The decade comes to a close, and we can't resist making lists. Here's The AV Club; the delightfully surly Michael Atkinson weighs in here; here's the aggregate Time Out New York list, with links to critic's individual ballots; Richard Brody of The New Yorker has a delightfully pretentious list here (even more so than my own); the online social networking/streaming video, and home of friend-of-this-here blog Ignatius Vishnevetsky, The Auteurs, has got a huge collection of links here and here; James Quandt and TIFF Cinematheque have a list compiled Indiewire style from a bunch of international critics, curators and programmers.
My participation in a list of the decade's best came about originally as a simple joint effort between myself and some close friends, under the auspices and benevolent editorial hand of Alex Dowd. As of now, the project has expanded to include writers for the relatively new film/music website In Review Online, home to Mr. Dowd and a few other friends. I've got no problem with this, although the inclusion of several new people has changed the eventual consensus Top 100 (coming soon!), which I'm also assuming will be eventually unveiled on their website. Contributors have been encouraged to release their own personal ballots, so here we go.
A few thoughts on list making: There is no 'Dark Knight'. Nor will you be seeing the Coen Brothers or Almodovar. You'll also notice a lack of documentaries and animated films on my list. With the exception of Pixar and a handful of anime titles, there wasn't a lot else to even begin to consider. In the end, I decided that offering a unique and artistic statement about our world using the building blocks of filmed reality were more important than mentioning, once again, how rad Pixar movies are. Call me an old fashioned Bazinian, but that's how it goes. At the risk of incurring further wrath, I'll also say that most straight forward documentaries don't particularly interest me, from an aesthetic point of view. This decade saw an impressive group of home grown, DIY docs about the war, 9/11, Katrina, corporate malfeasance, etc. I applaud their intentions, and am happy that they exist - these are truly important pedagogic utensils. Nevertheless, their polemic intent frequently overshadows any exploration of film as a medium; in other words, the camera is simply a means to an end. I'll also add that some of the films on my list do utilize documentary film techniques, blending them in fascinating ways with traditional narrative visual grammar. This intersecting of mediums is what interest me. I did make an effort to think globally, although their are no 'token' films present on the list - in other words, the Sembene film is not on here simply because I needed an 'African' film. There is also a lack of films from 2009 - simply put, there hasn't been, in my mind, enough time to fully live with '09 films, or to see them again. The way thoughts and feelings change over time and multiple viewings is very important to me, and as much as I value 'Serbis', 'Public Enemies', 'The Headless Woman' and 'Where the Wild Things Are', I simply haven't had a chance to revisit and test my initial responses. Incidentally, all of these films will appear on my 'Best of '09' list, and I have seen 'Public Enemies' more than once - but Mann has plenty of love on the list already. On that note:
1. Miami Vice (Mann; 2006/USA)
2. Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr; 2000/Hungary)
3. Inland Empire (Lynch; 2007/USA)
4. Notre Musique (Godard; 2004/France)
5. Ten/10 on Ten/Five (Kiarostami; 2002;2004;2003/Iran)
6. Demonlover (Assayas; 2002/France)
7. The Intruder (Denis; 2004/France)
8. Millennium Mambo (Hou; 2001/Taiwan)
9. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai; 2003/Taiwan)
10. Moolaade (Sembene; 2004/Senegal)
11. Exiled (To; 2007/Hong Kong)
12. Bright Future (Kurosawa; 2003/Japan)
13. Code Unknown (Haneke; 2000/France)
14. Morvern Callar (Ramsay; 2002/UK)
15. ABC Africa (Kiarostami; 2001/Iran)
16. The Uncertainty Principle (de Oliveira;
17. The Holy Girl (Martel; 2002/Portugal)
18. Syndromes and a Century (Weerasethakul; 2006/Thailand)
19. In the Mood For Love (Wong; 2000/Hong Kong)
20. 24 City (Zhang-ke; 2008/China)
21. Yi Yi (Yang; 2000/Taiwan)
22. A History of Violence (Cronenberg; 2005/USA)
23. Offside (Panahi; 2006/Iran)
24. L’Enfant (Dardenne’s; 2005/France)
25. Zodiac (Fincher; USA)
26. The Duchess of Langeais (Rivette; France)
27. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Anderson; 2003/USA)
28. Regular Lovers (Garrel; 2005/France)
29. Ali (Mann; 2002/USA)
30. Bamako (Sissako; 2006/Mali)
31. Colossal Youth (Costa; 2006/Portugal)
32. Memento (Nolan; 2000/USA)
33. Russian Ark (Sokurov; 2002/Russia)
34. Children of Men (Cuaron/USA/UK
35. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry/USA)
36. The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson/USA)
37. Last Days (Van Sant/USA)
38. Invisible Waves (Ratanaruang; 2006/Thailand)
39. Esther Kahn (Desplechin; 2000/France/UK)
40. Los Muertos (Alonso; 2004/Argentina)
41. The Flower of Evil (Chabrol/France)
42. The Believer (Bean/USA)
43. Before Sunset (Linklater/USA)
44. The Proposition (Hillcoat/Australia)
45. Woman is the Future of Man (Hong/South Korea)
46. All the Real Girls (Green/USA)
47. Dogville (Von Trier/Denmark/UK)
48. Case of the Grinning Cat (Marker; 2004/France)
49. There Will Be Blood (Anderson/USA)
50. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik/USA)
51. Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinema (Godard; 2004/France)
52. Spider (Cronenberg; 2002/Canada/UK)
53. Warm Water Under A Red Bridge (Imamura; 2001/Japan)
54. Mulholland Dr. (Lynch/USA)
55. The Man From London (Tarr/Hungary)
56. Summer Hours (Assayas/France)
57. Kings and Queen (Desplechin; 2004/France)
58. The Son (Dardenne’s; 2002/Belgium/France)
59. Strayed (Techine/France)
60. Divine Intervention (Suleiman; 2002/Palestine)
61. Chekovian Motifs (Muratova; 2002/Ukraine/Russia)
62. Aporto of My Childhood (de Oliveira/Portugal)
63. Fat Girl (Breillat/France)
64. The Captive (Akerman/France)
65. Comedy of Power (Chabrol/France)
66. Nobody Knows (Koreeda; 2004/Japan)
67. Eureka (Aoyama; 2000/Japan)
68. Sparrow (To; 2007/Hong Kong)
69. 2046 (Wong/Hong Kong)
70. Still Life/Dong (Zhang-ke; China)
71. Three Times (Hou; 2005/Taiwan)
72. Tokyo Sonata (Kurosawa; 2008/Japan)
73. Last Life in the Universe (Ratanaruang; 2003/Thailand)
74. What Time is it There? (Liang; 2001/Taiwan)
75. Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul; 2004/Thailand)
76. George Washington (Green/USA)
77. School of Rock (Linklater/USA)
78. Spartan (Mamet/USA)
79. Brick (Johnson/USA)
80. Half Nelson (Fleck and Boden/USA)
81. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (Gianvito; 2001/USA)
82. Punch Drunk Love (Anderson/USA)
83. We Own the Night (Gray/USA)
84. Code 46 (Winterbottom/UK)
85. Paranoid Park (Van Sant/USA)
86. Sunshine (Boyle/UK)
87. I Heart Huckabees (Russel/USA)
88. The Devil’s Backbone (del Toro/Spain/Mexico)
89. Homecoming (Dante/USA/Canada)
90. 25th Hour (Lee/USA)
91. Marie Antoinette (Coppola/USA)
92. Primer (Carruth/USA)
93. Space Cowboys (Eastwood/USA)
94. 28 Days Later (Boyle/UK)
95. The Devil’s Rejects (Zombie/USA)
96. Black Book (Verhoeven/Netherlands/Germany)
97. Keane (Kerrigan/USA)
98. The Descent (Marshall/UK)
99. Vera Drake (Leigh/UK)
100. A.I. (Spielberg/USA)
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
List-O-mania, Part 1: DVDs
The decade’s best lists are rolling in by the truck load, but I’m interested in a different, yet equally important (to my mind) kind of list – this soon to be past decade has presented the most important development in film connoisseurship since VHS, the digital versatile disc, affectionately dubbed the DVD. The introduction of the video cassette and its effects of film viewing habits cannot be overstated. Not only enabling us film fanatics to posses, watch and rewatch our favorite films, over and over, (changing film scholarship, academic or otherwise, in the process), but allowing even the most casual viewer to procure a personal object. Obviously, this has engendered not only a huge shift in how we consume media, but also the business of consumption itself. VHS changed studio distribution patterns, regional and international release windows, international copyright laws and sales, created an entirely new revenue stream for studios and their corporate conglomerate parent companies, and forever altered how we interact with, and ultimately value, images – filmed or otherwise. DVD has heightened that phenomena, not only with an increased awareness of sound and picture quality, but more importantly, an increased awareness of aspect ratios. Those of us raised on VHS became accustomed to experiencing film on demand, but DVD became a bracing rejoinder that we recognize that what we were experiencing was not in actuality a home based phenomena. In other words, we became aware that watching our favorite movies in the comfort of our own homes was not in any way ideal. As far as I know, Michael Mann was the first director to demand that the VHS reproduction of his film ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ be presented in letterboxed format, virtually unheard of at that time. And while letterboxed VHS caught on as a niche collectors format, it wasn’t until the introduction of DVD that reproduction of original aspect ratios became not only accepted, but the norm (witness the gradual decline of fullscreen DVD, a practice not unrelated to, but which predates, the ascendance of widescreen TVs). People might not have any interest in the technical lingo of ‘scope and widescreen, 1:85 versus 2:35, or the classic academy ratio of 1:33, nor the preferred European ration of 1:66. Regardless, even the casual viewer now knows what those black bars at the top and bottom of their screen signifies. Simply put, it signifies artistic intent, and an increased awareness of how to best appreciate that intent.
Obviously, the home viewing experience is nowhere near unproblematic – the very great critic Fred Camper has an essential article on how viewing films on TV differs from film projection, and there has been numerous spats on what exactly constitutes a films original aspect ratio (most recently a heated exchange on Universal’s 50th Anniversary release of Welles’s ‘Touch of Evil’). Admittedly, it is entirely possible to project a film print incorrectly, and I’ve seen 35mm prints on the big screen that pale in comparison to my restored DVD copies. Even Mr. Camper capitulated at one point, and supervised a Criterion Collection set of Stan Brakhage films. There’s also those extreme restorations that have been carried out digitally, existing only on disc form and therefore circumventing the original format in which the object was created (film stock, 35mm or otherwise). This can be done with intelligence and erudition, ala the recent Coppola supervised restoration of ‘The Godfather’, or can be done ineptly, ala the recent Friedkin supervised restoration of ‘The French Connection’.
All of which is to suggest the multitude of complexities inherent in film viewing, either in a theatre or at home. Nonetheless, I’d like to single out my favorite DVDs of the decade – a decade that belonged, for better or for worse, to the rise of DVD, as both market force and collector’s choice. For the record, these choices are based on 1. DVDs that I own, not only that I’ve seen or know about, 2. I’m basically Region 1 locked. Sorry; and 3. A combination of quality of film and maximizing of the format’s capabilities. In other words, regardless of how much I value Hill’s ‘The Driver’, de Toth’s ‘Day of the Outlaw’, Ray’s ‘Bitter Victory’, Aldrich’s ‘Attack!’, or Universal’s Marlene Dietrich Collection (and how amazed I am that these films exist for my consumption at home on my couch), these discs don’t exactly epitomize what the format is capable of. Conversely, films like Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy use the format brilliantly, with exhaustive behind-the-scenes features and substantially different cuts of the films themselves. These novelties aside, additional bells and whistles don’t elevate the actual films from big budget novelties, and ultimately epitomize the darkside of DVD as pure marketing device – a special edition version of a film appearing just before its sequel hits theatres has become endemic.
Sony’s Budd Boetticher Collection: an essential revelation, and evidence of the format’s ability to resurrect a reputation, while introducing Boetticher to a new generation and allowing entry to the pantheon with Ford, Hawks, Mann (Anthony) and de Toth. Hopefully we’ll get a Region 1 Allan Dwan set sooner rather than later.
Warner Bro’s John Wayne/John Ford:
Fox’s Ford at Fox: two releases that finally give the master his due. Ford has quickly become one of the filmmakers best represented in the digital format, and we are all the richer for it. Accompanied by an exquisite hard back book and ample supplemental materials, this box set is easily the equivalent of a college course.
Universal’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection: Ditto. If I’m not mistaken, with the exception of ‘Under Capricorn’, every Hitchcock film is now available for home viewing. With the decline of repertory theatres, it is increasingly difficult to see the films of the masters on a big screen, so I suppose we’ll take what we can get. Minus his early British films, you get the full gamut here, from the acknowledged masterpieces to some lesser known gems to those eccentric, late-period oddities: Family Plot, Frenzy, and Topaz, all of which are underrated.
Tati’s Playtime: Jonathan Rosenbaum has famously quoted Noel Burch that Playtime might be the first genuinely ‘open’ film, fulfilling the dreams of Bazin’s fabled ‘democratic’, long-take based cinema, and a film which requires not only multiple viewings, but viewings from different seats in the same theatre. Home video might not be the best venue with which to put this theory to the test, but Criterion’s superior edition of the film at least gives us the chance to revisit Tati’s grand folly for the grace of its design, its production values, and the intricacy of its choreography. It might be blasphemous of me to suggest this, but I value Tati over Chaplin and Keaton – all three comedians are inherently modern, but only Tati seems to have bent celluloid to his own whims in so fearless a manner.
Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar: If I where cornered with a gun to my head, then I might have to admit that this is my favorite film of all time. I encountered it early on, totally unaware of Bresson as an artist, and while I could initially make neither heads nor tails out of what was unfolding in front of me, it felt new and special – unique in a way I had never encountered before. Half a dozen viewings later, I’ve decoded some of the films mysteries, but by no means all – Bresson remains, along with Dreyer, one of those opaque masters. Totally concrete – every composition and edit lands with force, and no gesture or glance is wasted - yet ephemeral, and threatening to float away at a moments notice. I was lucky enough to see the film twice on the big screen in ’99, but revisiting the film required seeking out a bootleg vhs copy - suitable enough, although it was not unlike trying to watch a movie through a window, from some distance, with the screen covered by various layers of cloth - in other words, the ghost of an image. Thanks to Criterion for removing at least a few of those distracting layers.
Fantoma’s The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volumes I & II: our favorite experimental phantom of Hollywood, and a grand alchemist cum fetishist, finally gets some respect. This is an essential starting point for any understanding of avant garde film. Tom Gunning: ‘Anger does it all, bending the essential stuff of cinema into works that transport a viewer even while the filmmaker strips enthrallment and enchantment of any alibi of innocence.’
Criterion’s John Cassavettes: Five Films: It’s not quite accurate to claim that Cassavettes invented the American independent film, but it is a useful short hand. One has to experience the exhilaration of his peculiar brand of emotional damage, a kind of manic nervousness that results in absurdity and comedy as much as it does violence. This box set includes the exhaustive, nearly three hour documentary ‘A Constant Forge’.
Criterion’s Contempt: available for ages only on a pan and scan, dubbed VHS release, Criterion unleashed the full force of Godard’s acerbic masterpiece with this beautiful restored disc, overflowing with bountiful extras (the conversation between Godard and Fritz Land is a revelation). Meanwhile, witness the eroding of a relationship in all its protracted agony, one of the most searing set pieces in all of film.
Eclipse’s Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu: perhaps no national cinema has benefited more from the digital revolution than Japan. We’ve gradually shifted from Kurosawa to Ozu, and then to Mizoguchi. Now, we can asses the contributions of Naruse and Shimizu as well.
The Big Red One: The Reconstruction: Or, a resurrection; bless Warner Bro’s for giving Richard Schickel the money to produce this DVD package. Not only is the film about 45 minutes longer than the only know previous edition, but even more importantly, key sequences have been reworked and expanded, deepening the film’s narrative and emotional range, and the psychological ramifications of boys at war. War is hell, but in Fuller’s world, it is also sometimes surreal, sometimes absurd, and occasionally funny.
Criterion’s The Complete Mr. Arkadin: something of a misnomer, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out in several commentaries. The complex history and travels of Welle’s orphan film are far to complex to be easily resolved into a definitive, final version. Instead, we are offered three different versions of the film, allowing those interested to study variation after variation – some minute, and some more drastic. Plus, we get an essential audio commentary on the ‘Cornith’ version, with Rosenbaum and the great James Naremore discussing Welles and the various iterations of Arkadin. Not only is this film history class in a box, but it suggests the archival possibilities of the medium.
Criterion’s By Brakhage: An Anthology: once you’ve made your way through those Kenneth Anger films, you can start on this set. P. Adams Sitney has claimed that Brakhage had the most astonishing career in the history of cinema, leaving a body of work consisting of over 400 films over the last fifty years, and I’m not about to disagree. Brakhage wants to change the way we see the world, not only as a photo chemical phenomena but deep into our central nervous system.
Chris Marker’s AK: this is actually an extra feature on Criterion’s two disc release of Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’. I wish I was as enthusiastic about Kurosawa as Marker is, but nevertheless his poetic, essayistic making-of film journal is a small masterpiece of the personal documentary. There’s an interesting number of very great films that have been packaged as ‘bonus features’ on discs for other different films. I suppose one should just be grateful that these films are available at all, but I fear that this ghettoizing suggests that these films are somehow less than important. See also ’10 on Ten’, attached to Kiarostami’s ‘Ten’ (Zeitgeist Video); Wender’s ‘Tokyo Ga’, on the second disc of Ozu’s ‘Late Spring’ (Criterion); Zhang-ke’s ‘Dong’, released with his ‘Still Life’ (the now defunct New Yorker Video).
Auteurs in a box: A brief appreciation of a particular phenomena – the grouping of otherwise disparate auteurist masterpieces into box sets dedicated to a particular star personality. I certainly understand studios trying to capitalize in any way they can on an easy, ready made, selling point. More often than not it results in us getting a group of films that might not otherwise ever see the light of day. Case in point, Warner Brother’s Film Noir series: my personal favorite is volume five, with films by Andre de Toth (Crimewave) and Anthony Mann (Side Street). The real gem is Nick Ray’s glorious directorial debut, the phenomenal ‘They live By Night’, the first (and best) version of Bonnie and Clyde, and an ideal introduction to this supreme master. Sony’s Cary Grant box set has got two (count’em) Howard Hawks masterpieces – the definitive screwball romance yarn ‘His Girl Friday’ and the tough-guys-don’t-cry action vehicle ‘Only Angels Have Wings’. It’s a combo that represents the long running Hawksian dialectic between action and comedy, the masculine and the feminine, and always that particular sense of mortality so prevalent in Hawk’s work. We also get Leo McCarey’s ‘The Awful Truth’ and George Cukor’s underrated ‘Holiday’. Rounding out the set is the ok George Steven’s ‘The Talk of the Town’. At least it’s not as lugubrious as Steven’s prestige, Oscar bait vehicles. Warner Bros’ Robert Mitchum box set offers us one of Vincente Minnelli’s greatest efforts, the family melodrama ‘Home From the Hill’. Mitchum is particularly fierce as an emotionally distant Southern patriarch tearing his family apart. Otto Preminger’s ‘Angel Face’ is one of the great noirs, with a deceitful Jean Simmons wrapping Mitchum around her little finger until he cracks. It’s one of Preminger’s darkest thrillers, with a mechanical precision leading inexorably to one of the great cruel endings of all time. There’s also that strange, auteurist odd duck – the Von Sternberg/Nick Ray mash-up ‘Macao. While both are great directors, neither sensibility translates much in this noir-ish little crime thriller. Some nice photography and a certain level of pessimism make it an intriguing one-off. Rounding out the set is ‘The Yakuza’, which boasts some of the finest credits ever (directed by Sydney Pollack, from a screenplay by Paul Shrader and Robert Towne) for such a tepid crime picture. Mitchum soldiers through it, stoic as ever.
Up next for List-O-Mania: the albums of the year, my 100 best films of the decade (in conjunction with Mr. Andrew Alexander Dowd), wrapping up 2009, and some abandoned fragments on both a great recent film and a great older film.
Obviously, the home viewing experience is nowhere near unproblematic – the very great critic Fred Camper has an essential article on how viewing films on TV differs from film projection, and there has been numerous spats on what exactly constitutes a films original aspect ratio (most recently a heated exchange on Universal’s 50th Anniversary release of Welles’s ‘Touch of Evil’). Admittedly, it is entirely possible to project a film print incorrectly, and I’ve seen 35mm prints on the big screen that pale in comparison to my restored DVD copies. Even Mr. Camper capitulated at one point, and supervised a Criterion Collection set of Stan Brakhage films. There’s also those extreme restorations that have been carried out digitally, existing only on disc form and therefore circumventing the original format in which the object was created (film stock, 35mm or otherwise). This can be done with intelligence and erudition, ala the recent Coppola supervised restoration of ‘The Godfather’, or can be done ineptly, ala the recent Friedkin supervised restoration of ‘The French Connection’.
All of which is to suggest the multitude of complexities inherent in film viewing, either in a theatre or at home. Nonetheless, I’d like to single out my favorite DVDs of the decade – a decade that belonged, for better or for worse, to the rise of DVD, as both market force and collector’s choice. For the record, these choices are based on 1. DVDs that I own, not only that I’ve seen or know about, 2. I’m basically Region 1 locked. Sorry; and 3. A combination of quality of film and maximizing of the format’s capabilities. In other words, regardless of how much I value Hill’s ‘The Driver’, de Toth’s ‘Day of the Outlaw’, Ray’s ‘Bitter Victory’, Aldrich’s ‘Attack!’, or Universal’s Marlene Dietrich Collection (and how amazed I am that these films exist for my consumption at home on my couch), these discs don’t exactly epitomize what the format is capable of. Conversely, films like Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy use the format brilliantly, with exhaustive behind-the-scenes features and substantially different cuts of the films themselves. These novelties aside, additional bells and whistles don’t elevate the actual films from big budget novelties, and ultimately epitomize the darkside of DVD as pure marketing device – a special edition version of a film appearing just before its sequel hits theatres has become endemic.
Sony’s Budd Boetticher Collection: an essential revelation, and evidence of the format’s ability to resurrect a reputation, while introducing Boetticher to a new generation and allowing entry to the pantheon with Ford, Hawks, Mann (Anthony) and de Toth. Hopefully we’ll get a Region 1 Allan Dwan set sooner rather than later.
Warner Bro’s John Wayne/John Ford:
Fox’s Ford at Fox: two releases that finally give the master his due. Ford has quickly become one of the filmmakers best represented in the digital format, and we are all the richer for it. Accompanied by an exquisite hard back book and ample supplemental materials, this box set is easily the equivalent of a college course.
Universal’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection: Ditto. If I’m not mistaken, with the exception of ‘Under Capricorn’, every Hitchcock film is now available for home viewing. With the decline of repertory theatres, it is increasingly difficult to see the films of the masters on a big screen, so I suppose we’ll take what we can get. Minus his early British films, you get the full gamut here, from the acknowledged masterpieces to some lesser known gems to those eccentric, late-period oddities: Family Plot, Frenzy, and Topaz, all of which are underrated.
Tati’s Playtime: Jonathan Rosenbaum has famously quoted Noel Burch that Playtime might be the first genuinely ‘open’ film, fulfilling the dreams of Bazin’s fabled ‘democratic’, long-take based cinema, and a film which requires not only multiple viewings, but viewings from different seats in the same theatre. Home video might not be the best venue with which to put this theory to the test, but Criterion’s superior edition of the film at least gives us the chance to revisit Tati’s grand folly for the grace of its design, its production values, and the intricacy of its choreography. It might be blasphemous of me to suggest this, but I value Tati over Chaplin and Keaton – all three comedians are inherently modern, but only Tati seems to have bent celluloid to his own whims in so fearless a manner.
Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar: If I where cornered with a gun to my head, then I might have to admit that this is my favorite film of all time. I encountered it early on, totally unaware of Bresson as an artist, and while I could initially make neither heads nor tails out of what was unfolding in front of me, it felt new and special – unique in a way I had never encountered before. Half a dozen viewings later, I’ve decoded some of the films mysteries, but by no means all – Bresson remains, along with Dreyer, one of those opaque masters. Totally concrete – every composition and edit lands with force, and no gesture or glance is wasted - yet ephemeral, and threatening to float away at a moments notice. I was lucky enough to see the film twice on the big screen in ’99, but revisiting the film required seeking out a bootleg vhs copy - suitable enough, although it was not unlike trying to watch a movie through a window, from some distance, with the screen covered by various layers of cloth - in other words, the ghost of an image. Thanks to Criterion for removing at least a few of those distracting layers.
Fantoma’s The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volumes I & II: our favorite experimental phantom of Hollywood, and a grand alchemist cum fetishist, finally gets some respect. This is an essential starting point for any understanding of avant garde film. Tom Gunning: ‘Anger does it all, bending the essential stuff of cinema into works that transport a viewer even while the filmmaker strips enthrallment and enchantment of any alibi of innocence.’
Criterion’s John Cassavettes: Five Films: It’s not quite accurate to claim that Cassavettes invented the American independent film, but it is a useful short hand. One has to experience the exhilaration of his peculiar brand of emotional damage, a kind of manic nervousness that results in absurdity and comedy as much as it does violence. This box set includes the exhaustive, nearly three hour documentary ‘A Constant Forge’.
Criterion’s Contempt: available for ages only on a pan and scan, dubbed VHS release, Criterion unleashed the full force of Godard’s acerbic masterpiece with this beautiful restored disc, overflowing with bountiful extras (the conversation between Godard and Fritz Land is a revelation). Meanwhile, witness the eroding of a relationship in all its protracted agony, one of the most searing set pieces in all of film.
Eclipse’s Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu: perhaps no national cinema has benefited more from the digital revolution than Japan. We’ve gradually shifted from Kurosawa to Ozu, and then to Mizoguchi. Now, we can asses the contributions of Naruse and Shimizu as well.
The Big Red One: The Reconstruction: Or, a resurrection; bless Warner Bro’s for giving Richard Schickel the money to produce this DVD package. Not only is the film about 45 minutes longer than the only know previous edition, but even more importantly, key sequences have been reworked and expanded, deepening the film’s narrative and emotional range, and the psychological ramifications of boys at war. War is hell, but in Fuller’s world, it is also sometimes surreal, sometimes absurd, and occasionally funny.
Criterion’s The Complete Mr. Arkadin: something of a misnomer, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out in several commentaries. The complex history and travels of Welle’s orphan film are far to complex to be easily resolved into a definitive, final version. Instead, we are offered three different versions of the film, allowing those interested to study variation after variation – some minute, and some more drastic. Plus, we get an essential audio commentary on the ‘Cornith’ version, with Rosenbaum and the great James Naremore discussing Welles and the various iterations of Arkadin. Not only is this film history class in a box, but it suggests the archival possibilities of the medium.
Criterion’s By Brakhage: An Anthology: once you’ve made your way through those Kenneth Anger films, you can start on this set. P. Adams Sitney has claimed that Brakhage had the most astonishing career in the history of cinema, leaving a body of work consisting of over 400 films over the last fifty years, and I’m not about to disagree. Brakhage wants to change the way we see the world, not only as a photo chemical phenomena but deep into our central nervous system.
Chris Marker’s AK: this is actually an extra feature on Criterion’s two disc release of Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’. I wish I was as enthusiastic about Kurosawa as Marker is, but nevertheless his poetic, essayistic making-of film journal is a small masterpiece of the personal documentary. There’s an interesting number of very great films that have been packaged as ‘bonus features’ on discs for other different films. I suppose one should just be grateful that these films are available at all, but I fear that this ghettoizing suggests that these films are somehow less than important. See also ’10 on Ten’, attached to Kiarostami’s ‘Ten’ (Zeitgeist Video); Wender’s ‘Tokyo Ga’, on the second disc of Ozu’s ‘Late Spring’ (Criterion); Zhang-ke’s ‘Dong’, released with his ‘Still Life’ (the now defunct New Yorker Video).
Auteurs in a box: A brief appreciation of a particular phenomena – the grouping of otherwise disparate auteurist masterpieces into box sets dedicated to a particular star personality. I certainly understand studios trying to capitalize in any way they can on an easy, ready made, selling point. More often than not it results in us getting a group of films that might not otherwise ever see the light of day. Case in point, Warner Brother’s Film Noir series: my personal favorite is volume five, with films by Andre de Toth (Crimewave) and Anthony Mann (Side Street). The real gem is Nick Ray’s glorious directorial debut, the phenomenal ‘They live By Night’, the first (and best) version of Bonnie and Clyde, and an ideal introduction to this supreme master. Sony’s Cary Grant box set has got two (count’em) Howard Hawks masterpieces – the definitive screwball romance yarn ‘His Girl Friday’ and the tough-guys-don’t-cry action vehicle ‘Only Angels Have Wings’. It’s a combo that represents the long running Hawksian dialectic between action and comedy, the masculine and the feminine, and always that particular sense of mortality so prevalent in Hawk’s work. We also get Leo McCarey’s ‘The Awful Truth’ and George Cukor’s underrated ‘Holiday’. Rounding out the set is the ok George Steven’s ‘The Talk of the Town’. At least it’s not as lugubrious as Steven’s prestige, Oscar bait vehicles. Warner Bros’ Robert Mitchum box set offers us one of Vincente Minnelli’s greatest efforts, the family melodrama ‘Home From the Hill’. Mitchum is particularly fierce as an emotionally distant Southern patriarch tearing his family apart. Otto Preminger’s ‘Angel Face’ is one of the great noirs, with a deceitful Jean Simmons wrapping Mitchum around her little finger until he cracks. It’s one of Preminger’s darkest thrillers, with a mechanical precision leading inexorably to one of the great cruel endings of all time. There’s also that strange, auteurist odd duck – the Von Sternberg/Nick Ray mash-up ‘Macao. While both are great directors, neither sensibility translates much in this noir-ish little crime thriller. Some nice photography and a certain level of pessimism make it an intriguing one-off. Rounding out the set is ‘The Yakuza’, which boasts some of the finest credits ever (directed by Sydney Pollack, from a screenplay by Paul Shrader and Robert Towne) for such a tepid crime picture. Mitchum soldiers through it, stoic as ever.
Up next for List-O-Mania: the albums of the year, my 100 best films of the decade (in conjunction with Mr. Andrew Alexander Dowd), wrapping up 2009, and some abandoned fragments on both a great recent film and a great older film.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Tsai's FACE:
It's difficult to know how to approach a film as strange and shocking as The River--Tsai Ming-liang's third feature… I want to start by labeling it a masterpiece, but in cases such as this that assertion seems more a gamble than a certainty, however much I'd prefer to pretend otherwise.
How to explain my lack of confidence? First of all, when encountering something as peculiar as The River, my first impulse isn't to assert anything but to ask, "What the hell is this?"…
That I regard The River as a masterpiece and the work of a master doesn't mean that I consider it fun or pleasant--terrifying and beautiful would be more appropriate. It's been a subject of dispute ever since it won the special jury prize in Berlin in 1997, and I can't exactly quarrel with those who complain that it's sick or boring; I can understand how one could have these responses, even though I don't share them
It’s been more than ten years since Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote these words, and not much has changed. ‘Face’ isn’t instilled with the same sense of foreboding doom as ‘The River’ or ‘The Hole’, nor the apocalyptic ‘The Wayward Cloud’, although it is not quite as gentle as 'Goodbye Dragon Inn' or ‘What Time is it There?’. But the same deadpan comedy laced with melancholic nostalgia that links all of his films is alive and well, superbly realized in what might be his most simple, understatedly beautiful film to date. To praise the film’s surfaces is neither a back handed compliment (resonance usually come later for Tsai’s films, after contemplation and further viewings), nor to suggest a lack of depth (ditto).
There have always been intimations of cinephilia in Tsai, in a way not as common to say, Hou or Yang. With ‘Face’, Tsai dives into the behind-the-scenes-of-a-film-shoot film, aligning himself to Fassbinder’s ‘Beware of a Holy Whore’, Godard’s ‘Contempt’, Assayas’ ‘Irma Vep’ and especially Truffaut’s ‘Day for Night’. Tsai’s Truaffaut love has popped up before, complete with Jean-Pierre Leaud cameos, and while ‘Face’ is not full blown homage, it is a full fledged love letter/eulogy. Truffaut regular Fanny Ardant is the put upon production manager trying to manage quirky, antsy leading man Leaud, young ingénue Latetia Casta, and director Lee Kang-Sheng, who doesn’t speak a word of French. I hasten to add that even this minimal amount of plot is divulged slowly and elliptically, with Tsai’s penchant for long scenes that only reveal their meanings towards the end of their duration, or when coupled retroactively with forthcoming scenes. Both the film’s proponents and detractors have mentioned its sketchy nature, consisting of a series of moments strung together. It’s hard to disagree, although I would add that there is a cumulative effect of recurring motifs; Leaud’s attempts at communing with nature, first with a deer, then with a small bird (leading to as unique a funeral scene as one is ever likely to see); an emphasis on close ups of faces that encompasses three different long scenes of Casta putting black tape over windows and mirrors, and which eventually leads to her seduction of Lee’s translator in near pitch black; Ardant traversing various terrains in high heels, over dressed and clearly ill-equipped to deal with various pressures; the death of Lee’s mother and her ghost subsequently hanging out, keeping an eye on things. What holds it all together is Tsai’s mastery of the match cut, which effortlessly segues us from scene to scene, along with his seemingly innate ability to time out a scene. As always, time is of the essence in Tsai.
Visually speaking: one of the film’s most striking tableau comes late, with a camera mounted outside of a high rise building, its depth of field capturing both Fanny Ardent on a bed inside her hotel room, as well as a labyrinthine system of freeways below, with a sparse cityscape visible in the distant background. Tsai has been building to this moment in several ways – the extreme distances involved within the shot contrast his consistent emphasis on faces in close up, and the bustling traffic is visually and architecturally opposed to a general stillness that pervades the rest of the film. We hear Ardent on the phone discussing an actress who is refusing to play a role, an actress we at first assume to be Casta, although later scenes do not confirm this. As Ardent sarcastically proposes to simply play the role herself, we realize that the soundtrack is not in synch with the image - as the dialogue continues, Ardent approaches the window, revealing that she is neither holding a phone nor moving her lips. The past tense invades the present (the clarity of the window rhymes nicely with those scenes involving Casta blackening out any and all reflective surface – someone who does not want to be gazed upon, fearful either of her own reflection or of what other people might see).
If my good friend and fellow Tsai enthusiast Ignatius is correct, and the film is Tsai's sketchbook (including the blank pages), it is important to qualify that term, blank. Empty spaces are always monumental in Tsai – while directors like Denis or Mann use negative space within the frame to isolate characters and reflect certain emotional states, Tsai’s space is always charged with a sense of the potential; even in stillness there is a kinetic possibility. Face might be a simple compendium of specific personal obsessions on Tsai’s part (might being the operative term, since I’m not convinced that there isn’t more to it) – even so, there are few places I would rather roam around in than Tsai’s mind.
How to explain my lack of confidence? First of all, when encountering something as peculiar as The River, my first impulse isn't to assert anything but to ask, "What the hell is this?"…
That I regard The River as a masterpiece and the work of a master doesn't mean that I consider it fun or pleasant--terrifying and beautiful would be more appropriate. It's been a subject of dispute ever since it won the special jury prize in Berlin in 1997, and I can't exactly quarrel with those who complain that it's sick or boring; I can understand how one could have these responses, even though I don't share them
It’s been more than ten years since Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote these words, and not much has changed. ‘Face’ isn’t instilled with the same sense of foreboding doom as ‘The River’ or ‘The Hole’, nor the apocalyptic ‘The Wayward Cloud’, although it is not quite as gentle as 'Goodbye Dragon Inn' or ‘What Time is it There?’. But the same deadpan comedy laced with melancholic nostalgia that links all of his films is alive and well, superbly realized in what might be his most simple, understatedly beautiful film to date. To praise the film’s surfaces is neither a back handed compliment (resonance usually come later for Tsai’s films, after contemplation and further viewings), nor to suggest a lack of depth (ditto).
There have always been intimations of cinephilia in Tsai, in a way not as common to say, Hou or Yang. With ‘Face’, Tsai dives into the behind-the-scenes-of-a-film-shoot film, aligning himself to Fassbinder’s ‘Beware of a Holy Whore’, Godard’s ‘Contempt’, Assayas’ ‘Irma Vep’ and especially Truffaut’s ‘Day for Night’. Tsai’s Truaffaut love has popped up before, complete with Jean-Pierre Leaud cameos, and while ‘Face’ is not full blown homage, it is a full fledged love letter/eulogy. Truffaut regular Fanny Ardant is the put upon production manager trying to manage quirky, antsy leading man Leaud, young ingénue Latetia Casta, and director Lee Kang-Sheng, who doesn’t speak a word of French. I hasten to add that even this minimal amount of plot is divulged slowly and elliptically, with Tsai’s penchant for long scenes that only reveal their meanings towards the end of their duration, or when coupled retroactively with forthcoming scenes. Both the film’s proponents and detractors have mentioned its sketchy nature, consisting of a series of moments strung together. It’s hard to disagree, although I would add that there is a cumulative effect of recurring motifs; Leaud’s attempts at communing with nature, first with a deer, then with a small bird (leading to as unique a funeral scene as one is ever likely to see); an emphasis on close ups of faces that encompasses three different long scenes of Casta putting black tape over windows and mirrors, and which eventually leads to her seduction of Lee’s translator in near pitch black; Ardant traversing various terrains in high heels, over dressed and clearly ill-equipped to deal with various pressures; the death of Lee’s mother and her ghost subsequently hanging out, keeping an eye on things. What holds it all together is Tsai’s mastery of the match cut, which effortlessly segues us from scene to scene, along with his seemingly innate ability to time out a scene. As always, time is of the essence in Tsai.
Visually speaking: one of the film’s most striking tableau comes late, with a camera mounted outside of a high rise building, its depth of field capturing both Fanny Ardent on a bed inside her hotel room, as well as a labyrinthine system of freeways below, with a sparse cityscape visible in the distant background. Tsai has been building to this moment in several ways – the extreme distances involved within the shot contrast his consistent emphasis on faces in close up, and the bustling traffic is visually and architecturally opposed to a general stillness that pervades the rest of the film. We hear Ardent on the phone discussing an actress who is refusing to play a role, an actress we at first assume to be Casta, although later scenes do not confirm this. As Ardent sarcastically proposes to simply play the role herself, we realize that the soundtrack is not in synch with the image - as the dialogue continues, Ardent approaches the window, revealing that she is neither holding a phone nor moving her lips. The past tense invades the present (the clarity of the window rhymes nicely with those scenes involving Casta blackening out any and all reflective surface – someone who does not want to be gazed upon, fearful either of her own reflection or of what other people might see).
If my good friend and fellow Tsai enthusiast Ignatius is correct, and the film is Tsai's sketchbook (including the blank pages), it is important to qualify that term, blank. Empty spaces are always monumental in Tsai – while directors like Denis or Mann use negative space within the frame to isolate characters and reflect certain emotional states, Tsai’s space is always charged with a sense of the potential; even in stillness there is a kinetic possibility. Face might be a simple compendium of specific personal obsessions on Tsai’s part (might being the operative term, since I’m not convinced that there isn’t more to it) – even so, there are few places I would rather roam around in than Tsai’s mind.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Kiarostami, Round 2:
I’ve been thinking about Abbas Kiarostami a lot lately, primarily because no else seems to be. With a new film on the festival circuit, the once unassailable front runner of the Iranian New Wave has been getting less press than the forthcoming GI Joe movie*. Perhaps this was always the case, as Kiarostami occupied a precarious space between critical accolades and mainstream indifference (see also: Godard, Zhang-ke, Hou, etc.). But it would seem that even that most reliable barometer of cinephile taste, Film Comment, has declared Kiarostami passé – Gavin Smith himself has stated that Kiarostami’s “moment has passed”. But is this a case of a once great filmmaker who has simply “lost it”? Or is it something else all together?
Maybe part of the problem is that we never really understood Kiarostami in the first place. Once it was decided that some kind of “new wave” was happening, there was an automatic context with which to place his films, and social/political issues could be trotted out as window dressing, obscuring a failure to grapple with the actual films themselves. So rather than following the filmmaker where he wanted to go, we’ve instead seemingly ostracized him for not doing what we want him to do, what we were already comfortable with. As I recall, his film ABC Africa didn’t make much of a splash, and his follow up feature, Ten, was actively loathed in most mainstream quarters. From that point on, Kiarostami has, for all intents and purposes, become an experimental filmmaker. Certainly, there was always something different there, even in his most blatantly narrative features – the based-on-fact recreations and mobius-strip narrative of Close Up, the real-life disaster back drop of Life And Nothing More… that snakes backwards to involve real players in his previous film, Where is the Friend’s House?, the Brechtian, video-shot coda of Taste of Cherry, and always the emphasis on location shooting and non-professional actors. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have seemed so radical that Kiarostami would shift to the extreme formalism of Ten, or the essayistic collections of miscellany that are 10 on Ten and Five (Long Takes Dedicated to Ozu). It is these last two features that interest me the most, perhaps because they don’t seem to interest anyone else.
Pace Jonathan Rosenbaum, the notion of a simultaneously “incomplete” and “interactive” cinema seems most instructive to what we might currently designate “late period” Kiarostami (here’s to many more years, and the hopeful potentiality that what I refer to as “late period” will eventually become “mid-period”). With regards to narrative, one can trace a line of increasing disinterest, from Ten to 10 on Ten to Five (Long Takes Dedicated to Ozu) to Around Five: The Making of… (I hasten to add that while dvd distributors have relegated 10 on Ten and Around Five to the margins of simple supplemental features, they are in fact important films in and of themselves, akin to Filming Othello, Scenario du film Passion, and even Histoire(s) du Cinema, ripe for discovery and inclusion into the canonical filmography proper). Yes, narrative has been largely replaced by actuality - Kiarostami has eschewed standard film grammar (the genius of the system indeed) for a new kind of narrative, predicated on real time and a kind of temporal naturalism. In other words, he has devalued that most basic unit of functionality – plot based storytelling – alienating large sectors of the critical community that rely solely on story to hang their hats.
* * *
“The disappearance of direction. That’s what is at stake: the rejection of all elements vital to ordinary cinema.”
“If anyone were to ask me what I did as director on the film (Ten), I’d say, “Nothing and yet if I didn’t exist, this film wouldn’t have existed.”
Kiarostami in interview
Ten is, as the title suggests, ten segments, each showing the same woman driving her car with a passenger. These passengers include her petulant son (who appears in four segments), a prostitute, an elderly woman, a female friend who she is going out to eat with, and a young woman (who appears twice, first going to, then returning from, a shrine). That our driver is a young woman, attractive, recently divorced and now remarried carries with it an implicit political and feminist point of view – the woman’s young son being an obvious stand in for an immature patriarchy that chastises her repeatedly for her unabashed expression of individuality.
Plot and political subtext aside, what irks most people is Kiarostami’s formal vigor – the film consists of two simple camera set ups, one pointed at the driver and the other pointed at the passenger. Kiarostami will occasionally cross cut between the two angles, although he’ll also allow long scenes to pass with only one view, while either passenger or driver exist only as an off-screen voice. A sampling of the critical derision this method garnered in the mainstream press, courtesy of that great barometer of middle brow taste, Roger Ebert: “Anyone could make a movie like Ten. Two digital cameras, a car and your actors, and off you go… but if this approach were used for a film shot in Europe or America, would it be accepted as an entry at Cannes? I argue that it would not. Part of Kiarostami's appeal is that he is Iranian, a country whose films it is somewhat daring to praise. Partly, too, he has a lot of critics invested in his cause, and they do the heavy lifting. The fatal flaw in his approach is that no ordinary moviegoer, whether Iranian or American, can be expected to relate to his films. They exist for film festivals, film critics and film classes.” That such a bold gambit would even be attempted in a European or American feature is debatable, and certainly no apparatus exists with which to distribute such a feature. But is it the artist’s fault that his work becomes ghettoized, relegated to the one place that can, however tentatively, express support for such a film? Obviously Ebert doesn’t think to question the system itself, and in the meantime manages to criticize said festivals, critics who might dare support the film (clearly in Ebert’s mind an affectation) and ever-elitist film schools. Never mind the construction of this hypothetical “ordinary” moviegoer, a dubious assumption on his part. There’s also an implied anti-intellectualism in the criticism, pitting “normal” against those fancy festival bound critics – in one fell swoop Ebert demonizes the fringe elements of his own profession (sorry Rosenbaum, Jones, Kehr, Martin, Hoberman, etc).
Such arguments have existed for as long as modern art, although one doesn’t suspect Ebert relating his reservations to similar bromides against Duchamp or Pollock or Twombly or Rothko (my kid could paint that indeed).
* * *
“What exactly is a documentary, as opposed to the other kinds of movies that we make? I finally decided that if you just attach the camera to the top of a bull’s horns and let him loose in a field for a whole day, at the end of the day you might have a documentary. But there’s still a catch here, because we’ve selected the location and the type of lens that we want.”
“making something simple requires a great deal of experience. And, first of all, you need to understand that simplicity isn’t the same as facility.”
One can hardly imagine Ebert’s ire at Five (Long Takes Dedicated to Ozu), if only he had bothered to see it (Rotten Tomatoes lists about 50 reviews for Ten, and only two for Five, compared to around 220 for Transformers 2). Consisting of five long takes (of course), Five delves even deeper into the murky waters of authorial signature, or the lack thereof. Even more so than Ten, this is a film in which Kiarostami seemingly does nothing, and yet it would not exist without him. We see a piece of driftwood laying on the beach, waves crashing around it. And the camera sits there, and we watch. Eventually the wood splinters into two pieces, one of which gradually drifts back into the sea. This process takes around 9 minutes or so. Another scene involves bystanders walking back and forth through the camera’s view for several minutes, followed by a scene in which a gaggle of ducks does likewise (a humorous symmetry). We also see a pack of dogs as they awake with the sunrise, while the image very gradually blows out to striking white. The final long take is an epic shot that defies a simple written synopsis. The camera appears to be pointed downwards towards a body of water. It is nighttime, and only the moon’s wavering reflection on the water’s surface punctuates the darkness. The reflection periodically disappears, although it is not clear if this is because clouds are passing over it, obscuring the light, or if Kiarostami is fading the image in and out. It eventually starts to rain, the drops forming fascinating patterns as they strike the surface of the water, and gradually the sun begins to rise. This is the longest of the five takes, and the gradual accumulation of details, revealing what it is exactly that we are looking at, as well as a dense sound design of ambient noises, creates a sense of total envelopment in the moment. In a perverse sense, each scene does have a kind of narrative logic, with a beginning, middle and end, as well as the occasional ‘climax’ – the drift wood breaking in two, the sun rise, an approaching storm. The film demands patience, but one is rewarded by the simple pleasures of natural beauty and a calming, meditative tone. Adrian Martin has written: “Of course, there is work, profound work, underneath Kiarostami's productions. But the 'exercise' of his capacity for art-making comes, as he puts it, from practising the act of 'seeing' – with his eyes, not in the first place with any representational apparatus. Kiarostami's laziness – tales abound of his ability to walk away from projects in which he quickly loses interest, or the 'squandering' of his best ideas by simply speaking and not writing them down, musing as he travels from one location to another – is a kind of openness, an 'availability' to the world. What he learns to see, to notice, can then be immortalised, swiftly and effortlessly, in the framing of a photo or the composition of a poem. Aesthetic time is, for him, a matter of captured moments.”
10 on Ten goes some ways towards explicating much of the process of 5, at last as much as it explicates Ten, and exists as a kind of Kiarostami primer. And what an invaluable little film, the very definition of a ‘sketch’, that allows us to spend time with a master – I can’t think of many other documents of its kind. Of course, suggesting that someone watch a film to explain another film might strike some as too much ‘heavy lifting’, but only if one refuses the notion that a filmmaker’s body of work is in constant conversation with itself. 10 on Ten follows Kiarostami as he travels the roads used in filming Taste of Cherry, while he speaks plainly about his process, from casting, writing and shooting, as well as his philosophical and political concerns. Clearly, his movement away from traditional narrative is a bold assertion of political purpose, freeing him from ‘the clutches of production, capital and censorship’. He also speaks rhapsodically about the advent of digital cameras, and reveals the gradual process of his adapting to them – an interesting aside, that the controversial digital coda of Taste of Cherry was originally shot on film, which was then damaged while being processed. The end of the film is actually video rushes they had shot before running the 35mm camera.
It has been mentioned more than once that Kiarostami’s recent work belongs in a gallery, not a movie screen. True, Kiarostami has dabbled with installation pieces, and the slow pace and formal rigors of Five, in particular, would not necessarily be out of place projected on the wall of the MCA. But what does it mean that we have to decide where to place the work before even beginning to deal with the work itself, on its own terms? And what does it mean that we constantly allow this to happen? Similarly, who decides, and at what point, what is ‘difficult’ and what is not? Clearly, it is inarguable that any film deemed ‘difficult’ becomes a kind of work, and is therefore no longer pleasurable. A silly syllogism, and one that reeks of anti-intellectualism, but I fear it is one of those self perpetuating ‘truths’. Perhaps one demands the context of a specific institution to provide an entry point to difficult films, when one really only needs the eyes with which to look. That, ultimately, is the value of a Kiarostami film - that he helps us reinvest importance to such a seemingly simple act as watching.
*I suppose this dated reference reveals how long this piece has been gestating, as well as my complete lack of working method and sporadic free time. Even more depressingly, I could have made reference to any number of other disposable by-the-numbers product that comes and goes, leaving nary a trace on the cultural landscape. Does anyone remember Whiteout? How about, I don’t know, Pandorum or A Perfect Getaway? And yet, for a brief amount of time, this stuff generated more words and more press in the process of disappearing than Kiarostami has in the last few years.
Maybe part of the problem is that we never really understood Kiarostami in the first place. Once it was decided that some kind of “new wave” was happening, there was an automatic context with which to place his films, and social/political issues could be trotted out as window dressing, obscuring a failure to grapple with the actual films themselves. So rather than following the filmmaker where he wanted to go, we’ve instead seemingly ostracized him for not doing what we want him to do, what we were already comfortable with. As I recall, his film ABC Africa didn’t make much of a splash, and his follow up feature, Ten, was actively loathed in most mainstream quarters. From that point on, Kiarostami has, for all intents and purposes, become an experimental filmmaker. Certainly, there was always something different there, even in his most blatantly narrative features – the based-on-fact recreations and mobius-strip narrative of Close Up, the real-life disaster back drop of Life And Nothing More… that snakes backwards to involve real players in his previous film, Where is the Friend’s House?, the Brechtian, video-shot coda of Taste of Cherry, and always the emphasis on location shooting and non-professional actors. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have seemed so radical that Kiarostami would shift to the extreme formalism of Ten, or the essayistic collections of miscellany that are 10 on Ten and Five (Long Takes Dedicated to Ozu). It is these last two features that interest me the most, perhaps because they don’t seem to interest anyone else.
Pace Jonathan Rosenbaum, the notion of a simultaneously “incomplete” and “interactive” cinema seems most instructive to what we might currently designate “late period” Kiarostami (here’s to many more years, and the hopeful potentiality that what I refer to as “late period” will eventually become “mid-period”). With regards to narrative, one can trace a line of increasing disinterest, from Ten to 10 on Ten to Five (Long Takes Dedicated to Ozu) to Around Five: The Making of… (I hasten to add that while dvd distributors have relegated 10 on Ten and Around Five to the margins of simple supplemental features, they are in fact important films in and of themselves, akin to Filming Othello, Scenario du film Passion, and even Histoire(s) du Cinema, ripe for discovery and inclusion into the canonical filmography proper). Yes, narrative has been largely replaced by actuality - Kiarostami has eschewed standard film grammar (the genius of the system indeed) for a new kind of narrative, predicated on real time and a kind of temporal naturalism. In other words, he has devalued that most basic unit of functionality – plot based storytelling – alienating large sectors of the critical community that rely solely on story to hang their hats.
* * *
“The disappearance of direction. That’s what is at stake: the rejection of all elements vital to ordinary cinema.”
“If anyone were to ask me what I did as director on the film (Ten), I’d say, “Nothing and yet if I didn’t exist, this film wouldn’t have existed.”
Kiarostami in interview
Ten is, as the title suggests, ten segments, each showing the same woman driving her car with a passenger. These passengers include her petulant son (who appears in four segments), a prostitute, an elderly woman, a female friend who she is going out to eat with, and a young woman (who appears twice, first going to, then returning from, a shrine). That our driver is a young woman, attractive, recently divorced and now remarried carries with it an implicit political and feminist point of view – the woman’s young son being an obvious stand in for an immature patriarchy that chastises her repeatedly for her unabashed expression of individuality.
Plot and political subtext aside, what irks most people is Kiarostami’s formal vigor – the film consists of two simple camera set ups, one pointed at the driver and the other pointed at the passenger. Kiarostami will occasionally cross cut between the two angles, although he’ll also allow long scenes to pass with only one view, while either passenger or driver exist only as an off-screen voice. A sampling of the critical derision this method garnered in the mainstream press, courtesy of that great barometer of middle brow taste, Roger Ebert: “Anyone could make a movie like Ten. Two digital cameras, a car and your actors, and off you go… but if this approach were used for a film shot in Europe or America, would it be accepted as an entry at Cannes? I argue that it would not. Part of Kiarostami's appeal is that he is Iranian, a country whose films it is somewhat daring to praise. Partly, too, he has a lot of critics invested in his cause, and they do the heavy lifting. The fatal flaw in his approach is that no ordinary moviegoer, whether Iranian or American, can be expected to relate to his films. They exist for film festivals, film critics and film classes.” That such a bold gambit would even be attempted in a European or American feature is debatable, and certainly no apparatus exists with which to distribute such a feature. But is it the artist’s fault that his work becomes ghettoized, relegated to the one place that can, however tentatively, express support for such a film? Obviously Ebert doesn’t think to question the system itself, and in the meantime manages to criticize said festivals, critics who might dare support the film (clearly in Ebert’s mind an affectation) and ever-elitist film schools. Never mind the construction of this hypothetical “ordinary” moviegoer, a dubious assumption on his part. There’s also an implied anti-intellectualism in the criticism, pitting “normal” against those fancy festival bound critics – in one fell swoop Ebert demonizes the fringe elements of his own profession (sorry Rosenbaum, Jones, Kehr, Martin, Hoberman, etc).
Such arguments have existed for as long as modern art, although one doesn’t suspect Ebert relating his reservations to similar bromides against Duchamp or Pollock or Twombly or Rothko (my kid could paint that indeed).
* * *
“What exactly is a documentary, as opposed to the other kinds of movies that we make? I finally decided that if you just attach the camera to the top of a bull’s horns and let him loose in a field for a whole day, at the end of the day you might have a documentary. But there’s still a catch here, because we’ve selected the location and the type of lens that we want.”
“making something simple requires a great deal of experience. And, first of all, you need to understand that simplicity isn’t the same as facility.”
One can hardly imagine Ebert’s ire at Five (Long Takes Dedicated to Ozu), if only he had bothered to see it (Rotten Tomatoes lists about 50 reviews for Ten, and only two for Five, compared to around 220 for Transformers 2). Consisting of five long takes (of course), Five delves even deeper into the murky waters of authorial signature, or the lack thereof. Even more so than Ten, this is a film in which Kiarostami seemingly does nothing, and yet it would not exist without him. We see a piece of driftwood laying on the beach, waves crashing around it. And the camera sits there, and we watch. Eventually the wood splinters into two pieces, one of which gradually drifts back into the sea. This process takes around 9 minutes or so. Another scene involves bystanders walking back and forth through the camera’s view for several minutes, followed by a scene in which a gaggle of ducks does likewise (a humorous symmetry). We also see a pack of dogs as they awake with the sunrise, while the image very gradually blows out to striking white. The final long take is an epic shot that defies a simple written synopsis. The camera appears to be pointed downwards towards a body of water. It is nighttime, and only the moon’s wavering reflection on the water’s surface punctuates the darkness. The reflection periodically disappears, although it is not clear if this is because clouds are passing over it, obscuring the light, or if Kiarostami is fading the image in and out. It eventually starts to rain, the drops forming fascinating patterns as they strike the surface of the water, and gradually the sun begins to rise. This is the longest of the five takes, and the gradual accumulation of details, revealing what it is exactly that we are looking at, as well as a dense sound design of ambient noises, creates a sense of total envelopment in the moment. In a perverse sense, each scene does have a kind of narrative logic, with a beginning, middle and end, as well as the occasional ‘climax’ – the drift wood breaking in two, the sun rise, an approaching storm. The film demands patience, but one is rewarded by the simple pleasures of natural beauty and a calming, meditative tone. Adrian Martin has written: “Of course, there is work, profound work, underneath Kiarostami's productions. But the 'exercise' of his capacity for art-making comes, as he puts it, from practising the act of 'seeing' – with his eyes, not in the first place with any representational apparatus. Kiarostami's laziness – tales abound of his ability to walk away from projects in which he quickly loses interest, or the 'squandering' of his best ideas by simply speaking and not writing them down, musing as he travels from one location to another – is a kind of openness, an 'availability' to the world. What he learns to see, to notice, can then be immortalised, swiftly and effortlessly, in the framing of a photo or the composition of a poem. Aesthetic time is, for him, a matter of captured moments.”
10 on Ten goes some ways towards explicating much of the process of 5, at last as much as it explicates Ten, and exists as a kind of Kiarostami primer. And what an invaluable little film, the very definition of a ‘sketch’, that allows us to spend time with a master – I can’t think of many other documents of its kind. Of course, suggesting that someone watch a film to explain another film might strike some as too much ‘heavy lifting’, but only if one refuses the notion that a filmmaker’s body of work is in constant conversation with itself. 10 on Ten follows Kiarostami as he travels the roads used in filming Taste of Cherry, while he speaks plainly about his process, from casting, writing and shooting, as well as his philosophical and political concerns. Clearly, his movement away from traditional narrative is a bold assertion of political purpose, freeing him from ‘the clutches of production, capital and censorship’. He also speaks rhapsodically about the advent of digital cameras, and reveals the gradual process of his adapting to them – an interesting aside, that the controversial digital coda of Taste of Cherry was originally shot on film, which was then damaged while being processed. The end of the film is actually video rushes they had shot before running the 35mm camera.
It has been mentioned more than once that Kiarostami’s recent work belongs in a gallery, not a movie screen. True, Kiarostami has dabbled with installation pieces, and the slow pace and formal rigors of Five, in particular, would not necessarily be out of place projected on the wall of the MCA. But what does it mean that we have to decide where to place the work before even beginning to deal with the work itself, on its own terms? And what does it mean that we constantly allow this to happen? Similarly, who decides, and at what point, what is ‘difficult’ and what is not? Clearly, it is inarguable that any film deemed ‘difficult’ becomes a kind of work, and is therefore no longer pleasurable. A silly syllogism, and one that reeks of anti-intellectualism, but I fear it is one of those self perpetuating ‘truths’. Perhaps one demands the context of a specific institution to provide an entry point to difficult films, when one really only needs the eyes with which to look. That, ultimately, is the value of a Kiarostami film - that he helps us reinvest importance to such a seemingly simple act as watching.
*I suppose this dated reference reveals how long this piece has been gestating, as well as my complete lack of working method and sporadic free time. Even more depressingly, I could have made reference to any number of other disposable by-the-numbers product that comes and goes, leaving nary a trace on the cultural landscape. Does anyone remember Whiteout? How about, I don’t know, Pandorum or A Perfect Getaway? And yet, for a brief amount of time, this stuff generated more words and more press in the process of disappearing than Kiarostami has in the last few years.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Abbas Kiarostami in Chicago:
A Kiarostami film will play on a big screen in Chicago for the first time since 2002, and I can think of nothing more important happening this weekend. I had hoped to have a decent length post up by now pontificating on the state of Kiarostami's reputation, as well as the factors that have led to its decline. Like some who believe that Orson Welles was a failed Hollywood director, as opposed to a successful independent director, there are some who treat Kiarostami as a failed narrative filmmaker, as opposed to a successful experimental filmmaker. His newest film, Shirin, plays as part of a double bill with his last 'commercial' feature, Ten at The Gene Siskel Film Center. David Bordwell has some nice things to say about Kiarostami and Shirin here, and my good friend Ben Sachs has got an intelligent appreciation over at the CINE-FILE. Kudos also to the Chicago Reader for giving a surprising amount of space to Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa's conversation on Shirin. One might consider it a brief addendum to the book length study of Kiarostami that they co-authored 2003, which remains, to the best of my knowledge, the only one of its kind in English. So go and see Shirin this weekend, and then come back here so we can talk about it.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl:
The sketch is often approached as one of two things – a study, or practice for, an eventual painting (polished and final; heavy) or a scribbling, something done on impulse and then put away or passed over – a doodle. But the sketch can offer something more, a kind of energy, the very lack of refinement opening up the possibility of a less mediated dialogue between artist and viewer. I’ve always preferred Surrealist drawings to paintings, particularly Dali’s. And who can forget Rembrandt’s self portraits, or Giacometti’s furious, violent charcoal storms, gradually accumulating layers approaching the human face. I’m also thinking even more specifically of the Impressionists: Millet, Courbet, Degas, Pissaro, and especially Cezanne and Picasso. The looseness, the lack of self awareness are refreshing, the lines of the pencil alive with energy – “drawing is the artist’s most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing – a study of even the swiftest sketch discloses the mind and nature of its author”. (Maurice Serullaz).
Film can do the same: Rivette has created his epic sketch (Out 1); Chris Marker’s essays have a similar quality, along with late period Kiarostami, Assayas’ Irma Vep and Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn. Video doesn’t immediately signify the qualities I’m thinking of, and one shouldn’t push the analogy too far, although we do have Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema and Mann’s Miami Vice. Manoel de Oliveira has switched back and forth for some time now, vacillating between the unprepossessing and the heavier, more concrete – my favorite de Oliveira, The Uncertainty Principle, is film with a capitol 'F', along with A Talking Picture, Magic Mirror and The Convent. The sketch films include two of his earliest features, Rite of Spring and Doomed Love (epic in the Godard/Rivette sense), the more recent Porto of My Childhood and I’m Going Home, and now Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl.
Clocking in at a mere 65 minutes (although brevity is not the sole signifier or even a pre-requisite for a sketch), De Oliveira moves with economy and broad strokes, the film’s opening scene announcing, literally, that a man has a story to tell about a woman, and that it will not end well. De Oliveira regular (and grandson) Ricardo Trepa is the heart broken man; he flashes back to the beginnings of his love affair, the great lengths he has gone through to secure his beloved’s hand, and the abrupt ending of their affair, shocking in its immediate finality as much as anything else.
De Oliveira has sometimes been accused of focusing too frequently on the upper class, but here he has snuck in a critique that barely registers until that ending – charting Trepa’s rise through polite society and jockeying for financial position, the film is ultimately not about doomed love but his own failure to achieve the status he desires. De Oliveira films Trepa’s introduction to his obscure object of desire through several layers of artifice, framed (accordingly) through windows. Sitting in his accountant’s office, Trepa chances to gaze upon Catarina Wallenstein and her Chinese fan. Catarina first parts a lace curtain to reveal not only herself, but a framed portrait of a woman hanging behind her. She then coyly obscures her face with the waving of the fan, before lowering a window shade. Now blocked from view by the shade, although obliquely visible as if seen through gauze, she moves behind the curtain and walks underneath the portrait, leaving the image’s frame. At this moment, she essentially becomes a ghost of herself, physically receding into an opaque mirage-image, and it is the moment that Trepa falls in love not with a woman, but with a portrait of a woman – an idea. It is not until the film’s end that she will reveal a part of herself, only to be violently rejected by her suitor. The “eccentricities” of the title is Catarina’s humanity, and it is a humanity that is spurned in favor of societal appearances and resentments. A sketch of a film, to be sure, but what a moving, complex sketch it is, as de Oliveira indulges tangents through a literary club, with a brief history of its founder, as well as a musical scene featuring a harp and a poetry recital (a poem, incidentally, bemoaning class warfare and resentment in favor of the simple pleasures in life). Yes, this sketch might be one of the master’s finest.
Film can do the same: Rivette has created his epic sketch (Out 1); Chris Marker’s essays have a similar quality, along with late period Kiarostami, Assayas’ Irma Vep and Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn. Video doesn’t immediately signify the qualities I’m thinking of, and one shouldn’t push the analogy too far, although we do have Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema and Mann’s Miami Vice. Manoel de Oliveira has switched back and forth for some time now, vacillating between the unprepossessing and the heavier, more concrete – my favorite de Oliveira, The Uncertainty Principle, is film with a capitol 'F', along with A Talking Picture, Magic Mirror and The Convent. The sketch films include two of his earliest features, Rite of Spring and Doomed Love (epic in the Godard/Rivette sense), the more recent Porto of My Childhood and I’m Going Home, and now Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl.
Clocking in at a mere 65 minutes (although brevity is not the sole signifier or even a pre-requisite for a sketch), De Oliveira moves with economy and broad strokes, the film’s opening scene announcing, literally, that a man has a story to tell about a woman, and that it will not end well. De Oliveira regular (and grandson) Ricardo Trepa is the heart broken man; he flashes back to the beginnings of his love affair, the great lengths he has gone through to secure his beloved’s hand, and the abrupt ending of their affair, shocking in its immediate finality as much as anything else.
De Oliveira has sometimes been accused of focusing too frequently on the upper class, but here he has snuck in a critique that barely registers until that ending – charting Trepa’s rise through polite society and jockeying for financial position, the film is ultimately not about doomed love but his own failure to achieve the status he desires. De Oliveira films Trepa’s introduction to his obscure object of desire through several layers of artifice, framed (accordingly) through windows. Sitting in his accountant’s office, Trepa chances to gaze upon Catarina Wallenstein and her Chinese fan. Catarina first parts a lace curtain to reveal not only herself, but a framed portrait of a woman hanging behind her. She then coyly obscures her face with the waving of the fan, before lowering a window shade. Now blocked from view by the shade, although obliquely visible as if seen through gauze, she moves behind the curtain and walks underneath the portrait, leaving the image’s frame. At this moment, she essentially becomes a ghost of herself, physically receding into an opaque mirage-image, and it is the moment that Trepa falls in love not with a woman, but with a portrait of a woman – an idea. It is not until the film’s end that she will reveal a part of herself, only to be violently rejected by her suitor. The “eccentricities” of the title is Catarina’s humanity, and it is a humanity that is spurned in favor of societal appearances and resentments. A sketch of a film, to be sure, but what a moving, complex sketch it is, as de Oliveira indulges tangents through a literary club, with a brief history of its founder, as well as a musical scene featuring a harp and a poetry recital (a poem, incidentally, bemoaning class warfare and resentment in favor of the simple pleasures in life). Yes, this sketch might be one of the master’s finest.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Nick Ray: The Living and the Dead
We are once again in the midst of festival season, that bizarre, hectic period of time where thousands of films are screened and thousands of opinions are generated, more often than not before said films are even over. In this age of instant messaging, blogging, tweeting and constant 24 hour news cycles, the desire to "get there first" seems the be all end all of critical faculty. Never mind that the occasional reflection might change one's view, that notion that a new and unique work of art can grow and change in one's mind over time. I for one can't imagine sitting through a Pedro Costa film on zero sleep, having already seen a film or two and planning the next screening afterward. This is not the mindset with which to approach certain kinds of films (yes, I mean the slow ones - slow and contemplative).
With that in mind, I'm embarking on a series of profiles on whatever director I feel like writing about, with no concern whatsoever for what is new, "hot" or decisively controversial. Simply great filmmakers who I happen to find intriguing. Up first is Nicholas Ray, an iconoclastic maverick who got his start as a Hollywood melodrama artist and gradually built a body of work based on romantic disillusionment, replete with crushed dreams, dashed hopes and near suicidal doses of ironic fatalism. He's perhaps best known for "Rebel Without A Cause", although that film's enduring legacy is based more on the Dean performance than Ray's masterful direction. One of his greatest films, "Bigger Than Life",remains criminally unavailable on any home video format, along with "The Lusty Men", "Wind Across the Everglades" and "Hot Blood" ("The Savage Innocents" exists in a now out-of-print region 2 import. Snatch it up if you find it somewhere). "Party Girl" has recently become available thanks to Warner Home Video's unique (and somewhat ill advised) archive on demand service. So here it is:
Godard once remarked that “the cinema IS Nick Ray” – a dictum that requires few qualifications, not only with regards to what constitutes Ray’s cinema but to what constitutes cinema in general. Never one to conform to studio bound hegemony, Ray quietly navigated genre-bound assignments (careful to leave indelible marks wherever he went) to idiosyncratic tangents to full blown maverick outsider, ending, perhaps inevitably, as avant-garde provocateur. At the risk of sounding intentionally contrarian, We Can’t Go Home Again might be Ray’s masterpiece, a bold summation of virtually every subtext that occurs throughout his several decades as a studio outsider. Unabashedly lo-fi and a one-of-a-kind time capsule, We Can’t Go Home Again represents most fully a particular kind of (anti) social discontentment, a kind of unique surliness that expands upon, informs, and retroactively explodes Ray’s own genre-defining excursion into the youthful counter-culture-discontentment as self-actualization-cum death trip.
* * *
A heartbeat
tears my insides apart
And tears apart my dreams
in the whirling dark
I never got to go
I cannot make it
I never get to have my dreams
and I will not take it…
You can’t take and steal from this body…
They were supposed to be my dreams…
Gun Club, My Dreams
“This boy…
and this girl…
were never properly introduced into the world we live in…”
opening title scrawl of They Live By Night
“I was born when she kissed me
I died when she left me
I lived a few weeks while she loved me”
from In a Lonely Place
“I’m a stranger here myself”
from Johnny Guitar
“I kill the living and I save the dead”
from Bitter Victory
“love as ambivalent pathos,
the search for authenticity,
happiness existing if only by virtue that it can be destroyed”
notes I scribbled in the margins of a book while watching Bigger Than Life about 10 years ago
* * *
A “circle of pain” indeed; two more notes, written hastily while in the daze of an overwhelmingly emotional viewing of On Dangerous Ground (the viewer inevitably succumbing to Robert Ryan’s shattered sense of self) – cosmic inevitability and existential predetermination. Too lofty a philosophy perhaps, reeking of term paper bigness, but one feels the crushing sensation of smallness while watching a Ray film - smallness in the sense that everything around us – society, family, institutions - is simply too big, too awesomely grand (and awesomely corrupted) for one man to fathom. No mistake about it, Ray’s is a sensitive cinema, at least in the sense of undercutting and schizophrenically undermining traditional masculine roles. Sensitivity can’t help but come to the forefront (doomed love being a Ray specialty), only for that same sensitivity to be crushed under a boot heel (here is social criticism at that existential level). One is reminded of the unforgivingly violent landscape, prone to eruption at any given moment – the exploding hills in Johnny Guitar, the cold plains of On Dangerous Ground (even the title itself!), the frozen lands of The Savage Innocents, the arena of The Lusty Men (institutionalized violence, played for profit and sport), the war torn dessert of Bitter Victory (again with the title and a penchant for self fulfilling prophecy!), the perpetual unknowability and deadliness of the Florida swamps in Wind Across the Everglades, even the family unit itself in Rebel and Bigger Than Life (emotional strife located in the distorted geometry of the home gone horribly awry). The helicopter shot that opens They Live By Night surveys a vast, empty landscape, which will eventually host a series of violent encounters.
There is the addition of hopeless love – fatalistic more often than not. Potential violence is, apparently, much like emotional inertia – inescapable; note how many of his characters come together, only to be eventually ripped apart: Born To Be Bad traces the disintegration of not one but two relationships, one right after the other; Sal Mineo perishes for Dean in Rebel; the rivals of Wind reconcile, only for Cottonmouth to die of a snake bite while saving his once bitter enemy; Bogart and Graham find happiness and stability only to be driven apart by fear, rage and violence, as he returns to his lonely place; Crawford and Hayden walk away from the final confrontation in Johnny Guitar, but into an unknown future, as the frontier is becoming more and more civilized (civilization being corruption more often than not); Mason recovers from addiction in Bigger Than Life, but has exposed the dark underside of the nuclear family and its incubation of paranoia, dread and violence; the absurd futility of war is expressed through romantic rivalry in Bitter Victory, the current husband and former lover slugging it out on a grand scale, Burton eventually succumbing not to bullets or artillery but nature itself (that deadly landscape!) - etc, etc.
As Jonathan Rosenbuam has pointed out in his seminal essay “Circle of Pain”, Ray is fascinated by outsiders – rodeo men, gypsies, the blind, poachers, teenagers (especially teenagers), cowards, the poor – all on the fringes of proper society. It was perhaps inevitable (that word again), given his activism and liberal politics in the 30’s and 40’s, that he would be attracted to the counter-culture in the late 60’s. But that romantic fatalism rears its ugly head, and violence is once again located in the home, this time contextualized by a failing and fading revolution (this cements Ray’s similarity with Rivette). We Can’t Go Home Again traces the efforts of a film class, under the guidance of Ray himself, to make a collective film - that the film itself, although scripted, is essentially a document of its own making, is entirely part of the point; that the film disintegrates along with its protagonists is also part of the point. Ray and his students use all manner of equipment, whatever could be begged or borrowed, resulting in footage shot on 8mm and 16mm then being projected and re-photographed on 35mm.
The use of multiple images on the same screen is its own kind of simultaneous collectivity mixed with obliteration – they share the same space but cancel each other out, becoming a kind of white noise. Is there a more profound extrapolation of post ‘68 politics? It can be difficult to follow what exactly is going on at any given moment, and the use of multiple projections eschews any traditional standards of framing or cutting – the edit now exists between two or three or four completely unique images, not simple individual scenes. There is also ray’s fascination with everyday architecture becoming visual symbols of entrapment – lattice work or stair railings become bars, often ensconcing his doom laden last-romantic couple or self destructive individual (think Sternbergian bric-a-brac laden with masochism). The filmed narrative, what there is of it, reaches a kind of boiling point of accusatory disintegration, resulting in Ray’s onscreen death by hanging. That Ray intends to commit suicide, only to then change his mind, then accidentally hanging himself, speaks to something larger, I think. This is the personality that has given us so many catastrophic couplings destined for untimely ends that he perhaps felt he should save the best for last. It is an absurdity – tragic, certainly, but fundamentally absurd. As a bold final statement of purpose, Ray sums up a career of romantic contradiction: take care of each other and let the rest of us swing. This is sentimentality tinged with masochistic violence. This is sensitivity being crushed under a boot heel. This is the cruel romantic irony of Nicholas Ray.
With that in mind, I'm embarking on a series of profiles on whatever director I feel like writing about, with no concern whatsoever for what is new, "hot" or decisively controversial. Simply great filmmakers who I happen to find intriguing. Up first is Nicholas Ray, an iconoclastic maverick who got his start as a Hollywood melodrama artist and gradually built a body of work based on romantic disillusionment, replete with crushed dreams, dashed hopes and near suicidal doses of ironic fatalism. He's perhaps best known for "Rebel Without A Cause", although that film's enduring legacy is based more on the Dean performance than Ray's masterful direction. One of his greatest films, "Bigger Than Life",remains criminally unavailable on any home video format, along with "The Lusty Men", "Wind Across the Everglades" and "Hot Blood" ("The Savage Innocents" exists in a now out-of-print region 2 import. Snatch it up if you find it somewhere). "Party Girl" has recently become available thanks to Warner Home Video's unique (and somewhat ill advised) archive on demand service. So here it is:
Godard once remarked that “the cinema IS Nick Ray” – a dictum that requires few qualifications, not only with regards to what constitutes Ray’s cinema but to what constitutes cinema in general. Never one to conform to studio bound hegemony, Ray quietly navigated genre-bound assignments (careful to leave indelible marks wherever he went) to idiosyncratic tangents to full blown maverick outsider, ending, perhaps inevitably, as avant-garde provocateur. At the risk of sounding intentionally contrarian, We Can’t Go Home Again might be Ray’s masterpiece, a bold summation of virtually every subtext that occurs throughout his several decades as a studio outsider. Unabashedly lo-fi and a one-of-a-kind time capsule, We Can’t Go Home Again represents most fully a particular kind of (anti) social discontentment, a kind of unique surliness that expands upon, informs, and retroactively explodes Ray’s own genre-defining excursion into the youthful counter-culture-discontentment as self-actualization-cum death trip.
* * *
A heartbeat
tears my insides apart
And tears apart my dreams
in the whirling dark
I never got to go
I cannot make it
I never get to have my dreams
and I will not take it…
You can’t take and steal from this body…
They were supposed to be my dreams…
Gun Club, My Dreams
“This boy…
and this girl…
were never properly introduced into the world we live in…”
opening title scrawl of They Live By Night
“I was born when she kissed me
I died when she left me
I lived a few weeks while she loved me”
from In a Lonely Place
“I’m a stranger here myself”
from Johnny Guitar
“I kill the living and I save the dead”
from Bitter Victory
“love as ambivalent pathos,
the search for authenticity,
happiness existing if only by virtue that it can be destroyed”
notes I scribbled in the margins of a book while watching Bigger Than Life about 10 years ago
* * *
A “circle of pain” indeed; two more notes, written hastily while in the daze of an overwhelmingly emotional viewing of On Dangerous Ground (the viewer inevitably succumbing to Robert Ryan’s shattered sense of self) – cosmic inevitability and existential predetermination. Too lofty a philosophy perhaps, reeking of term paper bigness, but one feels the crushing sensation of smallness while watching a Ray film - smallness in the sense that everything around us – society, family, institutions - is simply too big, too awesomely grand (and awesomely corrupted) for one man to fathom. No mistake about it, Ray’s is a sensitive cinema, at least in the sense of undercutting and schizophrenically undermining traditional masculine roles. Sensitivity can’t help but come to the forefront (doomed love being a Ray specialty), only for that same sensitivity to be crushed under a boot heel (here is social criticism at that existential level). One is reminded of the unforgivingly violent landscape, prone to eruption at any given moment – the exploding hills in Johnny Guitar, the cold plains of On Dangerous Ground (even the title itself!), the frozen lands of The Savage Innocents, the arena of The Lusty Men (institutionalized violence, played for profit and sport), the war torn dessert of Bitter Victory (again with the title and a penchant for self fulfilling prophecy!), the perpetual unknowability and deadliness of the Florida swamps in Wind Across the Everglades, even the family unit itself in Rebel and Bigger Than Life (emotional strife located in the distorted geometry of the home gone horribly awry). The helicopter shot that opens They Live By Night surveys a vast, empty landscape, which will eventually host a series of violent encounters.
There is the addition of hopeless love – fatalistic more often than not. Potential violence is, apparently, much like emotional inertia – inescapable; note how many of his characters come together, only to be eventually ripped apart: Born To Be Bad traces the disintegration of not one but two relationships, one right after the other; Sal Mineo perishes for Dean in Rebel; the rivals of Wind reconcile, only for Cottonmouth to die of a snake bite while saving his once bitter enemy; Bogart and Graham find happiness and stability only to be driven apart by fear, rage and violence, as he returns to his lonely place; Crawford and Hayden walk away from the final confrontation in Johnny Guitar, but into an unknown future, as the frontier is becoming more and more civilized (civilization being corruption more often than not); Mason recovers from addiction in Bigger Than Life, but has exposed the dark underside of the nuclear family and its incubation of paranoia, dread and violence; the absurd futility of war is expressed through romantic rivalry in Bitter Victory, the current husband and former lover slugging it out on a grand scale, Burton eventually succumbing not to bullets or artillery but nature itself (that deadly landscape!) - etc, etc.
As Jonathan Rosenbuam has pointed out in his seminal essay “Circle of Pain”, Ray is fascinated by outsiders – rodeo men, gypsies, the blind, poachers, teenagers (especially teenagers), cowards, the poor – all on the fringes of proper society. It was perhaps inevitable (that word again), given his activism and liberal politics in the 30’s and 40’s, that he would be attracted to the counter-culture in the late 60’s. But that romantic fatalism rears its ugly head, and violence is once again located in the home, this time contextualized by a failing and fading revolution (this cements Ray’s similarity with Rivette). We Can’t Go Home Again traces the efforts of a film class, under the guidance of Ray himself, to make a collective film - that the film itself, although scripted, is essentially a document of its own making, is entirely part of the point; that the film disintegrates along with its protagonists is also part of the point. Ray and his students use all manner of equipment, whatever could be begged or borrowed, resulting in footage shot on 8mm and 16mm then being projected and re-photographed on 35mm.
The use of multiple images on the same screen is its own kind of simultaneous collectivity mixed with obliteration – they share the same space but cancel each other out, becoming a kind of white noise. Is there a more profound extrapolation of post ‘68 politics? It can be difficult to follow what exactly is going on at any given moment, and the use of multiple projections eschews any traditional standards of framing or cutting – the edit now exists between two or three or four completely unique images, not simple individual scenes. There is also ray’s fascination with everyday architecture becoming visual symbols of entrapment – lattice work or stair railings become bars, often ensconcing his doom laden last-romantic couple or self destructive individual (think Sternbergian bric-a-brac laden with masochism). The filmed narrative, what there is of it, reaches a kind of boiling point of accusatory disintegration, resulting in Ray’s onscreen death by hanging. That Ray intends to commit suicide, only to then change his mind, then accidentally hanging himself, speaks to something larger, I think. This is the personality that has given us so many catastrophic couplings destined for untimely ends that he perhaps felt he should save the best for last. It is an absurdity – tragic, certainly, but fundamentally absurd. As a bold final statement of purpose, Ray sums up a career of romantic contradiction: take care of each other and let the rest of us swing. This is sentimentality tinged with masochistic violence. This is sensitivity being crushed under a boot heel. This is the cruel romantic irony of Nicholas Ray.
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