Who are these people?"

* 

The first section of The Nun's Story crossed with Times Square would equal something not unlike Ida Lupino's The Trouble with Angels.

* 

And if you look at The Trouble with Angels, it's refreshing to see how rough-edged commercial cinema once allowed youths to be - blemished skin, seemingly unrehearsed body movements.  One can't imagine a hair going astray on the head of Hugo's Asa Butterfield.

Sympton and Theme

Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009) could be described as crypto-conservative - respect for military (check), longing for the order and authority of the days of yore (check).  But it's crypto because it takes care not to code its racial anxieties racially.  In fact the majority of the criminals in the film are white.  Nevertheless, it would be possible to insert a mouthpiece into the film along the lines of David Starkey.  Everything else is in place for Harry Brown to hypothesize that the problem with contemporary, welfare state Britain is from its "culture" turning "black."  There's just no one in the script connecting those dots explicitly.  I presume this is because writer Gary Young, director Barber, etc., are more concerned with articulating a storyline that can be comparably more broadly marketed than they are mounting an ideological critique (that is, one from the right).  I suspect socially divisive (e.g. racist, classist, jingoistic) nostalgia is usually easier to market when it's an overtone or undertone, rather than a front-and-center theme.

*

Early in Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris (2007), the American boyfriend - played by Adam Goldberg - misdirects a gaggle of American tourists by giving them false directions to the Louvre.  His reasoning is that this has drastically cut their wait in the line for a cab at the airport.  They're Bush-voting Americans here on a Da Vinci Code tour, he rationalizes to Delpy.  They deserve to see something outside of their little worlds, such as a riot.  (Nevermind that this film seems to whitewash Paris as much as Amélie ever did.)  "You're so mean," Delpy replies, "but you're so right!"  Then she kisses him. The class privilege on display here is totally nonchalant.  It's good for American tourists from flyover country to "see some riots."  But does the syndicalist bohemian Parisian culture of Delpy's gentle caricature admit many - or any - nonwhite people?  Perhaps it might, if the nonwhite person is an artist, poet, designer, photographer, etc.  Goldberg's character, suggested to be a Clinton Democrat (!!!), speaks no language but English, went through Italy simply snapping photos ... he's not so unlike these ugly Americans after all, and his real quarrel with the Bush-Cheney tourists he lies to is that they have such poor taste.  They read Dan Brown, not the Faulkner-Kerouac axis of respectable literature.  They live in Kansas or something like it, whereas he lives in New York.  They voted for Bush, not for a proper left-wing politician like, ahem, Clinton or Gore or Kerry.

And this division constitutes the heart of 2 Days in Paris, which is in many ways a sophisticated film.  Delpy is an intelligent person and though I don't think the movie is totally successful, her intelligence shows.  Almost everything annoying on display, that I want to read as a symptom, is at least implicitly or subtly acknowledged by the film itself - a line of dialogue, a choice of setting or blocking.  (For instance, Goldberg goes to McDonald's in a moment of crisis, underlining his proximity to the compatriots that he so despises.)  The Before Sunrise/Before Sunset diptych, which Delpy was so crucial in helping to create, does an even better job than this, though - one of the great recent achievements of cinema in displaying a particular class position (rootless, precarious, but nonetheless privileged, educated, culturally savvy youth), not treating it with scornful distance but inhabiting this position, all the while subtly pointing to its limitations, the fact that it's not the center nor the apex of the world.  Even if it's easy to think that the films' so-called "message" is equal to Jesse's worldview, or Celine's.  This is a common refrain in virulent criticism against those two movies (as against a lot of Malick) - ignoring the structure in order to have one part (usually one or two characters' POV) stand in for the whole movie, a critical upgrade via synecdoche.  Of course there are films, and other artworks, where this is a valid enough operation.  But it should be demonstrated instead of assumed.  2 Days in Paris tempts this kind of reading, and indeed I'm not certain how one could examine the content of the film without it, and yet proves quite slippery ... the lesson being that it's a tricky and provisional thing to arrive at conclusions about an artwork's conclusions.  There are too many variables, too many contingencies - and cultural products have potentially long afterlives, they can be re-purposed, re-articulated, by people and from variable perspectives.

Hence the necessity of materialist (not moralist) analysis, when asking political and social questions of culture.  If we return to the example of Harry Brown, we could jump to the conclusion that the film is not only an indictment of an ineffectual nanny state bureaucracy, but also a thinly veiled lamentation that Britain's culture is "becoming black" ... even if the racial aspect is precisely what is veiled.  What then?  Having cracked the film's code, do we move on to the next?  Do we "combat" the film somehow?  (Why this one and not countless others?) 

Tech Notes

"[T]he arrival of any new technology that has significant power and practical potential always brings with it a wave of visionary enthusiasm that anticipates the rise of a utopian social order.  Surely the coming of this machine, this new device, this technical novelty will revitalize democracy.  Surely its properties will foster greater equality and widespread prosperity through the land.  Surely it will distribute political power more broadly and empower citizens to act for themselves.  Surely it will cause us to cultivate new and better selves, becoming larger and more magnanimous people than we have been before.  And surely it will connect individuals and groups in ways that will produce greater social harmony and a relaxation of human conflict."  (Langdon Winner, "Sow's Ears from Silk Purses")

"The technological plane is an abstraction: in ordinary life we are practically unconscious of the technological reality of objects.  Yet this abstraction is profoundly real: it is what governs all radical transformations of our environment.  It is even - and I do not mean this in any paradoxical sense - the most concrete aspect of the object, for technological development is synonymous with objective structural evolution.  In the strictest sense, what happens to the object in the technological sphere is essential, whereas what happens to it in the psychological or sociological sphere is inessential.  The discourse of psychology or sociology continually refers us to the object as apprehended at a more consistent level, a level unrelated to any individual or collective discourse, namely the supposed level of technological language.  It is starting from this language, from this consistency of the technological model, that we can reach an understanding of what happens to objects by virtue of their being produced and consumed, possessed and depersonalized."  (Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects)

“My point is that Marx is not working to create an undivided subject where desire and interest coincide. Class consciousness does not operate toward that goal. Both in the economic area (capitalist) and in the political (world-historical agent), Marx is obliged to construct models of a divided and dislocated subject whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other.” (Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”)

I've taken the above quotes from out of their contexts and chosen them to populate this post, which has no real point - it's blunt and vague, instead.  But I've been thinking the last several days about the grafting of politics into or onto technological forms.  Politics and technology are not equivalent and mutually exclusive spheres, but what I mean is the substitution of the latter for the former.  Or maybe the relocation of the former to the latter.  I.e., the rhetoric that Langdon Winner evokes.  But it's something that has prompted me to take a look at one of the earlier books by that joker Baudrillard, The System of Objects, because it now seems worth entertaining what he means when he provocatively suggests that the essential feature of the object resides in its technological abstraction - not its "psychology or sociology."  Something appealingly anti-determinist ...

TV Waves

"The cover centers on a television set seen from the side.  To the right are two little blond viewers in their pajamas, presumably siblings, who watch the illuminated screen raptly, one seated and the other lying on his stomach, head lifted at attention.  This domestic scene takes place in a void - the uniform black of the cover allows for no spatial orientation whatsoever.  But framing the floating vignettes are two twisting configurations of rainbow-colored electromagnetic waves.  Here the gap between the television commodity, represented photographically, and the network, represented in abstract wave patterns, is almost traumatic, as though some monstrous science fiction force had invaded the cozy children's world.  The cover of All About Radio and Television insinuates a startling fact: the network and the commodity, though structurally linnked in the ways I have suggested, are profoundly dissimilar and even antagonistic."  (David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy) 

For all its virtues, Joselit's book is also highly symptomatic: very much the work of an art history professor deciding to take on the brave new world of television studies, absorbing some of it, but also forming an argument without completely attending to the literature's findings.  (Such is the challenging nature of interdisciplinarity ...)  Interpretation suffocates a lot of Joselit's readings; if the electromagnetic waves are "almost traumatic" then one wonders what could possibly not constitute a trauma.  Instead the fashionable buzzword of trauma serves to contextualize an image that, to my own "art historian" eyes, is much more mundane than that. 

In Joselit, network broadcasting culminates (more or less) in the object, the physical object of television as well as its mainstream programming.  The network is represented abstractly, at least when in the context of commercial broadcasting, and video art rides in to save the day when finding more sophisticated or literal ways of representing it.

Image of the Day

Starting Eleven?

 

(Note: I see the above selection is fairly uncontroversial, as Arsenal fan Piers Morgan has recently tweeted support of the same eleven - Szczesny in goal, Santos at left back, Mertesacker and Vermaelen in central defense, Sagna at right back, Song and Wilshere and Arteta in midfield, Gervinho wide left, Walcott wide right, Robin Van Persie in the middle.  Though I hope the front three play fluidly and swap positions.)

Apologies for breaking my recent blogging hiatus with Premier League talk instead of, oh, the Toronto International Film Festival (not that I'm going) or FX's Louie (which I'm enjoying) or similar cinephilic-telephilic objects.  I've spent the last few days (a) reading, (b) writing, and (c) fretting obsessively about the end of the European league transfer window.  

To make a long, armshair sports column a little more concise - I'll just repeat that I'm an Arsenal fan.  

(Already I want to introduce a tangent into my "concise" blog entry: We American fans of the English game are so predictable.  Most of us witlessly gravitate to Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool - the three most successful clubs in English history.  I knew Arsenal were a big club when I ceremoniously devoted my allegiance to them, but it took me just slightly longer to realize what a damn statistic I was.  Whatever.  I could have jumped ship at any of the low points before, but I didn't and I won't.  On one hand, I don't call myself a "supporter" because that sounds like an unbearable affectation coming from someone who's never even set foot in London.  On the other hand, the big European leagues are very much a global game now, so there's no shame in being a Malaysian, Hungarian, or American fan of an English club.  I've roused myself at ungodly weekend hours for years just to see Arsenal try to pass the ball into the net.)

This past weekend, of course, saw the Gunners humbled by Manchester United ... 8:2.  That's right.  That's a soccer score.  If you're not aware of the significance of this and - strangely - are still curious, Google will direct you to countless pages of commentary and analysis.  Suffice it to say that this was definitive proof that the club's, and the manager's, actions in the transfer market and their policy on young talent has simply not been good enough on their own.  The squad needed skilled and determined players, and while some of the youth talents had that, they needed to embed it with a lot of experience on the pitch.

So you see, Arsenal's last gasp flurry of transfers was a highly satisfying - here are several experienced new players, all past college-age, who can help anchor all the youth talent in the club.  I think the average age of this ideal starting eleven is about twenty-five, and with some other recent signings, Park Chu-Young and/or Yossi Benayoun, in the squad, we'd even be a hair closer to greybreard.  This did not at all seem the case in the early part of the transfer window, when Arsene Wenger was signing - it seemed - mostly teenaged, unproven wide players when fans were clamoring for strength in so many parts of the pitch.  I am optimistic that the team will finish fourth, maybe even third (at the expense of Liverpool or perhaps Chelsea), and that they could even grab a cup trophy by season's end.  Finally.

That said, a tiny morbid part of me still expects Vermaelen, Van Persie, Song, Wilshere, and Szczesny all to pick up season-ending injuries before the end of October.

Image of the Day

Quote of the Day

"Let us retrace, more slowly and gradually this time, the step that Patrice Blouin made in his Shirin pan from classical mise en scène to the modern dispositif. It is not a matter of declaring, in this progression, that mise en scène is dead, whether as a mode of filmmaking or of film criticism. Perfectly fine classical films are still made today (whether by Clint Eastwood or Lone Scherfig), and mise en scène criticism, as we have known and loved it, is far from exhausting the field, historical or contemporary, of its research (see Gibbs 2006, McElhaney 2009, Perkins 2009). Rather, the question is: has there been a certain tendency in cinema (and audiovisual production more generally), not necessarily only an invention of recent times, that has been marginalised or literally undetected by the protocols of mise en scène critique, with its inevitable, in-built biases and exclusions? A tendency which is not the opposite of mise en scène or its negation, but a particular, pointed mutation of it? (Indeed, many auteur signatures—those of Bresson, Ozu, Angelopoulos, to take only a few classic art cinema examples—resemble the structure of a dispositif, even though auteurism, with its Romanticist attachment to a creed of unfettered creativity, has long fought shy of apprehending this intuition.)

"Or—the most radical notion—does the notion of the dispositif name or point to something that is and has always been inherent in mise en scène—maybe even larger or greater than it, as an overall formal category? This is what Raymond Bellour suggested in 1997 when he proposed that la-mise-en-scène (as, with a literary flourish, he dubs it) is a classical approach that corresponds “to both an age and a vision of cinema, a certain kind of belief in the story and the shot”, but is ultimately only one of the available “modes of organising images” in cinema (Bellour 2003: 29). And if the dispositif idea should rivet our attention to anything, it is the modes of organising filmic materials: Christa Blümlinger, for instance, defines a dispositif as the “spatial or symbolic disposition of gazes characterising a medium” (Blumlinger 2010), where gaze refers to all manner of looks, orientations and perspectives (fictive, technological, spectatorial)—and this is a matter not only of our eyes but also our ears. Naturally, within an art gallery—where directors including Akerman and Pedro Costa have literally disassembled some of their feature films and spatialised them across several screens in an architectural arrangement—the idea of dispositif as installation (and this can serve as yet another possible English translation of the term) is obvious enough. But can we also project the concept, and everything it raises, back into the single-screen medium of cinema, illuminating this medium in a new way?

"A key thrust of the machinic or systematic side of the dispositif concept is to remind us—a 1970s notion too quickly forgotten or repressed since then—that a dispositif is heterogeneous, that it is truly a matter of bits and pieces of very different substances brought into an often volatile working relation. For the great German critic Frieda Grafe (who died in 2002), all cinema—no matter how seemingly neutral or classical—came down to something resembling this: “Only the calculated mingling of formative elements originating in various media, each with its own relative autonomy, generates the tension that gives the film life” (Grafe 1996: 56). And she was, on this occasion, speaking not of any conceptual art installation but Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)!"

(Adrian Martin)