Monday, March 11, 2013
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
'85
Hey, here's another list ... top ten films from 1985.
The Blind Director
(Alexander
Kluge)
Chain
Letters
(Mark Rappaport)
Détective
(Jean-Luc
Godard)
Dreamchild
(Gavin Millar)
Fandango
(Kevin
Reynolds)
Himatsuri
(Mitsuo Yanagimachi)
Ran
(Akira Kurosawa)
Steaming
(Joseph
Losey)
Treasure
Island (Raúl
Ruiz)
Vagabond
(Agnès Varda)
Honorable mentions - After Hours (Scorsese), The Emerald Forest (Boorman), Rendez-vous (Téchiné), Police (Pialat), Heaven Help Us (Dinner), 'Je se vous salue, Marie' (Godard), Lost in America (Brooks).
Might have missed a few films, there are surely a few key ones I still haven't seen (two that spring to mind are Come and See and Return of the Living Dead), and I might make a few changes were I to revisit many of these, but otherwise ... here it is.
Friday, March 01, 2013
Scraps
The older I get, the more I value dispassion - not to supplant emotion, I mean, but I value it more for its own utility, to complement emotion.
*
Political denunciations of a cultural text that rest upon an interpretive stance of a stable text or subtext as a bound to failure on some level, even if just a philosophical one. Interpretation of meaning from the standpoint of form means that a political judgment in this vein is isomorphically similar to a formalist or hermeneutic one. But instead, I would argue, the possibility of any reading carries with it by necessity the possibilities of misreading, reading against, and reading alternatively. As a result ... political judgments that rest upon implied (and thus often unacknowledge) formalist grounds are specious and become ad hominem attacks only. Where then from here? Maybe the criticism of formal conditions of possibility (i.e., non ad hominem) or criticism of inductive/empirical trends.
*
I found Project X (Nima Nourazadeh, 2012) kind of exhilirating and funny, and though it was attacked (not wrongly) for its misogyny, it seems to me that it is at root no more misogynistic than 95% of Hollywood films - but is perhaps more forthright about it. I suppose some people have made defenses of Seth MacFarlane's Oscar routine from the position that it mocks this rampant misogyny through satire and grotesque, but I didn't see or pay attention to enough of the ceremony to have an opinion, really.
*
Commercial film sequels frequently stay largely in the same territory already laid out for them, but there's something elusive about what separates the diminishing returns variety (e.g., Taken 2, by many accounts also Expendables 2 though I didn't see that one) from the ones that remain comparatively fresh (e.g., the Transporter and Fast and Furious franchises).
*
Political denunciations of a cultural text that rest upon an interpretive stance of a stable text or subtext as a bound to failure on some level, even if just a philosophical one. Interpretation of meaning from the standpoint of form means that a political judgment in this vein is isomorphically similar to a formalist or hermeneutic one. But instead, I would argue, the possibility of any reading carries with it by necessity the possibilities of misreading, reading against, and reading alternatively. As a result ... political judgments that rest upon implied (and thus often unacknowledge) formalist grounds are specious and become ad hominem attacks only. Where then from here? Maybe the criticism of formal conditions of possibility (i.e., non ad hominem) or criticism of inductive/empirical trends.
*
I found Project X (Nima Nourazadeh, 2012) kind of exhilirating and funny, and though it was attacked (not wrongly) for its misogyny, it seems to me that it is at root no more misogynistic than 95% of Hollywood films - but is perhaps more forthright about it. I suppose some people have made defenses of Seth MacFarlane's Oscar routine from the position that it mocks this rampant misogyny through satire and grotesque, but I didn't see or pay attention to enough of the ceremony to have an opinion, really.
*
Commercial film sequels frequently stay largely in the same territory already laid out for them, but there's something elusive about what separates the diminishing returns variety (e.g., Taken 2, by many accounts also Expendables 2 though I didn't see that one) from the ones that remain comparatively fresh (e.g., the Transporter and Fast and Furious franchises).
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Monday, February 04, 2013
Is Bulleit So Rare?
The return of Walter Hill to the big screen is a cause for celebration in itself. Hill is a terrific filmmaker who has a large number of superb, probing genre films to his name: The Long Riders, The Warriors, Geronimo, Undisputed, Streets of Fire, and so on. Not all of his movies are masterpieces but the cinema would be a richer place if he made more feature films. I'm very much in his corner. But I don't think Bullet to the Head is a strong film at all - it's not poorly directed (Hill is too competent for that), but the overall conception is oppressively routine and this is not a case of a smuggler-auteur transcending the material and building something greater than the sum of its parts (as could be argued for Undisputed).
At the risk of beating a dead horse, or just picking at low-hanging fruit, I'm maddened by a recent dialogue between Armond White and Gregory Solman in praise of the movie. I don't really read White any more, but I do think that 10-12 years ago he was a quite decent critic who used his "contrarian" status much more judiciously than today. Now it's just a calling card which can get him writing gigs, I suspect, because his imperious manner and outrageous claims are parlayed into a brand, and help drive pageviews. (You might say that White updates the role of pop critic in our 9/11 context. We've forgotten how critics could examine morality through genre fun.)
I am also curious if anyone can establish for us that Gregory Solman is not, in fact, a long-standing pen name & alter ego for Armond White. Perhaps the two are critic-friends who've developed similar tastes over time - that's certainly a possibility. But given that they share a personal canon of great cinema, as well as similar styles of argumentation & critical reference, and they write for a lot of the same venues, and that White is known & seen around public screenings but Solman is seemingly even less photographed than Manohla Dargis, and is referred to almost exclusively by White (and rarely by other critics) ... well, you can see how suspicions arise in an idle mind. Maybe a bit like the possibility of Ray Carney writing some of his own fan mail - there are too many flattering imitations, too many phrases like the ones we see Solman put forth in this interview: "You convinced me!" or "As I know you know..."
Bullet to the Head is a story built upon cliche - if you like this, you can call it "myth" or perhaps "archetype," but at least be so honest as to acknowledge that 98% of these conventions draw upon other recent low budget action cinema, not The Searchers. Cliche and convention don't make a work bad (novelty is sometimes blindly overrated), but it's all in how they relate to one another and how they're expressed. For me, it's not as if the bonds of, say, Walter Hill's termitish authorial expression (as tied to his basic filmmaking competence) are absent so much as they are, in fact, too weak to overpower the essential moviemaking-by-committee feel of the material. At any rate, such action movie cliches on display here include escapes to fully equipped hideouts and climactic sequences set in abandoned warehouses full of machines and industrial detritus. Plus Stallone is his own man and we know this in part because he drinks an ultra-obscure bourbon, Bulleit, which he carries around to bars himself because nobody anywhere stocks Bulleit. That's right, Bulleit. Way obscure. And in Bullet to the Head. On the damn nose, screenwriters! (Or should we blame the money people?) Conveniently, Stallone's beautiful tattoo artist daughter (Sarah Shahi) also happens to recognize the names of local judges and politicians who pop up on a flash drive. Civics.
Another problem is the tired, unreconstructed partnership between the cop Sung Kang and the hitman Stallone. I'm shocked - shocked! - that the assassin-protagonist has his own moral code, or that the by-the-book detective must revise his highly legalistic standards toward violence and procedure. Then, of course, there are the par-for-the-course identity politics jokes that thud their way into the dialogue. Anyone who thought that Gran Torino's race banter was completely unmotivated should use this to see how rote, how mechanical such attempts at "wit" can truly be. (At least the point in Gran Torino is that Eastwood is ridiculous at the same time as he's being offensive, and his racism is ultimately shown as culturally conditioned rather than a conditioning feature of the movie's very genericism: Wikipedia says that Joel Silver chose to cast Kang, an "ethnic" i.e. non-white actor, for wider audience appeal.) Kang is Asian, and it's funny to see old folks disregard national and ethnic differences among Asians! Stallone's old! The actors spout off lines as if they're going through the motions, but what's more, it almost seems as if the characters are just as tired hearing this bullshit come out.
So it alarms my delicate, pearl-clutching sensibilities to see a discussion that appears to be on the side of the angels (because Walter Hill is the man) but is not only in my opinion wrong (since I'd say Bullet to the Head is very squarely mediocre) but doesn't even bother to establish a basic competence as a critical argument in the film's favor. White feints in the direction of auteurist polemic, but his "case" is actually devoid of any argumentation at all. Part of the formula is to mention a similarity between Bullet to the Head and some other esteemed movie (a similarity general enough that it far exceeds the specificity of anyone's particular craft, and, well, probably applies to macho action movies in general). Then, you up the ante with an sweeping declarative statement that might appear like a conclusion from the preceding premises but isn't. No joke, this is how White starts his dialogue:
Stallone's performance as career hitman Jimmy Bobo reminded me of Charles Bronson's streetfighter in Hill's directorial debut Hard Times. The same grizzled features, the same masculine ethos. The plot of Bobo teaming up with policeman Taylor Kwan (Sung Kang) recalled Hill's buddy movie 48 HRS. Hill and Stallone's cinema histories are combined, the action genre is updated.
One could also point out that the cinema histories of any two collaborators are necessarily "combined" when they work together on the same movie, and that strictly speaking a genre is always "updated," even through bad or run-of-the-mill contributions. (Note how often White speaks of "advances" and "updates" and what "we've forgotten," without ever describing what he means by any of this: it's snake oil.) Really, a genre artist like Hill deserves much better (and by this I also mean more rigorous) treatment than White's hollow ode.
Hill knows how make a few words matter. He evokes personal ethics and sums up genre ethics.
Is the second sentence supposed to follow logically from the first? Does it simply add to it? How does one "sum up" genre ethics? Are we talking about an ethics of genre? Ethics through genre? Is it enough for a movie to merely "evoke" personal ethics? Most movies evoke personal ethics - the problem is that they stop timidly, lazily at such evocation.
Bullet is an exciting exploration of post-9/11 morality.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
The post-9/11 world where money and ethics collide?
Oh, for fuck's sake, part two.
The torture of Christian Slater scene feels Godardian ...
It feels odd to me that someone might make this statement with a straight face if one has actually seen Le petit soldat ... what a blatant and irresponsible disregard for form, politics, and philosophy.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, or just picking at low-hanging fruit, I'm maddened by a recent dialogue between Armond White and Gregory Solman in praise of the movie. I don't really read White any more, but I do think that 10-12 years ago he was a quite decent critic who used his "contrarian" status much more judiciously than today. Now it's just a calling card which can get him writing gigs, I suspect, because his imperious manner and outrageous claims are parlayed into a brand, and help drive pageviews. (You might say that White updates the role of pop critic in our 9/11 context. We've forgotten how critics could examine morality through genre fun.)
I am also curious if anyone can establish for us that Gregory Solman is not, in fact, a long-standing pen name & alter ego for Armond White. Perhaps the two are critic-friends who've developed similar tastes over time - that's certainly a possibility. But given that they share a personal canon of great cinema, as well as similar styles of argumentation & critical reference, and they write for a lot of the same venues, and that White is known & seen around public screenings but Solman is seemingly even less photographed than Manohla Dargis, and is referred to almost exclusively by White (and rarely by other critics) ... well, you can see how suspicions arise in an idle mind. Maybe a bit like the possibility of Ray Carney writing some of his own fan mail - there are too many flattering imitations, too many phrases like the ones we see Solman put forth in this interview: "You convinced me!" or "As I know you know..."
Bullet to the Head is a story built upon cliche - if you like this, you can call it "myth" or perhaps "archetype," but at least be so honest as to acknowledge that 98% of these conventions draw upon other recent low budget action cinema, not The Searchers. Cliche and convention don't make a work bad (novelty is sometimes blindly overrated), but it's all in how they relate to one another and how they're expressed. For me, it's not as if the bonds of, say, Walter Hill's termitish authorial expression (as tied to his basic filmmaking competence) are absent so much as they are, in fact, too weak to overpower the essential moviemaking-by-committee feel of the material. At any rate, such action movie cliches on display here include escapes to fully equipped hideouts and climactic sequences set in abandoned warehouses full of machines and industrial detritus. Plus Stallone is his own man and we know this in part because he drinks an ultra-obscure bourbon, Bulleit, which he carries around to bars himself because nobody anywhere stocks Bulleit. That's right, Bulleit. Way obscure. And in Bullet to the Head. On the damn nose, screenwriters! (Or should we blame the money people?) Conveniently, Stallone's beautiful tattoo artist daughter (Sarah Shahi) also happens to recognize the names of local judges and politicians who pop up on a flash drive. Civics.
Another problem is the tired, unreconstructed partnership between the cop Sung Kang and the hitman Stallone. I'm shocked - shocked! - that the assassin-protagonist has his own moral code, or that the by-the-book detective must revise his highly legalistic standards toward violence and procedure. Then, of course, there are the par-for-the-course identity politics jokes that thud their way into the dialogue. Anyone who thought that Gran Torino's race banter was completely unmotivated should use this to see how rote, how mechanical such attempts at "wit" can truly be. (At least the point in Gran Torino is that Eastwood is ridiculous at the same time as he's being offensive, and his racism is ultimately shown as culturally conditioned rather than a conditioning feature of the movie's very genericism: Wikipedia says that Joel Silver chose to cast Kang, an "ethnic" i.e. non-white actor, for wider audience appeal.) Kang is Asian, and it's funny to see old folks disregard national and ethnic differences among Asians! Stallone's old! The actors spout off lines as if they're going through the motions, but what's more, it almost seems as if the characters are just as tired hearing this bullshit come out.
So it alarms my delicate, pearl-clutching sensibilities to see a discussion that appears to be on the side of the angels (because Walter Hill is the man) but is not only in my opinion wrong (since I'd say Bullet to the Head is very squarely mediocre) but doesn't even bother to establish a basic competence as a critical argument in the film's favor. White feints in the direction of auteurist polemic, but his "case" is actually devoid of any argumentation at all. Part of the formula is to mention a similarity between Bullet to the Head and some other esteemed movie (a similarity general enough that it far exceeds the specificity of anyone's particular craft, and, well, probably applies to macho action movies in general). Then, you up the ante with an sweeping declarative statement that might appear like a conclusion from the preceding premises but isn't. No joke, this is how White starts his dialogue:
Stallone's performance as career hitman Jimmy Bobo reminded me of Charles Bronson's streetfighter in Hill's directorial debut Hard Times. The same grizzled features, the same masculine ethos. The plot of Bobo teaming up with policeman Taylor Kwan (Sung Kang) recalled Hill's buddy movie 48 HRS. Hill and Stallone's cinema histories are combined, the action genre is updated.
One could also point out that the cinema histories of any two collaborators are necessarily "combined" when they work together on the same movie, and that strictly speaking a genre is always "updated," even through bad or run-of-the-mill contributions. (Note how often White speaks of "advances" and "updates" and what "we've forgotten," without ever describing what he means by any of this: it's snake oil.) Really, a genre artist like Hill deserves much better (and by this I also mean more rigorous) treatment than White's hollow ode.
Hill knows how make a few words matter. He evokes personal ethics and sums up genre ethics.
Is the second sentence supposed to follow logically from the first? Does it simply add to it? How does one "sum up" genre ethics? Are we talking about an ethics of genre? Ethics through genre? Is it enough for a movie to merely "evoke" personal ethics? Most movies evoke personal ethics - the problem is that they stop timidly, lazily at such evocation.
Bullet is an exciting exploration of post-9/11 morality.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
The post-9/11 world where money and ethics collide?
Oh, for fuck's sake, part two.
The torture of Christian Slater scene feels Godardian ...
It feels odd to me that someone might make this statement with a straight face if one has actually seen Le petit soldat ... what a blatant and irresponsible disregard for form, politics, and philosophy.
Sunday, February 03, 2013
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Shot Poorly
Every so often over the last month or two I have come across commensensical dismissals of the recent Les Miserables film as a crime against cinema - an objectively bad film, or at least, one that is objectively poorly shot or poorly framed.
But each time I see this argument I'm left scratching my head. I wonder what an objectively poor shot is supposed to look like. A viewer is entitled to such judgments, obviously, but shouldn't it be as a result of formal context rather than a lonesome little standard ripped out of a fictitious rulebook? Instead a lot of the grievances against Les Mis imply that there an objectively correct way to shoot musicals (in long shot!) and that Les Mis breaks this rule (because musicals musn't be filmed in close-up!). All this seems like utter nonsense to me, though. Even if there are solid practical reasons to frame a musical performance a certain way in general, there are always going to be legitimate reasons to at least attempt to frame it differently in a particular scene or a particular film. In the case of Les Mis, and Tom Hooper (not a great director - but, I quite like The Damned United) seems to have had at least an idea in his head when he was framing things. Most directors of prestige product are merely content to mimic the appearance of an idea, and instead cling to convention.
The dreaded close-ups which mark much of Les Mis, including the big scene which may win Anne Hathaway an Oscar, seemed fairly motivated to me. In conjunction with the insistently filthy make-up and costuming, on the most basic level these long take close-ups are a study in abjection. (Mind you, this is a prestige film abjection.) I would have to see the film again to be sure but I wonder if the off-center framing - surely in the "I Dreamed a Dream" number at least - isn't also directed toward a sense of longing or lack, so that shunting a face to one side of the frame in a number about aspirations is a simple (yet, for some, off-limits) decision. And the aesthetic trade-off to hearing better singers perform the role on stage is that here one gets the opportunity to see characters' faces up close and deliberately pathetic. The face on the frame is meant to express what the whole body and voice express in the more continuous timespace of the stage.
I'm not saying it's great or even good. I'm saying it's not awful and it's not pointless, and that the exaggeration about its mediocrity may have other, hidden motivations.
Lest you think I'm rallying to the film's defense as a superb achievement (like the esteemed Matt Zoller Seitz, who has bravely waved a banner for this movie), I'll disclose that I have no special affection for Les Miserables as a stage musical and I don't even think it's a particularly good film. I probably would not have seen it at all if I hadn't accompanied my wife. There are plenty of things to criticize about it, both as an adaptation of a "contemporary classic" stage musical and as a standalone work of cinema.
However, some of the glee with which this movie has been attacked (particularly the attacks from outside the fan community for the stage show) reminds me of venom directed at Mamma Mia, a film which was much more poorly received than Les Mis, but which (after two or three very grudging viewings) I eventually came to appreciate. Catering to the cinematic tastes of a decidedly unhip, largely female audiences is something many "discerning" viewers will not forgive or even try to understand - myself included, at times, I'm ashamed to say.
But each time I see this argument I'm left scratching my head. I wonder what an objectively poor shot is supposed to look like. A viewer is entitled to such judgments, obviously, but shouldn't it be as a result of formal context rather than a lonesome little standard ripped out of a fictitious rulebook? Instead a lot of the grievances against Les Mis imply that there an objectively correct way to shoot musicals (in long shot!) and that Les Mis breaks this rule (because musicals musn't be filmed in close-up!). All this seems like utter nonsense to me, though. Even if there are solid practical reasons to frame a musical performance a certain way in general, there are always going to be legitimate reasons to at least attempt to frame it differently in a particular scene or a particular film. In the case of Les Mis, and Tom Hooper (not a great director - but, I quite like The Damned United) seems to have had at least an idea in his head when he was framing things. Most directors of prestige product are merely content to mimic the appearance of an idea, and instead cling to convention.
The dreaded close-ups which mark much of Les Mis, including the big scene which may win Anne Hathaway an Oscar, seemed fairly motivated to me. In conjunction with the insistently filthy make-up and costuming, on the most basic level these long take close-ups are a study in abjection. (Mind you, this is a prestige film abjection.) I would have to see the film again to be sure but I wonder if the off-center framing - surely in the "I Dreamed a Dream" number at least - isn't also directed toward a sense of longing or lack, so that shunting a face to one side of the frame in a number about aspirations is a simple (yet, for some, off-limits) decision. And the aesthetic trade-off to hearing better singers perform the role on stage is that here one gets the opportunity to see characters' faces up close and deliberately pathetic. The face on the frame is meant to express what the whole body and voice express in the more continuous timespace of the stage.
I'm not saying it's great or even good. I'm saying it's not awful and it's not pointless, and that the exaggeration about its mediocrity may have other, hidden motivations.
Lest you think I'm rallying to the film's defense as a superb achievement (like the esteemed Matt Zoller Seitz, who has bravely waved a banner for this movie), I'll disclose that I have no special affection for Les Miserables as a stage musical and I don't even think it's a particularly good film. I probably would not have seen it at all if I hadn't accompanied my wife. There are plenty of things to criticize about it, both as an adaptation of a "contemporary classic" stage musical and as a standalone work of cinema.
However, some of the glee with which this movie has been attacked (particularly the attacks from outside the fan community for the stage show) reminds me of venom directed at Mamma Mia, a film which was much more poorly received than Les Mis, but which (after two or three very grudging viewings) I eventually came to appreciate. Catering to the cinematic tastes of a decidedly unhip, largely female audiences is something many "discerning" viewers will not forgive or even try to understand - myself included, at times, I'm ashamed to say.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Movie 43
Along the same lines as Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, Peter Farrelly et al's Movie 43 foregrounds the commercial substrate of any particular movie project and in the narrative of a film about the creation of a film, parodies and lampoons Hollywood representational strategies and conventions. The first (and one of the funniest) segments has Hugh Jackman as a charming man on a blind date with Kate Winslet, who appears to be the only person who can see (or is bothered by) the pair of testicles hanging from his neck. As the sketch fizzles and ends, the clueless character (Dennis Quaid) who's been trying to pitch this scenario as part of an intelligent movie with heart that will be a box office hit responds, in earnest, that it's a metaphor! We let these small things get in the way of our happiness! This should clue us in to the film's M.O., and anyone who says the movie is gratuitously stupid, offensive, or tasteless has only indicated they haven't caught on to what the movie's doing. Basically every segment is a meta-exercise, a calculated exaggeration or displacement of some convention or another that seems absurd. But then you recognize its close structural similarity to a thousand movies you've already seen before which just did the same trick earnestly. Movie 43 is in many ways a hard film to love if you haven't seen so many commercial narrative films that you've grown tired of them, disappointed by them, yet still sort of love them. (Or you might love it if you dig jokes about shit, balls, and menstruation. I won't lie, I enjoy gross-out comedy too.) So, this is a shaggy dog kind of a project and it's not totally even or successful. It doesn't really cohere, and you certainly might expect it wouldn't, but at the same time it's probably best appreciated as an astringent gesture from a deceptively foolish perspective.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Viewing Opportunities (II)
Finally Got the News (Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman, Peter Gessner, Jim Morrison, John Louis Jr., in cooperation with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 1970) [h/t Nicole Brenez]
Wildcat at Mead (the October League, 1972)
The Cry of Jazz (Edward O. Bland, 1959)
Pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse (Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1957)
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Viewing Opportunities
I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Caveh Zahedi, 1994)
In the Bathtub of the World (Caveh Zahedi, 2001)
The Psychotronic Man (Jack M. Sell, 1979)
Dialogue with a Woman Departed (Leo Hurwitz, 1981) [part one]
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Argo
Ben Affleck's film is so many things, it wants to be so many things, that its adequate effectiveness as political thriller is overburdened by complications arising from its other genuflections to Hollywood modes. First, the "witty" dialogue. Sweet Jesus, I've grown to hate "witty" dialogue. Let me be clear: it is not wit I hate - instead it is the sort of strained . Not quite verbatim, here's an exchange. "History starts out as farce, and ends up as tragedy," says Alan Arkin at one point. "You have it backwards," corrects John Goodman. "Who said that?" "Marx." "Groucho Marx said that!?" The audience laughed on cue, but I just groaned. Another example: "Jimmy Carter said you were a great American." "A great American what?" "He didn't say." (Polite chuckles from the crowd.) To me this plays like dialogue written by someone not in the interest of sculpting interesting characters or situations, or even of advancing the narrative efficiently, but instead seems like dialogue written by someone straining. But what do I know, since the theater was packed full of vocally appreciative viewers, and Ben Affleck won a Golden Globe. How many Golden Globes have I won?
Additionally, the question of family comes up. Earnest portrayals of broken families are totally in right now, so it's important to round out the character of Tony Mendez by showing his dedication to estranged wife & child. It's Hollywoodism, plain and simple, these conventional nods to things like family background, or the brief snippets we get of the "good Iranian." Yet this appears at odds with another touch (which I also didn't appreciate), namely Affleck's decision to craft so many of the images in imitation of news clippings - and in case you didn't understand how art directed this whole things was, with the hair & the mustache & the big glasses, the credits sequence clues you in by showing side-by-side comparisons of iconic images of Iran during the hostage crisis coincided with moments from the film. (How much better would Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky have been if it kept its own iconographic dalliances an "open secret," rather than repeating and explaining them all at the climax?) Argo seeks the closure and comfort of Hollywood convention while striving all the same for an imaginative, quasi-archival recreation. This, plus the constant attempts at smart and witty dialogue, conspire to bog down what is otherwise a competent suspense movie.
Of course I have not even touched upon the film's politics, except in a very broadly implicit way, but you can suspect that some of the problems I've outlined here transfer over, naturally ...
Additionally, the question of family comes up. Earnest portrayals of broken families are totally in right now, so it's important to round out the character of Tony Mendez by showing his dedication to estranged wife & child. It's Hollywoodism, plain and simple, these conventional nods to things like family background, or the brief snippets we get of the "good Iranian." Yet this appears at odds with another touch (which I also didn't appreciate), namely Affleck's decision to craft so many of the images in imitation of news clippings - and in case you didn't understand how art directed this whole things was, with the hair & the mustache & the big glasses, the credits sequence clues you in by showing side-by-side comparisons of iconic images of Iran during the hostage crisis coincided with moments from the film. (How much better would Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky have been if it kept its own iconographic dalliances an "open secret," rather than repeating and explaining them all at the climax?) Argo seeks the closure and comfort of Hollywood convention while striving all the same for an imaginative, quasi-archival recreation. This, plus the constant attempts at smart and witty dialogue, conspire to bog down what is otherwise a competent suspense movie.
Of course I have not even touched upon the film's politics, except in a very broadly implicit way, but you can suspect that some of the problems I've outlined here transfer over, naturally ...
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Year's End
I watch a lot of movies at home nowadays; I'm neither proud nor ashamed of this fact. Time and budgetary constraints, to say nothing of the near-vanishing of the immersive commercial moviegoing experience, have disinclined me from going to the cinema as much as when I lived in New York. Another part of what disappoints so often is how predictable, how tiny and tidy so much cinema has become. (And in this instance I use cinema in its most expansive and inclusive sense.) So many commercial genre films merely run through their motions, and if a steaming pile of horseshit like The Avengers has a half-dozen supposedly clever lines and a pop "auteur" at the helm, it gets lauded. Even simple pleasures fall prey; the Step Up series (with which I have a love-hate relationship) shot out this year its worst, most bloodless, most hackneyed entry ... all in the guise of social and political protest! Whatta sham, whatta shame. I'm not even sure what made genre hits like The Raid: Redemption stand out to critics amidst the flourishing mini-appreciation of e.g. Isaac Florentine and DTV action cinema some of the bolder cinephiles have spearheaded. (If you like action cinema, the oeuvre of Michael Jai White is ripe for examination.) I was thankful to see The Grey - a commercial movie surely not without problems and limitations, but also a movie that appeared to actually investigate a few things, present a few ideas about the world, life, death, space, time, vision, conversation, regret, debts, labor. Sometimes, under-the-radar Oscarbait pleases and surprises in a similar way: Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Michell) quickly reveals itself as a kind of Presidential Sister Wives of Downton Abbey, delving into human problems of secrecy and propriety, showing it knows what its demographic (really) wants quite shrewdly. Let no person tell you prestige movies are less "exploitative" than low genre crap.
When you see enough of anything, you either settle into comfortable patterns (and accept it, consciously or not), you get bored and move on (not because the film "in itself," whatever that may mean, is boring, but because you know its architecture too well already), or you continue to relate at an anxious and apprehensive arm's length. Sadly this last is how I feel about so much new cinema. I named my blog Elusive Lucidity because I was in search of something, and willing to look for it in many places. This quality, or rather this shared non-quality, is what I want to see replicated, addressed, expanded upon in cinema. The obvious question is why do I even bother - why don't I simply see what I want, and not give a damn about "the critical community" or "the zeitgeist." Well, to some extent I do precisely this, but the fretful remainder exists because I'm an academic in the field of film & media studies, and even if something like The Dark Knight Rises or Zero Dark Thirty has no personal appeal to me, I'm often expected to have seen it by my friends, family, peers, and most importantly my students - to whom I owe a responsibility so that I may best act as a guide and interlocutor from within the spectacle.
I figured I could include a list of favorites, though. There are so many films I've still left to see if I want even the barest pretense of currency, including Dan Sallitt's The Unspeakable Act (a scandalous omission!), Robinson in Ruins (Keiller), A Burning Hot Summer (Garrel), the recent Hong Sang-soo efforts, Damsels in Distress (Stillman), Almayer's Folly (Akerman), Magic Mike (Soderbergh), Cosmopolis (Cronenberg), The Turin Horse (Tarr), Amour (Haneke), Tabu (Gomes), Barbara (Petzold), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan), and Holy Motors (Carax). So take the below list with as many grains of salt as you'd like; I just figured I'd not wait too long to put up my customary "year's end" column, and this time I thought returning to a current top ten would be a pleasant way to hearken back to when I actually did keep such lists on a regular basis.
Favorites of the year, in alphabetical order.
anders, Molussien (Nicolas Rey, 2012)
Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2011)
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)
The Grey (Joe Carnahan, 2011)
The Kid with a Bike (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2011)
Marriage Material (Joe Swanberg, 2012)
Open Five 2 (Kentucker Audley, 2012)
Safe (Boaz Yakin, 2012)
Scattered Junk (Timothy Morton, 2011)
Well Then There Now (Lewis Klahr, 2012)
There were various other releases I thought were good honorable mentions or just surprisingly decent next to very low expectations: The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, a clear example of the latter category); Mark Tween (Craig Keller, 2012); God Bless America (I'll watch anything directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, since Sleeping Dogs Lie is a really brilliant film, though this one is a bit much); The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield; reality TV content creeps into sociological diagnosis); Time and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim - though I've barely seen any of the Tim & Eric TV show); Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino; pleasurable but uneven and by no means should be assumed as "redemptive" ... my thoughts on Inglourious Basterds apply in large part to this one too); The Three Stooges (some fine gags in a lesser Farrelly brothers effort); also Haywire (Steven Soderbergh) had its elements of interest, and I'd be curious to see it again in a year or two; finally there was On Spec (David Phelps).
TV-wise, let me say too little by saying I'm also happy to defend the great pleasures of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (TLC), a show which explodes the stereotype of red state rednecks, and by extension troubles the categorical perceptions disseminated by the very mass media from which it springs. Honey Boo Boo is a whipping boy du jour for an upper-middlebrow aesthetic as an example of ostensibly disastrous cultural decline, but in truth I think it is still better for my country than every program of "liberals" spouting off on MSNBC. (Let us say nothing of Fox News.) People who endlessly praise e.g. The Wire, a show I like very much, without pausing even once to consider its repertoire of highly conventionalized stock characters & situations, would do well to meditate just for one second about the implicit politics of race, class, and sexuality pulsing in the material on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. For better, for worse, Alana is our Shirley Temple.
I don't say this last bit to provoke indignant reactions (I'm no Armond White) so much as to start an itch in the minds of people who maybe hadn't quite thought of things this way.
* * *
In the spirit of surprise, edification, reconsideration ...
... here are some older viewings of 2012 that weren't solely among the year's personal highlights, but which also shook me out of my shell, surprised me, puzzled me, even offered an aesthetic which connected to more than "mere" aesthetics: Fury (Fritz Lang - how had it taken me this long to get to this?), Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa - ditto), Szamanka (Andrzej Zulawski), Killer (Darezhan Omirbayev), Inventur (Zelimir Zilnik), Pretty Baby (Louis Malle), The Great Sadness of Zohara (Nina Menkes), The Pornographer (Bertrand Bonello), Brother (Aleksei Balabanov), Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme), The Idle Class (Charlie Chaplin), Severed Ways (Tony Stone), Khrustalyov, My Car! (Aleksei German), Outrage (Ida Lupino), Redacted (Brian De Palma). Special, (dis)honorable mention to Giuseppe Andrews' Trailer Town (2003) ... what the hell was that!? (Catching up recently on Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers just seemed ho-hum in comparison.) At any rate it wasn't routine.
Add to these various classics whose revelations were more expected, if no less great - watching the odd Mizoguchi or Hawks I'd not yet watched - and that would be the bulk of my great cinema experience this past year. Even if much, probably too much, was seen on small electronic screens.
A huge disappointment was finally getting around to the late, great Raul Ruiz's Klimt ('06) ... this is maybe the first and only time I've thought a movie by Ruiz fell completely flat.
* * *
Celluloid experience of the year: Tras-os-Montes (Antonio Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Portugal, 1976), a film of great substance, and also elusive in more ways than one. I've written a few modest words on it which will appear on the Web in the near future.
When you see enough of anything, you either settle into comfortable patterns (and accept it, consciously or not), you get bored and move on (not because the film "in itself," whatever that may mean, is boring, but because you know its architecture too well already), or you continue to relate at an anxious and apprehensive arm's length. Sadly this last is how I feel about so much new cinema. I named my blog Elusive Lucidity because I was in search of something, and willing to look for it in many places. This quality, or rather this shared non-quality, is what I want to see replicated, addressed, expanded upon in cinema. The obvious question is why do I even bother - why don't I simply see what I want, and not give a damn about "the critical community" or "the zeitgeist." Well, to some extent I do precisely this, but the fretful remainder exists because I'm an academic in the field of film & media studies, and even if something like The Dark Knight Rises or Zero Dark Thirty has no personal appeal to me, I'm often expected to have seen it by my friends, family, peers, and most importantly my students - to whom I owe a responsibility so that I may best act as a guide and interlocutor from within the spectacle.
I figured I could include a list of favorites, though. There are so many films I've still left to see if I want even the barest pretense of currency, including Dan Sallitt's The Unspeakable Act (a scandalous omission!), Robinson in Ruins (Keiller), A Burning Hot Summer (Garrel), the recent Hong Sang-soo efforts, Damsels in Distress (Stillman), Almayer's Folly (Akerman), Magic Mike (Soderbergh), Cosmopolis (Cronenberg), The Turin Horse (Tarr), Amour (Haneke), Tabu (Gomes), Barbara (Petzold), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan), and Holy Motors (Carax). So take the below list with as many grains of salt as you'd like; I just figured I'd not wait too long to put up my customary "year's end" column, and this time I thought returning to a current top ten would be a pleasant way to hearken back to when I actually did keep such lists on a regular basis.
Favorites of the year, in alphabetical order.
anders, Molussien (Nicolas Rey, 2012)
Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2011)
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)
The Grey (Joe Carnahan, 2011)
The Kid with a Bike (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2011)
Marriage Material (Joe Swanberg, 2012)
Open Five 2 (Kentucker Audley, 2012)
Safe (Boaz Yakin, 2012)
Scattered Junk (Timothy Morton, 2011)
Well Then There Now (Lewis Klahr, 2012)
There were various other releases I thought were good honorable mentions or just surprisingly decent next to very low expectations: The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, a clear example of the latter category); Mark Tween (Craig Keller, 2012); God Bless America (I'll watch anything directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, since Sleeping Dogs Lie is a really brilliant film, though this one is a bit much); The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield; reality TV content creeps into sociological diagnosis); Time and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim - though I've barely seen any of the Tim & Eric TV show); Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino; pleasurable but uneven and by no means should be assumed as "redemptive" ... my thoughts on Inglourious Basterds apply in large part to this one too); The Three Stooges (some fine gags in a lesser Farrelly brothers effort); also Haywire (Steven Soderbergh) had its elements of interest, and I'd be curious to see it again in a year or two; finally there was On Spec (David Phelps).
TV-wise, let me say too little by saying I'm also happy to defend the great pleasures of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (TLC), a show which explodes the stereotype of red state rednecks, and by extension troubles the categorical perceptions disseminated by the very mass media from which it springs. Honey Boo Boo is a whipping boy du jour for an upper-middlebrow aesthetic as an example of ostensibly disastrous cultural decline, but in truth I think it is still better for my country than every program of "liberals" spouting off on MSNBC. (Let us say nothing of Fox News.) People who endlessly praise e.g. The Wire, a show I like very much, without pausing even once to consider its repertoire of highly conventionalized stock characters & situations, would do well to meditate just for one second about the implicit politics of race, class, and sexuality pulsing in the material on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. For better, for worse, Alana is our Shirley Temple.
I don't say this last bit to provoke indignant reactions (I'm no Armond White) so much as to start an itch in the minds of people who maybe hadn't quite thought of things this way.
* * *
In the spirit of surprise, edification, reconsideration ...
... here are some older viewings of 2012 that weren't solely among the year's personal highlights, but which also shook me out of my shell, surprised me, puzzled me, even offered an aesthetic which connected to more than "mere" aesthetics: Fury (Fritz Lang - how had it taken me this long to get to this?), Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa - ditto), Szamanka (Andrzej Zulawski), Killer (Darezhan Omirbayev), Inventur (Zelimir Zilnik), Pretty Baby (Louis Malle), The Great Sadness of Zohara (Nina Menkes), The Pornographer (Bertrand Bonello), Brother (Aleksei Balabanov), Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme), The Idle Class (Charlie Chaplin), Severed Ways (Tony Stone), Khrustalyov, My Car! (Aleksei German), Outrage (Ida Lupino), Redacted (Brian De Palma). Special, (dis)honorable mention to Giuseppe Andrews' Trailer Town (2003) ... what the hell was that!? (Catching up recently on Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers just seemed ho-hum in comparison.) At any rate it wasn't routine.
Add to these various classics whose revelations were more expected, if no less great - watching the odd Mizoguchi or Hawks I'd not yet watched - and that would be the bulk of my great cinema experience this past year. Even if much, probably too much, was seen on small electronic screens.
A huge disappointment was finally getting around to the late, great Raul Ruiz's Klimt ('06) ... this is maybe the first and only time I've thought a movie by Ruiz fell completely flat.
* * *
Celluloid experience of the year: Tras-os-Montes (Antonio Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Portugal, 1976), a film of great substance, and also elusive in more ways than one. I've written a few modest words on it which will appear on the Web in the near future.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
"From the Top of Your Silly Head to the Soles of Your Dancing Feet"
Dynamite (Cecil B. DeMille, 1929)
The wedding ceremony, with the hammer blows of the gallows and an inmate's guitar-accompanied serenade, is jaw-dropping. My favorite scene in an impressive work overall.
This film does feature one of my least favorite conventions of dramatic narrative. In this case, Kay Johnson has promised her husband-by-technicality Hagon Derk (Charles Bickford) that she won't take her fast, fancy car out of the garage of his workingman's home. (You see, she is expected to put a damper on her moneyed big city ways while living with him.) But an emergency prompts her to break her promise for unselfish reasons. When Dirk returns, he sees evidence of Cynthia's broken promise and immediately accosts her, leveling accusations that are hardly gallant.
In movie-situations like these, it irks the hell out of me when the person wrongfully accused trips over himself not to get in a substantive word in his own defense. Instead, even during ample silences, he stammers, stutters, offers lines like, "Well if you'd just gimme a chance..." It's the sort of contrivance of speech and behavior I can accept in the context of Shakespearan drama, but it usually (usually!) rings very false in films.* I'd hardly suggest movies should mimic anything so vague as "real life," but nonetheless it seems like such a lazy, convenient dramaturgical construction that juts out from almost any previously established code of verisimilitude that given film employs. It's on the basis of narrative and dramaturgical form that I make this criticism; not on the basis of mimetic realism. Rarely is it clear why the character in question should fail to blurt out the most salient information. It's simply a convention for writers and directors that edges us closer to the climax.
* I grant, of course, that such a contrivance will sometimes constructively signify an overly domineering vs. docile character.
Thursday, January 03, 2013
Administrivia
A year-end round-up is on the way - I'll probably roll it out in all its inadequate, uneven glory sometime in the next week. As I continue to write and research in a more academic capacity, I want to keep this space useful for something and I want it to be useful in a way that will accommodate my dry spells with posting as well as my busier periods.
For instance ... Theoretical Bibliographies. These will be constantly in-progress bibliographies for questions in or around film & media theory - not just "theory" biblios, they are "theoretical" inasmuch as they might sketch out an area that doesn't seem fully formed; something speculative.
But I may also attempt one or two more regular series or columns throughout the year. I've intended to do these before and they've usually dissipated. But who knows what the year will bring.
For instance ... Theoretical Bibliographies. These will be constantly in-progress bibliographies for questions in or around film & media theory - not just "theory" biblios, they are "theoretical" inasmuch as they might sketch out an area that doesn't seem fully formed; something speculative.
But I may also attempt one or two more regular series or columns throughout the year. I've intended to do these before and they've usually dissipated. But who knows what the year will bring.
Theoretical Bibliography: Figural Criticism
The following is intended to be a bibliography-in-progress for anyone interested in pursuing the line of inquiry concerning figural criticism of cinema, as popularized in at least some circles by the dedicated work of Nicole Brenez over the past two decades. This is something I'll be cobbling together and updating in my spare time indefinitely, and I welcome comments and suggestions for the list (including non-English language sources). Sources below are generally attached to English language texts and translations, perhaps with key untranslated texts mentioned as well. On first pass ...
Dudley Andrew, "Figuration," Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford, 1984), pp. 157-171.
Erich Auerbach, "Figura," trans. Ralph Manheim, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (University of Minnesota, 1944/1984), pp. 11-71.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 2003)
Béla Balász, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (1952) [link]
Nicole Brenez, De la figure en général et du corps en particulier: l'invention figurative au cinéma (Paris, Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1998)
- Nicole Brenez, "Come Into My Sleep," trans. Adrian Martin, RougeRouge (excerpt from the introduction to De la figure en général et du corps en particulier) [link]
Nicole Brenez, "The Ultimate Journey: Remarks on Contemporary Theory," trans. William D. Routt, Screening the Past (1997) [link]
Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1981)
Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922) [link]
Lucretius, On the Nature of the Things [link to one freely available translation]
Adrian Martin, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez (Punctum Books, 2012) [link]
- A video interview with Adrian Martin on his book, approximately an hour long. [link]
D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After New Media (Duke, 2001)
William D. Routt, "For Criticism," Screening the Past (2000) [link part 1] [link part 2]
... of course, Catherine Grant's [insert your own superlative here] Film Studies for Free has already compiled a list similar to this here (and I'll eventually include more of the links on my own list); one key difference is that my bibliography might extend more into non-electronic sources and philosophical genealogies for the consideration of figural theory & criticism.
... of course, Catherine Grant's [insert your own superlative here] Film Studies for Free has already compiled a list similar to this here (and I'll eventually include more of the links on my own list); one key difference is that my bibliography might extend more into non-electronic sources and philosophical genealogies for the consideration of figural theory & criticism.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Quote of the Day
"In its most distilled form, science (and especially mathematics) provides a certain temptation toward pristine and unvarnished truth
that I have never experienced anywhere else–unfortunately, some have
taken this to mean that science provides the complete vision of what truth
can be and so we’d better get used to it. At least in its present form,
science does not do that, because I have had enough glimpses of it
through other methodologies to know that science, at least in its common
naive sense, is not sufficient.
"The better answer, at least from those who see what a mess science is and has always been, is that “science” is a broad enough methodology to encompass these other methodologies as well, if the criteria of science are restricted to what seem to be its core essentials: fallibilism, skepticism, and provisionality. (You could say humility and modesty, except that these traits are often applied without much of either.) More and more I see these traits in most of my favorite literary authors, and I also see their absence in a great many writers I disdain."
- David Auerbach
"The better answer, at least from those who see what a mess science is and has always been, is that “science” is a broad enough methodology to encompass these other methodologies as well, if the criteria of science are restricted to what seem to be its core essentials: fallibilism, skepticism, and provisionality. (You could say humility and modesty, except that these traits are often applied without much of either.) More and more I see these traits in most of my favorite literary authors, and I also see their absence in a great many writers I disdain."
- David Auerbach
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Cause/Effect/Cinema
More scribbled notes. Let's posit two different tendencies toward approaching the evaluation and explication of what V.F. Perkins termed film as film. One is to presume a natural response to a film, and react, after the fact, to excavate the relations between our experience and the film's mechanics. (By "natural" here what I mean is the extent to which a response is conditioned by such determinants as mood, exhibition setting, race, class, gender, physiology, etc.) This is the easier tendency to explain to Average Joe who wants to understand what makes The Dark Knight so good, so gripping: "You see, what Christopher Nolan did here was ..." In many ways it's also the cinephilically-popularizing method of David Bordwell's blog.
Another tendency, less widespread, less commonsensical, but still quite influential, is to approach cinema as an act of discovery, and so watching a film becomes an act of participation in a project, an ethos: Bazin's ontology is but one expression of such an attitude. The "natural" responses one has to a film may well still pertain, but they are no longer privileged as the ground upon which to unpack all cinematic meaning; instead there is an implied field of intersubjectively-affirmed inhabitations of aesthetic gestures. We relive the mechanical trace of a cinematic choice. The "act" of something like a camera movement is thus potentially of moral, ethical, stylistic concern simultaneously, and in this tendency one rejects or advocates such acts not because one has bracketed out aesthetics but because one has, in comparison to the other tendency, relocated the place of aesthetics.
I should stress that this is all quite abstracted and schematic; it is purposely so. Surely both of these tendencies occur in anyone who sets before herself the task of understanding film, or a film. These tendencies relate and influence each other in so many ways that it would be wrongheaded to proceed much further
Cause versus effect, effect versus cause. Effect: we examine what a film did to get us there, wherever there is and was, almost as a case of reverse engineering. Cinema is like a machine - and I do not mean this in a crude or anti-mechanical way, either, for our bodies too are machines - and we look upon this field of bodily and mental effects (tears, butterflies in the stomach, clenched fingers, stiff backs, numb butts, eye-tracking, deduction, inference) as epiphenomenal signs that the cinematic machine is working. Cause: the aesthetic experience involves the inhabitation, the repeat performance, the approximation of an ever-deferred trace. This endeavor is always in vain, it never completely matches up, but it is in the echoing of such paths (Guy Davenport wrote a relevant essay, "Wheel Ruts") that gives tradition, that gives a connection to & through history and thus a means - a ground - of critique outside of a status quo. Or in other words: outside of the determinations of a so-called natural response.
No doubt I've unnecessarily privileged this thing "cinema" here, when in fact I could be extending some of these points to talk about a much wider field of cultural production. But it's just a starting point ...
Another tendency, less widespread, less commonsensical, but still quite influential, is to approach cinema as an act of discovery, and so watching a film becomes an act of participation in a project, an ethos: Bazin's ontology is but one expression of such an attitude. The "natural" responses one has to a film may well still pertain, but they are no longer privileged as the ground upon which to unpack all cinematic meaning; instead there is an implied field of intersubjectively-affirmed inhabitations of aesthetic gestures. We relive the mechanical trace of a cinematic choice. The "act" of something like a camera movement is thus potentially of moral, ethical, stylistic concern simultaneously, and in this tendency one rejects or advocates such acts not because one has bracketed out aesthetics but because one has, in comparison to the other tendency, relocated the place of aesthetics.
I should stress that this is all quite abstracted and schematic; it is purposely so. Surely both of these tendencies occur in anyone who sets before herself the task of understanding film, or a film. These tendencies relate and influence each other in so many ways that it would be wrongheaded to proceed much further
Cause versus effect, effect versus cause. Effect: we examine what a film did to get us there, wherever there is and was, almost as a case of reverse engineering. Cinema is like a machine - and I do not mean this in a crude or anti-mechanical way, either, for our bodies too are machines - and we look upon this field of bodily and mental effects (tears, butterflies in the stomach, clenched fingers, stiff backs, numb butts, eye-tracking, deduction, inference) as epiphenomenal signs that the cinematic machine is working. Cause: the aesthetic experience involves the inhabitation, the repeat performance, the approximation of an ever-deferred trace. This endeavor is always in vain, it never completely matches up, but it is in the echoing of such paths (Guy Davenport wrote a relevant essay, "Wheel Ruts") that gives tradition, that gives a connection to & through history and thus a means - a ground - of critique outside of a status quo. Or in other words: outside of the determinations of a so-called natural response.
No doubt I've unnecessarily privileged this thing "cinema" here, when in fact I could be extending some of these points to talk about a much wider field of cultural production. But it's just a starting point ...
Thursday, December 06, 2012
Material (II) / Scribbles
Harman: "For orthodox Marxists,
everything else is superstructure or ideology built on top of that economic
base. I reject such reductionism completely, whether it comes from Marxists or
from anyone else."
Graham Harman is a superb and clear writer, and as I've dipped my toes in the waters of "speculative realism" his work has been that which I've felt the most able to work with and learn from - often, I think, because of his style. I begin this way simply because debate pro and con SR/OOO has fostered a really ugly online rat-king over the last few years and I don't want to jump in there at all. But I would like to comment on one sticking point that seems strange to me, which I've come across on more than one occasion regarding speculative realists or sympathizers (for lack of a better word), which is a common canard of Marxism as a base/superstructure idiocy that literally reduces "everything else" (including any number of the variegated lists of objects that SR-types are prone to including, e.g., airplanes, the ozone layer, fertilizer, and apartment buildings) subsequent to economic base. I.e., it calls Marxism reductive because it gives a reductive image of Marxism.
I highly recommend my readers look over the excerpts of Z.A. Jordan I posted here a while back, which in turn link to a substantially longer excerpt of Jordan's work on the Marxists Internet Archive. The world is human, for Marx, not because the guy was "Correlationism 4 Life!" but because it may make little sense to delude ourselves into thinking the external and convincing each other that we are in fact apprehending the very "weird" essences of the objects that exist outside of us. To think or speak the contingency of human existence within the greater scope of the physical world is to transcribe this physical world into comprehensible material for that very contigency. It is a style, or a posture, of human existence.
Graham Harman is a superb and clear writer, and as I've dipped my toes in the waters of "speculative realism" his work has been that which I've felt the most able to work with and learn from - often, I think, because of his style. I begin this way simply because debate pro and con SR/OOO has fostered a really ugly online rat-king over the last few years and I don't want to jump in there at all. But I would like to comment on one sticking point that seems strange to me, which I've come across on more than one occasion regarding speculative realists or sympathizers (for lack of a better word), which is a common canard of Marxism as a base/superstructure idiocy that literally reduces "everything else" (including any number of the variegated lists of objects that SR-types are prone to including, e.g., airplanes, the ozone layer, fertilizer, and apartment buildings) subsequent to economic base. I.e., it calls Marxism reductive because it gives a reductive image of Marxism.
I highly recommend my readers look over the excerpts of Z.A. Jordan I posted here a while back, which in turn link to a substantially longer excerpt of Jordan's work on the Marxists Internet Archive. The world is human, for Marx, not because the guy was "Correlationism 4 Life!" but because it may make little sense to delude ourselves into thinking the external and convincing each other that we are in fact apprehending the very "weird" essences of the objects that exist outside of us. To think or speak the contingency of human existence within the greater scope of the physical world is to transcribe this physical world into comprehensible material for that very contigency. It is a style, or a posture, of human existence.
ANW
"Language is the triumph of human ingenuity, surpassing even the intricacies of modern technology. It tells of widespread intelligence, sustained through scores of thousands of years. It is interesting that from the alternatives, sight and sound, sound was the medium first developed. There might have been a language of gesticulation. Indeed, there is a trace of it. But the weak point of gesticulation is that one cannot do much else while indulging in it. The advantage of sound is that the limbs are left free while we produce it.
"But there is a deeper reason for the unconscious recourse to sound-production. Hands and arms constitute the more unnecessary parts of the body. We can do without them. They do not excite the intimacies of bodily existence. Whereas in the production of sound, the lungs and throat are brought into play. So that in speech, while a superficial, manageable expression is diffused, yet the sense of the vague intimacies of organic existence is also excited. Thus voice-produced sound is a natural symbol for the deep experiences of organic existence."
(Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, NY: Capricorn, 1938, reprinted by Macmillan, 1958, pp. 44-45)
"But there is a deeper reason for the unconscious recourse to sound-production. Hands and arms constitute the more unnecessary parts of the body. We can do without them. They do not excite the intimacies of bodily existence. Whereas in the production of sound, the lungs and throat are brought into play. So that in speech, while a superficial, manageable expression is diffused, yet the sense of the vague intimacies of organic existence is also excited. Thus voice-produced sound is a natural symbol for the deep experiences of organic existence."
(Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, NY: Capricorn, 1938, reprinted by Macmillan, 1958, pp. 44-45)
Saturday, December 01, 2012
CC
You cannot talk about progress in ensemblistic-identitarian (which I call the ensidic for short), let us say: the logico-instrumental. There is progress, for example, in the H-bomb relative to flint, since the former can kill a lot more and better than the latter. But when it comes to fundamental things, one cannot talk about progress. There is neither progress nor regression between the Parthenon and Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, between Plato and Kant, between Bach and Wagner, between Altamira and Picasso. But there are breaks: in ancient Greece, between the eighth and fifth centuries, with the creation of democracy and philosophy; or in Western Europe, beginning in the tenth-eleventh centuries, accompanied by a gigantic host of new creations and culminating in the modern period.
(Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Project of Autonomy Is Not a Utopia")
[M]y ontology is an ontology of creation: creation and destruction. Creation can be democracy and the Parthenon and Macbeth, but it is also Auschwitz, the Gulag, and all that. These are fantastic creations. Politics has to do with political judgments and value choices.
Q: For which you can't find an ontological ground?
No. I don't think there is an ontological basis for value judgments. Once you enter the field of philosophy, you have already made a value judgment, Socrates' value judgment: the unexamined life is not worth living (and the unlived life is not worth examining, as you say in Essex - this is true as well). But this is already a stand you have taken. In this sense, the decision to enter the reflexive domain is already a sort of grounding decision, which can't rationally ground itself. If you try to rationally ground it, you use what is the result of the decision. You are in a vicious circle.
(Castoriadis, "Autonomy Is an Ongoing Process")
(Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Project of Autonomy Is Not a Utopia")
[M]y ontology is an ontology of creation: creation and destruction. Creation can be democracy and the Parthenon and Macbeth, but it is also Auschwitz, the Gulag, and all that. These are fantastic creations. Politics has to do with political judgments and value choices.
Q: For which you can't find an ontological ground?
No. I don't think there is an ontological basis for value judgments. Once you enter the field of philosophy, you have already made a value judgment, Socrates' value judgment: the unexamined life is not worth living (and the unlived life is not worth examining, as you say in Essex - this is true as well). But this is already a stand you have taken. In this sense, the decision to enter the reflexive domain is already a sort of grounding decision, which can't rationally ground itself. If you try to rationally ground it, you use what is the result of the decision. You are in a vicious circle.
(Castoriadis, "Autonomy Is an Ongoing Process")
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