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.

Last Update: January 3, 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

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 ...

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. 

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)

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")

Concerns

To eradicate that affected tone, prevalent online, wherein a progressive & well-meaning voice announces loudly yet indirectly to its progressive & well-meaning audience how progressive & well-meaning it is.  (Too often this appears to satisfy observers that a political critique has been lodged.)

(This is not to indicate concern over the eradication of irony.)

To aim never simply to presume that what I offer is special, without any reflection, and that therefore any rejection of it is a sign of my would-be interlocutor's backwardness.

To work quietly in my own time & ways such that when I speak out I can be confident that what I say is thoughtful, helpful, timely, amusing, or insightful.

Cynicism

These days, the most successful cynical filmmakers aren't hucksters and/or straightforward, talented businessmen (like a Corman, an HG Lewis, even an Andy Sidaris), but are instead people who actually believe in their own cynicism – in fact might have no cognizance of it cynicism.  This is the feeling I get when watching Christopher Nolan movies.  Another end of the Hollywood spectrum, though?  I only stumble upon a tiny few a year - there may be more I don't see - but I'm always impressed by those films that while being unambiguously commercial still display a certain harmonious balance between understanding what they are not simply as entertainment but also as expressive objects ... 

(i.e., people can enjoy simple pleasures but people also aren't machines whose buttons need to be ticked off with depressing, predictable ploys) 

... and can take their craft seriously without taking important/imported themes too seriously from the get-go.  It's through the latter that genre can be built into something.  Not from bum-bum-BUM music and dark "topical" material copped from a 14-year-old suburban boy's sense of morality. 

Redacted

Before you even begin, please accept my apology for the run-on sentences, dangling modifiers, and jumpy structure on display here.  These are, as usual on EL, notes rather than article.  This is often how I write when hit with a bit of inspiration (but "inspiration" isn't quite the right word; "impulse" maybe).  And in truth I have not written like this for myself in a while, and I am doing so here for two reasons: one, I want to get the feelings out now so I can start to formulate them more coherently down the road; two, when faced with writing a dissertation as I am currently doing (and the dual strictures of occasional writer's block & the requirements of careful, footnoted fact-checking), it can feel great sometimes simply to open up the floodgates on a completely unrelated topic.  (Also: this post discusses Redacted with a general sense that you the reader are familiar with it.  But for readers who may not have seen or heard much about this film from a few years ago, it was a controversial and very disturbing docudrama recreating some of the events around the rape and murder of a teenage girl and her family by US soldiers in Mahmudiya in March of 2006.)

Here's a useful tangent spurred by the talk of mimesis I reproduced here earlier today, occasioned by a recent viewing of Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007).  Though I generally like De Palma, I let this one pass me by years ago because concensus seemed to be that it was a hugely messy, well-intentioned statement film: a movie made with a straightforward agenda by a leftie greybeard of liberal Hollywood, using newfangled "new media" techniques.  I didn't rush to see it; I already had assumed a picture of what I'd get out of it ... and that picture didn't include a heightened understanding of the political or human dimensions of the war in Iraq.  Plus, those who know me realize I'm like a sloth, cinephilically-speaking - it often takes me a long, long time to get around to things.

Imagine my surprise when I put on the DVD and was completely devastated.  I think it's a great film. 

Yet, how could this be?  Many of the people I'd look to for guidance on this matter were apathetic or mixed, at best, toward Redacted.  My man Girish, for instance, listed it as a film that don't work for him at all from Toronto 2007.  Olaf Möller concluded, "But when all is said an done and every image fucked over, remade, and defiled, we still need to believe in images as carriers of truth, and there's a sense of desperation to the whole enterprise."  In the same issue of Film Comment, the late, great Paul Arthur absolutely excoriates the film on every level.  He writes, "Scarcely a single frame of this stuff looks or feels plausible: a surveillance camera miraculously records crystal-clear dialogue; a female journalist accompanying a nighttime raid shoves her mike [sic] into the faces of troops trying to clear a potentially hostile zone; the diarist's first-person voiceovers and accompanying images rarely match."

Even De Palma advocate and card-carrying professional contrarian Armond White panned the movie: "De Palma hasn’t thought through what to say about war."  (I don't think this is a movie begging for a statement about War in general, exactly, but more to that point below.)  White then echoes Arthur's misgivings about the choice to tell the story through imitation of various new media & journalism templates: "Sequences sample either a soldier’s video diary, Internet webcasts, surveillance camera footage, Al Jazeera broadcasts, even a French liberal-TV documentary with hokey editing transitions from a generic software package. This inconclusive media jumble may be anti-war fodder for those who can’t get enough slant on the war, but it’s essentially a technocrat’s quandary."

If you ask me, Olaf Möller's mixed-to-negative appraisal is actually much closer than White's or Arthur's to getting at what Redacted does and what sorts of an aesthetic it actually employs.  Der OM, at least, more or less recognizes that the root of the aesthetic here is a matter of distance from realism, and proximity- or intimacy - in an ethical quandary: how does one reconcile service, even mere citizenship, with complicity in events that push outside the bounds of what is permissible (i.e., what is one's relation to the state's non-sovereign enemy?); and also a quandary one about witnessing such trespasses (i.e., about looking & testimony).

Perhaps because I saw this movie late, largely free of expectations of a bold and timely statement, I was more receptive than many to the acting style and the clear-voiced multimedia tableaux, or the fact that the characters play somewhat stereotyped roles, or that certain plot points and images are "heavy-handed." These things did not strike me as failures because I don't think I agree with many of the film's other observers about what it is even trying to do.  I don't come away from Redacted with any impression that the film was aiming for psychologically rounded characters woven in a rich social-novelistic tapestry - i.e., The Wire in Iraq (or just The Hurt Locker, a film roundly praised for its being fairly "apolitical" yet highly psychological-realist, tho' maybe just maybe those two things are connected!).

For one thing, examples of the latter type of fiction are often overestimated in terms of "realism," and for another, Redacted instead seems to me spurred more along the lines of the thought experiment, the anecdote, or the case study.  Characters are drawn broadly not because they're drawn badly, but for economy of expression.  The situation in which they're placed is artificial, but it seems overwhelmingly self-evident to me (and perhaps I'm crazy since it was not so self-evident to the film's many detractors) that it is meant to be artificial.  (Of course the conveniently-placed surveillance cameras record dialogue perfectly, much to Arthur's dismay!)  This is one reason, perhaps, why so many of the peripheral characters are shown off-screen, given no identification as real "characters," but instead as hands and as voices serving a purpose.

What about, then, the use of multimedia?  I think part of the issue here is the question of mimesis; to what ends and in what capacities does De Palma imitate the trappings of this new spectacular digital age of war?  Is it a choice motivated by texture?  Meaning: does the proliferation of new media techniques, cheap editing transitions, and "fake" looking YouTube vlogs, etc., exist to heighten a sense of the war by retreading the means by which "we" as a society see it?  I don't think this is quite it.  I think the choice stems from a deeper decision about the nature of the text.  (At this moment I'm using "text" in its broad, lit crit sense of the word.)  If Vietnam was the TV war and the Iraq wars were gradually spectacularized into innumerable digital vectors, the means by which we - the American populace at home - have of these wars is also, obviously, mediated through all these electronic forms.  But I would disagree, respectfully but strenuously, with Olaf Möller's assertion that "we still need to believe in images as carriers of truth."  No.  Images alone are not ever carriers of truth.  There is no such thing as a pure film language; there is no such thing as a purely imagistic communication.  These are myths; we have language, and images do not cast us back to a prelapsarian/pre-discursive truth, not even temporarily.  Language is always there waiting, even if we decide it is not active.

So it's important to attend to what the movie does with words, too.  The wooden dialogue many sneered at contains, to me, a lot of subtle and significant cues.  There are Freudian slips (Salazar talks about "her" body) and verbal blocks: that body-twisting rage one feels when an emotion finds no adequate words, or is met with resistance from within oneself to get the words out.  Words themselves seem inadequate once uttered; when McCoy makes his speech near the end of the film, he clearly has no comfort of a talking cure.  He is asked to tell a war story, but what he has to tell falls upon deaf ears as his friends with cameras push him into the production of an another sanctioned image (video & a candid picture of the returned veteran whose peers and colleagues will not even allow him to shake them out of their complacency: he's awkwardly, politely ignored).  Redacted opens with discussion of soldiers bequeathing their Iraq war footage to another; all through the film there is an implicit promise of all this accumulated material being seen by someone, by someone who would have the authority to act in justice's name.  But it comes to nothing.  It peters out.  There's too much out there, there so too many images and words.

(I would go so far as to suggest that the political-ethical problem is not that a proliferation of media objects is intrinsically bad; it is more a matter of how this very proliferation functions in the society that produces it.  In this case, proliferation functions to silence even as many citizens hope and work to do just the opposite.  But it's hard work.  Debord: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.")

*

And a note about the "bad apples" argument: while the narrative is such that there is indeed an atomized spectrum of monstrosity (Flake and Rush as bad apples, Salazar as complicit with little conscience, McCoy as complicit but with a great deal of conscience, Blix as far away from complicit as a soldier could be - which is not that far), and I think this quasi-typage is in keeping with the non-realist dramaturgy of the film, I would emphasize that the film subtly conveys the impression that transgressive behavior by soldiers is structural and systemic rather than solely personal and moral.  To point to a few ways the films does this: (a) providing Flake, if not Rush, with a story about his family history and its pressure cooker of violence, (b) underlining the military imperative to weigh charges of misconduct with morale and tight functioning of the troops, for instance in the video chat between McCoy and his father - this don't rock the boat pragmatism comes across explicitly but we can also draw out a lot of tacit communication too, including about parental indoctrination, (c) indicating via Salazar the choice of a stint in the military as an opportunity for long-term careers, something that the Army has used in its marketing/recruitment since the 1970s [this last is a point gleaned from a talk I saw recently by historian Beth Bailey].

*

Finally, on political controversy: I understand that conservative commentators generally hated this movie, too. My own feeling is that while this is a highly radical and extremely political film, the tenor of its stance in terms of blue/red electoral politics is actually fairly muted.  Though Redacted makes a stringent and angry appraisal of American conduct both individual and systemic, its chief concern is not how or why American foreign policy led troops into the mess it did.  It presumably leaves that for other films, books, etc.  Instead its concern is a matter of our ethical reaction to a line crossed.  A state functions by excluding something, even most things, from its own body politic.  In the act of defense of that very body, and of those very lines, the military arm of the state can cross the lines which had previously been counted upon to help constitute the very substance of that state's body politic.  (In other words, murder would be implemented so as to protect/"protect" even the Land of Pacifism.  Protection of the law entails extra-legal force.)   Even when such transgressions are not officially ordered or sanctioned, they often goes unpunish, or punished only by a scapegoat.  ("Sovereign is he who decides the exception.")  But for the citizen of a state, putatively democratic, who sees this transgression, in fact takes part in it - even from off to one side - there remains a profound ethical problem.  And the modes of seeing such trangressions multiply; rather than carrying truth on their own, they instead act as shattered glass or shards of a mirror.  Perhaps they inure us with their small, image-heavy truths to the demand a more singular, clearer articulation of truth might convey.  Redacted sketches out exactly this sort of clarion meta-picture.

Material (I)

The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions* came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death — from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occassion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.

Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of the spirit to nature — the paramount question of the whole of philosophy — has, no less than all religion, its roots in the narrow-minded and ignorant notions of savagery. But this question could for the first time be put forward in its whole acuteness, could achieve its full significance, only after humanity in Europe had awakened from the long hibernation of the Christian Middle Ages. The question of the position of thinking in relation to being, a question which, by the way, had played a great part also in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question: which is primary, spirit or nature — that question, in relation to the church, was sharpened into this: Did God create the world or has the world been in existence eternally?

The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other — and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity — comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.
 
These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense.

* Among savages and lower barbarians the idea is still universal that the human forms which appear in dreams are souls which have temporarily left their bodies; the real man is, therefore, held responsible for acts committed by his dream apparition against the dreamer. Thus Imthurn found this belief current, for example, among the Indians of Guiana in 1884.

(Friedrich Engels, from Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 1886)

* * *

Graphology has taught us to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer conceals in it it.  It may be supposed that the mimetic process which expresses itself in this way in the activity of the writer was, in the very distant times in which script originated, of utmost importance for writing.  Script has thus become, like language, an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences.

But this aspect of language, as well as of script, does not develop in isolation from its other, semiotic aspect.  Rather, the mimetic element in language can, like a flame, manifest itself only through a kind of bearer.  This bearer is the semiotic element.  Thus, the nexus of meaning of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears.  For its production by man - like its perception by him - is in many cases, and particularly the most important, tied to its flashing up.  It flits past.  It is not improbable that the rapidity of writing and reading heightens the fusion of the semiotic and the mimetic in the sphere of language.

(Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty," 1933) 

* * *

Benjamin's fascination with mimesis flows from the confluence of three considerations; alterity, primitivism, and the resurgence of mimesis with modernity.  Without hesitation Benjamin affirms that the mimetic faculty is the rudiment of a former compulsion of persons to "become and behave like something else."  The ability to mime, and mime well, in other words, is the capacity to Other.

This discovery of the importance of the mimetic is itself testimony to Benjamin's enduring theme, the surfacing of "the primitive" within modernity as a direct result of modernity, especially of its everyday-life rhythms of montage and shock alongisde the revelation of the optical unconscious that is made possible by mimetic machinery such as the camera and the movies.  By definition, this notion of a resurfacing or refocussing of the mimetic rests on the assumption that "once upon a time" mankind was mimetically adept.  In this regard Benjamin refers specifically to mimicry in dance, cosmologies of microcosm and macrocosm, and divination by means of correspondences revealed by the entrails of animals and constellations of stars.  Much more could by said of the extensive role of mimesis in the ritual life of ancient and "primitive" societies.

(Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, pp. 19-20, 1993)

* * *

Although what men see, touch, or grasp are responses to external stimuli, the external objects are determined by the selective activity of the senses and the senses in turn are constantly modified by the biological, social, and cultural evolution of the human species.  In a certain sense, then, there are no natural data, no God-given external facts of nature, but only socially-mediated objects.

(Z.A. Jordan, "The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism," 1967)

[It is helpful to reinforce here that Jordan's gloss on Marx does not claim that there is no eternal world from the standpoint of a Marxist materialism/naturalism, but that our data or our objects of such a world are only ever mediated.]  Further, from the same source:

Unlike mechanistic materialism, which is anxious to explain how ideas and systems of thought are produced by physical and chemical processes in the brain, historical materialism tries to show how ideas and systems of thought emerge from and are determined by social conditions, which both shape and mould man's behavior and are shaped and moulded by man.  But historical materialism also goes beyond what mechanistic materialism was ever able to consider, namely, it tries to explain how man as a natural entity, analogous to other natural entities, acquires his human characteristics through social existence and social evolution.

* * * 

An unrelated, personal addendum: I know that there are few thriving film blogs these days, and the faint guilt over my own inactivity with Elusive Lucidity has been alleviated somewhat by this fact.  It is not that I have been doing nothing, seeing nothing, reading nothing, or writing nothing.  It has all simply been directed elsewhere.  Almost definitely, EL will never return to the same level of activity as it had several years ago.  However, this has been a useful tool for me and may continue to be so here and there, so spurts of activity may still be forthcoming ... including a lot of quotes and maybe some commentary on philosophical questions of materialism, matter, mimesis, perception, and society as inaugurated in this very post.  Cheers, y'all.

Human Comedy

Bernie: Here is a movie with people who look and talk like people one meets outside the frame of a movie screen.  Nevermind that the lines between fiction and documentary blur here; the point is the effect within the context of a docudrama.  Richard Linklater, a liberal outsider (and an adopted son of "the People's Republic of Austin") casts a seriocomic eye on a corner of the American South, the town of Carthage in East Texas.   Linklater is attuned to striations of class and geography that many other directors might condense into an undifferentiated portrait of backwoods, backwards good ol' boys.  But he lets these divisions rub up against each other, giving his social portraiture texture, and reducing the problem of a unified, cod-anthropological "take" of his own.

For the second time in his career (Shallow Hal was the first), Jack Black strikes me as an actor well-used, and admirably committed to his part.  Slightly effeminate, perhaps subtly officious, a bit of a huckster, and a real sweetheart; his boundless activity, unflagging neatness, and ramrod posture express an internal energy the film suggests might be closeted queerness (but the film also leaves this as a question - a puzzle piece - rather than a merely suggestive, and lazy, explanation, for what ultimately could Bernie's same-sex attractions "explain"?).  I have known people like Bernie in my life, just as I can also recall the children who would possibly have grown into Bernies.  What the film tries to confound - I think - is the idea that one saying such a thing ("I have known that type...") could serve as a passable summary of a person.  Can one even summarize a person?  Perhaps so - legally - whether it's the court of the state or of public opinion.  But I would say that Bernie demonstrates how a person's summary is inextricable from his social commitments and dialogues, and that these apparatuses are not reducible only to the punitive register.  (Or, to put it like a sociologist in the wake of May '68, there is more to the society than the state.)

So Bernie is also about the problems that arise from typecasting.  If you're still reading this post, but haven't seen the film, I'll simply say that the story (based on actual events) culminates in a trial where Bernie's identity must be decided upon - criminal or good man.  He is, by evidence of the film, clearly both.  Tension arises when Bernie must be taken out of his community (and ever-so-slightly, but crucially, away from his peers) for this trial.  The legal system has no satisfying response to the possibility that Bernie may in fact be both guilty of a serious crime and a truly decent and valuable member of a community.  Rather, the legal system is meant to penalize the crime rather than the identify of the person - but as the movie's trial demonstrates, the only effective way to do this is to paint Bernie as a criminal type, a monster who will do this again because of his type.  There essentially is no fair trial available to Bernie (pro or con).

Helen Grace: "The relation between Eisenstein and Marfa Lapkina we know only through images.  There is no doubt that she is one of the finest representatives of the theory of typage, which some Soviet filmmakers, like Eisenstein, espoused - a theory which gaves a place in the history of the image to figures who are invisible to history.  The theory of typage is the culmination of all those attempts of the eighteenth century on to understand the language of the body, all those theories of bodily legibility through which character might be read.  The theory of typage is replaced at a certain point by a concern with personality rather than character, since this makes everything simpler.  Modernity demands that character declares itself, is made visible in the form of "the personality," the performing subject, who creates the appearance of depth and the problem of "good" and "bad" character disappears into the question of good or bad performance.  No longer is moral judgement required, since the subject merely reveals itself, speaks itself.  This is far more efficient since the temporalities of modernity do not allow for the slow revelation of character which pre-industrial societies depended upon.  Now it is necessary to make decisions on character from first impressions, from the strength of performance when the image, character or person first appears."

(See also Guy Debord's Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici and Roland Barthes' "Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature.")

LPdN

Not So Funny

"In the first edition of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the Oompa-Loompas were members of an African tribe displaced by Willy Wonka to the northern industrial hinterland. Not quite so funny anymore that his workers worship him like a god, is it? Or that he keeps them scrupulously isolated from the general population? Or that he pays them in cocoa beans? For the second edition in 1973, Dahl changed the Oompa-Loompas from black pygmies into “rosy-white” creatures with long “golden-brown” hair. The 1971 movie made them orange-skinned with green hair. Loompaland is a complicated place." ("How to Read a Racist Book to Your Children," NYTimes)

Strange* to think that the NYTimes intelligentsia categorizes a fiction which depicts a group of people working in (wage?) slavery as somehow pleasant if they're orange-and-green and magical, but "not so funny anymore" if they're brown-skinned, and African.  (That is, if they're placed in actual history.)  Why should it have been funny to begin with?  The imaginative capacity of genre is such that it makes the symbolic and the imaginative able to stand in for the material, which is why there are so many debates about the "meaning" of whatever comic book adaptation has the box office busy at any given point in the year.  My impression is that official liberal culture sanctions one of two reactions to the politics in & of genre - one is the sort of heartfelt, betcha-didn't-know conscientiousness of this piece linked to above; the other is a kind of j'accuse toward whatever cultural object offends with this "uncovered" or "spotlighted" shortcoming - the equivalent of that Wonder Showzen clip of the kid shouting "That's racist!"

Lest I not be clear for anyone reading this, I'm not even trying to be judgmental so much as descriptive of this tendency; my aim is to sketch out the tendencies of the educated intelligentsia of the imperial center - that which structures the "scripts" we have for cultural debates.  I'm also not trying to be a puritan myself when I ask "why should it have been funny to begin with."  It's a sincere question rather than a rhetorical one.


* No, not really.

A General Note on Legitimacy

Certain filmmakers, say Nicolas Winding Refn or Quentin Tarantino, interest me for a number of reasons - but not necessarily because I think they offer complex investigations of ethics - or, in cases where the ethics might be more complex, because they point to ethically sound conclusions to problems of violence, vengeance, social dysfunction, or representation.

The purely formalist critic can bracket off messier cultural, social, and/or ethical questions to one side; it can be easy then to presume that the thorny questions of non-formal meaning an object offers are containable and possible - even preferable - to ignore.  (Even if one's personal political opinions might "happen" to veer toward Straub-Huillet rather than Riefenstahl).  But for the critic who is interested in form but also in the world of this form, the world this form must always inhabit, an array of problems come into focus. 

One of the major problems, for the critic, is the question of legitimacy.  What counts as a proper object of analysis - do we legitimate harmful culture when we give it our attention, and when cultural intellectuals expend verbiage on such products?  To an extent, this is true.  But if this is the only strategy, the single overall strategy, then the cultural critic has hamstrung herself with the efficacy of the merely personal boycott - i.e., a pointless project whose usefulness is solely inward.  To me this suggests something of the "aestheticization of politics" (pace Benjamin) which projects aesthetics onto the final domain of all other human endeavors.  It would be better to push outward, instead, and to remind ourselves that the serious investigation of aesthetics need not lead to its supersession over all other domains (ethical, moral, social, and so on).

"Amazing"

Should verisimilitude be a concern ... decades from now, fiction representing American life circa 2012 would do well to incorporate liberally into the dialogue the word "amazing."  The world I inhabit has not seemed to tire of this word.  If you watch TV, hardly a commercial break goes by without the word coming up.  Pay attention, readers, and if you haven't noticed it before see if you don't notice it now.  See if it doesn't drive you a little batty.  See if you don't start regretting the word as soon as you say it yourself (as I do, not infrequently).  There are two main variations - the more abrupt "uh-mazing" and the slightly whinier "ammaaaayzing."  Either way, the object described is only rarely amazing in any boring old twentieth century way. 

We all fall into linguistic habits and ruts.  Certainly I've allowed this very blog to be the site of a lot of my lazier brainstorming and freewriting.  But for the sake of mere diversity, for the sake of the joys of that a larger vocabulary might bring, I submit to the public this plea: that we shake things up and reinvigorate our diction with a host of other words that do just as well, sometimes better, to describe "a thing I've encountered that I like."  We might start with lovely, superb, spectacular, wonderful, special, terrific, capital (as in, "capital idea, old man!" - arch, but appealing).  We can even dust off neat.  It would be pretty neat if people eased up a bit on amazing.

Prolific Psychotronic

Taken from Michael J. Weldon's Psychotronic Video Guide:

"These are some directors who made the most psychotronic movies (not necessarily the best).  All of them have their fans (believe it or not).  The list does not include Italians or serial directors.

1. Jesus Franco (Spain)
2. Fred Olen Ray
3. Cirio H. Santiago (Philippines)
4. Al Adamson (murdered in 1995)
5. William Beaudine (last in 1962)
6. Sam Newfield (last in 1958)
7. Terence Fisher (UK; last in 1973)
8. Fred Sears (last in 1958)
9. Jim Wynorski
10. David DeCoteau"

Workers, Potters (Interlude)

A problem with rah-rah popular culture criticism is the exaggeration of all discussion into "likes" and "dislikes," thumbs up and thumbs down.  This diminishes and perhaps neuters real critique - as Andrew O'Hehir points out right away in his review of The Avengers.  In this paradigm people are encouraged not to have dialogues or to hold complex and nuanced opinions, but instead to sublimate their sense of selves to the enumeration of "likes" and "dislikes." 

O'Hehir, in the comments: "But rest assured that most of the reviews of "Avengers" will be way more positive than mine. And in fairness I'm really not bashing the film."

Douglas Moran: "[laughter] No, you're bashing the genre."

What is this "[laughter]"?  And what has led the expression of so many opinions through the conjectural filter of a public posture?  Another curious speech behavior one might note, especially in the likes of Twitterworld, is the construction of sentences about TV shows or whatever as if one is buffeted about by the dictates of a profoundly impersonal, disassociated rational choice.  For instance: "I can't get behind X" or "I can't support Y."  Or, echoing a lot of sports talk, prefacing one's opinion about an outcome or an elective choice with "I gotta go with..." even when no logical argumentation appears before or after the choice.  It's how this active, speaking subject erases itself in speech that intrigues me.  Such speakers rhetorically dissolve their own agency the endorsement of one "stance" (often product) or another.

Pop Goes Precarity

I have unspecific recollections that other people I've listened to have said this before, but ... for purely commercial cinema, 2010's Morning Glory is shockingly decent.  Not "subversive"; nothing "smuggled": it's simply a product with narrative content that is honest and expressive in contrast to most Hollywood releases: there's a faint trace of 1930s-40s classical Hollywood in this movie.  (Perhaps it's because it depicts a world of busy invention and constant improvisation, not unlike the production plants of classical Hollywood themselves.)  Rachel McAdams plays a 28-year-old morning show producer, Becky Fuller, who loses her job in New Jersey.  She gets a shot at a low-rated morning show in New York at the station IBS.  There, she is soon expected to raise flagging ratings considerably if she wants to keep her job and to keep the show on air.

The apartment she moves into in New York, while nice-looking, does not seem spacious in the way that commercial fantasies about "life in New York" often do; nor - if I recall - are there any guarantees that she even lives in Manhattan.  (Imagine a happy professional woman living in - gasp! - an outer borough!  One of the many execrable things about, say, Julie & Julia is how its contemporary scenes present Queens as a hellhole.  For a movie about the magic of cooking, one would hope against hope that a movie would recognize the culinary miracle Queens represents.  But I digress...)  There's a tough scene in Morning Glory between Becky and her mother where the latter explains that this dream of "making it" in broadcasting was adorable at age ten, inspiring at age eighteen, and embarrassing at age twenty-eight.  "Stop before it becomes heartbreaking."

This is a common gesture in recent cinema and television.  The arrested hero or heroine confronts "maturity" through some task or job, a direction in life.  This sense of direction seems to be everything.  Or maybe we can say it seems to be everything in this Hollywood material that is not exactly about precarity, but is in fact profoundly informed by it in its premises and in its assumptions.  This is, after all, a movie about an adult woman - still youngish - who loses her job abruptly, and feels lucky to get a chance at another measly job, for lower pay, at a struggling organization.  This is not "political cinema," yet it is nevertheless a movie speaking directly to a public that knows what it is like to never get a lunch break or to see highers-up freeze pay raises and cut benefits.

A quick note on a name: Becky Fuller.  "Becky" is plucky, it is forceful yet informal.  In the 1930s, RKO adapted Vanity Fair under the name of Thackeray's heroine, Becky Sharp ('35).  Fuller connotes plenitude, but also echoes a certain economic pluck (e.g., Lucille Ball in 1950's The Fuller-Brush Girl).  Plenitude is what Becky Fuller is after, but the movie dramatizes this not as economic fantasy but rather the richness of community.  If we can pay the bills, and eat all right, how many of us would not be happy - simply - with a workplace of labor from which we do not feel alienated?

Whether or not Becky's labor, and IBS's mission, is alienated in the Marxist sense is beside the point insofar as we're trying to figure out what the film does or says.  (I certainly don't claim it's anti-capitalist, or anti-hegemonic.)  But I think it is meaningful that the film designates as its goal a workplace where the feeling of community is important.

And it does something else interesting: it pictorializes the same relation to audiovisual content that I would imagine its audience also has.  Well into the film, Becky Fuller pushes the segments at IBS's show toward the ridiculous, the attention-grabbing, the viral.  We are treated to several shots of laughing Becky reacting to these clips, readymade for YouTube.  (Matt Malloy plays a correspondent who gets pushed into segments on rollercoasters, skydiving, etc.)  Harrison Ford plays a semi-retired serious evening news anchor who reluctantly takes on the role of morning show co-host; his character and Becky at a few points debate explicitly the merits of addressing what we might call the "public sphere" of old-school news discourse, versus the all-consuming and pre-emptive need to get ratings up by grabbing and keeping attention.  Becky, in fact, must satisfy the demands of ratings in order for her and her co-workers to earn a paycheck, and therefore lack the material circumstances even to consider the cultivation of a serious, grave, and ethical journalistic culture.  The movie does little to contextualize or question Becky's position, but what's interesting are the inferences we can draw from how it's all structured.

Savage

Frankenheimer's early film The Young Savages ('61), not without its merits, exemplifies one of the weird problems of the period's social problem cinema.  A lot of directors coming into commercial filmmaking during this period cut their teeth in television (in some cases live television), and when some of them wanted to utilize the space available in the wider, larger film screen, there is still a mannered patina to otherwise realist or naturalistic blocking and performance.  (Which is why some pockets of cinephiles still poke Frankenheimer, Lumet, et al., for a stagey or televisual aesthetic.  Can't say I always disagree.)  What seems incongruous in The Young Savages is how its concern for "social problems" on the streets of New York nevertheless give way to eloquent, monologue-like cathartic expressions of self: from the era of Morris Engel and John Cassavetes, such a hybrid of realism and performative conventions seems full of holes ... one wonders where the sincerity of pauses, stutters, and silence has gone?  Hollywood cinema in the 1930s, compared to the 1950s, seems to have a much better pictorial and sonic range of effects for expressing the "problem" class, the underclasses, etc.  Just a feeling ...

Workers, Potters (Part III)

It may tempt one to think, as Serge Daney once put it in perspective, that "if there is something missing on the formal level there must be something missing on the political level."  One keeps one's hands clean if one can point to a chosen pantheon, or constellation, of filmmakers and say, Look!  These are praiseworthy figures.  These are artists fit for the heroic narrative.  From there, it may tempt one, to give not a thought to the structure or continued existence of that very heroic narrative.  The cinephile who thinks he is politically enlightened may have simply supplanted Hollywood's Martin Scorsese with the subproletariat's Pedro Costa ... as though the work of politics proceeds from the private pleasures of taste.  What a profoundly antimaterialist way of going about things, though! 

Still, let's remind ourselves that we are tracing through a complex and balanced situation.  The politics of taste do matter - what I am saying is that they are not however ultimately determinant of the politics of cinema/art/aesthetics.  The aesthetic domain cannot do all the work, and I suspect the amount of work it can do is often overestimated.  Another facet of what I am saying is that our tastes are not themselves free from determinants and conditions ... not even when they appear most evolved, or anyway most divorced from the dictates of the culture industry.  One is not necessarily free of anything simply because one has left behind the sweep of JK Rowling, LMFAO, Avengers, Lost, The Sopranos, Gaga, and Bieber.  Aesthetic tastes and predilections are never simply natural (i.e., physiological or predestined) but are forged.  Even what Bourdieu referred to as a kind of naive, natural taste emerges from the crucible of society.

"We must remind people that behind the auteur and his rich subjectivity there is always, in the last analysis, a class which is speaking."  (Daney, "The Critical Function")

(The word "auteur" would be better dropped in English most of the time; and people would be better suited to use the word "author."  If that sounds weird in a given context, then perhaps "auteur" was not the right word in the first place.)

*

"No one knows what it means, but it's provocative.  Gets the people goin'!"  (Will Farrell in Blades of Glory)

There's no need to dwell on creating a new classification system for "types" of cinema or media (e.g., the famed Cahiers categories).  What, if any, plan of political action comes from supporting one of the two major veins of popular political cinema (as I see it), meaning, (a) films which clearly demonstrate , as with Ken Loach's work, or (b) pop films that harness a particular message, as Step Up: Revolution is primed to do?

Arguments that either, or both, of these categories are simply subsumed back into the culture industry - that this is a weak "critique" acting merely as a way for capitalist hegemony to innoculate against real critique - may be true.  But they miss a crucial point, which is that audiences never consume these works in a vacuum.  This is sometimes referred to as the "hypodermic needle" model of mass culture, wherein the mindless unwashed simply take in whatever bad shit the corporations sell them - McDonald's, Two and a Half Men, and so on.  To put it another way, critics of mass culture from this viewpoint presumptively project onto the lumpen masses a condition of pure and uninhibited spectatorship, ... i.e., recreating in fact the very modernist ideal of the immersive, mainlined gaze seen in something like Anthology Film Archives' Invisible Cinema.  But whereas something like the Invisible Cinema was an elective practice for society's aesthetes, the hypodermic needle funhouse is a prison.  Recto or verso, what "haunts" these conceptions of media consumption is the fantasy of erasure of the viewing-listening subject, and the elaboration of this same subject as answerable to the mediated mechanics of ideology (as in cybernetics, another field of inquiry whose heyday was roughly contemporaneous with the height of avant-garde Western cinema as well as hypodermic needle masscult theory).  The subject becomes, indeed, subject-to.

To extend more fully - films may contain politics subject to interpretation.  For instance, we can state without controversy that The Birth of a Nation is a racist film.  But these are not necessarily the first nor final word on the politics of those films; in any event they are never, ever the only word.  This is why we can have something like DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation - which I haven't seen, admittedly, but which by all accounts seems to be exemplify in its production/distribution exactly what is overlooked in the spectatorial theories of the previous paragraph: i.e., the act of reception (which entails the possibility of critique and the inevitable context of the social body).  And it is around the act of reception that the more cultivated tastes of more cultivated observers may, in fact, veil a profound insensitivity to sentiment.  More on this to follow.

Workers, Potters (Part II)

One thing we should want to take away from the quagmire of cultural politics is that we're doomed if we look to the textual qualities of objects themselves to defeat their placement in cultural commerce.  Context can make films politically radical in some sense - I'm thinking of the profligacy of a work like Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, or the anti-colonialist "missiles" by the likes of Rene Vautier (pace Nicole Brenez), or Debord's famous Howls in Favor of Sade screening (or Isou's Venom and Eternity), or even the solid and principled liberalism of a filmmaker like Bertrand Tavernier.  There are a number of ways that cultural objects are political - often these ways overlap, and can even contradict each other.  And often an "activist" version of cinema - a la Michael Moore (or, let's say, the Kony 2012 folks) - presumes that a political cinema is one that causes its audience to leave the theater and act in some way.  Indeed this is what Eisenstein sought when he tried to devise a cinema which could play upon the spectator's sensorium in such a way as to help foment revolution.  (On this, see Jonathan Beller's terrific book The Cinematic Mode of Production, whose praises I've sung many times here over the years.)  But I do admire political gestures that aren't simply the instrumentalist consequences of "effective" political filmmaking.  I harbor a certain romanticized liking for big, expensive movies that fail to turn a profit - and this regardless of whether I think the film is secretly good or not.  I admire the Straubs and Pedro Costa, and in his own way Pasolini, whose films' very production have often sought a political and economic order alien to the hostile, dominant paradigm: i.e., matters of payment, and of closeness to the working class, the underclass, and their environments.

But films can't opt out of the money economy simply by virtue of their message.  The domain of art is neither divorced from politics, nor does it - can it - offer a satisfactory trump card before politics.  There are aesthetes who simply ignore politics; there are aesthetes who hope against hope that aesthetics will overcome politics.  (I suppose what I'd strive for is to have the qualities of an aesthete who follows neither path.)

At the same time, we first world commentators on movies, books, and the like, risk irrelevance - at least in some circumstances - if we adopt what we might characterize as the "Adorno approach."  Like with Pierre Bourdieu, Theodor Adorno's massive body of work is now relegated to a placeholder status for the puritanical position that "culture industries are always bad, no matter how revolutionary they appear."  And the implied shorthand addendum to this position is that Adorno was wrong, because he "didn't like jazz," and as we know, jazz is the great American artform.  Ergo, one must at all costs avoid being an Adorno - this can be a serious offense in the high court of internet intelligentsia.  It causes more vitriol, at times, than the aerial bombing of hospitals and civilian neighborhoods...

Let me impress, once more, that my quarrel is not with mass culture but with a certain way of characterizing and defending it.

Quoting the great AvW/LCC (I've already in fact quoted this exact post of hers once on this blog):

"Realism (and its children in 'literary fiction') was and is largely a formal and political reaction to the vigour of the 'genre' (avant la lettre) habits/tropes/imaginative power of the long 18th century - their revolutionary verve and critical capacity - rather than, as it advertises itself, and as it has been assumed by the major theorists and historians of the novel, from Auerbach to Watt, the result of a direct adaptation of and attention to social and individual reality, naturally arising in the context of the bourgeois individual emancipation narrative."

...the blogger then writing as Alphonse van Worden characterizes a tension between mimesis and metaphor in literature that comes to a head in 1848 ...

"To 1848 the proletarian challenge, to expropriate the bourgeois revolution and universalize it, make it look both backward to commoning and forward to civil liberties, is building, as it adapts certain ideas generated in the course of bourgeois emancipation. 


"To 1848 the 'fantastic' and what later becomes 'genre' generally is gaining force and intensity as it adapts certain techniques of realism and mimesis.


"After 1848, realism - the canon - and genre are separated and hierarchised.  Realism takes power and achieves hegemony and legitimacy; genre is degraded, becomes the formal prison in which the radically imaginative is both 'confined' and 'reformed' under the surveillance and despotism of bourgeois liberalism."

...

"The history of the mimetic in the bourgeois novel can be written as the history of two tropes for property, that is, the love story of I and Mine: The Umbrella and The Camera.  (The seamstress/sewing machine is important too.)


"(Genres on the other hand whirl around the vehicle and the weapon.)"

In other words, we might trace what NYTimes-style discourse characterizes in terms of split between a serious (artistic, adult) and a frivolous (mass, juvenile) approach to cultural production.  In the former category, keep an eye out for how often critics feel obliged to justify the play & whimsy that can sometimes creep into these works.  'Such-and-such isn't a genre film, but rather a meditation on genre.'  'The author simply uses genre tropes.'  Characterizations like these may often be true.  But it is the fact of the separation that intrigues me.  Defenders make great claims about the likes of Harry Potter or Lost, sometimes quite extravagant claims - but rare is the recourse to realist or modernist justification.  Nobody (or almost nobody) says that the oeuvres of Rowling, J.J. Abrams, the entire Batman franchise, or Joss Whedon are really something other than genre.  Instead, the achievements of mass culture are surplus to genre, or built off it.  In a sense, then, what serious culture performs, when it uses genre, is in fact a representation of it - a mimesis of or toward metaphor, if you will.

I haven't gotten to sentiment today, but that will come ...

Workers, Potters (Part I)

A familiar cultural script, perennially contested by two "wings" of the 21st century NYTimes-style hegemon.  Exhibit A: Joel Stein's less-than-thoughtful defense of Adult Culture, contra Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Twilight, Pixar, etc., etc., a few weeks ago.  Exhibit B, following script: Julian Sanchez in a more thoughtful response to Stein, nevertheless bringing out a tired, tiresome trope: "It’s hard to resist poking fun at the pretentious undergrad lugging some William Gaddis doorstop to the local café so everyone can see what they’re reading."  You see, because when people read things that are difficult, they do so primarily for reasons of social climbing. 

(But in a world where the proverbial everyone reads and secretly prefers stuff like The Hunger Games, who is the pretentious undergrad actually likely to impress?  Poor hypothetical fellow.)

The ease of this trope stems from the fact that cultural discourse in or around The New York Times tends to assume at least a faint familiarity with the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a major theorist of taste whose many, many pages of work tend to get reduced to the principle that people's economic privilege determines or at least conditions their cultural tastes.  Bourdieu comes to stand in as a shorthand argument stored in the backs of everybody's minds who has the cultural capital to have at least a general sense of what Bourdieu argued when it came to having cultural capital.  (You see a circular, or at least spiraling, structure forming here?)  Thus, the mere invocation of Bourdieu - even when he's not actually named, but stands phantasmatic over "his" argument - is a ready weapon for when the cultural conservators attack, muggle-like, the fortresses of YA lit, cartoons, etc.  Another way of tracing through Script B: enjoying Harry Potter (for example) is a function of its ease and its fun, and who are you to insist we read serious literature when the dirty secret is that we only like it in small doses - or not at all?  (And people who like the really serious literature are clearly pompous, full of youthful hubris ready to be deflated - "the pretentious undergrad lugging some William Gaddis" for everyone to see.)

The problems I have with these scripts are somewhat oblique to the back-and-forth shape they take on in such venues as the Times or popular literary blogs.  One reservation I'll venture is with the idea that these low and/or youthful forms are always compulsively easy to digest because they're just so enjoyable.  For everyone.  Neutrally and equally. 

I'm not so sure.  Though the prose may go fast, "keeping up" with one of these mega-franchises often requires a significant investment of time, money, and mental energy (both cognitive and emotional).  And if one really keeps up with the gossip, the behind-the-scenes production of film adaptations, the peripheral merchandising, etc., this actually involves a great deal of effort.  It is work that may be enjoyable, but it is still work.  And if one doesn't like Harry Potter to begin with, having to read through all of Rowling's titles would absolutely be equivalent to, errr, what Dan Kois unfortunately discussed as "cultural vegetables."  This "good for you" logic can work in multiple directions though; it needn't refer only to Gaddis or Jafar Panahi.  Easy, leisurely cultural objects - if indeed they are leisure - should not require effort unless that effort is fun for people.  Yet a real coup for the makers of Harry Potter, Lost, Hunger Games, comic book movie franchises, and so on, is to capture that labor of looking amongst a willing audience.  The scholarly field of fan studies, especially when it is industry-centric, might celebrate this win-win synergy but I think a healthy infusion of Marxist political economy is always called for when considering the overdetermined cultural life of such objects.

Think, very quickly, about dancing (popular, folk, or street forms of dancing).  This is a leisure activity that also requires a substantial measure of effort and time.  In some circumstances, it can be highly politicized.  But it can also be commodified, or not commodofied.  I'll be seeing Step Up: Revolution when it comes out - a dance film harnessing a "protest" message which, however sincere or sophisticated it might even turn out be, nevertheless also serves to sell tickets to mass youth audiences in order to make money for companies that would otherwise be occupied.  (Adorno's rolling over in his grave...)

What I would want to add to this scripted, recurrent debate is a reconsideration of the merits of the low, the mass, or the popular.  The script on both sides presumes that serious or adult culture entails work and that the low, the mass, or the popular doesn't.  The Joel Steins of the NYTimes-world presume this work to be ultimately beneficial, while the Dan Koises undermine such self-improvement framings to celebrate the pleasures of unstressed, unforced leisure.  A capitalist work ethic underlies this entire conceptualization.  The Stein approach wants to build cultural capital (and a path of self-improvement) which tends to rely upon a foundation of economic privilege - leisure produces not things but the minds and practices that could be devoted to higher ideals.  This, Aristotle saw as a goal to which to aspire, and which the likes of Marx and Gramsci pointed out was the material basis for ruling class ideology before communism was to overthrow it.  The Kois approach inverts this logic, however, snickering a bit like Paul Lafargue about the right to be lazy, maybe even arguing (like Steven Johnson) that it's counter-intuitively "good for us," and yet also (often mindlessly) volunteering labor for the attention economy - so that one doesn't think about Harry Potter as "cultural vegetables" (its social utility designated mainly as fodder for chit-chat), and yet one's spectatorial investment in Harry Potter, etc., produces a great deal of profit for the companies that put out these "leisure" products.  We're toiling in the fields and factories of the attention economy.

Seen this way, might you not agree with me about the distinct lack of appeal these options present?  Official culture fails us.  In the next part of this post - coming in the near future - I'll try to talk about genre and sentiment, among other things, and see what useful through-lines we can find when it comes to talking about the high and the low, the serious and the frivolous, in culture ...

Quote of the Day

“I was out to show that there are more meanings in ordinary meanings — of the shallow type required for entertainment — than usually spotted by critics, who imagine that only important art can involve people and make poetic and ideological points. I’m looking at movies which are run-of-the-mill yet saturated with something too shallow really to be myth (in the full sense), but too ambivalent to be merely cliché. I’m trying a kind of micro-criticism, more concerned with the molecules of a film’s meaning than the implications of its meaning.” (Raymond Durgnat, talking about his work on This Island Earth)

Shorts

Les Dragueurs (1962, above) inaugurates my informal, long-term project to explore Jean-Pierre Mocky's comic-thriller universe.  Yes, J-P Mocky, "whose giant oeuvre has yet to really be discovered in English-speaking territories" (says Craig Keller, rightly so).  Existing tonally somewhere between the poles of sweet nonchalance and winking Weltschmerz, this strikes me as the work of a "man of cinema," though perhaps not quite on the same level as the Nouvelle Vague's brighter lights.

Here's another JP: that is, Donleavy.  I recently read the classic cult novel The Ginger Man and can't for the life of me figure out how it would be turned into a film (starring ... Johnny Depp?), without it being a wry, slow-paced, darkly lit vignette-construction of hunger, mildew, and lechery.  Actually.  Come to think of it, that doesn't sound all that bad.  Cross between Withnail & I and certain scenes from Bela Tarr.  I wonder if the teleplay from 1962 still exists in any available form.

Darezhan Omirbayev's Kairat (1959) is full of clean images, a lot of sequences and sameness (open fields punctuated by railroad tracks like in Saless' Still Life); there are queued lines, beds, tables, compartments, etc.  The same would appear to be true for time - a procession of days, interactions, trips to the cinema.  Omirbayev had his day in the (slightly overcast) sun a little while ago - why does it seem nobody talks about him anymore?  Is it only because he hasn't made a film for a few years apparently?  Film culture, sooner or later, will have to get over its fascination with novelty.  (This refers to both the level of aesthetics and the level of circulation.)  Give me a very good film from 1992, like Kairat, over a merely "talked about" film from 2012, six days of the week.

Very gradually I realize one part of the (submerged) rubric by which I judge a lot of recent American microbudget cinema is how it seems to deal with the class privilege supporting so many of its characters.  The smirking nonchalance with which certain mumblecore figures, on-screen, abandon jobs to do things like "live in my own head" (to paraphrase what Kentucker Audley's character says in his slightly annoying, yet charming, Team Picture) seems panic-inducingly cavalier to a person like myself, who lives paycheck to paycheck. One can live, parentally subsidized, in a nice East Village apartment.  Or one can occupy very modestly a communal house in Memphis, paying only subsistence fees.  Either way - but as a character points out in Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, the mere expectation of financial security serves an important role in suturing the identity of the bourgeois individual.  Yet I am not lodging a one-sided complaint.  The tensions are part of what makes the films interesting.  There is also this problem of sour grapes, and of envy.  One can be envious that a person has the means to opt, partway, out of the money economy.  One can be, simply, jealous that another person has the opportunity to live without the pressures of an inane job, and has found a measure of contentment just hanging around, eating coleslaw (Quiet City), watching Bela Tarr DVDs (Marriage Material - an excellent film), strumming guitars (everything), as unfocused as an artsy middle-class 20-year-old when you're 40 (Uncle Kent).  And all of this is what makes this loose confluence of filmmakers (Swanberg, Bujalski, Audley, etc.) difficult to be indifferent toward.  There are number of so-called "mumblecore" movies that aggravate me to no end, but this is nevertheless work that has hooks.  If some of the films suffer from class-based myopia, it is nevertheless to their credit that they strive to engage with lived experience as it is not presumed to be entirely filtered through the simulacra of other media objects.

I missed the print of Lancelot du Lac when the traveling Bresson retrospective came to town, but I watched the film again on DVD recently and thought it holds up incredibly well on fourth (?) viewing.

First Impressions

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

*

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

*

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

Lazy

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

Nineteen Fifty-Five

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

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

The Long Gray Line (John Ford)

Les Maîtres fous (Jean Rouch)

Night and Fog (Alain Resnais)

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

The Tender Trap (Charles Walters)

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk)

Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles)

Mosaik Im Vertrauen (Peter Kubelka)

Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich)

Summertime (David Lean)

Lola Montes (Max Ophüls)

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray)

Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray) 

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse)

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

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

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

The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder)

To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

Cleopatra

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