Cases Closed / Problems Opened

Two of the primary impulses toward the sanctity of authorship are ownership and (pace Foucault) punishment, and in film culture we can see this not only in conservative and less-conservative celebrations of favorite "auteurs" but also in the highly moralizing (and not always exactly wrong) skepticism toward same when they make a film that is supposedly too indulgent (like with Malick's recent efforts), or even morally reprehensible (as with Mel Gibson).  Even many of those who've moved on from the cult of the author when it comes to celebration nevertheless fall back onto these presumptions when we're left looking for someone, something to blame.  In the end, the ideological operation of this type of critique - itself sometimes couched as an ideological critique - can be an astringent defense of the critic himself, a sort of puritanical consumerism which establishes clear borders around the holy temple of one's own taste.  

"This film / this author is too modernist, too accessible, too lazy, too simplistic, too classical, too frenetic, too indulgent, too conventional, too puritanical (!) for my tastes.  I can't have it; can't get behind it."  The last defense of the person of taste is the elective ability to verbally demarcate what won't be consumed and enjoyed.  And it is difficult not to be, not to house within our complex selves, "persons of taste."  With the analysis of artistic objects, then, it is better to continue reminding oneself to attend to what it does (and can do) rather than what it is.  Establishing an understanding of the former is not the same thing as - essentially - finessing a noun into a verb.  Case in point: the common charge that in The Tree of Life Malick "universalizes."  The implication being here that Malick's quasi-autobiographical film propels, even forces, the viewer to see the linkage between cosmology and lilywhite mid-century Waco as incontroveritble evidence of Malick's ingrained sexism, racism, religiosity, etc.  This charge is often not fleshed out very much beyond innuendo, and is often hastily rushed over.  (As in my earlier point that in The Tree of Life, critics swiftly associated the "simplistic" nature/grace binary with Malick rather than with a character in the film, though it's clearly the latter.)  And it might behoove many of us to ask, first, what it would mean to universalize?  That makes two questions in one: What does the verb mean, to universalize? and What is the significance of an instance of universalization in a cultural object?

Far be it from me to willingly shield Malick from due criticism, ideological or otherwise.  His film is, I think, deeply metaphysical and romantic/Romantic in its concerns, and it does perpetuate some iconic visual tropes of Americana.  These may register far more clearly than the sophisticated context in which he places them.  So this is where certain fallacies in thinking bout authorship come to the fore: critics of the film want to shift discussion from what the film does and can mean, and conclusively place blame at Malick's misguided intentions. It's easy to just say "Malick universalizes white Americana, and that's bad."  

Yet does The Tree of Life whitewash a multicultural reality for reasons of nostalgia (like, say, Amelie)?  The film is specific, and its view of the world rooted in class as well.  (This is the aspirant middle class, a distinctly American inflection, whose ambitious failings - associated heavily with Mr. O'Brien and his patriarchal legacy - the film explicitly lays out.)  And The Tree of Life frequently provides glimpses of interactions with "others" - both within a community (e.g., the epileptic) and outside it (e.g., the black people selling barbecue).  The experience of childhood also involves the inculcation of codes in dealing with these "others" - i.e. one learns to treat an epileptic seizure as a shameful, one understands in the 1950s South that poor black neighborhoods and lower middle-class white neighborhoods may be quite distinct but there are conditions under which one may cross over (commerce, namely).  [In the segment where the O'Briens grieve over their son's death, there is a brief close-up of Chastain's hands clasped by a black woman's.  A neighbor?  More likely - given this historical specificity - a maid: another subtle example of the local cultural and economic ordering of hierarchies and the conditions in which these play out.]  That Malick pictorializes and dramatizes these does not imply that he also endorses them, especially when his portrait of this family/social life is so profoundly inconclusive (bitter and sweet, traumatic and lovely, cruel and loving: a "wrestling" verbalized in Sean Penn's voice-overs).  If one wants to criticize The Tree of Life further, one must build upon the recognition of this violent interplay, instead of lazily presuming only nostalgia.  And sometimes of course, even retrograde or seemingly conventional forms and artworks can be reinhabited, repurposed, lived-through in unanticipated ways by audiences who would not have seemed to be an unintended audience.  And we should not presume that the meaning of nostalgia itself could only ever mean one thing, across all histories, all places, and all situations, in all cultural objects. 

In Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light (2010), for example, a superb documentary which bears a few key resemblances to The Tree of Life (particularly a running link between cosmology and autobiography), the nostalgia is explicitly an injunction against political quietude.  Guzmán's ethical model for film is more left-wing than Malick's.  That is, though Nostalgia for the Light is no less subtle and layered than The Tree of Life, it would be difficult to imagine any viewer coming away from it not knowing precisely which side Guzmán is on within a very specific national and historical framework: Chile after Pinochet's coup.  The Tree of Life is not divorced from politics, and though I would defend it from charges of blatant reaction or regressive nostalgia, it certainly exists in a tradition whose historical and material association is with Western imperialism and its sanctioned aesthetics.  And it is a Hollywood film, made with Hollywood money: absolutely a product, among other things.  Malick's work, though, is virtually alone these days in the particular register of these imperial-sanctioned traditions: this is why his films seem so strange, because it's Hollywood talent used for a number of decidedly non-Hollywood ends and purposes, a dense assortment of codes, gestures, links that seems to me to hearken back to the early modernism about which Guy Davenport always wrote so cogently.  But it doesn't point outward, clearly, in the way that a film like Nostalgia for the Light does (or, say, the work of John Gianvito).

Below are some examples of writing I've read recently that point to what good discussion of art cinema, or "authored" cinema, might unfurl into ...

I.

“So as to best grasp the amplitude of what Jacobs' film tackles and its formal initiatives, I will begin by laying out the various forms by which an image can work on another image – a taxonomy of recycling.

“But, before plunging into the film [Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son], a few more preliminary remarks. First, such enterprises, deliberately or not, actively contest, even completely destroy, the traditional division of labor between art and criticism.

“Second, we would obviously come up with different results and questions by considering other visual studies, for instance – and mentioning only a few key references – the pioneering films of Adrian Brunel (Crossing the Great Sagrada, 1924) and Joseph Cornell (Rose Hobart, 1936); Kirk Tougas' The Politics of Perception (1973) and Lemaȋtre's Erich von Stroheim (1979); certain fundamental works by Malcolm Le Grice, David Rimmer, or Raphael Monatñez Ortiz's decompositions … but also the entire work of Godard, Pasolini's La Ricotta (1963), Antonioni's Blowup (1966); certain films by Raúl Ruiz, or Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Cézanne (1989). And also the John Ford film that possibly invented this form in 1948 when, at the end of Fort Apache, we learn that the entire story we have witnessed exists in order to criticize a painting exhibited in Washington: an official, “true” image, against which the film itself can only register as false. This criticized painting is absent, but the film's argument, via a beautiful effect of substitution, reaches its conclusion in front of an official portrait that Ford has by now equipped us to judge: a picture of Henry Fonda as Colonel Thursday. It is not hard to see in this the (perhaps unconscious) origin of Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Letter to Jane: An Investigation about a Still (1972), a major example of the visual study.

“Lastly, the visual study belongs to a far vaster field in which it figures as one type, and doubtless the most rigorous: all those exegetical visual forms, from the “making of” to poetic art, from the monograph to the historical essay – an enormous genre that can be rightfully confused with the entire existing body of film, since every image-based work can be considered a discussion of phenomena, of its own motifs, of conventional arrangements and linkages.”

(Nicole Brenez, from her essay “Recycling, Visual Study, Expanded Theory – Ken Jacobs, Theorist, or the Long Song of the Sons,” in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, eds. Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur)

II.

“It is for this reason that the Marxist tradition of television studies has expended so much energy “demystifying” the medium's hegemonic illusions at the level of content; if the contents of Today [NBC] do not necessarily coincide with the contents of “today,” then the impulse to distinguish the ontological status of the two – one is presumably material and the other is not – makes a certain amount of sense. And yet, it is also for this reason that so many scholars working in this same tradition take it for granted that technological forms of mass media forge different scales of “imagined communities,” “technoscapes,” and/or “mediascapes,” all of which indeed constitute the existence of the social world in some important sense. Since the variously scaled industrial technologies of print capitalism, television, and the Internet help forge social connections in what can safely be described as material social space, there is never much need to question whether this “effect” is also part of material reality; the ontological status of television technology can simply be cleaved apart from that of the image it displays.”

(Meghan Sutherland, “Death, with Television,” in On Michael Haneke, eds. Brian Price and John David Rhodes)

III.

“During the shooting of a Miklós Jancsó film it is, then, the actors who follow the elaborate tracking choreography performed by the camera, not the other way around. The camera does not simply "cover" the action; rather, the protagonists' actions provide the content that is fitted into the a priori patterned movements of the filming apparatus. The tracks along which the camera is moving outline, as if in a diagram, a non-determinate dynamic structure: Cinema as a relational Master Code. The "second degree" procedure of filming actual diegetic actions fleshes out this abstract matrix, giving it a variety of particular audio-visual forms. In films intent on exploring the history of class struggle (the fundamental theme of Jancsó's cinema, from The Round Up, to The Red and the White, to The Red Psalm, to Electra, My Love), this approach gives rise to a sense of History as inherently and unavoidably dialectical. The human subject's mandate is to accept it as such, and to participate in it. In other words, Jancsó does not use the camera to interpret history dialectically—to detect, in different epochs and socio-economic constellations, examples of an ongoing struggle between classes, between the oppressor and the oppressed. Instead, he creates filmed testimonies to his conviction that History, much like the Cinema, is an always already dialectical but, initially, also an empty Structure. The actual praxis of human history is, in turn, not unlike the practice of filmmaking: the particular manner in which the abstract cinematic Code is actualized in individual films (giving rise to distinct filmic enunciations), is analogous to the manner in which the dialectical Structure of History is brought to life by the human protagonists' concrete socio-political actions, undertaken amidst the specific circumstances of their existence. “

(Pavle Levi, "Toward a Meta-Reality of the Cinema")

Tree of Life (2)

With The Tree of Life, some would assert - as if it is self-evident - that "the film" sets up a nature/grace dichotomy.  (Usually the next step is to grant that it's a simplistic binary, etc.)  But I am not convinced that it is "the film" which does this.  The binary itself is associated with the character of the mother, Mrs. O'Brien.  It is her voice-overs which introduce and maintain the concept, and I think it is a hasty rush to judgment which presumes that "the film" aligns her with grace and Pitt with nature.  "The film" - if we attend to what's up on screen, and on the soundtrack - instead associates the the nature/grace distinction as a binary with Jessica Chastain's character.

One of the opening segments depicts what we might presume to be Mrs. O'Brien's childhood - we see a ginger girl on farmland.  Why does this sequence exist at all, especially when it bears no explicit story relation - in dialogue or voice-over - to the rest?  I suspect that its role is to ground Mrs. O'Brien herself in a specific milieu, to grant her character a bit (but a crucial bit!) of historical specificity precisely to circumvent the criticism that she's a long-suffering wife, i.e., more or less a sexist failing on Malick's part.  But I think the glimpse we get of her upbringing, if indeed it is that, instead works to ground this character.  She's a farmgirl, brought up with a Christian sense of love and grace.  She remarks, when she introduces the nature/grace distinction in VO, that it is what "they" told "us."  She was gettin' religion on the farm.

These very values - the ever-renewing sense of grace and acceptance, which also provide her with her almost saintly ability to be that long-suffering, quiet, ideal housewife.  But the film does present us with cracks in the facade, and as Jack tells his mother, "You let him walk all over you."   Pitt's Mr. O'Brien doesn't have a similar scene of his own childhood because of his dominating presence: we can draw out something about his background and his beginnings by looking at how he verbalizes, how he gestures and acts.

... We can maybe think of Malick as something like a "symphonic modernist."  When I say this, though, I specifically want to avoid the vagueness that comes with airily gesturing toward Malick and his films as being "poetry," "poetic," "musical," etc.  Maybe "symphonic" is not the best word.  (But can we borrow from letters?  To call Malick "literary" might just invite people to automatically assume that I mean "novelistic" ...)  I use it to gesture, perhaps clumsily, to the way he organizes his material so as to construct meaning.  In Tree of Life, there are "movements" (Mrs. O'Brien; adult Jack; birth of the universe; etc.).  The connective significance of these movements is not narrative, though the film sort of tells a story.  (But more primarily it organizes a web of experiences: this is something narrative does, but not all things that do this must be narrative.) 

Cut!

In The Bellboy, when The Kid steals the plane, we cut the sequence thirty times before finally deciding to drop two frames.  The sequence was in the hotel manager's office.  The camera was positioned about ten feet from him, holding the desk and a secretary.  The manager receives a phone call.  

"Yes, hello.  Stanley, the bellboy?  Yes, he works for me.  Yes."

The camera is moving slowly up to the desk, choking the manager.  As it stops, he says, "He what?"  

Before the t is out of his mouth, we straight cut to the Douglas DC-8 jet taking off.  Bwwwwwooooh!

We had a couple of frames too many.

"He what?"  Then four frames, then the jet engine roar.  Out came two frames, and then the bwwwwoooh was on the manager's t.  It was that critical.

(Jerry Lewis, The Total Film-Maker)

En Rachâchant

Recently I caught up with the Straub-Huillet short film En Rachâchant ('82), which is wonderful in its simplicity.  (The embedded YouTube video I'm including here has no English subtitles, though the intrepid digital explorer can find her own subtitled copy.  Otherwise the primary thing to know is that the child, Ernesto, decides he doesn't want to stay in school because learning things there isn't worth the trouble.  He remains stubborn.)  Mitterand = "a gentleman," a butterly pinned in glass = "a crime," a globe is a football as well as a representation of the earth ... am I wrong to react to this, initially, as a sly, Ivan Illichesque treatment of school as a site of ideological confrontation?

Deadlier Than the Male

Lately my bottom-of-the-barrel consumption has been Spike's Deadliest Warrior.  For those of you who have not sampled this program (available streaming on Netflix or also on Spike's own website), the premise is that two prototypical, unlikely, and mostly historical combatants (say: viking vs samurai, pirate vs knight) are put into a hypothetical battle.  Though the shows always culminate in a simulated live-action "face-off" between each of the contestants, the bulk of the running time follows specialists from either side demonstrating their weapons.  A computer simulation runs a thousand virtual battles to determine "the deadliest [meaning: deadlier] warrior." 

The most repetitive and unimaginative trash-talking and punditry pads out the program.  Think something along the lines of, "Oh man, that samurai sword is intense.  It will definitely kill you [i.e., if you are standing there being passively sliced by it].  But the chainsaw just has too much power.  Gotta give the edge to the chainsaw."  I believe Noam Chomsky once indicated that the general public is presumed to be a bunch of chumps, but if you listened to something like a call-in radio show about local sports, you'd hear people volunteer intelligent commentary.  This may have been more true in the past than it is today.  I wonder if sports punditry - which these days is just beyond idiotic, as with mainstream political punditry - might operate with similarly sinister effects on public culture.  Discourage people - The People? - from ever even thinking about strategy or tactics, which of course is what sport still offers the spectacularized public an opportunity to do ... so that the only end a person will end up ever being encouraged to achieve is selling labor in order to obtain and maintain the opportunity to eat and sleep.

At any rate, in Deadliest Warrior we see what happens when puerile but admittedly fascinating questions - like could an Apache defeat a gladiator? - are posed.  (Let's recall for a second that Guy Debord was a great student of war and martial matters.)  The show has a curious feature in that, when it pits like weapons against each other - such as the mid-range ones - it does it only by separating them and tabulating data based on what each weapon does to an inanimate object like a pig carcass or forensic gel torso.  (If the software the show uses does anything more complicated than this, we are not informed of it.)  Does even such a childish question as this show thrives upon require such dissembling?  This show simply cannot conceive of actual conflict, but instead can only run on the engines of simulation, of R&D execution.  It may be "totally rad" to see a katana blade slice through an entire swine, but the consistently evaded question is exactly what the show vocally promises.  Who would win?  Which weapon actually wins?

Not that one should ever expect that a show like Deadliest Warrior would deliver what it evokes.  I just find it interesting how baldly - and yet unconsciously - the film divorces itself from its actual premise.  I've plenty more episodes to go, but have yet to see a single woman on the show.  I am no expert on Spike and its demographic-marketing strategies, but this channel is still gunning for the heternormative dads-dudes-and-bros market.  (Right?)  It seems, at first, strange that they don't even offer the spectacle of "hot babes" as with boxing, professional wrestling, and mixed martial arts.  But perhaps it's an illustration of the separation between men and woman that war is supposed to engender - war is man's domain, and woman is man's repose.  (So bellowed Nietzsche, if I recall.)  In any event, a show like Deadliest Warrior promises a certain appreciation of violent, macho effectiveness while in fact nullifying this very thing.  Not from a feminist perspective, mind you ...

Image of the Day

Tree of Life

Though I haven't revisited The Tree of Life, as I still hope to, it's been stewing in my head for several days now.

Brad Pitt is probably as good as he's ever been.  The hands-on-lovehandles machismo he played to comedic effect in Inglourious Basterds here re-emerges as the performance of midcentury masculinity.  A rough Don Draper (with a dash of Single Man's Colin Firth, or maybe that's just midcentury modern home design talking), he embodies the marriage of a certain tough minded, indelicate approach to the world (similar to the materialist Sean Penn character in The Thin Red Line) and the Mortimer Adler / modernist self-improvement endemic to a certain class in the period.  Pitt's pouting lip and jawline, his gruff voice - these things glimpsed so many years ago in Legends of the Fall come out and are used to tremendous effect here.  There's no essential distinction between Pitt's performance and the father's "performance."  Or as the doc says in WR - Mysteries of the Organism, you don't have a body, you are your body.

I'm still thinking about the way The Tree of Life situates its women characters.  Jessica Chastain's silent, strong, long-suffering wife: is this a theme of the film, or one of its symptomatic conventions?  I think it may be some of both.  We see here one of cinema's great arguments against patriarchy - that it's neither beneficial nor eternal.  That much is clear.  The question remains, for me, as to Tree of Life's self-awareness with regard to how it uses its male/father/female/mother figures.  I suppose that what we have, in a certain sense, Malick's own examination of a loosely autobiographically informed childhood.  It's tricky to try to tease out what might be meant as historically specific and what might be meant as trans-historical.  Because I can certainly see how one could watch The Tree of Life and roll the eyes at parts, since the gazing-through-trees aspects might suggest the nuclear white 1950s family as the transcendental milieu, the natural context ... rather than a more strictly, more contingently historical one.  On one viewing I'm not sure if the film has really delineated, one way or the other, how it might mean to finesse its viewers' reception of this family microcosm: universal or particular?
  
The esteemed Peter Tonguette takes the film to task for its departures from classical storytelling craft.  But I don't know how fair this is.  Can one think of a film released by a Hollywood studio that more explicitly marks out the fact that its aims - whatever those might be - are not at all those of crafting a clear story with minimal spatial ruptures?  Peter suggests that The Tree of Life often feels like a trailer for itself.  I think I understand precisely what he means but I'm not sure it appropriately applies to this film, where the editing indeed departs from many fiction cinema norms but is nonetheless an extraordinary achievement.  More than any other Hollywood-released film I've ever seen, The Tree of Life reminds me of the likes of not only Nathaniel Dorsky but also Gregory Markopoulos.  The editing rhythms gun for the proprioceptive, the kinaesthetic, rather than the cognitive fundaments of a narrative.  I also think that, in the middle, most "story" heavy section especially, the editing is highly evocative of memory.  Instead of being efficient, images and actions overlap, we feel them more than understand them; they create a surplus without actually telling everything.  Granted, this is not how an economical, 1940s-style Hollywood film typically operates.  But given Malick's track record and the themes of the film, it's a more than reasonable way to produce meaning and sensation through cutting.  All this may, indeed, prove frustrating to some viewers - because the film suggests that there is a clear and compelling story "lost" in the editing.

Now, one doesn't have to love Terrence Malick's work.  And just because one likes the '70s films need have no bearing on reception of the more recent titles.  Even so, as Richard Neer's brilliant recent piece on The New World indicates, the editing patterns and sound-image relations that characterize later Malick are by no means just pretty or picturesque but in fact rather dense, sophisticated, and intricate.  This does not mean they are somehow above all critique.  Yet this is why I'm puzzled by Peter's objections - of all the potential skeptical approaches, is the best (or even the tenth best) to chide the film for "failing" to edit in such a way as to clearly and economically convey narrative information, as if this is the only criterion by which a film can or should ever be edited?  (Is Stan Brakhage a bad editor as well?  Do Bunuel and Dali's cuts fall short too?)

These are still just mostly initial thoughts ...

Historiography (I)

"A structure belonging to modern Western culture can doubtless be seen in this historiography: intelligibility is established through a relation with the other; it moves (or "progresses") by changing what it makes of its "other" - the Indian, the past, the people, the mad, the child, the Third World.  Through these variants that are all heteronomous - ethnology, history, psychiatry, pedagogy, etc. - unfolds a problematic form basing its mastery of expression upon what the other keeps silent, and guaranteeing the interpretive work of a science (a "human" science) by the frontier that separates it from an area awaiting this work in order to be known.  Here modern medicine is a decisive figure, from the moment when the body becomes a legible picture that can in turn be translated into that which can be written within a space of language.  Thanks to the unfolding of the body before the doctor's eyes, what is seen and what is known of it can be superimposed or exchanged (be translated from one to the other).  The body is a cipher that awaits deciphering.  Between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, what allows the seen body to be converted into the known body, or what turns the spatial organization of the body into a semantic organization of a vocabulary - and vice versa - is the transformation of the body into extension, into open interiority like a book, or like a silent corpse placed under our eyes.  An analogous change takes place when tradition, a lived body, is revealed to erudite curiosity through a corpus on texts.  Modern medicine and historiography are born almost simultaneously from the rift between a subject that is supposedly literate, and an object that is supposedly written in an unknown language.  The latter always remains to be decoded.  These two "heterologies" (discourses on the other) are built upon a division between the body of knowledge that utters a discourse and the mute body that nourishes it." 

(Michel de Certeau, from the Introduction to The Writing of History)

This and That

Whose Life Is It Anyway?: the narrative construction is both sharply professional, deeply felt, and bathed in too-much, too-soon pathos.  (The vase the falls and breaks?)  Lightning, at certain points, provided a clear illustration of the pathetic fallacy. But overall I liked the way the film uses weather, glimpsed from inside through windows.  It was neither remarked upon by characters and music for "mood," most of the time, yet remained quietly and open-endedly expressive.

-

If they make The Hangover, Part 3, it should simply be called Ken Jeong's Hangover.  I would still see that.  Otherwise, what's the point?

-

Dame Maggie sure seems immortal, sometimes.

-

I took down a post I made on The Tree of Life for a couple of reasons - mainly because it wasn't really ready to be posted.  I think I just absent-mindedly hit "publish" and directed my attention elsewhere.  Normally that kind of slip doesn't bother me since I rarely revise posts extensively, anyway.  But when I noticed it some hours later, I realized that what came out was a lot of unnecessary and mean-spirited snark, not to mention a straw man argument that was more a heuristic device for me to get to a particular rhetorical space than a "position" I had intended to put out into the ether.  It was my way of working through certain ambivalent feelings I have toward a lot of, hmm, extratextual questions.  Elusive Lucidity is a public notebook, not a polished journal - but it's also not open mic night for every little slice of its author's brain.  If anyone read my earlier post and rolled their eyes (as I would have done myself), mea culpa.  For the record, I loved the film and think it is incredible on a lot of levels, though I do have some reservations, and will probably still post something on it after my thoughts and feelings ripen.

Random Gripe

I don't know what's more irksome, Cisco's "the human network" or American Express' "the social currency."

Scribbles

(Colossus: The Forbin Project, dir. Joseph Sargent, 1970)

Serge Daney dit: "The word “power” came at one moment, synchronically with Foucault... We can say that our cinephilia helped us to go forward. For a cinephile, the power of the cineaste, even if it’s really imaginary, is out of proportion socially and real in regards to what he manipulates as material. Therefore, we see a moral preoccupation which comes back to Bazin, which is to evaluate films not really on their aesthetic quality but in ethical terms. It’s a period when we speak of “direct.” Then there’s a third period when, from the idea of power, we moved to the realization of the power of media. Power today is the new management of media which is a problem on which the Leftists have been nil, pre-historic, with the exception of someone like Baudrillard. But let’s say that, in general, Marxist reflection on media is nil. This is a little bit the Mattelart period. From then on we saw how we could re-interest ourselves in cinema, in films that were coming out, to become once more a film review while being a little bit ahead which consists in recognizing that film is one piece in the more general game of the media and that we can’t disassociate them. To approach these media, everything we learned before 1968, in psychoanalysis for example, is helpful." (h/t, of course, to Kino Slang)


Daney's suggestion about leftist or Marxist reflection on media seems both true and untrue - maybe less true now, some decades after he made the claim.  Still, there's a barb that remains: we haven't come very far.  Especially when Michael Moore and Slavoj Zizek seem like very tenable "choices" for significant portions of what we'd call, I suppose, a "progressive" public.  Some tentative postulates - 

• Culture always involves trade-offs.
• This doesn't mean that the complexity, richness, and nuance of culture at any time and situation equates to the proposition - or excuse - that culture is always "too complex" to make any political judgments about it.
• That said, judgments can come from puritanical positions as well as non-puritanical positions.  The puritanical positions hold virtually all sway in society.  "False choice in spectacular abundance, a choice which lies in the juxtaposition of competing and complimentary spectacles and also in the juxtaposition of roles (signified and carried mainly by things) which are at once exclusive and overlapping, develops into a struggle of vaporous qualities meant to stimulate loyalty to quantitative triviality.  This resurrects false archaic oppositions, regionalisms and racisms which serve to raise the vulgar hierarchic ranks of consumption to a preposterous ontological superiority.  In this way, the endless series of trivial confrontations is set up again, from competitive sports to elections, mobilizing a sub-ludic interest.  Wherever there is abundant consumption, a major spectacular opposition between youth and adults comes to the fore among the false roles - false because the adult, master of his life, does not exist and because youth, the transformation of what exists, is in no way the property of those who are now young, but of the economic system, of the dynamism of capitalism.  Things rule and are young; things confront and replace each other."  (Debord, Society of the Spectacle, section 62.)
• It seems important to reject an overly simplistic "false consciousness" model when it comes to a population's consumption of media, and their affective, social, and political relations to media.  At the same time, it seems foolish to overlook the possibility that no deception is happening anywhere, when probability deception is occuring more than almost anything else.
• Anyone looking for a simple formula that consigns, to ethico-political statuses, a particular "kind" of film - art film, auteur film, slow film (like slow food?), "popular" film, popul-"ist" film, people's film, mise-en-scene films, avant garde film - is probably wasting his or her time.  (Cf. bullet point one.)  The Cahiers du cinema "categories" from that famous editorial are intriguing, perhaps useful for analysis, but in fact a clumsy way to start going about political analysis of cinema, let alone media more broadly.  (Still, it is a start, which is more than most can ever say.)

More to follow in this vein later ...

Pixar Thoughts

If perhaps at one time after their invention as something other than "small adults," children couldn't wait to access - illicitly or not - the pleasures of adulthood, American culture has by now fully entered the inverse situation.  It's adults grasping for fantasy, wonder, splendor, who don't simply elevate low forms to respectable heights (like the comic strip form into the graphic novel) but come to value young adult fiction and texts alongside, even in place of, "adult" culture.  Thankfully the mania for Harry Potter has died down enough that one can express skepticism towards its merits, publicly, without the tar-and-feather gang emerging from out of nowhere.  It's still in force for Pixar, I think - though I think that by now, the cinephiles who don't expect to get much out of Pixar's movies simply steer clear of them.  Perhaps it's wisest this way.

The Pixar product has usually struck me as a little too pitch-perfect in its wide-eyed (though expert) conventionalisms - really, a hyper-Disney.  This is a mark one can hit a little too well, in fact; affectation is the cancer of whimsy and self-aware humor.  (It's a line drawn in American TV comedy all the time: Parks and Recreation tends to skirt on the acceptable side of this line, and has additional merits, whereas I've never been able to shake the bad vibes I get from the NBC Office, which is of course very similar in form and tone.)  It can be grating to keep hearing about how amazing the Toy Story films are, mainly because a substantial amount of the acclaim seems to be a really good consumer review - 'this is new, and it pushed my buttons.'  There's a formula to Pixar appreciation: express fascination with the dexterity of its use of technology (not soulless like those Final Fantasy movies), then wax gee-whiz about the deep moral lessons and emotional textures the film imparts.  This gets to the heart of the problem: it's not, of course, that I take issue with treating animation seriously.  I don't even take issue with treating "cartoons" (the commercial, juvenile, formulaic things) with care and attention.  It's simply that "the culture of Pixar" (or the culture around it) has fashioned a particular way of treating these films seriously.

It's this ingrained analytical toolkit towards which I'm most resistant.  I'm not a heartless person, and in fact I think that sentiment is an underappreciated tool in the array of artistic effects (this upper-middle and just-plain-upper cultural bias is probably largely a more unfortunate holdover from modernism).  So the techniques in films like Monsters, Inc., Wall*E, and Up - extremely faint but definite echoes of a Fordian way of dealing with on-screen objects, time, and memory - do indeed move me.  And I even take pleasure from the fact that a film as unrelentingly sad as Up is somehow targeted toward children.  What I do also appreciate about Pixar is, because of their privileged place within the mainstream film industry, is that they're able to go ahead and be what most products in the culture industry are far too timid to be - a little lopsided, a bit risky in terms of narrative formula, willing to take their time in parts (this is an aspect of modernist aesthetics I wholeheartedly encourage).  This all exists in addition to, and in conjunction with, the often annoying conventionalisms and predictable affectations the films possess.  I'd love to see a kid who's not "cute," a landscape that's not "breathtaking" ...

De Toth in the Landscape of Dreyer

A minor crime film helmed by Andre De Toth (but even those are always worthwhile) from 1957, Hidden Fear is a US-Danish co-production.  Periodically the scenery (urban or natural) shakes up the familiar blackmail/procedural narrative.  The films of De Toth comprise what should be one of the prime exhibits for auteurist cinephile analysis - working mainly in the crime and Western genres, never amassing a great deal of recognizable power, the director seemed to gravitate toward similar premises and plotlines.  This isn't so much a matter of creative authority as it is, more likely, workaday affinities.  It was what he was good at, what he earned a proven track record in.  In the mode of production he was working in, De Toth would not have been able to "birth" a top-down relation to his material, in the same way that (say) Hitchcock was able to establish his presence with the far-reaching authority over his content around the same time period.  Nevertheless, again and again, De Toth's movies feature world-weary characters in a network of distrust, lightning-fast betrayals, and haunted memories.  Important actions happen quickly, startlingly (like when a heavy pulls a gun or the hero pummels a mug), but the narratives themselves never feel rushed: think of the long spaces finely suggested by the waiting in Last of the Comanches and Day of the Outlaw.

The Living and the Dead

"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." (Karl Marx)
"[Tradition] is the democracy of the dead." (G.K. Chesterton)
"I don't fuck everything that's dead!" (Sandra, played by Molly Parker, in Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed, 1996)
"You're going to die screaming ... and I'm going to watch."  (Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight [Renny Harlin, 1996])

Nail Clippers

It's probably best to preface any pithy commentary on Jean-Claude Carrière's The Nail Clippers with a link to David Cairns' own pitch-perfect (and pithy) write-up on the same, a few years back.  What I like about this film, in addition to the obvious pleasures of its Phantom of Liberty-style, vignette surrealism, is the spareness of space - the soundtrack picking up the emptiness behind a closet door or an empty drawer.

Both Sides Now

“Hawks' films have shown a remarkable consistency (which is also a tedious monotony) throughout his long career, with the paradoxical result that though his films are full of American cliché they are also identifiable as the work of an auteur. He has all the insidious convenience of typicality; his individuality is in his flawless typicality. In his perfection, there is, undoubtedly, an authentic sophistication – if that implies that he has made decisions about the importance of human moods and meanings. Yet, if sophistication means humanity, variety and subtlety, then his films are generally simpler and more facile than their nearest comparisons. Thus his Scarface is simpler than Wellman's Public Enemy, his A Girl in Every Port is a sardonic counterpoint to Tay Garnett's Her Man, his 'satires' are innocuous compared to Wellman's A Star Is Born, his Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is eclipsed by Wilder's Some Like It Hot. But if 'sophistication' means a sardonic attitude to humanity, a deadpan humour which, under the pretext of toughly controlling emotion, also all but denies it, then the very limitations of his films enable these tensions to emerge more sharply.” (Durgnat, Films & Feelings, p. 82)

Recently Seen

The Shadow Box (Paul Newman, 1980) - The videotape material seems a little undercooked, simply "there," when it could have been developed into something with more thematic/aesthetic resonance, à la Egoyan.  But an intriguing enough effort, because it tries to do a lot with a little - noticeably finite actors and sets, a little stagebound, but it looks like someone was at least paying attention to the colors of props and costumes, for example.  (Thanks to M. for supplying me with a copy a few years back ...)

Blues in the Night (Anatole Litvak, 1941) - Depression-era bonhomie along with a pair of shots that encapsulate an entire century of white commercial popularization of black music in America.

From Paris with Love (Pierre Morel, 2010) - These days Travolta, like Jimmy Fallon, needs roles that allow one to laugh at him in order to stay bearable onscreen.  From there, a film that uses him well will build off of the humor of the premise itself, like From Paris with Love does - making Travolta a brash hick with a scarf way too fashionable for his station.  The film, like Taken, has a million things wrong with it ... but the EuropaCorp formula is depressingly efficient at hitting certain pleasure buttons.  I cannot lie.  Still, as much as I love the Transporter movies (and District B13) I wonder if the EuropaCorp stable has an artiste, making masterpieces - like MilkyWay has main man Johnnie To producing superb film after superb film (whether modest or grand in scale).  Luc Besson, whose work I do find fairly enjoyable and somewhat interesting, doesn't cut it by comparison.  Anyone else?  I'm all ears since I've basically mentioned at least half of the EuropaCorp films I've even seen ...

Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) - My ambiguous feelings toward this film can, in many ways, be summed up in how the cinematography captures the actors' blemishes and imperfections.  I appreciate the impulse to bare the body - not in terms of nudity, but rather as a matter of the body as a "machine" that excretes, sweats, wrinkles, etc.  But the idea seems to go nowhere; it's not motivated by aesthetics, nor politics (god forbid an amalgam of both).  Really this just summarizes my disappointment with the vast majority of the whole Apatow school of comedy.  It's not that I don't value the abstract goals - "deep" gross-out comedy - it's that Apatow (whether he's a writer, director, or producer) seems to mostly get behind projects that just pale in comparison to the Real Thing ...

The Harvest (David Marconi, 1992) - I saw this mentioned by a facebook friend a while back (h/t NDC), and out of curiosity I checked it out.  The 1990s were a really rich time for a particular type of cinema that almost nobody talks about - low-budget films that may be "independent" or "genre" or a little of both, that may have enjoyed a stronger life on cable than in theaters.  The qualities of The Harvest include its slightly ingenious plot construction, which is intelligent - there's more New Rose Hotel here (inviting the mindfuck, thematizing it, developing it) than there is Vanilla Sky (taming it, killing it, burying and disavowing it).

"I Buy Forever"

I took another look at the great film Docteur Chance (F.J. Ossang, 1997) the other day, for the first time in a few years.  This time I felt the urge to read it - very faintly - as an allegory of capitalism.  Here: the re-emergence of certain techniques of 1920s French avant-narrative, filtered through punk, and emplotted within a story about living with copious resources ... all on the precipice of its own destruction.  There's even a scene where Angstel goes to the docks, the substrate, the big boxes (yes, those big boxes Noel Burch and Allan Sekula made their movie about, which I've yet to see).  "No future," like the Sex Pistols say.

Cheers.

Image of the Day

Railway Journey

"the limitations of the camera itself are also used innovatively, Martin is using a hi-8 consumer camera that has a built in auto-iris, the camera struggles to expose high contrast images, between strong highlights et deep shadows causing the iris to open et close continuously. Martin uses this restriction creatively, he renders the pulsing dilations et contractions of the iris as a rhythm, a heartbeat, but it also has a blinking quality, like a sleepy eye, slowly opening et closing, the intervals getting longer, slower, heavier, before finally remaining closed.  ... Martin significantly rotates his continually moving/train-tracking images, reorienting the horizontal nature of the landscape/horizon so that it becomes vertical. in doing so he makes the images flow upwards, as if they are streaming out of a film projector."  (m.d'd!) (apologies for inconsistent coloration in this quote - a blogger bug, I think)

"The nineteenth century's preoccupation with the conquest and mastery of space and time had found its most general expression in the concept of circulation,which was central to the scientistic social notions of the epoch." (Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey)

"Responding to the journal’s publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s newly published photographic motion studies, Marey writes: “I was dreaming of a kind of photographic gun, seizing and portraying the bird in an attitude, or, better still, a series of attitudes, displaying the successive different motions of the wings…” The technique Marey has in mind, of course, is the “proto-cinematic” technique he would come to call chronophotography: the depiction of movement in successive instantaneous photographs. What he was dreaming of amounts to the ability to shoot a bird, not to kill it but to capture its living, vision-confounding motion and convert it into legible, fixed image sequences. The passing into obsolescence of older meanings of “flicker” thus marks a contemporaneous shift in the way movement and time could be viewed. Since the bird’s incomprehensible flying movements have become reducible to a number of arrested instants, its body ceases to move. Once it had been seized over and over, cinema proved it could bring the bird back to life, so to speak, by spinning the image sequence back into motion." (René Thoreau Bruckner, in a brilliant essay)

"There are good reasons to use transportation as a foil to our symbolic model of communication.  For most of human history, any definition of communication that separates symbolic action from movement is nothing more than an anachronism.  Writers interested in the history of the idea of communication have often noted the associational connections between transportation and communication that held sway until late in the nineteenth century.  As both [James] Carey and John Durham Peters point out, in previous moments, communication meant - among other things - transportation, movement, connection, and linkage.  "Steam communication" was travel by train, and a door could form a "communication" between a house and the outdoors.  At some point in the nineteenth century, the words "intercourse" and "communication" also traded connotation with one another. ... Even our central terms for symbolic action gesture toward a concept of communication as a subspecies of movement.  "Metaphor" comes from the Greek for "to transfer" or "to carry."  "The word metaphoros ... is written on all the moving vans in Greece," writes Bruno Latour."  (Jonathan Sterne)

Raya Martin's short film Track Projections intrigues because it draws out a rhetorical connection to film - and to filmed time/space - even while it was shot on video.  The bulk of the film consists of sideways "tracking shots" from a train window, and their abstract, running verticality recalls a Brakhage.  (In the more pictorially recognizable passages, it's like early Brakhage, but at times it resembles the later hand-painted works.  But I've all ready spent too much time comparing this film to Brakhage.)  The blinking & flickering, which the first author quoted above has noted, suggests the effect of a celluloid flicker though we may not see it projected on film. 

This is not to say that Track Projections masquerades as a film or that it erases the distinctions between film and video technology - instead it's a feature of the film's rhetoric, it gestures toward film, and to a whole technology of segmented, standardized movement, celluloid strips & train tracks, and not just the "illusion" of photography carried over into chronophotography, but also the "illusion" of continual time, produced through the fragmentation effect of individual frames (seen, or unseen, as flicker).  For Martin, perhaps, these illusions are in fact allusions, part of the repertoire of techniques to incorporate or evoke ...

Track Projections (Raya Martin, 2007)

Humanoids

The story goes that Creation of the Humanoids (1962) was Warhol's favorite film.  If Warhol himself had teamed up with Alain Robbe-Grillet to film a SF screenplay by a bright, nerdish 18-year-old, they might still not have dreamed up something quite so fierce or so stolid, so marble-slab-cool (but filled with bright colors).  The beauties of this film come from both being ambitious but also not at all trying to court any real standards of modernism (i.e., modernist critical taste) in nevertheless producing a quasi-modernist end product.

It "manages to be both ridiculous and sublime, often simultaneously, in its view of what it means to be a human being."  (Peter Nellhaus)

"To be a Warholian film means to be concerned with boredom and automation.  And for a film to be concerned with boredom and automation means not just that the film addresses boredom and automation as themes, but that it engages with or reveals boredom and automation in presenting itself to the viewer and through this process, 'the meaning goes away.'  As a Warholian film, The Creation of the Humanoids is, then, not just a film that represents an evacuation of meaning, but one that performs it."  (Chris Fujiwara)

Quote of the Day

"In 1961 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recruited Charles Hitch of the think-tank RAND Corporation as his assistant secretary and undertook to streamline the Department of Defense through the use of systems analysis.  Before long, the defense personnel and methods filtered out of the Pentagon and into the civilian parts of government, not only on the federal level but on the state and municipal level as well.  In 1964, California governor Pat Brown called upon that state's aerospace corporations to use the new methods to study such problems as transportation, waste management, poverty, crime, as well as unemployment among California's aerospace engineers, and the systems analysts responded enthusiastically to the call, confident that with their computers and space-age techniques they could solve any mere earth-bound problem.  Convinced of the superiority of their formal methods over the "conventional" approaches of more experienced and knowledgeable specialists - and, as critic Ida Hoos noted, mistaking their ignorance for objectivity - the systems analysts appropriated all of reality as their legitimate domain, the social world as well as the physical world.  Perhaps no one epitomized this new breed better than Jay Forrester, the electrical engineer who is credited with developing the magnetic core memory for the high-speed digital computer.  Forrester moved on to pioneer the new field of "systems dynamics," which he applied, successively, to industrial, urban, national, and, finally, global "systems."  "The great uncertainty with mental models is the inability to anticipate the consequences of interactions between parts of a system," Forrester explained.  "This uncertainty is totally eliminated in computer models."  Whether the "system" is an industrial process, a manufacturing plant, a city, or an entire planet, its operations are ultimately reducible to a set of "rate equations" which become "the statements of system policy."  "Desirable modes of behavior" are made possible, Forrester insisted, "only if we have a good understanding of the system dynamics and are willing to endure the self-discipline and pressures that must accompany the desirable mode.""

(David F. Noble, Forces of Production, p. 55)

The Riddle of Steel

By Night with Torch and Spear (Joseph Cornell, 1942)

Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)

It's Only Tashlin

It's well-known that Frank Tashlin's career started in cartoons.  This beginning is often thought (not wrongly) to have affected the way he treated his live-action images as plastic, pliable, either immaterial or too material.  The more I see or revisit Tashlin the more impressed I am at the ways in which the content and feel of his films actively engages with the borders and institutionalized ancillaries of (certain definitions of) cinema - animation, television, advertising, performance ...

"Are Video Games Art?"

I keep seeing this debate - not only in the film & media blogosphere, but in that too.  Are video games art?  On occasion the defenses of video game art read like uninspired recuperation.  Perhaps even more off-putting are pronouncements from those who would wish to be cultural conservators.  "Video games can not be art, because art is ..." 

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Aesthetics is so fragmented and bracketed off in "our culture" that the aesthetic experience itself becomes secondary (at best).  The age of the spectacle is highly aestheticized, no doubt, and aesthetic considerations have cleared out political questions. ... Strangely enough, when it comes to activities and objects meant for leisure, one confronts a range of false moves.  For instance, if one has taste, one is supposed to honor the aesthetic object.  This is on the basis of its aesthetics alone, presumably.  Whether it's a Fritz Lang film from 1953, or Rembrandt painting, or Heian scroll.  Its pleasure is the pleasure of enlightenment, improvement, distinction.  The valorized aesthetic object may bravely emerge from & struggle against something so ghastly as a material, commercial context (ripping free of it like a Little Engine That Could).  But it is never to be equated with same.  In fact the visible traces of efficiency amidst shoestring means is a sign of pride, a sign that some creator has "made do" despite limitations.  But this is not, actually, aesthetic appreciation.  It is in fact the aestheticization of the material contexts from which an object comes. 

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Stephen Dwoskin once wrote - and I'm sure I've already quoted this half a dozen times on this blog - that in a period when so many were torturing themselves with the question, "What is cinema?", Raymond Durgnat would, figuratively speaking, just show up at the movie house and say, "This is!"  I admire the impulse.  A major part of why I admire it is because it does not presume to know.

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The answer to the question, "Are video games art?" will either remain a deadlock, or the object of video games as art will be recuperated and become common sense to later generations.  But I cannot side with the group who assume the position of aesthetic guardians, contra video games, for the main reason that they seem to possess knowledge of what art - Art? - is and thus can proceed deductively.  Neither, though, am I convinced by the "logic" that states that anything that people enjoy must be acknowledged as art lest the naysayer be elitist.  (This too, if more implicitly, presumes that art - Art? - has a stable definition which can be known ... and its necessary & sufficient conditions can be met through inductive means of popularity and widespread pleasure.)

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I don't even play video games.  But I would be most satisfied if this debate were kicked out of the house and people started devoting the same energy to questions like, What's happening in these video games?  What do they provide?

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Image of the Day

The Lights

The flicker of a moving image has long and diffuse history.  Occasionally it has been put to use as an aesthetic effect or even a weapon - as the deliberately exaggerated by-product of early cinema's non-standardized frame rates. A feature of the historical deployment of the flicker effect has been its implicit reliance on the editing of frames - different colors, white/black, 24fps.  As a result, because of the 3:2 pulldown, it's difficult for video versions to approximate the precise effects of Arnulf Rainer or The Flicker or N:O:T:H:I:N:G.  Less specific to the material of celluloid, however, may be the aesthetic suggestion of the blurring of lines between image and formlessness, or between image and pure light / pure dark.  Colors or light bleed into an image, aestheticize it despite "identification" or "story" by pulling it outside those realms and denaturing it.

Some of the rare images in Paul Sharits' flicker work depict violent or sexual acts.  Sharits' films, and techniques, were not meant purely for their powers of provocation, however.  He indicated on numerous occasions his desire to use cinema to enhance consciousness. 

"In his flicker films, Sharits disrupts this process. He replaces the consecutive phases of action with solidly colored or black or white frames . The effect is literally dazzling . The viewer sees often violent bursts of light whose color and intensity are functions of the speed at which the colored frames and the complementary colors of spontaneously induced afterimages change. The oscillating colors not only foreground the pulsing light beam, they also reflexively remind the viewer of the physical limits of the frame and of the surface on which films are projected." (Stuart Leibman)

For Leibman's description of effects to make sense, of course, so much depends on this "viewer" glazed with modernist theory before the white screen.  But perhaps we can talk about the impulse to produce such effects.  What directs audiovisual creators to devise and deploy the flicker effect?  In one respect it might be a push towards a total, consuming aesthetic vision.  For Sharits, a mandala to "end war"; for today's pop artists, the mock-sublimity of an expression too big to fail (or too big for execution, craft, to even matter).

"Want you to see everything," sings Rihanna in "All of the Lights," the Kanye West track released a few months back.  Enlisting the vocals of a whole slew of pop singers (Elton John, Alicia Keys, La Roux, etc., etc.), the track is a bit monstrous in size, slightly indeterminate in direction.  This isn't simply a wall of sound, it's a wall of celebrity persona.  The video, by Hype Williams, uses numerous bright flicker effects that destabilize the images (if they ever were stable) from any purely "functional" role, like telling a story, or creating a mood through mise-en-scene alone. The images flirt with pure color, they appear to filter into and out of one another, they heighten the sense of color within some of the shots.  So many flashing lights - actually that phrase is, of course, the title of another Kanye West song.  Probably someone better versed in Kanye Studies than me could say how deep this trope runs ...

... I think this is particularly fascinating for a guy like Kanye West - the tropes of education that run throughout his work, "can't tell me nothing," even the way Taylor Swift called him "an innocent."  West: yet to be informed, yet to be instructed, yet to be enlightened.  Weighed down by the necessity of enlightenment, West associates these themes in his lyrics - pain or trauma, with education and illumination. "Cop lights / flash lights / spot lights / strobe lights / street lights."

"In 1945 a Western force greater than electricity descended on the Japanese arkheion.  The atomic assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States unleashed the heat and light of atoms, which threatened not only the Japanese archive but the "mansion called literature," the literary archive.  It threatened to destroy the trace, to destroy even the shadows." Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), p. 25 (for Adrian)

(Still from Radiohead's video for "House of Cards," made without cameras.)

Previously on ... in 2009 ... (Light 1) (Light 2) (Light 3) (Light 4) (Light 5)

Image of the Day

Realization

A problem in thinking about taste hierarchies is the impulse for the reformed elitist to wish to embrace the low, popular, mass, vulgar, etc., and yet - in the process of vocal exculpation - recuperate these objects for the high.  Specifically, the low objects are (re)integrated into a kind of high grammar.  One of the privileged instances of this is the heroic mythos of the Cahiers du cinéma critics, who "realized" that Hitchcock and Hawks could be spoken of like Racine or Shakespeare. 

They realized it.  Apologies for the very poor Derrida imitation, but let me suggest that my deliberate use of this word (to realize) is meant to convey something of the double meaning that is buried in this mythology of taste.  The evident meaning of this "realization" is a recognition and subsequent acknowledgment.  But what it actually entails is the making real of a value judgment.  The Cahiers critics put these ideas into circulation.

The recuperation of the popular artist for high tradition (Shakespeare is the ultimate example) is, itself, an "always already" excavated gambit for anyone who wishes to defend the legitimacy of a particular, relatively contemporary piece of popular culture.  "Dude, you don't think Two and a Half Men has a particular type of genius?  You dismiss it just because tons of people watch it?  Well look, Shakespeare was popular, too."  Substitute Harry Potter or any number of objects for Two and a Half Men.  The logic at work here is that, time and again, prevalent elitist tastes have been shown to have "wrongly" dismissed or at least unfairly pigeonholed popular works of their era.  We see it over and over again.  Shakespeare, Hitchcock, Guiding Light.  "It's an objective pattern, don't blame me if I'm a little further ahead of the curve than you are.  It's history ... but as logical and predictable as a science experiment!"

I don't propose that a rigid, reductive high-middle-low scale is any better than this operation.  For my part, do bring on Bourdieu, and while you're at it bring on White Chicks.  (Coherence and reason are great things when discussing particularities.  But I neither require nor desire my own tastes to be subordinated to the laws of coherence or logic.)  But I do think this rhetoric of realization has survived too long as a truism, a crutch, a replacement for thought, and a lazy & unearned badge worn to denote anti-elitism.  And it's always convenient to pose as an anti-elitist in terms of cultural tastes when you exist in the heart of capitalism.  The signification of tastes is indeed a political question, but perhaps more politically pressing is when that question comes to eclipse any & all others as the only political question.

To the End of TV

In the dismally undercooked film Legion (Scott Charles Stewart, 2010), the coming apocalypse is in one instance signified by an emergency broadcast signal on an old TV.  "This is not a test," it reads.  It's got to be a test, concludes one character.  No - but if the emergency was real, wouldn't there be instructions for us? asks another.  Perhaps.  The film indicates at one point that, in parts elsewhere, crypto-government forces are reaching critical mass to fight the god-zombies.

In this film, God can shut off TV transmission, send a storm of billions of flies, but cannot send a bomb into a roadside gas station.  (The roadside gas station out in the desert: from Detour, Ace in the Hole, Red Dawn, the first two Terminator movies, the Tremors franchise, etc.)  If you've read Meaghan Morris' "Banality in Cultural Studies" (here) you may recall her anecdote of a television newsflash in Sydney about how "something has happened" in Darwin - or to Darwin.  But, initially, the startling thing was that no information had come from Darwin.  The city, which it turned out was hit by a cyclone, had stopped communication, and this was the certain marker of disaster.  "This was not catastrophe on TV - like the Challenger sequence - but a catastrophe of and for TV."

The television set is a portal to the electro-ether that soothes a nation.  TV transmission operates like antennae of the social imaginary.  When it - it, not any particular TV set - malfunctions, one may conclude that the shit has hit the fan.

Apologies

... for extremely light posting lately.  I've been a busy fellow.  Expect a few posts to crop up before the month is over, though.

The Lawless

If you have not read Andy Rector's beautiful, compelling reflections from a few years back on Joseph Losey's The Lawless, you should do so.  (This work is available to stream on Netflix now, at least in the US.  It's not very long, and it is very good.)  Losey's film is in many ways similar to the roughly contemporaneous Ace in the Hole (also set out West, in the sticks), but while it is less ambitious than Wilder's excellent film, The Lawless seems deeper and more cohesively critical in some ways.  I will springboard from Andy's comments into some of my own notes.

-The rigorous framing of the police who are only rhetorically good; they let real brutality and distortion happen always.

A representational strategy the film employs: most of its cops are presumably "decent folk," and The Lawless depicts them early on as being a number of reasonable individuals with a bad apple or two in the bunch.  Intriguingly, this representation mirrors the function of the police themselves in the social body depicted, i.e., superficially benign (and indeed perhaps benign almost to a man), but systematically complicit with the mob lawlessness which seeks to enact revenge upon Paul (Lalo Rios) - an imperfect kid caught in a bind.  The effect of this is a beautiful, subtle perversion of the general model, which valorizes individualism and thus individualized action, causation, culpability, etc.  The Lawless grants as much but contextualizes it - "just doing my job."

-The cut from Lalo Rios taking a shower outdoors to the white privileged kid taking a shower in a comfortable bathroom.

We see the latter character first in silhouette, I believe.  Paul though is silhouetted later in the film, at the police station, after they've taken his fingerprints at a desk - and in the same shot, courtesy of shadows on the wall, we see his mug shot being taken.

-The father of the privileged kid as well-meaning only insofar as his wallet goes (shoring up the system in the process)

Though I do think the film positions his behavior as sincere - perhaps he's a so-called "liberal communist" avant la lettre?  The shoring up of the system is not laid at the feet of his supposed character fault, but rather at the incongruity of his liberalism toward a good cause when it fails to link up with the proper destructive/reconstructive mechanisms against the system.  Again and again, The Lawless outlines individualism's dead ends - despite all manner of faith & good works ...

-The long (dare I day Straubian) pan across the quarry where Rios is being hunting for something he didn't do - beginning on the back of the farmers head and going in the opposite direction from the idealistic newspaper man trying to find Rios before the police do - a dialectic shot if there ever was one.

I am constantly impressed again with the flexibility and strength of classical Hollywood cinema - the malleability of its codes and the way that these codes could be applied to ends highly antithetical to what is generally presumed to be Hollywood's product.  (This presumption may be correct in everything except its range across the films themselves.)

-The newspaper man's gestus. Ciment says he's a positivist Capra hero who realizes he is wrong. His stopping to admire the smell of burning leaves in October (representing nostalgia for small town America) in contrast with marred human relations all around him.

And again, I would stress here that the film does not dwell on the individualist wrongness of this "positivist Capra hero" (an apt description).  Burning leaves in October - an uncontroversial existence? - these aren't illicit desires in themselves.  It is the use of these desires in a context which renders them as a screen against more pressing, ultimately damaging concerns which The Lawless criticizes.

-The very Brechtian gesture of the match that the newspaper man lights for the callous and sensational newspaper woman's cigarette as she dictates lies to her paper, saying that Rios had no "remorse" in his eyes, all she could see was "cruelty". This gesture of the newspaper-man's is in contradiction to his moral position in the scene prior. The lighting of the match is an action showing that the newspaper man has not put into action his consciousness of complicity (which the film is so good at laying bare,media/career wise) and it's like the opposite of the fish-wrapping scene in NOT RECONCILED (Straub) where Schrella REFUSES to dine with a still-fascist democrat by having his lunch wrapped up and leaving.

Yes, this is a brilliant scene - in part for how low-key it is, demonstrating something about Larry's "character psychology" but also of political consciousness in general, the way it is so quickly effaced or repurposed into uselessness in the face of social niceties.  Though we do live in an age when manners seem to matter far too little, their convenience as an occasional shield to political (i.e., politicized) interpersonal confrontation is still to prevalent a function.

-Gail Russell's strong moral/political-bearing character. Such a character is not unconventional to Hollywood films of the time but hers stands out in performance and absolute clarity of the political lines she demarcates. Russell's actual personal/professional life during the shooting of LAWLESS is even more devastating, and constitutes a story worth looking into

She's amazing in the film.  Her character does fall into a certain line of anglicized Hollywood tradition - a romantic interest; pale eyes - but she's still a superb character, and her existence is notable for the perhaps shocking (shocking!) presumption that there were women who were politically active, knowledgeable, committed, etc.  (Not simply "won over" because their boyfriends blazed a trail.)

Know that THE LAWLESS is a film directed by a man who studied Fritz Lang and worked with Bertolt Brecht. Know that an argument could be made for it as a Marxist film, made within Hollywood, and after the HUAC purges no less (courage). That its screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (sometimes credited as Geoffrey Homes) was "greylisted" and yet fought for his blacklisted comrades. Somehow Losey went on to make several more politically advanced films within Hollywood, THE PROWLER and a remake of M among them. And know that you must track it down...

... and tracking it down, thanks to Netflix, is very easy.  Just as it was possible - not easy, but possible - make films like The Lawless in classical Hollywood, the system allows for the regurgitation of yesterday's politically critical products.  (The Lawless is less an A-list film than V for Vendetta or Children of Men, but its politics are far better.)

With THE LAWLESS's politics as a film intact, through his account we can already see some irreversible degradations that went on in industrial Hollywood. If THE LAWLESS is a product of a group of people who represent something that has been lost in the US today (Losey, springing from the same lively and progressive artistic/cultural atmosphere as Orson Welles that once existed in Winconsin early in the 20th century; and Daniel Mainwaring, springing from an honest journalistic tradition, now almost completely gone, where it remains it is ghettoized), and who in all sincerity tried to expose the rottenness of certain aspects of America, we mustn't forget that THE LAWLESS was still a product.


Yes, and what sad state of affairs has befallen latter-day Wisconsin?  Exeunt.

Image of the Day

(for Ignatiy)