Truth 24 Frames per Second

Top Ten (or 20):

2012-01-05T22:25:00.000-06:00

As an infrequent contributor to In Review Online, they were kind enough to invite me to take part in their end-of-year best films extravaganza (I also blurbed Film Socialisme for their staff aggregate best list). The below list is what I sent them, although I hasten to add two caveats: I was told that de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica wasn't eligible for inclusion, nor Costa's Ne change rien, as both were technically 2010 releases (you'll hear more about this in another post coming soon - yes, I'm gonna bitch about it); I neglected to include Andre Ujica's The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, surely some kind of masterpiece. I hope that my oversight reflects not on the film itself and simply on my own inexplicable ineptitude. If anyone is interested, the InRO list was, to the best of my knowledge, ranked via each participants specific placement. With that in mind, I decided not to play the numbers game, as Film Socialisme would be my number one choice regardless of what list I was making or for who I happened to be making it for. Which is a long winded way of saying that the placement of my top five adequately reflects my enthusiasms for each, while the placement of the remaining titles is largely arbitrary.

1. Film Socialisme
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
3. Certified Copy
4. Poetry
5. Change Nothing
6. The Arbor
7. The Four Times
8. Martha Marcy May Marlene
9. The Strange Case of Angelica
10. 13 Assassins
11. Meek’s Cutoff
12. Nostalgia for the Light
13. Fast Five
14. A Dangerous Method
15. Drive
16. Don’t Go Breaking My Heart
17. The Ward
18. We Need To Talk About Kevin
19. Miss Bala
20. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
21. Attack the Block
22. Goodbye First Love

Martha Marcy May Marlene:

2011-12-09T12:34:00.000-06:00

for In Review Online, I talk about Sean Durkin's masterful debut feature, surely a lock for top ten of the year and as superb an actor's showcase as you're likely to see.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame:

2011-12-09T12:27:00.000-06:00

over at In Review Online, I blather about the newest Tsui Hark opus.

Miss Bala:

2011-11-18T20:21:00.000-06:00

a review of Gerardo Naranjo's 'Miss Bala' at In Review Online. Scoot on over and give it a glance, will ya?

Contagion:

2011-10-19T16:53:00.000-05:00

I wrote a few words on Soderbergh's Contagion for In Review Online. Check it out.

CIFF Dispatch #1:

2011-10-11T02:52:00.000-05:00

I’m a big fan of Joachim Trier’s 2006 debut Reprise, and with his new film, Oslo, August 31, I think its safe to say that a major cinematic talent as arrived – if Reprise was the work of a gifted newcomer, all kinetic energy and speed, Oslo, August 31 is calmer, more soulful and despairing, a kind of funeral dirge for lost youth. Working once again with leading man Anders Danielsen Lie, Trier charts a day-in-the-life of a recovering addict on an evening pass from his rehab center. Anders sees some old friends, has a disastrous job interview, contemplates a reunification with an old girlfriend and weighs his options, such as they are – as he puts it, ‘I’m 34 years old, and I’ve got nothing. I can’t start over again from scratch.’ There’s not much that Trier does wrong here, from the literate, deeply felt screenplay to a deceptively simple mis-en-scene; Trier has taken a page from the Assayas play book, finding inventive ways to enliven dialogue heavy scenes and allowing small, quiet moments to articulate otherwise abstract states of mind. There’s no arm chair shrinks here, and while Trier’s characters are intelligent and articulate, even self-aware, there’s no one simple diagnosis - disappointments abound.

Trier oscillates freely between Anders’ subjective point of view and a larger, seemingly objective view of the city surrounding him. Sitting in a café, Anders eavesdrops on the numerous conversations surrounding him; his isolation is palpable, and Trier hammers it home when Anders leaves the café – stepping outside, the din of voices suddenly drops off the soundtrack. As Anders converses with an old friend, a scene otherwise covered by traditional shot counter shot, Trier jump-cuts on the friend mid-sentence, his words continuing on the soundtrack while his lips no longer move. Anders himself is constantly isolated in the frame by various bits of architecture or the lines of a room; even when surrounded by people, as in the various gatherings he floats into during the narrative proper, Anders is isolated in one-shots while others are grouped together in the frame. As Anders’ long day’s journey into night continues, Trier’s editing becomes more jagged, the images more subjectively abstracted (Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar came to my mind more than once), and the soundtrack even louder – while the first two-thirds of the film features only ambient sounds and diagetic dialogue/music, the last third becomes immersed in booming techno music (my ears detected at least one Daft Punk song). Anders seems to be sinking deeper and deeper into his own head, dragging us along (a further Assayas connection, as Oslo, August 31 roughly mirrors that narrative trajectory of Cold Water, also culminating in an extended party scene/free floating pseudo-narrative matrix).

Trier begins the film with an intimate montage of Oslo, a mixture of stock footage, video images and a myriad number of overlapping voice-overs describing people, places and memories that amounts to a brief-but-epic city symphony; Trier ends the film with a series of still frames that progress in reverse chronological order through the film’s locations – Anders’ pre-rehab home, several apartments, a park, a lake and finally Anders’ room at the rehab center. The locations are empty now, and since we’ve been tethered to his point of view for the entire film, we palpably register Anders’ absence. We will miss him, but the world will continue without Anders, and ultimately without us.

Interesting Stuff:

2011-09-07T17:44:00.000-05:00

It's been a long summer, and I've been pretty quiet on the old blog. But new content is on the horizon (for the few of you who care).

I wrote two short appreciations of Kiarostami for In Review Online's recent Kiarostami 'Directospective'. They've parceled Kiarostami's oeuvre into three sections, only the first two of which are currently available. My thoughts on 'Ten' and '10 on Ten' will be revealed sooner or later, at which point I'll update this post. In the meantime, I can wholeheartedly recommend the pieces already posted.

Adrian Martin has been particularly busy this summer; working with Girish Shambu, they've launched a new online magazine called LOLA - it's a worthy successor to the now apparently defunct Rouge, with at least several of the same contributors (notably Nicole Brenez) and a similarly broad approach to contemporary cinephilia. It is a welcome addition to the online film community, and hopefully fares better than Martin's previous endeavor.

Martin has also spearheaded a conference called World Cinema Now; there's a companion blog that promises to be updated regularly before and after the event, and already has some significant content, including some nice pieces on mad man provocateur Philippe Grandrieux.

In a stunning bit of good news, and to my mind perhaps the most significant cinema event of the year, Venice has just screened Nick Ray's We Can't Go Home Again. It is apparently not just a restoration, but a completion of Ray's final masterpiece, which has seen the light of day only briefly in two different early versions (one in 1973, the other sometime in the early 80's. I should note that I'm not actually sure which version I've seen, such is the limited information available on any version of the film). David Hudson has collected a bunch of links over at the Daily Notebook, including writings by Rosenbaum and links to a current Ray 'blog-o-thon.' Reports have the fine folks over at Oscilloscope acquiring the film for distribution. So hopefully we see it sooner rather than later.

Happy reading, let's talk soon...

Literary Interlude:

2011-09-07T13:50:00.000-05:00

'Yap, yap, yap. Part of this generation that is proud of its shallowness. The sincere performance is everything. Sincere and empty, totally empty. The sincerity that goes in all directions. The sincerity that is worse than falseness, and the innocence that is worse than corruption. All the rapacity hidden under the sincerity. And under the lingo. This wonderful language they all have - that they appear to believe - about their 'lack of self-worth,' all the while what they actually believe is that they're entitled to everything. Their shamelessness they call lovingness, and the ruthlessness is camouflaged as lost 'self-esteem.'... it's a con these kids have going. The hyperdramatization of the pettiest emotions. Relationship. My relationship. Clarify my relationship. They open their mouths and they send me up the wall. Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There's one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end - every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliche.'

Phillip Roth, The Human Stain

Videos by Jake Barningham:

2011-06-24T02:48:00.000-05:00

‘Pretty’ is the failure of interesting

I never intend any of these things (videos) to be relaxing experiences

All my images die. I think a good image should die…

VIDEO is the little brother who ends up killing himself.

Jake Barningham, quoted from conversation and email correspondence

“It is well-known that a standard video image lacks the sharpness and definition of even 8mm film. There are other, and in my view even more important, differences as well. In video, the range of darks and lights, the differences between the blackest black possible and the whitest white, is far narrower than in film. As a consequence, there are fewer intermediate shadings possible. Video colors lack the fullness and saturation of pure film colors; they are less intense. I am not speaking so much of the measurable purity of the light as of the fact that video green seems somehow less different from video red than a film green is from a film red. The video image is thus less differentiated in its internal structure than the film image. Similarly, far less of an illusion of depth is possible on video than in film… one senses the physical solidity of each object, but one also feels that the space between objects has the same palpable sensuality. A space is created, all pieces of which are in measurable and articulate relationships with each other. In video, this sense of physical space, of a felt distance between foreground and background, is largely lost.”

Fred Camper, The Trouble With Video

I quote Camper at length here for several reasons, not the least of which is that his negative description of video’s shortcomings as a medium are, in fact, appropriate estimations of the virtues of Jake Barningham’s video work (it should be noted, in the interest of full disclosure, that Barningham and Camper are on friendly speaking terms, and that I also know them both). Indeed, Camper’s assertions on the distinct virtues of various mediums, and the belief that within these distinctions lay the strengths of each medium, has been a formative influence on myself and Barningham. In point of fact, Barningham himself insists on the distinction, referring to himself as a video artist, not a filmmaker, and having no desire to work with film (to quote the artist: ‘I don't like handling film, I don't like shooting film, I don't like touching film cameras… its such a barbaric process, I've no idea how Brakhage made such beautiful poetry’.). What Barningham has managed to do is, simply put, more than akin to the poetry that Brakhage has imbued to celluloid. It is this critic’s opinion, whatever it may be worth, that Barningham is building a formidable body of work and quickly emerging at the forefront of this still new, not entirely understood, medium.

It can be difficult to speak of a diverse number of individual works that share a unifying sensibility while still diverging in their particulars. Nevertheless, Barningham’s videos strike me, first and foremost, as studies on absence. While none suggest a narrative, in each there is a hint of an image, something almost, barely tangible, that ultimately remains elusive and transient. It is interesting that the discernable images which do crop up, however fleetingly, are objects most associated with the human figure – a car in ‘#25’, houses cropped to the bottom of the frame in ‘and houses’, what appears to be an entire plot of land in ‘night, day’. Indeed, ‘color copy’ suggests an entry point into the other works – an almost recognizable image of a tree is bombarded by a flurry of pixels, each seemingly in a random, chaotic collision course with another. Yet these pixels almost ‘gather’ themselves, as if attracted to the image and attempting to ‘fill it’ in. But repeatedly, the pixels break down and scatter. While the image is partially defined by that which it is lacking – a specificity of sorts, Barningham also invites us to view the breakdown as something worthwhile in-and-of itself, as moments of pure movement, abstracted motion, the pixels themselves as unique sculptural objects. Camper is correct in suggesting a lack of articulated space/depth in video; Barningham’s works are interested not in spaces with which to insert oneself, but in building walls.

I’ve had the opportunity to speak with Barningham about his process, and while the technical specificity is above my head, the basics provide an interesting tension between chance operations and tightly controlled structure. The basis for each of the videos in the Onion City program is, in the beginning, images culled from web based weather cameras, usually unmanned and virtually anonymous, installed by amateur meteorologists. Interestingly, this anonymity is in itself a kind of absence (images without an author). Barningham then proceeds to edit chunks of footage as he sees fit, before putting the footage through a series of ‘save as’ iterations. By ‘saving’ the footage as a different video file at each iteration, various degrees of de-resolution creates layers of pixelation and color manipulation. This process lends itself to what I’m referring to as chance operation, although Barningham has enough practice with his process that he can anticipate, to some degree, what each iteration will look like. And, of course, if he is unhappy with the results, he can simply delete the file and start again.

It is this process of ‘breaking down’ that gives some of the videos an almost clinical feel; even when organic materials are visible, the viewer is aware of the artist’s hand at work, digging into the video (if such a thing is possible) to arrive at its smallest possible unit. ‘trees’ is a fascinating study, and along with ‘night, day’, the strongest video in a series of strong videos. While using natural light to film a forest might produce a stunning effect, it is the antithesis of what video does well – light on film is translucent and has an ‘emanating’ quality. Video absorbs, as Camper has pointed out, and Barningham’s study of the forest gives a lesson in this process – there is no grain, only blocks, with an undulating quality that layers rather than blends; versus the solidity of film, video could be described as ‘disintegrating’, on the verge constantly of not unraveling but dissipating, bit by bit, back to the ether. Certainly, there is a ghost-like quality to Barningham’s images, ‘echo transmissions’ to use Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s term.

Horizontal lines tend to turn up in each of the videos on display in this series, particularly in ‘#25’ and ‘and houses’, usually as pseudo-violent intrusions across the frame that also serve, not unlike the occasional ‘X’ title cards in Michael Snow’s La Region Central, to orient the viewer. But a consistent horizon line serves as the organizing factor in Barningham’s ‘night, day’, an almost straight-forward landscape film that might also be the best in the series. It’s certainly the longest (clocking in at a whopping 7 minutes). But the additional length allows Barningham to build a more complex rhythm, with segments serving as distinct movements. ‘night, day’ consists in part of time lapse photography that Barningham has edited so as to conflate his own chosen patterns with the unique, even bizarre lighting effects produced by the time-lapse; bursts of pixilated white merge into murky gray/blacks with remarkable fluidity, and the viewer is aware of the possibility of an almost-recognizable field of vision playing out before them. The bottom of the frame exists in constant tension with the horizon line, strange almost-color bars that threaten to rise up and engulf the image proper. Meanwhile, flickering white dots in a field of black explode into an approximation of daylight before quickly settling down, back into oblivion, only to then repeat the process. Barningham returns repeatedly to the image of a house, begging the question of what could possibly be transpiring in this constantly morphing landscape (which again suggests an absence, i.e. who exists within this home?).
By my estimation, the second movement begins with the introduction of rain drops onto the camera lens. The attentive viewer can ascertain what is physically causing this effect, but formally speaking, the rain drops occur without warning as large physical objects invading the frame. They clump in an interesting way, again suggesting the tension between chance (random footage) and control (the artist chose this footage of these objects). This section moves along for a couple of minutes, building to a crescendo of rapid cutting that stuns the eye – if we’ve been lulled by the preceding pace, Barningham jars our attention.
The third movement seems to begin with the introduction of a new formal element, an architectural structure that intersects the frame and the horizon line, totally disrupting the field of vision that we’ve become accustomed to in the previous five minutes or so. Barningham repeats the structure, while maintaining the already established night-day-night rhythm, as well as briefly re-introducing, if only for a moment, the rain drops on the lens motif. The effect is of a cumulative ‘building-up’; one senses that Barningham could keep adding layers indefinitely, while simultaneously defamiliarizing and deconstructing the image. The complexity of ‘night, day’ exists in this dichotomy between simplification (the pixel) and maximizing (the infinite number of shapes one could introduce to this landscape).

If video could be called film’s ‘baby brother’, as Barningham has self-deprecatingly joked, it is through the efforts of artists like himself that the medium will assert itself as a peer, capable of its own unique poetry. Go see this work.

Saturday, June 25th
7pm – Chicago Filmmakers
Shorts Program 3
#25 (2011, 2 min)
western (2011, 3 min)
night, day (2011, 7 min)
trees (2011, 2 min)
and houses (2011, 3 min)
color copy (2011, 3 min)

Anticipating Film Socialisme, Part 3:

2011-06-13T01:49:00.001-05:00

"... montage is what made cinema unique and different as compared to painting and the novel. Cinema as it was originally conceived is going to disappear quite quickly, within a lifetime, and something else will take its place. But what made it original, and what will never really have existed, like a plant that has never really left the ground, is montage. The silent movie world felt it very strongly and talked about it a lot. No-one found it. Griffith was looking for something like montage, he found discovered the close-up. Eisenstein naturally thought that he had found montage... But by montage I mean something much more vast."

Godard, "Le montage, la solitude et la liberte"; translation by Trond Lundemo

Anticipating Film Socialisme, Part 2:

2011-06-13T01:23:00.002-05:00

"When it comes to a love of the cinema, cinephilia, fond citations from old movies, he believed (as did everybody else) that he's 'been there, done that'. To such an extent in fact that his name is now emblematic of a passion which even his detractors have had to concede, namely a passion for the cinema. The name 'Godard'... designates an auteur but it is also synonymous with a tenacious passion for this region of the world of images that we call cinema...

A love of the cinema desires only cinema, whereas passion is excessive: it wants cinema but it also wants cinema to become something else,it even longs for the horizon where cinema risks being absorbed by dint of metamorphosis, it opens up its focus onto the unknown...

He is caught between a recent past and a near future (unlike prophets who can easily combine archaism and the future), he is crucified between what he can no longer do and what he cannot yet do, in other words, he is doomed to the present...

Godard has been so easily described as an 'enfant terrible', an 'avant-garde filmmaker', an 'iconoclast' and a 'revolutionary' that we have failed to notice that, right from the start, he respected the rules of the game (unlike Truffaut). In fact, Godard is troubled by the absence of rules. There is nothing revolutionary about Godard, rather, he is more interested in radical reformism, because reformism concerns the present..."

selections from Serge Daney's 'The Godard Paradox'

Anticipating Film Socialisme, Part 1:

2011-06-13T01:12:00.000-05:00

"In my opinion, films are hardly ever seen anymore, since 'seen' suggests to me the possibility of making comparisons. By that I don't mean comparing two things, or one image to the memory that one has of that image. Rather, I mean comparing two images and, at the moment of viewing them, highlighting certain links between them. For instance, if one claims that Eisenstein's parallel editing echoes a style of editing traditionally ascribed to Griffith, then one would need to project them simultaneously, with Griffith on the left and Eisenstein on the right. It would be like a trial and one could be sure of the accuracy of the claim. And one could discuss it. It would be technically difficult to place two cinema screens side by side, but video playback is now available so videotapes could be viewed side by side and compared."

Godard, quoted by Antoine de Baecque

Mission: McTiernan

2011-05-24T07:50:00.000-05:00

I've got a new post up over at the Mission: McTiernan blog, scoot on over and check it out. Posting has been light, but rest assured that my writing partner and I are hard at work on two large scale McTiernan projects. It might be a little while yet before either is ready to be officially announced, but rest assured more odds and ends will make their way to the blog before long.

The Mann Silhouette, Part 3: an Interlude

2011-05-11T17:20:00.000-05:00

I started this project because I was struck by how frequently Mann returned to, and revised, a particular ‘move’, a piece of visual rhetoric that pops up continuously and that has been tweaked, refined, simplified and which, ultimately, becomes the heart of a certain kind of philosophy (which we’ll get to with Public Enemies, perhaps Mann’s most misunderstood masterpiece).

Having said that, no great artist can be boiled down to some kind of schematic meaning; as David Bordwell is frequently reminding us, artists tend to experiment, attempting new solutions to frequently recurring scenes (like filming people around a table). Hence, a handful of Mann films that refuse to fit my ‘silhouette’ rubric – they are nonetheless, worthy of some attention.

Despite having some fans, The Keep strikes me as Mann’s one total, outright failure. To my mind, it is the one film his detractors constantly accuse him of making - bombastic, seemingly impersonal and ultimately incoherent. The Keep ultimately stands as an attempt at a German Expressionistic horror-thriller, a genre so far removed from Mann’s comfort zone as to boggle the mind. The idea of ‘stretching’ might be one of the reasons Mann took on the project, and as a film school student, it is obvious the he was enamored with Lang and Murnau (perhaps Lewton/Tourneur as well). Coincidentally, the film is actually filled with silhouettes, although they are so devoid of interior meaning as to essentially invalidate my functioning premise.

The Last of the Mohicans is another beast altogether. Along with The Keep and Public Enemies, it’s his only period piece (although the former are both, comparatively speaking, recent history). It’s also his only film to take place almost exclusively in nature, as opposed to the urban milieu Mann usually favors. Critic F.X. Feeney has suggested that Mohicans was a conscious left-turn for Mann after several years of television work (roughly ’86-’92), although Mann shoots down that idea in an interview with Feeney. Still, the notion of ‘stretching’ comes up once again, and after five years or so of heavily researched, true-crime related TV, it stands to reason that a totally new challenge would appeal to Mann.

Mann seems most concerned in Mohicans with establishing the difference between the native settlers and the stuffy British, as well as emphasizing the unity of the surroundings with Hawkeye and his family, men who have learned to live harmoniously with nature.

Hawkeye’s interactions with the Cameron family early in the film nicely encapsulate Mann’s visual rhetoric. The camera remains fixed, the group unified in the frame, with the mother and child supplying movement and energy to the tableau – she keeps turning around to look at the table, subtly reinforcing the viewer’s eye as to the shifting center of attention; the playful child becomes a wild card, adding something dynamic to the proceedings.

Contrast this with our introduction to the British: the long take of the carriage carrying Cora and her sister as it crosses the bridge is pretty enough, with a pleasing symmetry, but is bland and static after the rowdy dinner table scene.

Here, Cora’s first interaction with Duncan is a cold, shot-counter-shot interaction around a table. Situated nicely in the middle of a field (nature vs garden indeed), Mann cuts rapidly between the two characters, keeping their faces at opposite sides of the frame (further emphasizing their ‘apart-ness). Even when they occupy the same frame, as above, only Cora is in focus, complete with a dismayed look. Duncan is out of focus (also out of touch with Cora’s feelings), and appears to be looking of screen – hence the two shot capturing his failure to look her in the eye.

Mann furthers this notion of deadening symmetry with the films many battle scenes, contrasting the freedom of movement of the Huron warriors with the ‘column’ style fighting of the British. As they line up single file, their static arrangement becomes their downfall.

* * *

Collateral is an interesting, albeit small film, one which might usefully serve as a kind of divide between mid-period and late-period Mann. Heat, The Insider and Ali represent a string of masterpieces that show Mann further expanding his comfort zone into new arenas while remaining true to his own obsessions; the two films following Collateral, Miami Vice and Public Enemies, reveal a new kind of experimentation, with Mann paring down narrative as much as possible (while still remaining, obviously, narrative films). Collateral is also Mann’s first predominately digital film, after some experimenting in Ali (although bits of digital photography show up as early as Manhunter). Collateral strikes me as a transitional work – despite some well publicized script alterations, Mann receives no writing credit, and indeed the film is particularly beholden to an increasingly silly screenplay (by the scribe of the gimmicky, spectacularly inessential Wes Craven thriller Red Eye, no less). As Jonathan Rosenbaum noted upon the films release, it would have made a nice, taunt 80 minute noir back in the 50’s. If the scenario ultimately leaves something to be desired, Mann still directs the hell out of the movie, and Collateral’s ultimate pleasure is noting how a filmmaker can embrace and play with a new format – there’s a sense of constant discovery at work in the film’s mis-en-scene (it’s also his first film with cinematographer Dion Beebe, who will become as important to him as Dante Spinotti).

Mann sets up his primary motif in the films first section, as Jamie Foxx picks up Jada Pinkett Smith’s harried lawyer. Having bodies in the fore and mid-ground (front seat and back seat) allows Mann to play with character dynamics – first cutting between the two, then framing the two together, with one figure slightly out of focus, as they cast furtive, flirtatious glances at each other, and finally framing the two together as an equilibrium, a potent visual metaphor for ‘coming together’. As in some scenes in Mohicans, Mann keeps characters on opposite sides of the frame even when cutting between them. Interestingly, this maintains a sense of visual stability (the camera and cutting doesn’t interfere with their physical position within the car), while simultaneously keeping the viewer off balance (there’s an increasingly jagged force to the cuts).

* * *

The Last of the Mohicans could justify a book-length study in and of itself, and I don’t wish to undersell the pleasures of Collateral. Mann’s ‘city symphony’ contains (arguably) career best performances from Cruise and Foxx, and there is a lovely sense of isolation and disconnect as characters move through an eerily empty urban landscape. Interestingly, I get the sense that Mohicans and Collateral are most frequently cited as Mann’s best films – in other words, movies for people who don’t like Michael Mann films. That, perhaps, is grist for a later post. Up next, we tackle Mann’s first bona fide masterpiece, the exquisite Heat.

Andre de Toth's Springfield Rifle:

2011-05-02T00:38:00.001-05:00

The instant streaming boom has lead to a few interesting things, one of which is the dumping of old, forgotten B Westerns by the boat load. Not unlike the studios slipping in auteurist gems amongst actor-centric dvd box sets, Netflix Instant is gradually accumulating a nice library of underserved genre-specialists. The infancy of the technology is also leading to some extreme aesthetic distortions, which we’ll get to in a moment.

The obscure object under consideration here is Andre de Toth’s Springfield Rifle, a quick, no-frills, frequently brutal western-thriller. I’m no de Toth specialist, but at least a handful of his films are essentials – Ramrod, Day of the Outlaw, Crime Wave and Play Dirty spring immediately to mind. De Toth’s universe is as physically jagged as it is emotionally crippling, with multiple agendas playing out against an unforgiving landscape – de Toth’s landscapes being as integral to the physical and philosophical motivations of men as they are to the films of Boetticher, Ray and Mann; that is, the landscape becomes something of a character in and of itself.

The perennially over-valued Gary Cooper lends his unmovable granite visage as a Union officer who goes undercover to infiltrate a group of horse thieves; they are raiding Union horses and selling them to the South, who in turn hope to amass a huge cavalry that will ultimately crush their opponents to the North. In typical de Toth fashion, our hero is shunned by his commanding officers, his son and ultimately his wife – in a stunning reversal, a Union officer first introduced as a heavy is revealed to not only be in on the undercover plot, but becomes Cooper’s only ally. Of course, once this reversal is made clear, he is gunned down, leaving Cooper once again alone, in over his head, and without evidence of his mission ( interesting that every espionage/cop thriller of the last several decades has in effect already been anticipated by this modest oater).

De Toth’s mise-en-scene is masterful, and the use of the full frame to contain two different (and oppositional) kinds of movement, extreme horizontals and verticals, is not only startlingly audacious but also a fascinating formal metaphor for Cooper’s dual existence. The fact that the film involves huge numbers of horses creates an interesting dynamic. De Toth will keep his camera back at a distance, the better to observe huge herds of animals grazing – it is in these amassed shots that we realize the sheer size of the Confederates’ ultimate goal, obliterating one’s enemies through sheer numbers. Conversely, de Toth anticipates scope photography while filming lines of horses in movement. Throughout the film, de Toth frequently starts a scene with a slow pan, usually from left to right, first introducing the space and setting, as well as character’s spatial relationships within it. As the film progresses and the action ramps up, the movements become so quick as to induce whiplash – in an attempt to reproduce the movement of the horses, while also keeping in mind numbers and a sense of scale, de Toth tracks the camera along side the animals, eventually catching up to a human figure, then passing them by to finish the movement at the head of the herd.

As impressive as these formal dynamics are, de Toth ultimately seems to value vertical, downward movements even more. While not as refined, thematically, as the much later Day of the Outlaw or Play Dirty (a physically grueling trek that puts Herzog’s Aguirre to shame), the treachery and inherent danger of an unforgiving nature is still readily apparent in Springfield Rifle. The film begins with Union troops moving horses through a snowbound pass, assuming that it is so dangerous that the raiders would be insane to follow, never mind that the terrain could also kill them before they reach their destination (reach it they do, only to find a band of outlaws waiting for them - treacherous indeed). Later, Cooper escapes his tower jail cell, de Toth emphasizing the extreme distance with long vertical lines from the tower to the ground; the finale of the film finds Cooper chasing his friend and commanding officer, now revealed to have been a traitor all along, down a rugged mountain side, each man careening wildly down steep inclines and ultimately hurling themselves from great distances. One is tempted to attach some kind of psychological interpretation to these ‘leaps of faith’, one man trying to evade capture at all costs, the other attempting to catch his adversary no-matter-what.

The great critic Fred Camper (one of the few who have dealt with de Toth in any kind of serious way) writes, ‘De Toth's great theme is betrayal--not single betrayals by individuals but networks of betrayal that implicate most of his characters. In de Toth's moral universe, the majority are susceptible to compromise, and the minority who remain pure… wind up dead or otherwise ruined, their lives altered forever by the treachery they've survived. Indeed, the phrase "None Shall Escape" could serve as a motto for de Toth's entire oeuvre. Born in Hungary, de Toth directed several films there and elsewhere in Europe before emigrating to the United States in 1940--on a ship, as he recalls, that sank on its next voyage. It's hard to know how his worldview originated, but perhaps it had something to do with coming of age amid the complexities of Europe between the wars, and having witnessed and filmed the 1939 German invasion of Poland.’

While Springfield Rifle has a happy ending (the traitor is caught and the plot revealed, Cooper is reinstated, given a medal and reunited with his wife and son), it’s hard to believe in it – there are so many tacked on happy endings in Hollywood films of every era that one is inclined to dismiss the final two or thee minutes of any given film. It’s hard to imagine anyone surviving unchanged in de Toth’s universe, where even nature itself has stacked the decks against us. Cooper’s victory must ultimately be hollow: one of his friends dead, the other revealed to be a traitor to his country, and his family left to survive the remainder of a Civil War.

Unfortunately, the technical limitations of this still new streaming technology reveals itself the most during camera movements – even more vexing as de Toth reveals so much with this contradictory visual scheme. The horizontal pans become blurred and choppy, and swaths of color betray clumps of digital artifacts, with tree leaves becoming square-ish bits and flowing water congealing into a morass of blue and white streaks. Granted, even HD streaming films have similar issues, and there is no doubt that whoever owns the rights to Springfield Rifle couldn’t give a shit as to how it’s shown (if you queue up anything that starts with a ‘Starz Network’ logo, you are guaranteed a sub-VHS visual presentation). But these gripes are perhaps grist for another post. Technical deficiencies aside, it’s still essential viewing.

The Mann Silhouette, Part 2: Manhunter

2011-03-25T12:48:00.001-05:00

Posing one or more characters against an expanse of space becomes increasingly important to Mann, and will gradually begin to take on more and more existential importance (particularly in the later works, as we'll eventually see). Here, we have a variation on the initial silhouette shot in Thief. But Mann has complicated the visual rhetoric. The placement of Petersen's Will Graham and Farina's Jack Crawford is important, as they are visually unified (in the same shot), but placed at opposite sides of the image, with their backs to each other. Crawford is asking Graham to return to the FBI and resume his profiling job, Graham is reluctant to place himself and his family in harm's way. Both men are visually overwhelmed by the horizon.

Another variation on the above shot, as Crawford briefly visits with Molly Graham. Again, both figures are together-but-separate, and Mann further emphasizes their rigidly oppositional stances with the vertical and horizontal lines of the bay windows.

Mann follows the previous scene with a shot of the empty night sky. This is, if I'm not mistaken, his first stab at this kind of shot - it's not motivated by narrative, nor does it contain any characters. It's certainly moody, and that alone might justify its inclusion. But I think there's more to it than that, and this is in fact Mann's (perhaps not yet fully conscious?) initial attempt at poetic abstraction - the implacable night sky, uncaring and indifferent to the human drama playing out beneath it.

The Mann Silhouette, Part 1: Thief

2011-03-16T20:27:00.000-05:00

This was originally intended not as a series of different posts, but one large, in-depth essay, exploring (almost) all of Mann's films together. However, a few Blogger limitations have reared their ugly heads, so instead each film will receive its own, specific entry.

The genesis of this idea came, quite naturally, from watching Mann's films, over and over again, and realizing a certain stylistic unity. Obviously, you might rightly suggest, as all the great directors exhibit some kind of consistency from work to work. But in this case, it is really a matter of a specific move that he has continuously returned to, this move, this gesture, growing in complexity and meaning as his oeuvre has advanced.

This is an early scene from Michael Mann's first film, Thief. James Caan enacts what we infer to be a daily ritual, sitting with a friend on the lakefront in Chicago. This is really the birth of the 'Mann Silhouette', although in this context it reveals the limitations of Mann's early style. Simply put, it is graphically appealing, with a simple, immediate design and symmetrical precision (a precision that Mann will never fully abandon, even in his later work, and which metaphorically adheres to his admiration of stoic professionalism). As we'll see below, however, Mann isn't interested in just simple aestheticism -

Two frames from a scene that lasts several minutes - this comes from much later in the film, as Caan's life has spiraled out of control. It's a pivotal moment in the film, a moment of reflection, summoning courage and bracing himself for what must come next. It also represents Mann's first, seemingly instinctive extrapolation/expansion of the silhouette technique - it's now something like a close-up, more personal, and now informed by a specific context. It is the character (not the last) saying nothing, in terms of dialogue, and Mann telling us everything with his images. The objectivity of the camera and the subjectivity of the character conflate into a moment of visual/narrative awareness.

A Belated Look Back at 2010 (because two of you demanded it):

2011-02-04T00:41:00.000-06:00

‘I’m reminded of the pipe dream of the late Carlos Clarens, a Cuban born film buff and critic… (Carlos) used to fantasize that one year the studios would fail to release a single new movie and would instead be forced to revive all the unseen and unseeable glories they had locked up in their vaults.’
Jonathan Rosenbaum

‘Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.’
Walter Benjamin

‘The concept of investing in the development of a cultured filmgoer is not evidenced in any aspect of commercial distribution. So why do we continue to validate this flawed institution by making a theatrical run the primary requisite for coverage? Media outlets that don't challenge such distinctions as "distributed" and "undistributed" are slowing down a paradigm shift that's already happening. The best, most challenging films left the art house long ago and occupied the sphere of film festivals and the internet. More importantly, the dissemination of these films has been left in the hands of savvy curators rather than soulless marketeers. These alternative systems are making exciting work readily available and deepening the cultural value of films by attaching a meaningful context to them (in a nutshell, this is the main purpose of a film festival).’
Gabe Klinger

All three of the above quotations encapsulate, more or less, what’s been on my mind all year. I saw something like 220 movies in 2010 that were entirely new to me (not including rewatching favorite films over and over again, either for pleasure or for study), although maybe less than a third of those were new releases. But I’d like to consider this a personal year-in-review, not just a top ten - as I’m fond of saying (perhaps too frequently even), cinephilia is a full time job, and I worked a lot in 2010. I filled in some huge gaps in regards to long standing favorite directors: Lang’s Moonfleet more than lived up to it’s reputation as a Serge Daney fetish object and formative touchstone of the New Wave directors (it offers in particular a kind of skeleton key to Rivette’s oeuvre); Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn is a mind boggling achievement; I caught up with a few new Tourneur’s as well - Nightfall, Stranger on Horseback, Experiment Perilous, Berlin Express, Way of the Guacho and Curse of the Demon (as well as the first Tourneur I’ve seen that I didn’t like – Appointment in Honduras); I filled a major gap in my Ray oeuvre with The Lusty Men, as well as seeing the first Nick Ray film that I didn’t like – Flying Leathernecks; I saw a couple of great de Toth westerns, Riding Shotgun and Ramrod; caught up with some of Renoir’s great, under appreciated American period – The Southerner and The Woman on the Beach; some Ford’s that had eluded me, Donovan’s Reef and Mogambo, and a series of Hawk’s masterpieces (in order of preference): The Crowd Roars, The Dawn Patrol, A Song is Born, and one of his supreme achievements, Red Line 7000. I could also mention outstanding films by Jerry Lewis, Borzage, Cukor, Siegel, Mann (Anthony), Rossellini, Welles, Tsai Ming-Liang and Rivette

In addition to catching up with these favorite directors, there are always totally new discoveries as well. The biggest one for me in 2010 was the remarkable Allan Dwan. I must pause to say thanks to Jake Barningham, who not only facilitated many of the above mentioned screenings, but also, single handedly, showed me, by my last count, thirteen films by Mr. Dwan. This is barely a scratch on his filmography, with something like 420 films credited as director, starting in the silent era. I also caught up with 7 titles by Joseph H. Lewis, thanks to a marathon on TCM, and was immediately smitten - he is a case for definite further study.

Despite all this rhapsodizing over older films, I did manage to see a few new ones, and liked quite a few of them. A brief list:

Liverpool (Alonso)
The Sun (Sukurov)
Butterflies Have No Memories (Diaz)
Lost in the Mountains (Hong Sang-Soo)
Around A Small Mountain (Rivette)
Girl on the Train (Techine)
Everyone Else (Ade)
Dogtooth (Lanthimos)
The Ghost Writer (Polanski)
Father of My Children (Hansen-Love)
Wild Grass (Resnais)
Valhalla Rising (Refn)
Centurion (Marshall)
Winter’s Bone (Granik)
Bluebeard (Breillat)
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Weerasethakul)
Vengeance (To)
Certified Copy (Kiarostami)
White Material (Denis)
Alamar (Gonzales-Rubio)
Our Beloved Month of August (Gomes)
Unstoppable (Scott)
Lourdes (Hausner)
Home (Meier)
Mother (Bong Joon-ho)
My Joy (Loznitsa)
The Place In between (Bouyain)
Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (de Oliveira)
(with an honorable mention for Carnahan’s The A-Team)

I stumbled upon Gabe Klinger’s comment on his annual Indie Wire best-of ballot, and it succinctly states better than I could what exactly has been bothering me regarding the did-it or did-it-not get distribution game; it all finally came to head this year (for me at least). Simply put, the whole question reeks of extreme cognitive dissonance at best, barely concealed marketing ploy at worst. Granted, most of the above films received some kind of traditional theatrical release in 2010, but a combination of financial woes, struggling independent distributors and decreased art house exhibition has led to strange list-making loopholes. The default mode seems to have become ‘when did a film play in New York?’

Exhibit 1: a friend complained that he couldn’t include Kiarostami’s Certified Copy on his best-of list as it had not been officially distributed (i.e. released theatrically in NY). Never mind that he saw it in a theatre here in Chicago, projected on 35mm film in optimal conditions. He could, however, include Cattet/Forzani’s Amer on his list (i.e. it got a NY release), never mind that it hasn’t played anywhere in Chicago and was viewed via a bit torrent file. I hasten to add that I don’t doubt his enthusiasm for Amer. It is, however, a strange state of viewing affairs (a further discord to confuse matters: I’ll have an imported region free blu ray of Certified Copy before it gets ‘released’ in Chicago, further muddying what the word ‘release’ even means) .

Exhibit 2: in an effort to not let myself off the hook, I must confess to my own viewing habits as well. I didn’t catch up with Alonso’s Liverpool until it hit DVD a few months ago. In my defense, it screened for exactly one weekend here in Chicago (it’s also a film that Cinema Scope has been promoting for well over a year, as it technically has a 2008 release date). I also saw two great films under less than ideal conditions, hence their lack of inclusion here – Godard’s Film Socialisme (minus English subtitles), and Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew (via an astoundingly high def, albeit bootlegged, rip).

Exhibit 3: looking back, I realized that I placed both The Sun and 35 Shots of Rum on my 2009 best-list. Consulting my notes, I see that I viewed both of those films in early 2010. No doubt attempting to play the NY release game, I must have simply tacked them on before posting (same as this year, the list is going up a month or so after everyone else). The Sun hasn’t appeared on any recent lists, as it must have received ‘official’ release, but I’m seeing a lot of mentions for the Denis, which must have only recently achieved ‘official’ status. Further confusing the matter: lists that ‘belatedly’ included 35 Shots of Rum as well as Denis’ more recent feature White Material (I’m reminded of the strange soul that included Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn three years in a row on his Film Comment ballot – festival screenings, the year of official release, and its eventual DVD release). A brief addendum – the recent Film Comment ‘Final Cut 2010’ article includes de Oliveira’s ‘Eccentricities’ as well as The Strange Case of Angelica.

Exhibit 4: there’s no doubt that ‘On Demand’ and streaming film is going to radically alter how we receive movies – as I mentioned above, it’s already happening with some frequency. I myself viewed both the Weerasethakul and the Gomes online, courtesy of Mubi.com. The surprise success of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives has overshadowed most of Joe’s previous work, none more so than the exquisite short film that gave birth to the feature. A Letter to Uncle Boonmee came from a group of works that Joe has labeled the ‘Primitive’ series, including gallery installations and a series of videos. One could argue that the ultimate value of the internet will not be alternate revenue streams for the major studios, but instead the dissemination of small scale films like this. Ditto Our Beloved Month of August, although no one could accuse it of being small scale – it’s 2 ½ hours long. I was pleasantly surprised to see the film show up on some major lists, but again, this seems to be only because of a token NY release (or perhaps just a screening). Mubi.com has had it available for almost a year, at a more than reasonable three bucks.

Conclusion: I don’t want to go overboard here, but it seems to me that the longer we play by these ‘rules’, the longer we let distributors and corporations dictate what we can see and when we can talk about it. These are distortions and assumptions, not the least of which is that eventually, we can all see everything available, that everything will eventually reach home video, and if not, it probably wasn’t worth seeing in the first place. Case in point, the above mentioned films by Hong Sang-soo and Lav Diaz; both were produced for the 2009 Jeonju Film Festival as part of their annual digital projects showcase (a series including at least one other masterwork I’ve been able to see, Tsai Ming-Liang’s Fish, Underground). They screened here in Chicago thanks to Patrick Friel’s White Light Cinema group, but have yet to turn up at any other venue or on any home video format.

List making is ultimately an idiosyncratic, deeply personal avowal of taste, for better and for worse, and it seems to me that there is a vague effort to make it some how more ‘scientific’, as if the whole process was some kind of Gallup poll. Certainly the studios would like to gauge as much as possible the fervor for their product, the better to gauge their awards chances. But it is ultimately a process that crushes short films, experimental/avant-garde work, and all but a handful of documentaries.

Two closing thoughts:

“The game is not just vulgar, it’s stupid. Yet we all love games.”
David Thomson on list-making/canon forming

‘NO COMMENT’
JLG

a note on The Social Network:

2010-12-31T12:45:00.000-06:00

To my mind, the key moment of the film, where everything clicks into place, doesn’t come until the final moments of the movie. Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerman sits in front of his laptop, debating whether or not to send an ex a friend request. It’s a simple irony, and one the film gets a lot of mileage out of – the creator of the social networking juggernaut is himself an anti-social prick. He ultimately sends the request (in what Dave Kehr has dubbed the film’s ‘Rosebud moment’), and then begins repeatedly refreshing the page. It’s in that succession of clicks that the film’s power grows, as it suggests the nadir of on-line culture. Isolated, we wait for the page to update, continuously, forever, and so on and so on… It’s an obsessive moment worthy of Zodiac, a compulsive stretching into nothingness.

ephemera:

2010-11-15T16:49:00.000-06:00

Godard's Top Ten Films of 1956, from Cahiers du Cinema:

1. Mr. Arkadin (Welles)
2. Elena et les hommes (Renoir)
3. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock)
4. Bus Stop (Logan)
5. Slightly Scarlet (Dwan)
6. The Saga of Anatahan (von Sternberg)
7. A Man Escaped (Bresson)
8. Fear (Rossellini)
9. Bhowani Junction (Cukor)
10. My Sister Eileen (Quine)

Mann without men #2 - Abstractions:

2010-11-10T21:36:00.000-06:00

Mann without men #1:

2010-11-05T14:23:00.001-05:00

Literary Interlude:

2010-11-05T14:05:00.000-05:00

...Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol... Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist... who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Roberto Bolano, 2666

Manderlay Burns (Rebecca, '40):

2010-10-07T22:01:00.000-05:00

Experiment Perilous:

2010-10-07T21:49:00.000-05:00

‘One reason why Jacques Tourneur remains a major but neglected Hollywood filmmaker is that elusiveness is at the core of his art. A director of disquiet, absence, and unsettling nocturnal atmospheres whose characters tend to be mysteries to themselves as well as to us, he dwells in uncertainties and ambiguities even when he appears to be studiously following genre conventions. In other words, his brilliance isn’t often apparent because he tends to stay in the shadows.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Art of Darkness: Wichita’

There's something exhausted, and helpless, and fragile, and old… They have a strange quality of-- I don't know where it comes from; I'm trying to think of some other films of filmmakers who walk that same land, films that seem to generate their own, some kind of oblivion inside of them.

Pedro Costa in conversation with Chris Fujiwara on Tourneur

With all due respect to those who are currently immersed in the movie-event-of-the- moment (Read: Venice, TIFF, NYFF, etc.), to my mind the most exciting thing around is the series of Jacques Tourneur films playing every Saturday and Sunday morning at the Music Box. It’s a healthy sampling of his entire career (although by no means an exhaustive retrospective), encompassing arguably his best Lewton film, a great western, a late-period horror classic, a post-War espionage thriller, and an odd ball entry that we’ll consider here: a Rebecca-esque gothic melodrama called (rather misleadingly) Experiment Perilous. It’s never been available on home video until very recently (courtesy of Warner’s burn on demand Archive service), so the prospect of discovering it on the big screen is doubly enticing.

Costa’s notion of ‘oblivion’ is instructive here, as on paper, Experiment Perilous strikes one as another post Rebecca woman in peril/old dark house exercise. But Tourneur infuses the proceedings with an atmosphere of dread that threatens to engulf everyone, even the picture itself, at any moment. After a chance encounter on a train, Dr. Bailey (George Brent) becomes entangled with a beautiful, possibly insane woman, her potentially murderous husband, and a damaged, emotionally fragile child. Echoes of ‘Gaslight’ (released the same year) abound, as well as ‘Laura’ and ‘Vertigo’: Bailey falls in love with a portrait of Allida Bederaux (Hedy Lamarr); when they finally meet, she is wearing the same dress and poised in the same position; Lewis’ ‘My Name Is Julia Ross’: an insane patriarch struggles to drive his faux-wife insane as she professes her sanity to no avail, and Lewis’ ‘So Dark The Nigh’t: in each film one of the main characters willfully and symbolically eradicates a part of themselves by destroying their own reflection (in a pool of water and a window pane, respectively); as well as Tourneur’s own ‘Cat People’: a beautiful woman becomes a symbolic repository of male angst and phallic anxiety.

The important thing here isn’t how the film does or doesn’t mirror its contemporaries, but how Tourneur conjures a distinct sense of what Rosenbaum describes as ‘disquiet(ing) absence’. Tourneur’s camera creeps around the Bederaux mansion like an uninvited guest, tracking along walls and peering around corners, observing the bric-a-brac of the rich and disturbed. Heddy Lamarr’s Allida is constantly ensconced/trapped by people and objects – in a literal sense, as Tourneur forcefully arranges figures around her within the frame. At one point, the camera crawls along a hallway to focus on a table decorated with vases and flower bouquets. The camera stops and pans right to reveal a recess to the room; Allida is seated, surrounded by standing figures and vases in the extreme foreground. The image works as both a claustrophobic confinement of the body as well as an exhibition: Allida is another beautiful thing to be displayed. Another nice detail: the Bederaux home’s foray has a series of elaborate fish tanks built into the walls, an understated variation on a bird in its gilded cage – indeed, Tourneur’s sense of objects both defining and trapping his characters rivals that of Sirk.

Tourneur eschews exposition in favor of a long, detailed flashback, revealing the origins of Nick Bederaux’s (Paul Lukas) fascination with Allida – Nick is the rich, dashing and cultured older man who takes a young, naïve Allida under his wing, with promises to show her the world and educate her. This ‘education’ is clearly a molding, as Allida is transformed into a bourgeois. Tourneur explicates these changes with simple yet forceful visual corollaries, creating a sense of pre-marriage and post-marriage, i.e. pre and post assimilation. The ‘pre’ Allida is vibrant, always smiling, and associated visually with the land (open fields, vast landscapes, sitting on the ground, a willingness to ‘get dirty’). ‘Post’ Allida has been trained to sit still, maintain ‘composure’; she is seen only indoors, always seated and wearing dark dresses; the scenario becomes ‘clean’. Tourneur’s critique of ‘polite’ society snuffing out a vivacious personality is damning in its precision; the above mentioned shot of Allida wiping away her own reflection immediately follows Nick’s marriage proposal, and we are meant to understand that her gesture signifies not only her agreement (which we are never shown – the words themselves would be redundant), but her own complicit and tacit understanding that her old life is no more.

Tourneur further explicates these themes with recurring visual motifs. The Bederaux’s grand stair case houses an elegant, Greek-style sculpture of a woman that Nick refers to as his ‘goddess’ (SPOILER: he will meet his demise when this ‘woman’ collapses and literally crushes him); Bailey and the Bederaux’s share a common friend, a bohemian sculptor who has also harbored feelings for Allida – his studio houses a huge, oversized Medusa bust (tellingly, he refers to this as his masterpiece), as well as a large room with various molds of body parts strewn about. The medusa bust suggests, obviously, an object of great beauty that one must nonetheless refrain from looking at (denying the ‘gaze’, as it where), while the miscellaneous body parts floating around seemingly wait to be ‘assembled’, not unlike Allida herself.

* * *

Perhaps due to his reputation as a ‘horror’ director (a designation that is admittedly inadequate, like calling The Rules of the Game a film about a weekend hunting party or Citizen Kane a movie about a guy who runs a newspaper), one is always waiting for something horrific to happen in a Tourneur film. No one uses black and white quite like him; it’s neither high contrast nor inky, where blacks tend dominate everything else, but a silky, gray laden thing. Every scene seems to be waiting to be filled with smoke or fog, almost anticipating an oncoming haze that will envelope the frame, and everything in it. Indeed, Experiment Perilous ends in a kind of apocalypse, the home erupting in an inferno – the patriarchal homestead, built on corruption and subjugation, must be leveled.

Deep Focus/Attacking the Frame:

2010-09-29T21:53:00.001-05:00

Negative Space:

2010-09-27T18:39:00.000-05:00

McTiernan:

2010-09-23T00:11:00.001-05:00

The Limits of Control redux:

2010-09-22T15:16:00.000-05:00

To the best of my knowledge, this piece wound up generating more comments than any other on the old Tisch Film Review site. Along with a defense of Shyamalan's The Happening by this mad man, people seemed to generally hate my assessment of Jarmusch's odd ball hit-man/New Wave homage. I still think the film is a lot of fun, and I had a lot of fun writing this essay (in retrospect, it is perhaps slightly more pretentious than I had intended).

* * *

Opaque – adjective: “hard to understand; not clear or lucid; obscure: The problem remains opaque despite explanations”

Uncertainty, aridity, peace – all things will resolve themselves into these and pass away.
- Kafka

By the looks of it, Jim Jarmusch has committed the cinematic atrocity of the year. Despite a couple of reasonably high profile defenders, The Limits of Control has to be one of the worst reviewed films of recent memory. Even more curious is the vicious hyperbole and acidic vitriol being hurled his way, questioning Jarmusch’s integrity, sincerity, intelligence – as if the simple act of viewing his most recent film has somehow damaged the individual critics psyche in unknown, irreparable ways. Perhaps this is the price one pays when playing the kinds of games Jarmusch seems interested in here. Mysteries abound, and more to the point, remain unsolved, open ended…

1. Mystery:
A mysterious man has appeared, as if from nowhere, to perform mysterious tasks, apparently at the behest of mysterious people. He will go on to meet other mysterious people, interacting with them in mysterious ways, before seemingly attaining his ultimate goal – a goal which, by and large, we are unclear about.

2. Being and Nothingness: In his dismissive one star review, Roger Ebert assumes the persona of Isaach De Bankole’s elusive hit-man spectre in a snarky speculative fiction about a day-in-the-life on the set. His Isaach wonders about what the director and cinematographer will ask him to do, and how long he will have to wait before being done. Presumably unwittingly, Ebert sums up much of the film’s modus operandus, the idea of languidly waiting, of simply being.

3. Repetitions:
“You don’t speak Spanish do you?”; two espressos, in separate cups - not a double espresso; Diamonds, Matchbooks; Unintelligible, yet edible, notes; “he who believes himself bigger than everybody else ought to visit the cemetery”.

4. Point Blank:
As Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, the film bears a resemblance to John Boorman’s pseudo-psychedelic thriller, with De Bankole assuming the role of Lee Marvin’s carved-out-of-granite perpetual motion machine, a pit bull on a singular mission who’ll be damned if he’s letting go. Jarmusch honors the film, and lays bare his intentions, with an opening credit – the production company that birthed the film has been named after Boorman’s film. But to what end?

5. Godard, et al:
Not quite (not simply) a homage to the French New Wave, Jarmusch instead casts his net a bit wider. Glenn Kenny, as well as Rosenbaum, sense the spirit of Rivette at work in Jarmusch’s puzzle-without-an-answer. There is a bit of Antonioni’s spiritual and spatial ennui, as well as odds and ends from the noir love-letters/deconstructions of Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player. De Bankole’s stone faced non-acting aligns him with a legacy of Bressonian models, while Chris Doyle’s elusive, shimmering cinematography, beyond the most obvious connotation, evokes that other great contemporary DP, Agnes Godard. The other Denis connection? The presence of Alex Descas, Denis’ favorite leading man. The camera ogles the local architecture like it was a Gaudi masterpiece, and there is a diffusive sense of space that Pedro Costa has been exploring in his recent pictures. The narrative (which does actually exist, although perhaps not in the sense that most people would prefer) proceeds in fits and starts, with scenes seemingly motivated by exquisite corpse-like free associations, or, (Kenny again) Robbe-Grillet zero-degree word play. Another association, again involving play – the games/narrative puzzles of Resnais’ early trifecta (Hiroshima/Marienbad/Muriel).

6. Doubles and Doppelgangers:
Having nothing to say - having no point - is different from arriving at ones point in a round-about way. Jarmusch seems to have a handle on his material at all times, and while one can disagree with or dislike that point, or its system of delivery, it is entirely inappropriate to confuse that dislike with idiocy on the filmmaker’s part. Whatever one makes of The Limits of Control, to assume that, like Ebert, every shot and gesture is simply a passing whim is, not to put too fine a point on it, missing the point. Paz de la Huerta’s “Nude” is the quintessential femme fatale, her goal stated and pursued with, um, naked abandon. She is all surface, every gesture simply there, and truthful. She seems incapable of subterfuge, although her existence implies it, and her eventual death is simply inevitable. Her role (and there is nothing else – the lack of depth is (purposefully) comical) requires it. She occasionally reappears as Tilda Swinton, her double/opposite – fully clothed from head to toe (not naked, unfortunately), with pale skin and blonde hair (not dark skin and deeply brown hair). Jarmusch also links them with raincoats – neither functional, one is heavy and thick, the other is totally transparent. Descas and De Bankole could be brothers, and both speak French, although Jarmusch has them interact, perversely, with a translator. The brief cameos by John Hurt (“Guitar”) and Gael Garcia Bernal (“Mexican”) are, despite obvious differences in age and ethnicity, linked by similar garb – the film briefly digresses into trying to redefine bohemia in the modern age – as well as interest in a particular guitar case. There is also a visit by Youki Kudoh as “Molecules”, who provides a dubious scientific explanation for the film’s far-fetched, comical ending. Needless to say, an international cast of actors meeting in terse vignettes and having pseudo-comical interactions, interrupted by the occasional language barrier, should be no surprise to Jarmusch fans.

7. Politics:
Make no mistake – beyond the genre trappings (lovingly violated), Jarmusch has made a boldly political film. I don’t necessarily agree with Rosenbaum’s assertion that Bill Murray’s “American” is a Cheney stand-in (an unreasonably limiting perspective, to my mind), but I do agree that Jarmusch has, for better or for worse, laid out a very specific statement of purpose – a kind of personal declaration/summation. The limits of a very particular kind of “control” become clear, as Jarmusch is railing against a society that no longer values art, museums, film, genre, the act of looking and sitting quietly, waiting, meandering through quasi-defined space, repetitions that become mantra-like – those elusive secular prayers.

8. Repetitions:
“You don’t speak Spanish do you?”; two espressos, in separate cups - not a double espresso; Diamonds, Matchbooks; Unintelligible, yet edible, notes; “he who believes himself bigger than everybody else ought to visit the cemetery”.

Postscript: In the most recent issue of Film Comment, there is an appreciation of the film by Kent Jones, which I very purposefully avoided. And, as it turns out, with good reason – as usual, Jones elucidates difficult material with remarkable poise and a disarming ease. I don’t think there is any critic working right now in English that makes the art of writing seem so incredibly effortless. I worried that the above post would come off as the very snark I was decrying, or even worse, as pretentious. But if that is the case, so be it. While writing about film as a pastime engenders quite a few benefits – reflection, hindsight, sometimes a second or third viewing – it can also be encumbered by all the cultural noise around it. Unless one lives in a vacuum, it is impossible to avoid reviews, conversations, all those opinions both pro and con, and it becomes something of a chore to sift through the avalanche of words and try to remember something of ones initial response to the film at hand. In other words, it is entirely possible that I value The Limits of Control so highly simply because everyone else dismissed it so easily. I certainly hope this isn’t the case – only time, and a few more viewings, will tell. I’ll end with Jones’ words, “Jarmusch’s new film stands alone, within his own body of work and in the landscape of current cinema. It is militant, and it is serene.” I can’t wait to see the movie again.

Triangle redux:

2010-09-22T15:04:00.000-05:00

About a year ago I wrote a few essays for the Tisch Film Review, the brain child of a New York based filmmaker and critic. Various factors have conspired to render the site defunct; in the interest of keeping these pieces available, I'm re posting a couple of them here. I've tweaked a few typos here and there, and the pieces are missing illustrations that originally accompanied them. Otherwise, they remain unchanged. Unfortunately, I was unable to save a piece on Jia Zhangke's 24 City, which remains my favorite among anything else I've ever written. It's now lost somewhere out there in cyber-space.

* * *

Three men plan a heist in a shady backroom – loot will be stolen, no one will trust each other, and a cheating wife will be thrown in for good measure (her lover? A cop!). What could go wrong? Or more importantly, how long until something goes wrong? Usually, either the planning of the heist or its inevitable unraveling are the most common narrative conceits on which to hang such a thriller – the cosmic certainty of disaster. But here we have a unique gimmick – the hook is not the plot, nor the various machinations that propel the plot, but the way in which the film itself was made. Three directors perform a large scale exquisite corpse, with Tsui Hark writing/directing the first thirty minutes or so of the film before passing it along to Ringo Lam, who in turn sends it to Johnnie To for the grand finale. If the heist gone horribly awry genre is middling and far too familiar, the opportunity to see three distinctive visual styles juxtaposed together in such a fashion is, as far as I know, entirely unique – most omnibus films function as discrete units, or if there are recurring characters/motifs, will still stop to identify who is doing what at any given moment. Interestingly enough, despite no identification of “chapter stops,” even the untrained eye will have no difficulty distinguishing almost exactly where each director transitions to the next. This is a master class in the practical applications of wildly different, and ultimately wildly opposed, film technique.
Hark’s madman, anything-goes aesthetic has, in recent years, began to show its seams. What was once a wild, razors edge approach to narrative and visual story telling has become simply incomprehensible. Canted angles, unmotivated zooms, frantic rack focuses and bizarre whip pans have worn out their welcome, and revealed a filmmaker and the end of his tether. David Bordwell’s recent post on the legacy of Hark reveals the limits of his tenuous (and now tedious) tight rope act – what was once fresh, unpredictable and dangerous has turned into one Ghost Story too many, with a few Once Upon a Time’s thrown in for good measure. Hark franchised himself too willingly, and the wild inconsistencies of his last great film, Time and Tide, have come to predominate. Perhaps one would be more forgiving without the context of two superior directors – one good, one great – and an interval of increasingly diminishing returns (I’m sorry, for you and myself, for having sat through Seven Swords and Zu Warriors).
Lam comes off slightly better, his slick, horizontally based compositions gliding the action smoothly across the 2:35 frame (he ensconces where Hark fragments). Tarantino’s appropriation of City on Fire notwithstanding, Lam never reached the heights of a Hark (or Woo, for that matter). His success with low budget, low expectation Van Damme fodder seems both a blessing and curse – Lam sidestepped the downfall of more epically minded directors ala Ronny Yu (who went from Bride With White Hair to Bride of Chucky, alas), but never strived for grandeur in the same way as a Woo or Yuen (again, for better or for worse). Here, Lam is allowed a bit more atmosphere, and his penchant for enclosing the frame in geometric compositions is almost Sternbergian. Sleek architecture creates an atmosphere of constant forward propulsion, as various characters move from point A to point B with acute precision, enveloped in chiaroscuro lighting. His episode culminates in a beautiful dance amidst stoic pillars in an amphitheatre-like parking garage – drama is displayed as if one is on a Grecian stage.
Leave it to Johnnie To to integrate wild abandon and cold architecture into something resembling filmmaking. From his first epic composition, with various characters stacked in depth and filling the widescreen frame, we realize instantly the auteur of Exiled, Sparrow and Breaking News (to name just a few). As our good friend Ignatius has pointed out over at The Auteurs, To is left with the task of synergizing these disparate threads, and he comes through with flying colors. After so much spatial fragmentation, To’s sense of space unifies plot, character and theme into a thrilling conclusion, with a late night shoot-out that rivals the finale of Exiled in aesthetic bliss, plumes of muzzle smoke drifting like clouds over stalks of tall grass. It’s a mesmerizing choice, the confusion and discontinuity of the plot evoked in purely visual terms, while To’s camera reveals a larger pattern of spatial configuration that never disorients the viewer – this is geometry as catharsis.
Perhaps unwittingly, To’s segment serves as a final nail in what was considered the Hong Kong New Wave. The second generation of HK action gods turned their eyes towards Hollywood over a decade ago, choosing Van Damme as their conduit to Hollywood fame and fortune. Fittingly, Hark and Lam (along with Woo) eventually made their way back to HK, but the game was up (I hasten to add that Woo’s Windtalkers might be one of his finest achievements, followed closely by Hark’s Double Team, an absurdist action amalgamation of twenty different movies, disintegrated into one ludicrous master stroke – sublime stupidity. Lam never fared so well, and Woo’s triumphant HK return is the laughable, wannabe-pseudo epic Red Cliff). Regardless, a few minor successes were far outweighed by embarrassment after embarrassment. One-too-many Better Tomorrows later, current HK action has disintegrated into self parody, the visceral action of yesterday replaced by slipshod FX (Yuen Wo-Ping gone digital) and increasingly uninteresting pop stars-turned actor (see, for instance Storm Riders). Wing Chun becomes Her Name is Cat, Fist of Legend turns into Black Mask 2; Corey Yuen has gone to work for Luc Besson while Ching Siu Tung choreographs for Uwe Boll and the recently nationalized Zhang Yimou. Perhaps, like most New Waves, the initial burst of youthful energy and vigor where what mattered most – a sense of daring and anything-goes-not-giving-a-fuck aggressiveness. Such smoke and mirrors can only last for so long before one demands something more – and, as if in a face-off in one of his own films, To is the last man standing.

some 'Joe' talk, with plenty more to come:

2010-09-01T22:51:00.000-05:00

‘APICHATPALME’ screams the headline from last month’s issue of Cinema Scope – something of a victory lap for the venerable underground Canadian institution, spearheaded by the delightfully surly and irascible Mark Peranson. Certainly, they’ve got as much right as anyone (more even) to triumphantly proclaim the first genuine experimental filmmaker to win a Palme d’Or in who knows how long – along with Denis and Tarr, Peransons’ crew has been pushing Lisandro Alonso, James Benning, Lav Diaz, Miguel Gomes, Albert Serra, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhangke and Jean Louis-Guerin long before most of us had ever even heard of them. Champions of the unknown, for sure, and we all owe them a little something for fighting the good fight, as well as doing quite a bit of festival leg work. In other words, if anyone deserves that victory lap, it’s Peranson and Co. The object in question is, of course, Mr. Apichatpong ‘Joe’ Weerasethakul, who’s most recent feature ‘Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives’ just walked off with (arguably) the most prestigious film prize in the world (that it was awarded by a jury headed by Tim Burton is subject to another essay altogether, rife with speculation as to the worn-out Disney shill/whimsy-as-corporate-trademark/man-child’s private motivations).

So is this the year that ‘Joe’ breaks out? It depends. As with most things, who and what you’ve been reading plays no small part. Weerasthakul is not only on his 5th feature film, but has made a number of digital shorts and gallery installations – and while this might not exactly garner the attention of Entertainment Weekly, it aint’ nuthin’ either. In other words, he’s been a major figure for some of us for quite a while. Conversely, the bestowal of the above mentioned, internationally recognized, ‘wow, that guy is hot shit’ trophy is bound to make just about anybody sit up and pay attention (if only for a minute or two). Peranson dubbed his 2010 Canne’s coverage ‘The Year We Made Contact’, a fitting title that suggests a couple of perspectives – not only that of himself and his magazine, but a more general section of cinephilia at large. And if we haven’t quite ‘made contact’ with the mainstream (something that neither Peranson nor Weerasthakul could give a shit about), it’s a shot across the bow nonetheless. More than a few entities have reported on ‘Toronto Star’ critic Peter Howell’s dismissive thoughts on the award winning director after the announcement of the top prize: Scott Foundas expounds: ‘In a jeremiad so hostile to the very notion of alternative cinema that it could have been bought and paid for by a major studio, … Howell assailed Apichatpong’s film for being “so resolutely uncommercial, even Thais can’t figure it out”… He then went on to tsk-tsk Burton for “one of the most political and cynical moves ever from a Cannes jury,” which evidently “wanted to show how cool and cutting-edge they were” by awarding the kind of film destined to be “shunted off to single-screen art houses” and “play to tiny audiences and miniscule box office receipts before vanishing from the minds of all but film critics and the most adventurous of regular film-goers”. Another year, same as the last – I’m reminded of a long chapter in Rosenbaum’s ‘Movie Wars’, in which he chronicles David Cronenberg’s battle against Harvey Weinstein during the 1999 Cannes Festival; Cronenberg was required to defend himself for awarding top prizes to the Dardenne Bros’ ‘Rosetta’, as well as its non-professional cast, while Weinstein bitched and moaned about the festival not recognizing ‘real films’ (i.e. Miramax product). Pick a side. It seems like nothing changes, other than the titles of films and the ‘critics’ talking about them (remember the ‘Film Socialisme’ flap?). Ultimately, I’m not entirely sure how far an ‘us vs them’ attitude is going to get anyone, although I increasingly fear that mainstream studio product won’t rest until it has steam rolled everything in its path. It’s not enough to be the biggest kid on the block, they want to be the only kid on the block.

So here we are on the quickly approaching eve of another TIFF, where ‘Boonmee’ will be screening (and a couple of friends will be viewing), as well as another upcoming edition of CIFF, also where ‘Boonmee will screen (and I’ll be viewing). I’m not sure how ‘cool’ or ‘cutting-edge’ I am, nor how tiny the audience will be when I finally get to see it. I am positive that the film will ultimately play to ‘minuscule box office receipts’, although it is questionable how quickly the film will vanish from the minds of those who see it. I for one can’t stop thinking about ‘Joe’.

Coming Soon:

2010-08-21T13:32:00.001-05:00

Joe:

2010-07-28T15:12:00.000-05:00

Joe:

2010-07-28T15:08:00.000-05:00

The Dinosaur and the Baby:

2010-07-09T00:11:00.000-05:00

'Godard was not satisfied with his own ideas and he said, "Fritz, do you have any ideas how we can end this picture?" I had written something that I had never used, so I said, "How would it be if [I say], 'Murder - killing - is no solution.'" And he loved it. That's how we worked - and it was really very pleasant. I think he is the greatest hope for motion pictures.'

Fritz Lang in conversation with Peter Bogdanovich, on Godard and the making of 'Contempt'

McTiernan Lives:

2010-06-14T00:57:00.000-05:00

If you’ll take a look at the lower right side of your screen, you’ll notice a new ‘essentials’ link (listed conveniently in alphabetical order): allow me to officially introduce Mission: McTiernan. The brain child of yours truly and the estimable Mr. Jake Barningham (and, update, now including the participation of The Auteur’s regular, Sounds/Images proprietor, friend of this here blog, and all around nice guy Ignatius Vishnevetsky), the site is dedicated to, well, John McTiernan, and all things McTiernan related. Spurned on by an early morning screening of The Thomas Crown Affair (recently anointed with a stunning blu ray release), the idea hit us like some foregone conclusion – why on Earth had no one done this yet? Furthermore, why hadn’t we thought of such a thing before now? Despite some box office success, and the occasionally favorable critical notices, no one had, to the best of our knowledge, ever thought to consider McTiernan as an auteur – as if the visual qualities of Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October, DHWAV, and Predator (to name his biggest hits) had nothing to do with him, or, conversely, that those same qualities simply disappeared in films like Basic, The Thirteenth Warrior or Rollerball (to name his biggest commercial/critical disasters).

Nevertheless, during that fateful viewing of Thomas Crown, the revelations came quickly – alternately tight and loose compositions, a propensity for location shooting, an emphasis on converging lines highlighting the horizontal, rhyming placements of figures and objects over separate images, taunt, seemingly effortless editing – it became startlingly clear that this was a major work, criminally under seen and undervalued, as if forgotten (or, more precisely, never heralded in the first place). McTiernan’s ability to navigate the fickle world of large-budget studio filmmaking has led to some undeniable commercial and artistic successes, yet the inevitable downside is equally visible – in Hollywood, you’re only as valuable as you are profitable. The mission became clear: to revisit, rewatch, and in some cases re-evaluate the McTiernan oeuvre, as well as tracking down those unseen (his first feature, Nomads) as well as those lost to that curious limbo of commercial misfires/genre oddities (Medicine Man and Last Action Hero).

On a more personal note, it’s clear to me that John McTiernan was in fact the first director that I recognized as an auteur. Long before the term became a part of my vocabulary, I had nonetheless already realized, to a small degree, what a ‘film by John McTiernan’ was. I had the good luck to see both Predator and Die Hard in theatres in their original releases (1987 and 1988, respectively), and it would be an understatement to suggest just how much of a formative influence this was for a young me – clean and crisp, a lack of fussiness, with solid yet simple narrative through lines (usually of the men-on-a-mission type) that were always subservient to the precision of the image. It must have been around the time of Hunt for Red October that it was somehow brought to my attention that it was a new film by the director of these personal favorites (I hasten to add that these were films that lingered, as the ability to rewatch, to revisit and somehow possess these various movies on video was still a few years away in my home). With the exception of Nomads, and, years later The Thomas Crown Affair, I’ve managed to see every McTiernan film on the big screen at least once, if not several times. I’ve grown up with McTiernan, and erected my own Sarris-like pantheon around him. As a younger man, any and all action films were measured against McTiernan’s accomplishments; I find myself now measuring most any film against McTiernan. Visual grammar seems to no longer exist in big budget studio releases, and by and large, people don’t seem to notice (see also: the rapturous acceptance of Shutter Island)

The point here is not to force comparisons of McTiernan to Hitchcock, or Ford, or Hawks, nor Bresson, Mizoguchi, Mann (Anthony or Michael), Godard, Brakhage or Ozu. The point is, however, that while these filmmakers have had reams of ink spilled on their behalf (and rightly so), an accomplished artist like McTiernan languishes largely in critical obscurity. To that end, we are simply attempting to redress the balance, if only to a small degree. Our focus has started small, with a smattering of screen grabs highlighting visual symmetries/correlations, some thoughts on the very (very) beginnings of several films, a brief visual essay, and a typically idiosyncratic appreciation by Mr. Vishnevetsky on the ‘basics of Basic’. We’ve found a French interview with McTiernan never translated into English (once again, they’re a step ahead – see also James Gray) that Mr. Barningham was kind enough to post, doing as much proof reading as possible. The site is a work in progress, and we hope to steadily amass more material, including more visual essays and, eventually, full length audio commentaries for key films. I’m not entirely sure that the end product is going to somehow magically revitalize McTiernan’s career, nor am I naïve enough to think that our modest endeavor is going to secure him a place in the annals of film history. But we will have tried, at the very least. We love John McTiernan, and we want you to love him too.

Literary Interlude:

2010-06-13T02:40:00.000-05:00

'Like the celebrities who would follow, Gatsby was a symbol of twentieth-century America, where so many were discovering the fairy's wing on which to found their own unreal reality. Decades later, advertisers would invent a motto to accompany the symbol. It came from an oft-shown television commercial of the 1980s featuring a soap-opera actor pitching a pain reliever. 'I am not a doctor, but I play one on TV,' he said. In the same way Gatsby might have said, 'I was not an Oxford grad, but I played one,' or President Reagan might have said, 'I was not a president, but I played one,'... In a culture of personality, playing one was just as good as being one, which threatened to make us a faux society of authors without books, artists without art, musicians without music, politicians without policies, scholars without scholarship.'

Neal Gabler, 'Life: The Movie'

Polanski's Ghost:

2010-06-01T00:28:00.000-05:00

The first thirty minutes or so of Roman Polanski’s ‘The Ghost Writer’ contains some of the most assured, most precise, most exciting filmmaking that I’ve seen all year. We are clearly in the hands of a master here, as Polanski sets up a kind of culmination of all of his thematic concerns in a seemingly effortless manner (that this may in fact possibly be his final film is an unfortunate coincidence). The dialogue free opening is a marvel: a large ferry looms into view, as we cut to an interior shot of the ship. Cars begin exiting, slowly inching around a parked, unmoving vehicle. Attendants begin directing traffic and peering inside the vehicle. Cut to an empty ship, the SUV still motionless. A tow truck removes it, while investigators peer through the windshield and search the undercarriage for bombs (three minutes in, and already a reminder that we live in a post 9/11, post Iraq invasion world). Cut to a limp body washed up on a beach, motionless as waves crash around it: an evocative use of emptiness to suggest death, an overwhelming sense that there is an absence.

We are quickly introduced to Ewan McGregor’s ghost writer (never named in the film, and referred to only as ‘The Ghost’ in the film’s credits) and his agent in a restaurant. As they converse, Polanski refrains from the insufferable ping-ponging effect of shot-counter shot; instead, he lines people up behind his speakers, these figures creating a sharp straight line leading into the background of the shot. A minor detail, perhaps, but consider the effort in assembling these extras, directing them, and choreographing continuous action in the visible background: all of this instead of simply pushing the camera in for tight close-ups of faces.

Polanski moves immediately from the lunch scene to McGregor entering a publisher’s headquarters for an interview (the set design of the building’s foray, all glass and intersecting planes, would delight Assayas). Entering a room with a clearly displeased book editor, Polanski does several things very quickly: the screen is black as the shot begins, the camera placed squarely on McGregor’s back. As he walks away from the camera, light enters the frame, as well as a figure. Without cutting, the camera momentarily pushes in on this new character, before promptly stuttering to the right, introducing another new character. Again, without cutting, the camera pans right once more to reveal a third figure, this one recognizable as McGregor’s agent from the previous scene. It’s a brief sequence, but a highly suggestive one. Polanski has made several things clear with his mise en scene – this world purports to clarity and transparency, yet it is an illusion (the irate editor for one, also the fact that the actual meeting takes place not in the crystal clear world of panes of glass, but behind closed doors, in a windowless room). The precision of the framing is equally suggestive – more than a fascinating bit of manipulating offscreen space, it implies a fundamental instability. Within a certain confined (even claustrophobic) space, the frame can always fluctuate to reveal something new and unexpected (a powerful visual metaphor for the narrative mechanics of a thriller).

McGregor is assigned to begin ghost writing a political memoir for ex-British Prime Minister Adam Lang (a thinly veiled stand in for Tony Blair, embodied with an admirable mixture of bombastic self-awareness and aw-shucks-why-me ignorance by a very game Pierce Brosnan). McGregor travels to the politician’s private island sanctum under the auspices of interviewing Lang, only to become gradually immersed in, then enveloped by, and ultimately consumed in a vague conspiracy involving all sorts of pseudo-Haliburton/Middle East/extraordinary rendition escapades. The notion of private corporations, in conjunction with the US Government, manipulating world events is nothing particularly new. Again, what is fascinating is how Polanski marshals the pat topicality of the screenplay into a compendium of his own personal obsessions. Lang’s island stronghold is one of the great sets of recent cinema – a modernist fortress of sorts (complete with its own media/communications center), it represents a key duality, as well as a particularly dark Polanski joke. Each room of the house is equal parts wall and window. The visual dichotomy is clear: encased, McGregor is allowed glimpses into the outside world (Polanski makes great use of the symmetrical possibilities of the design, a solid gray filling half of the frame while the other half reveals an expansive view of the beach/ocean), but only glimpses: the island is gray, gloomy, foreboding and largely off limits. Polanski’s joke (one that sticks in the throat) is simply this – the vision of a world beyond the walls reveals only another prison, be it one that is larger than his current cell. Ultimately, McGregor’s Ghost is entrapped by a series of enclosing environs, and while some might be larger than others, they lead, inexorably, to the same fate.

* * *
McGregor’s ‘Ghost’ is another in a long line of passive Polanski protagonists. Even when they are investigating, and they almost always are, inevitably the Polanski hero stumbles across something bigger than himself - something that he thinks that he can control, yet ultimately proves far too grand to master. I’m thinking of Nicholson’s Jake Gittes, Depp’s Corso, Hugh Grant’s Nigel, Polanski himself as the hapless Tenant Trelkovsky, Adrien Brody’s Szpilman. Each character initiates, sometimes aggressively and usually against their better judgment, various mysteries and intrigues (even sometimes seemingly solving them, to a point), only to be crushed by the cruel vicissitudes of fate. The Pianist is particularly affecting in this light, as the context is neither supernatural nor a bit of existential ennui, but world historical events that crushed millions. Polanski’s origins have lead to a very specific, clearly defined world view. McGregor’s final destination in the grand, master narrative of political affairs is to remain nameless, his minor victory destined to be lost in a sea of powerful people manipulating events to their own liking.

Godard:

2010-05-28T12:54:00.000-05:00

'Some films that we admire discourage us, 'How can we do any better?' But they're not the best ones. The best films open doors. Cinema seems to start and restart with them. My Life To Live is like that.'

Truffaut, as narrated by Jean Narboni

'It's easy to get anxious about the place of Jean-Luc Godard in our cultural slipstream. He's held a top shelf slot of honor that has seemed unassailable for nearly sixty years, but sometimes I fear that his currency is becoming drastically devalued in our always renovating purgatory of digital 3-D candy corn... It will remain a Godardian world, no matter what comes, but who will know it?'

Michael Atkinson

a recent interview with Godard, courtesy of (and translated by) the indispensable Craig Keller.

'I don't believe in the body of work. There are works, they might be produced in individual installments, but the body of work as a collection, the great oeuvre, I have no interest in it. I prefer to speak in terms of pathways. Along my course, there are highs and there are lows, there are attempts... I've towed the line a lot.'

Godard

The People vs JLG, or, Cannes 2010:

2010-05-26T18:52:00.000-05:00

Another year, another Cannes. Amidst the usual griping (wasn’t last year supposed to be the worst competition line up in recent memory? Or was that the year before?), who would have thought that the big conversation starter would be JLG? The octogenarian has been doing his own thing his own way for so long now, I didn’t think anyone could muster the enthusiasm to feign outrage. Really, at this point who would even be surprised? As it goes, very few people involved in the fracas have actually, you know, even seen the film. Instead, it’s now a debate between ‘ivory tower elitists’ and more practical, level-headed viewers who have just had enough of Godard’s ‘pranks’. Start at Glenn Kenny’s blog, where the comments section has reached unheard of levels of vitriol (and length). Kent Jones stops by to give his usual calm, clear and concise input (it helps that he’s seen the film); Kristin Thompson touches briefly on the topic here, before branching out in another direction about distribution patterns, etc. Godard ‘apologist’ (or is that acolyte?) Jonathan Rosenbaum has some pertinent things to say here. Daniel Kasman has a nice write up here, where he talks about the film itself and not simply the critical conversation (argument, food fight, etc.) surrounding it.

Anyone who knows me or who has visited this space before knows very well my feelings on JLG – simply put, he’s probably the most important living filmmaker we have. Not to say that he’s my favorite – those are two different things entirely. But he’s the artist who has taught me the most about what sounds and images can, at least potentially, mean. He’s an experimenter in the best sense of the word, and like all experimenters, sometimes he fails and sometimes he succeeds spectacularly (frustratingly, sometimes within the confines of the same film). One doesn’t need to know that the factory set of Tout va Bien is modeled after Lewis’s ‘Ladies Man’ set – what is important in the film is linking the factory and the supermarket: the mode of production leading to the mode of consumption. Godard has given me more than I could ever give him, and for that I am grateful. Sure, go ahead and call me a disciple. I don’t mind a bit. I can't wait to see this movie.

HIATUS:

2010-03-09T23:00:00.000-06:00

see you in May friends...

Drumroll Please....

2010-02-15T12:44:00.000-06:00

At long last, I'm glad to finally point you towards the InRo Decade in Review feature. One of the benefits of online writing is the unlimited space, hence some lovely full color graphics and a few words on each title (as opposed to say, the recent Film Comment decade project, featuring a laundry list of titles and a few scattered words to suggest significance or contextualize within larger happenings during the decade). The down side is the lack of pay and the reliance on someone's word, as opposed to a deadline backed up by a paycheck. Nevertheless, I think it turned out pretty well, despite the usual oversights that will always accompany any project of this sort. So scoot on over and check it out. I'm responsible for one of the honorable mentions, as well as numbers 21, 44, 45, 51, 53, 54, 60, 61, 66, 68, 86, 96 and 99. If I'm not mistaken, #'s 100-51 will go live tomorrow, with the rest to follow the day after. I'll update each number as they become available with a link. Big props to Mr. Andrew Alexander Dowd for spearheading and organizing this fairly massive undertaking, as well as taking on a lion's share of the writing duties. You make it look it easy sir.

I suppose this officially puts the decade to rest, at least as far as writing about it goes, but movie love is a full time job. I look forward to the day I glance back at this list and kick myself for neglecting to include some great, as of yet undiscovered talent. Let's keep watching, shall we?

List-O-Mania: The Year (Finally)

2010-02-06T00:38:00.000-06:00

Is it possible to talk about the year in film 2009 without bringing up Avatar? James Cameron’s behemoth has become, as of this writing, the highest grossing picture world wide of all time, and the domestic record (set by his majesty’s own Titanic) is set to fall any day now. Of course, crunching the numbers reveals that only around half as many people that flocked to Titanic have seen Avatar. So what does all of this mean? I’m not entirely sure myself. I’m particularly cautious of zeitgeist criticism (as David Bordwell is fond of saying – which zeitgeist do you want to talk about?), and the notion that Avatar is some kind of game changer akin to the coming of sound, color or Cinemascope is particularly vexing. One thing is for sure – Avatar isn’t doing much in the way of storytelling, character development, or political discourse, nor is particularly interested in changing the grammar of the action-spectacular (for that, you’ll need to go and see Mann and To). Record setting box office grosses being what it is, Avatar is certain to influence a new crop of imitations, while continuing the fad of extra expensive 3D spectacle. Dave Kehr has an essential article in the current Film Comment that talks specifically about the new generation of 3D, as well as its history and formal properties. The article is also a bracing reminder that while the history books are fond of ‘eureka’, ‘lightning-in-a-bottle’ moments, the coming of sound and color went through many incarnations and incremental gradations before becoming the standards that they are today. I have no intention of getting all Bosley Crowther on you; for all I know, 3D might very well eventually become normalized, just another tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal. As Kehr notes, just such a normalizing was taking place when the studios decided to kill the 3D experiment, releasing Hitchcock’s 3D produced Dial M For Murder in 2D versions and abandoning the process all together. So perhaps what I’m arguing against is not the process itself, but its new found place in the sun courtesy of Cameron’s onerous, simple minded fantasy spectacle.
One thing is for sure: the films that mattered most to me this past year have nothing to do with Avatar or its ilk. I’m not interested in trying to yolk together thirty odd disparate films, but a quick glance reveals more than a few filmmakers concerned with where we are right now, and how we are doing, as opposed to where we can travel with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of special effects. And as an exercise in world-building and fantastical speculation, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has Cameron beat hands down.

So here you are, in no particular order:
24 City (Zhang-ke)
Tokyo Sonata (Kurosawa)
Summer Hours (Assayas)
35 Shots of Rum (Denis)
Bright Star (Campion)
Public Enemies (Mann)
Shirin (Kiarostami)
Two Lovers (Gray)
The Headless Woman (Martel)
The Beaches of Agnes (Varda)
The Limits of Control (Jarmusch)
Lorna’s Silence (Dardenne Bros.)
Treeless Mountain (Kim)
Sugar (Boden/Fleck)
The Sun (Sokurov)
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Gilliam)

That’s a hell of a year, no matter how you look at it. I could have also made room for Soderbergh’s twin experiments Che and The Girlfriend Experience, one an epic spectacle made with the most intimate of means, the other a quick one-off that happens to be a bold statement about capitalism; Rian Johnson’s The Brother’s Bloom, a charming lark of a film that’s ostensibly about con men, but is actually a profound meditation on the nature of storytelling; Steve McQueen’s installation in search of a gallery Hunger; Laurent Cantet’s public schools docudrama The Class; Brillante Mendoza’s pseudo-verite riff on 'Goodbye Dragon Inn' Serbis; Philippe Garrel’s fevered, doom laden romantic mind-fuck Frontier of Dawn; Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are and Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, two ‘kids films’ that sneak in more adult emotional baggage than this adult might be willing to admit; John Hillcoat’s noble failure The Road, Park Chan-Wook’s fuck you to ‘Twilight’ Thirst; Gotz Spielmann’s slow-burn (damn near glacial) knife-twist of a revenge thriller Revanche; and of course, so as not be left out of all the other reindeer games, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (yeah, at this point it's become a bit over hyped. But damn do those action scenes work like gang busters).

One of the things that annoy me most about these kinds of year-in-review type articles is that we frequently forget that cinephilia is a full time job. I saw a couple of hundred films this year that were entirely new to me, although less than half of those were current releases. Of course, whatever isn’t currently in release isn’t in the position to become a hot commodity, and is therefore unlikely to generate much ado about anything. Dave Kehr and The Auteurs are doing their part to redress the balance, with Kehr’s weekly NY Times column on older films hitting dvd (and presiding over the web’s best discussion forum) and The Auteurs maximizing the autonomy of the web to talk about whatever the fuck they feel like. One of the years most important events had nothing to do with what’s new and hot, and everything to do with exploring the past as a way towards pointing to the future. The Gene Siskel Film Center provided a near-exhaustive retrospective of Nagisa Oshima (courtesy of the estimable James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario), a criminally under rated auteur of the Japanese post-war cinema and, along with Shohei Imamura, an essential voice of social critique and protest (Imamura himself got some past due recognition of his own with a Criterion box set release of three hard-to-see early features). Often dubbed the Japanese Godard, Oshima dabbled in a lot of genres, appropriated a lot of styles and ruffled a lot of feathers while exploring deeply embedded themes of psycho-sexual disgust, self loathing, institutionalized violence, post-colonial racism and macho self-aggrandizement, sometimes within a strikingly modern meta-idiom. We’ve still got a lot to learn if we are only now discovering the likes of Oshima while hailing Cameron and his obliteration of the human body (you can take that literally or figuratively).

Way back in 2000, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote an essential essay lambasting critical complacency and the lazy, counter-productive, Hollywood sponsored notion that the cinema was ‘dead’. A decade on, she’s proving more resilient than ever.

Random thoughts:

Seven essential films by female directors? Now we’re talking. More please.

The release of ‘Farber on Film’: an essential collection, poised to bring Farber to a new generation of people hungry for authentic movie talk. His voice is missed, but it lives on.

The death of film criticism carries on unabated, or so I’m told. Myself, I can barely read all the words proliferating wildly all over the web. Yes, much of it is unpaid, and that’s a shame. Long live the passionate ‘amateur’.

Koch Lorber released Godard’s La Chinoise and Le Gai Savoir, and Masters of Cinema got their hands on the long unavailable Un Femme Mariee, while Criterion unleashed definitive editions of Made in USA and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, with Vivre sa Vie on the way. At this point, someone has got to suck it up and get around to releasing Godard’s forgotten Dziga-Vertov Group films. It amounts to a kind of phantom oeuvre, and past critical assessments to the contrary, it’s time to let us decide for ourselves the (potential) value of these (lost?) films.

Hope:

2010-01-28T00:52:00.000-06:00

Francis Ford Coppola in conversation with Adam Nayman in the Fall 2009 issue of Cinema Scope:

"I don't want a career. I had one and I gave it up. I'm just an amateur. I do it for the love of it... At my age, I can afford for film to be a passion and not a business. I approach it with respect, and with the knowledge of how lucky I am to be able to express myself in this beautiful art form that is so young that it still requires experimentation to learn about it. I want to learn about it."

Some thoughts for the New Year. Lets learn.

List-O-Mania, Part 3: The Decade in Music

2010-01-16T18:28:00.000-06:00

Because you demanded it:

Mastadon: Blood Mountain – epic and pulverizing; mixes the heaviness of Leviathan with a proggy intricacy that, arguably, went too far with Crack the Skye. This will make your ears bleed and have you begging for more.
Boris: Pink – epic riffs, and the best balls-to-the-wall guitar rock in ages. Loud and proud.
Wolf Parade: Apologies to the Queen Mary – beautiful pop melodies.
Arcade Fire: Funeral – delicate, wistful arrangements that belie a certain kind of youthful longing. Dances on the edge of twee and heart breaking.
Explosions in the Sky: All of a Sudden I Miss Everybody – each song builds to a glorious, epically crashing crescendo before fading into a mournful silence.
TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain – art nerds decide to mix dance rock with elctro clash, adding just a hint of punk and some whispers of groovy Motown – aka, a fucking blast.
Shellac: 1000 Hurts – jittery, angular math rock; these guys have a precision that’s not unlike being inside the head of a schizophrenic.
Mono: You Are Here – a spacey, ethereal opera.
The Walkmen: You and Me – has a barroom jam session kind of vibe, until they build to a crashing chorus, mixing propulsive drums and brusque howling, all whiskey sours and cigarettes.
Animal Collective: Feels – are they freak folk? Noise rock? Crafty pop song writers hiding their riffs behind layers of sonic debris? Yes, yes and yes.
New Pornographers: Mass Romantic – the decade’s finest power pop, heir to the throne of Big Star.
Deerhunter: Microcastle – My Bloody Valentine lives on – moody trances segue into tentative rock, bordering on the creepy.
Broken Social Scene: S/T – insane Canadian super-group creates the most whimsical pop of the decade. Not surprisingly, the album switches gears about a dozen times, but every moment is spot on.
Liars: Drums Not Dead – dark crooning gradually gives way to explosions of noise and fury, before retreating into moody, opaque soundscapes.
Godspeed You Black Emperor: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven! – It’s not unlike listening to a gathering storm – there’s a slow, low rumbling as the sky darkens, clouds splintering, eventually releasing a violent downpour. Bleak and epic.
Sunn O}}} & Boris: Altar – music for the apocalypse.
Mission of Burma: the Obliterati – indie rock legends take a hiatus for a decade or two, and return with three strong efforts in as many years. This is the best of the three, old school, straight ahead rocking out.
Deerhoof: Runners Four – like Liars, but cuter and bouncier.
Battles: Mirrored – math-y post rock with a psychedelic edge; jam session improvisations grounded by a tight-as-nails rhythm section. These fuckers are having fun.
Pelican: City of Echoes: expertly mixes stoner sludge with prodigious riffs into a doom laden concoction that makes the soul hurt. Their songs build and build and build until you’re standing on the edge of a precipice, tempted to plunge ahead.
Wilderness: S/T – with all due respect to Interpol (who I also like), these guys are the true successors to Joy Division.
Runners up:
Pelican: The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw
Pig Destroyer: Prowler in the Yard
The Sword: Age of Winter
Angels of Light: You Are Him
Uzeda: Stella
Sunset Rubdown: Shut up I am Dreaming
Bloc Party: Silent Alarm
Parts + Labor: Mapmaker
Jesu: S/T
Sigur Ros: Tak
31 Knots: It Was High Time to Escape
Shellac: Excellent Italian Greyhound
Mogwai: Mr. Beast
Low: Drums and Guns

List-O-Mania, Part 2: The Decade

2009-12-14T01:21:00.000-06:00

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)

List-O-mania, Part 1: DVDs

2009-12-07T21:09:00.000-06:00

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.

Tsai's FACE:

2009-11-22T04:06:00.000-06:00

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.

Kiarostami, Round 2:

2009-10-26T01:36:00.000-05:00

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.

Abbas Kiarostami in Chicago:

2009-10-24T14:06:00.000-05:00

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.

Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl:

2009-10-14T12:14:00.000-05:00

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.

Nick Ray: The Living and the Dead

2009-09-28T01:53:00.000-05:00

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.

Triangle

2009-08-24T21:47:00.000-05:00

The once-in-a-lifetime experience of planning, implementing, and then recovering from a wedding (along with miscellaneous computer problems) has managed to curtail most of my film viewing and writing over the summer (yes, honeymoon was totally worth it). But that all changes with this newest post over at the Tisch Film Review. This Hark/Lam/To pseudo-omnibus cum large-scale-exquisite corpse leaves much to be desired as a proper narrative (its structuring gimmick is more compelling than anything that the characters actually engage in on screen), but it does offer a unique movie going experience - three distinct visual styles buttressed up against each other, allowing very specific ruminations on some fascinating aesthetic variations. It doesn't hurt that the film goes out on a high point, courtesy of one of our greatest living filmmakers. Scoot on over and check it out, and as always please feel free to argue.

Marriage:

2009-08-01T16:49:00.000-05:00

"If there's one thing I think I'm sure of, it's the fact that I must marry... I'm pretty sure about this, I think. Yes, it is time I settled down, grew up. There's no choice really: not settling down and not growing up are killing me. I've got to quit it, being young, before it's too late. I must marry... and settle down and raise a family. I must be safe. Christ, safe sounds frightening. Settling down - that seems a bit adventurous, a bit precipitate, to me. Having kids! That's what takes real balls. To become a husband and a father: no you can't get much butcher than that. Yet nearly everyone shapes up to it in the end. I bet you have or will soon. I want it too, I think, in a way.
Of course, something is missing. Ah, you noticed. You are not blind. But it is missing in me, in her, it is missing, it will never be there. We are very well suited. We get along like nobody's business. I must marry. If I don't, I'll just die..."

Martin Amis, "Money"

24 City

2009-07-02T23:46:00.000-05:00

I've got a new post up over at the Tisch Film Review, this time on Jia Zhang-ke's "24 City". It's the second time I'm written on this particular film (my original essay can be linked to through the new post), and it has become increasingly clear (especially after a second viewing) that his films in particular simply speak to me. Anyone who's familiar with my writing knows that the seemingly tenuous line between fact, documentary (never to be confused with fact) and fiction are my favorite breeding ground for critical thought - the dialectical relationship between these modes seems to me the only genuine way to respond to our increasingly complex modern world, with all of its twists and turns being constantly extrapolated through the lens of our most popular artistic medium. The seismic flow of capitalism, which is seemingly in direct conflict with the natural flow of people, has repercussions for us all, and sticking our heads in the sand isn't going to solve anything.

The Limits of Control

2009-06-17T14:49:00.000-05:00

For some reason or another, The Tisch Film Review has allowed me to join their roster, so for the foreseeable future most of my writing will be popping up over there. First up is a piece on Jarmusch's most recent film, The Limits of Control. Despite popular opinion, I was quite taken with it - maybe the 3 or 4 of you who read this little blog of mine can swing on over and argue with me in the comments section.

Essential Reading:

2009-05-30T14:09:00.000-05:00

There's a great interview over at The Auteurs' Notebook with one of my favorite filmmakers, Mr. Olivier Assayas. His most recent film, Summer Hours, is in theatres now, and is an absolute must see. I've also just seen his third feature, Cold Water, generally considered to be his first mature work, and it is a full blown masterpiece. I'm very seriously considering re-watching Boarding Gate - to my mind the least of his features that I've seen. But, as he mentions in the interview, it is very much a film that exists in conversation with his newest. Anyway, lots of food for thought from one of our greatest contemporary directors.

Another Year, Another Cannes

2009-05-24T15:16:00.000-05:00

"...ten feet from my kerbside table the limousines moved on towards the Palais des Festivals between the lines of police and security men. Helicopters circled the Palm Beach headland, waiting to land at the heliport, like paramilitary gunships about to strafe the beachside crowds. Their white-suited passengers, faces masked by huge shades, stared down with the gaze of gangster generals in a Central American republic surveying a popular uprising. An armada of yachts and motor cruisers strained at their anchors two hundred yards from the beach, so heavily freighted with bodyguards and television equipment that they seemed to raise the sea..."
"...the film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep. For a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a facade, the largest stage set in the world. Without realizing it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles. As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminal ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit."

J.G. Ballard - "Super-Cannes"

JLG/JLG

2009-04-16T19:33:00.000-05:00

“He is not a man for small talk but he is a remarkably acute observer so one always feels a little bit on guard. He can be extremely funny but it is a mordant wit that keeps one constantly on guard… I always felt that he had the very highest comprehension of beauty and that he had made a lot of sacrifices to preserve the purity of his vision. And there was also a sense, which went with this, of a monastic anger. But above all there was a tremendous integrity: a total commitment to his art.”
Mary Lea Bandy, Curator of Film and Media at MoMA, on Godard

Is there any filmmaker who continues to capture the imagination of the cinephile in quite the same way as Godard? A figure who’s importance, longevity, intimidating body of work and breadth of knowledge continues to intrigue, anger, and above all, stimulate? A figure who has engendered continuous debate, reams of articles, appreciations both scholarly and colloquial, books upon books of sifting, collating, numbering, schematizing – a constant trying-to-make-sense-of? A figure who encapsulates several centuries worth of literature, history, philosophy, and at least one century worth of our preferred art form – the film. Who else has bent the medium to their own will - a mysterious, enigmatic will at that - in much the same way? Perhaps the elusive filmography of Welles comes closest, although even that entails more detective work and conjecture that an actual investigation of available evidence. By which I mean to say, is there any filmmaker who’s work we’ve yet to grasp in all its complexity even though, hypothetically, it is available? After all, we’re not talking about the elusive, presumed non-existent versions of Greed or Ambersons.
This month brings a bevy of Godard ephemera and controversy – I, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way. Up first is the “JLG in USA” dvd that is included in the most recent issue of The Believer (one of those token annual issues where clever writers who don’t know much about film purport to teach us something about it – all while being, you know, personal and entertaining. It is one of the many branches of the McSweeney’s publishing tree). The disk includes a 40 min documentary by Mark Woodcock entitled “Two American Audiences”, a 50 min collage film called “Godard in America” (basically a pastiche of Godard’s style, with interview footage and scenes from La Chinoise chopped together), and an 8 min trip down nostalgia road called “A Weekend at the Beach With Jean-Luc Godard (notable mainly for glimpses of Jean Pierre Gorin’s killer back tattoo, a shirtless Godard sporting his trademark shades and funny straw hat and an awkward Wim Wenders arriving on the sand in long sleeved shirt, baggy slacks and suspenders, as well as director/narrator Ira Shneider admitting that he had seen some of Godard’s films and found them insufferable, therefore treating his video portrait with a certain level of sarcasm). The real find is two thirty minute episodes of The Dick Cavett Show, featuring Godard in conversation with the obviously perplexed and increasingly uncomfortable Mr. Cavett (Cavett’s brief introductory remarks are interesting only inasmuch as witnessing a complete square stumbling over some of the more notable achievements of the New Wave – witness his inarticulate mumblings on the “jump cut”, or his inquiry as to why the French like Jerry Lewis).
Cavett and Godard are speaking on the occasion of the New York release of Everyman for Himself, usually regarded as Godard’s return to commercial filmmaking after the lost Dziga Vertov period (anyone who has seen the film knows that it is, as usual, resolutely un-commercial). Cavett asks about the nature of his comeback, or if one can indeed call it a come back. Godard: “in a sense, because I never went away – maybe I was pushed away. To me, I’d rather say, what is the reverse of comeback? Come forth?”
Other bon mots – “It is hard work, like any kind of work today (on prostitution).”
“I think woman are more natural today than men – I think they have better ideas”
“The problem with the man (Jacques Dustronc in Everyman For Himself) is he has no speed – one of the women is going too fast, the other one too slow, and the man is just not moving. And then maybe this is the despair.” When Cavett asks about distance, presumably referencing the Brechtian influence that most critics speak of in relation to Godard, he replies “I think much less (distance) now, I’m coming much closer, less distance. To look at things, you have to go very far for the possibility of taking a look of it. If you go too close, it is like advertisement – you are so close to the products, you don’t see anymore, you just have to name it …maybe I was too close in the beginning, then I went too far, and now it is more, there is more justice.”
“To me there is no real difference between image and sound, they are just tools… you have to listen to the image and look at the sound.”
“In movies, you ask to movie a certain amount of things, that you never ask to poetry, painting, music. I wonder why?” Cavett answers, visibly confused – “I don’t know.”
“The audience has more responsibility in the making of the movie, much more responsibility than the making of tv.”
Cavett: “You use slow motion in a way I find, unusual.” Godard: “I’m glad. On the use of this unusual slow motion: to slow it down, just to have the time to look, to have a look. To take your time to look at what you are doing. Then you discover, this movement, whether it can be a jab or whether a caress. And then, well probably I was not capable enough of doing it completely. The shot is too long, maybe should be a change of angles or timing. But I kept it that way…. whether too sentimental or too violent, and it had to be both.”
Godard on Jerry Lewis: “It’s a good sign, when good people go, have to go into exile from their country, it means there is something good in them.”

I’m not going to transcribe the entire hour long interview – that would be tedious for us both, and besides, you should just track down the magazine for yourself. There are some great bits that I’ve left out where Godard praises Scorcese, denigrates Hall Ashby and Woody Allen on his use of black and white in Manhattan, and praises Charles Bukowski (!) for his help in subtitling his most recent feature. Godard also mentions his desire for Norman Mailer to “present” his films, rather than subjecting them to the subtitling process (as we know, Norman Mailer would be at the center of Godard’s King Lear project just a few years later)

My interest in this material is largely to illustrate Godard’s constant traversing of binaries – identified most simply, and earnestly, with his deceptively simplistic maxim: all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun - the first set of twos. He is obsessed with Hollywood, yet rails against it. Image/Sound, Words/Symbols, Film/Video (Numero Deux or, the history of film as a video, as in the Histoire(s) du Cinema), filmmaking/prostitution (Passion), suburbia/prostitution (2 or 3 Things I know About Her), filmmaking/political activism, past/present (as in In Praise of Love, where, ironically, the past is presented as video), filmmaking/television (as in France/Tour/Detour/Deux Enfants, The Dziga Vertov Group films), left hand/right hand (perhaps a nod to Truffaut’s dictum on Welles- “he made films with his right hand and films with his left hand. In the right handed films there is always snow, and in the left-handed ones there are always gunshots”; see also: Godard’s lecture on shot/reverse shot in Notre Musique, as he passes pictures of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell from his left hand to right hand and back again, which leads us to…), male/female (the mother/whore schema representing a duality within a binary opposition), and, inevitably, love/sex. (“the director is incapable of seeing the difference between a man and a woman”: Godard is probably describing Hawks, but is perhaps stating something that he himself strives for.) In a very real sense, Godard is a failed dialectician – he investigates dualities but cannot reconcile them (his own autobiographical film is called JLG/JLG, a repetition that is, in this context, highly suggestive). These dualities may be superimposed, a visual/philosophical technique that Godard has grown increasingly fond of, with the superimposition becoming a (advanced?) form of montage, and perhaps an attempt at forcefully obliterating these oppositions. After all, if we could, as in the above example, forget the differences between men and women, then there is hope in forgetting the differences between, say, Israel and Palestine or Modern/Developing/Third World countries. Is Godard the ultimate utopian pipe dreamer? Or a cynical, depressed old man who has grown weary of this world? Another duality, I’m afraid.

For further reading, check out Bill Krohn’s passionate defense of Godard in the most recent issue of Cinemascope. I haven’t read Richard Brody’s new book “Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard”, although I had planned to pick it up as soon as I could find a used copy and save a few bucks. But now I’m not sure – to read Krohn, Brody’s book is a hatchet job, painting the director as an anti-Semite based on mis-readings of his films and dubious research, what Krohn dubs “ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism”. Any biography attempting to grapple with such a legacy is bound to raise someone’s ire – I recall the mixed reviews and fierce arguments that sprung up around Colin MacCabe’s “Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy” upon its release several years ago (a book, I hasten to add, that I found pretty informative, if at times dense with needlessly academic jargon). The collection “Forever Godard” sidesteps most of the issues that plague traditional biographies by virtue of being a more selective grouping of critical essays – as a result, one learns less about the man, but more about the work. It’s all food for thought, and in fairness to Brody, Jonathan Rosenbaum gave the book a favorable review a few months back in the Village Voice, although it was, as I recall, not ecstatic in any way. Unfortunately, I can no longer find it online for verification. In any case, I’ll be heading to the library for a free peek before adding Brody’s book to my Godard shelf.

Carax's "Merde"

2009-03-29T13:42:00.000-05:00

Emerging from the sewers of Tokyo to the strains of Akira Ifukube’s “Godzilla” score, Merde is dirty, unkempt, with long, claw-like finger nails, a bizarre hooked beard and a dead, milky white eye – Denis Lavant strikes an impossible figure, his body capable of contortions and configurations seemingly not possible with regards to normal human physiology. His increasingly violent escapades range from stealing cigarettes and flowers to licking arm pits to, eventually (almost inevitably), fire bombing the Japanese populous with WWII era grenades. A cultural terrorist? The return of the historical memory or the repressed “other”? Lavant returns to his sewer abode, limping past a burned out tank and a strategically placed Japanese rising sun, only to reemerge as a force of pure anarchic chaos. The forces of law and order never far behind, Lavant is eventually captured by Tokyo authorities and put on trial. Coming to his defense is superstar French attorney Jean-François Balmer, who (mysteriously) shares Lavant’s crooked beard, pupil-less eye and mysterious language (a language based on grunts and violent gesticulations, which leads to a hilarious, minutes long, subtitle free conversation between the two – it is Marx’s Bros inspired lunacy). Director Leos Carax then embarks on a series of familiar pop culture tropes – religious cults spring up in honor of Lavant’s “Merde”, his image is plastered on posters and tee shirts in a striking, black and white print that resembles a generation of Che merchandise, action figures, etc. But Lavant remains incorrigible – unrepentant, he’s given the death penalty and hung, only to then be resurrected. The film ends with a joking text, a taunt of future installments – coming soon, “Merde in USA” (Godard would approve).

Merde as punk rock Jesus Christ? Perhaps it is Carax himself, returning from a decade in the wilderness to provoke once again. The victim of a series of follies – some of which might have been his own doing – Carax seemed to disappear after the hugely expensive, and commercially unsuccessful, Lovers on the Bridge, which led to a lengthy gap in production, before returning with Pola X, another commercial and critical flop (that Pola X might remain his masterpiece, a highly personal, dense experience full of weird symbols, codes, and genre mutations, all in the service of a main character literally dying for his art work, led some people to question Carax’s sincerity, if not his sanity. It remains their loss). A decade long separation for Lavant and Carax; it is difficult for me to separate the two, Lavant long Carax’s preferred on screen surrogate, and one who has gone from boy-like innocence in the throes of first love (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood) to a an old man (Denis’ Beau Travail), his body chiseled out of granite, his face creased with lines that seem the result not of aging but of a particularly brutal knife fight. Lavant’s initial rampage as Merde – a long, graceful backwards tracking shot down a Tokyo sidewalk, Lavant seemingly finding his feet for the first time; stumbling, but a graceful stumble – the movement, of the human body and of the camera, harkens back to Bad Blood - a jubilant, younger Lavant, in a moment of ecstasy, cart wheeling, skipping, jumping, running down a Parisian sidewalk, Carax’s camera barely able to keep up to this fierce explosion of pure energy, this little ball of fury that has a name. Carax himself seems drunk with the possibilities of the camera, indulging in long tracking shots, split screens, extreme close ups and more meditative wide shots – it is almost as if he is reacquainting himself with an old lover, this camera that he hasn’t seen, or touched or caressed in far too long. I look forward to Merde in USA – lets just hope it doesn’t take another decade before it happens.

Some News:

2009-03-12T18:58:00.000-05:00

I don't plan on turning this little site into a clearing house for news, but several things have happened in the last week that seem worthy of discussion:

-after the news several weeks ago of New Yorker Films untimely demise, the first question on everyone's mind was what happens to their film holdings? With the advent of home video, people might forget that some companies still posses, and occasionally distribute, actual 35mm film. In point of fact, New Yorker Films itself was bought out some time ago by a larger company riddled with debt, which in turn used New Yorker's rich film holdings as collateral on loans. When the collectors called in their marker and no one had any money, said library became up for grabs. A recent post at Dave Kehr's site has details on the upcoming auction, in which films can apparently be bought individually or en mass. We'll see who steps up to the plate (or if any one actually has the funds to do so). In the meantime, I would assume that the company's dvds are, for all practical purposes, out of print, so snatch them up if you see them. Yes, they aren't exactly at Criterion levels of digital excellence, but sometimes the films themselves are simply worthwhile enough.

-more disturbing news for us beleaguered cinephiles - Kent Jones has resigned his position as associate director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I wasn't aware of any behind the scenes tumult until this news dropped almost literally out of the blue (Jones himself was recently posting on Dave Kher's site about an upcoming Robert Mulligan series that he seemed particularly proud of). According to Glenn Kenny, who has spoken with Film Comment (the magazine of the FSLC) editor Gavin Smith, the resignation will not alter Jone's status as the magazine's key contributor (sorry Amy and Olaf, but it's true). Here's the original Indiewire story, as well as the comments page on Kehr's site and Some Came Running. David Hudson's site also collates some related links, so go there as well.

-two articles over at The Moving Image Source: first up, critic Michael Atkinson eulogizes vhs. I assume that anyone roughly my own age got most of their film education through these little hard plastic rectangles, and I must admit I'm sad to see them go (I've still got a few hundred of them stacked up on shelves in my office). Anthony Kaufman's piece reports on the more pressing concern of films that get lost in the shuffle from one format to another. As I brought up in my last post on New Yorker Films, there is a persistent myth, brought about by ignorance coupled with studio logic, that anything and everything is available to the home viewer. Kaufman quotes Dave Kehr, that of the over 150,000 titles listed on TCM's list of American films, less than 4 percent are available in any format for home viewing. Dire straits indeed.

-a recent piece from Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent has, for lack of a more congenial term, really fucking pissed me off (it's my blog, and I'll curse if I want to). Macnab proffers the thesis that the French New Wave, on the eve of an academic conference celebrating its 50th anniversary, has lead, irreducibly, to decades of inferior films, filmmakers and insurmountable expectations. That is, new generations of European filmmakers are subjected to the standards of the New Wave and "found wanting", to which Macnab suggests a casting off of those standards - his deduction? That the young turks are now venerated old masters, therefore their railing against a "cinema of quality" has lost its validity. Really, go a head and read the article. It's here.

Back? Good. Pissed off? Me too.

I'm particularly fond of the following: "meanwhile, new French directors are burdened with a sense of expectation that they simply can't meet. Whether Leos Carax, Mathieu Kassovitz or the bearish old Jean-Claude Brisseau, these film makers are not simply judged on what they've done but their work is assessed (and ultimately found wanting) through the prism of the past." Poor old Kassovitz, who followed up his international breakthrough La Haine with a tepid Hollywood style thriller called The Crimson Rivers before jumping ship to America, where he has made two masterpieces in a row - the Halle Berry vehicle Gothika and the Vin Desiel mega-hit Babylon A.D. But perhaps these films failed not on their own (virtually non-existent) merits, but because they just simply can't live up to the expectations of the New Wave. Brisseau and Carax, on the other hand, seem to be making whatever it is they want, and on their own terms. Carax's bad boy reputation, obscure working methods and huge budgets have done as much to curtail his career as anything else, and unlike some of the venerated New Wave masters that he is indebted to, Carax's entire filmography is readily available on home video (we certainly can't say the same thing about much of Godard, almost all of early Chabrol and Rivette himself, the most underrepresented of the whole group). Brisseau, meanwhile, is producing film after film of pretentious art house soft core porn (although Secret Things and The Exterminating Angels, his last two features, are good for some titillation and inadvertent laughs).

Macnab sums up with a hell of an ending - "when all the academics assemble in London in March and April to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Nouvelle Vague, you just hope that they will spare a moment to reflect on the movements checkered legacy. Over the last half century, there have been many drab films made in the name of the New Wave... that everybody today still looks back to Godard and Truffaut suggests how bereft of ideas European filmmakers have been since the days of Breathless." You can almost sense the sneer on Macnab's face when he hisses the word "academic" - good to know that America isn't alone in its rabid anti-intellectualism. As for being "bereft of ideas", a heck of a large generalization, it seems to me that Techine, Assayas, Denis, Desplechin, Chereau, Nolot, Cantet, Noe and Breillat are doing just fine for themselves. Perhaps Macnab has simply never gotten over Truffaut's famous disparaging remarks about the British film industry, something along the lines of a certain incompatibility between the terms "cinema" and "British". To which we might now add, a certain incompatibility between the terms "intelligent criticism" and "British".

Obituary:

2009-02-25T00:03:00.000-06:00

The word began to spread last week, and was made official on Monday, that venerable distributor New Yorker Films was going under. It's hard to imagine the impact the company made in just its first few years, way back in 1965, well before the advent of home video and, later, dvd, when film was still watched in theaters and projected off of, um, film. They released a number of now established classics - films by Akerman, Herzog, Bresson, Lanzman, etc. Just a quick glimpse at my own video shelf reveals about two dozen of their cassettes, and about a dozen of their dvds (including films by Denis, the Dardennes, Resnais, Godard, Sang-soo, Zhangke and Kiarostami) . Indeed, the transition from video to digital perhaps revealed the first signs of an impending decline, if not out and out collapse - a number of their holdings never made the jump from one format to the other, either through lack of care, concern or rights retention. As point of reference, their video releases of Bresson's The Devil Probably and A Gentle Woman have not only not been released on dvd by them, they have in fact not been issued on dvd by anyone at all in this country.
Another sign of the times? Not quite - even before our current financial woes, distributors were going under left and right (Think Film, Palm Pictures, Wellspring, etc). More a sign, then, of the shifting tides of the state of film itself. As fewer and fewer companies release fewer and fewer films, even one financial disappointment can spell certain doom. Add into the mix higher budgets and increased advertising dollars for those few films, in addition to shrinking exhibition opportunities, and you've got a near suicidal business plan. So what's the concerned cinephile to do? Your guess is as good as mine. Smaller companies like the recently founded Benten Films are trying to carve out a little corner of the market on their own modest terms, more a labor of love than anything else, while Koch Lorber and IFC continue to release worthwhile films, although I fear to increasingly diminishing returns. While Washington fumbles about with its bailout plans and the bankers wait with baited breath, I'll be mourning (in private, with a minimum of fuss - a state that us increasingly marginalized film lovers are becoming more and more familiar with).

Oshima @ The Film Center

2009-02-09T03:41:00.000-06:00

“The problematic nature of Oshima’s work arises from the question: what is the relationship between this me and the struggle out there?”
Noel Burch, “To the Distant Observer”

“Film critics, film festivals, film magazines - they are all too obsessed with the latest thing, the cutting edge, the most incredible new discovery. Retrospectives are disappearing from film festivals and slipping into the walled-up tombs of museums, archives, libraries and cinémathèques. You can't read about an old movie - not even one by Rossellini or Borzage - in an issue of Film Comment or Cinema Scope these days unless it either a. is touring in a roadshow, b. is the object of a fabulous print restoration, or c. has just been released in an expensive dvd box set. Meanwhile, the fashions flush in and out: Wong Kar-wai, Sokurov and Kiarostami are yesterday's news, as we greedily leap upon Gomes and a couple of Filipinos.”
Adrian Martin, “Rank and file: The (re)discovery of William Klein”

I can’t bring myself to totally disagree with Adrian Martin and his above rant on criticism and the desire to turn learning into a marketable “event” – such is the nature of capitalism and commodities. I said something similar myself in the introduction to my end-of-year best list (a tradition that, in itself, seems to typify this desire to stay on “the cutting edge”). But I’m surprised by his tone – for one, my past experiences with Martin’s writings reveal an engaged, funny and above all optimistic critic, and second: that this kind of tirade does a certain dis-service to the magazines he singles out for derision. They happen to be two of my favorites, and, while both are guilty of the occasional hype mongering, both magazines, as institutions, have always struck me as the kind of film coverage we so desperately need more of. Furthermore, Martin’s dismissal of Film Comment doesn’t take into account their regular columns by Guy Maddin or Alex Cox, always dedicated to obscure past oddities that have been largely forgotten by the culture at large, or Cinemascope editor Mark Peranson’s peculiar blend of enthusiasm and anti-establishment curmudgeon (and since I'm unfamiliar with "Gomes" or these "couple of Filipinos", I'm looking foward to yet another avenue of untapped possibilities).
If the situation at “museums, archives, libraries and cinematheques” is really as dire as Martin would have us believe, thank god we Chicagoans have The Film Center. Their current retrospective of Nagisa Oshima is probably the first major event of the new year (woops, there I go) and indicative of the Center’s dedication to the oeuvres of key directors - about this same time last year saw a near complete retro of Imamura films, and their late-spring de Oliveira series was, while far from exhaustive, an indispensable primer for one of the major underappreciated figures in world cinema. Not coincidently, and perhaps further evidence for Martin’s discouragement, the de Oliveira series was accompanied by a lively essay in the pages of Film Comment by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Even more damning, the current Oshima series was preceded by a career assessing essay by, yes, Rosenbaum, in the pages of Art Forum. I happen to know that both directors are Rosenbaum favorites - he’s been writing about them in some capacity or another for years. It seems clear that it’s the magazines in question that needed some kind of up-to-the-minute, present tense reason for being interested in the careers of these particular directors. Regardless, anything that can drum up interest in films that aren’t The Dark Knight or more mindless Oscar predictions is all right in my book.

I’ve only seen three of Oshima’s features, and virtually no one can claim to have seen all of his work, which includes numerous documentaries and assorted television works (none of which, to my knowledge, are part of this series). I offer here some thoughts on two films encountered during the second week of the Film Center’s two month program, and hope to be able to catch at least six more by the end of February. Most critics familiar with Oshima agree that he is something of a stylistic chameleon, even if his thematic concerns (a kind of antagonistic, anti-social pedagogue) remains relatively consistent. Seeing Pleasures of the Flesh (1965) and In the Realm of the Senses (1976) back to back on a Saturday afternoon goes some ways towards validating this generalization. To my mind, both films present a soured, misanthropic view of society, which the two lovers of Senses struggle against - although in Flesh it extends to every character in the narrative. I’m not familiar enough with Oshima’s body of work to claim any kind of special insight, but I’m interested in several specific choices he makes in each film, and how those choices inform each other. Flesh is shot in a beautiful 2:35 aspect ration, the widest of widescreens. He alternates between wide open spaces that obscure characters with intrusions into the foreground, or, conversely, cramping multiple characters into one section of the frame, leaving the rest in a kind of negative space limbo. Whether obscuring an action or face, or creating a claustrophobic clumping of characters into clean, crisp straight lines (the protagonist’s modern apartment), both kinds of compositions hide something from the viewer while simultaneously revealing a character’s state of mind or physical condition. The contours of the plot are too outrageously convoluted to be fully revealed here (although in the film, it is repeated several times, almost as if Oshima is making sure late-comers will be up to speed), but it involves a teacher and his unrequited love for a pupil – he kills her rapist, who is trying to blackmail her family and ruin her good name. Once the deed is done, the pupil marries another man, sending our teacher into a serious funk. Meanwhile, he is blackmailed into concealing embezzled government money, which he must return once his blackmailer is released from jail. Our teacher decides instead to spend all of the money in one year and then kill himself before the embezzler/blackmailer gets out of jail. Anyone familiar with Vertigo will guess what happens next – he hooks up with women that resemble his lost love, showering them with money, gifts and fancy apartments. And that’s just the first thirty minutes or so.
In the Realm of the Senses is an entirely different beast, at least formally speaking. Shot in the relatively more cramped ration of 1:85, Oshima discards the horizontal emphasis of scope, along with the accompanying negative space – instead, we get something of a tableau style, with multiple figures “stacked” in space, their various movement choreographed to retain legibility within various levels of focus. Sidestepping the ever present “what is pornography?” issue, it seems likely that In the Realm of the Senses has become Oshima’s best known feature almost entirely due the controversy surrounding its explicit, hyper sexual content (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is probably the second best known, presumably because of the presence of David Bowie).
Senses can barely conceal its disgust at society – the two lovers abscond to a small room where hey indulge their every sexual whim, only occasionally venturing outside to earn money or buy food – eventually, their outdoor excursions simply turn into extensions of their love making. Other characters comment on their shocking behavior – clearly, Oshima is interested in a didactic kind of anti-moralizing. If the intense, non-stop sex in the film starts off as liberating, it eventually disintegrates into a kind of crazed dementia – each partner demands more and more of the other, and they threaten to consume each other. That the man concedes to his own demise, in fact making himself complicit in his own murder, is presented by Oshima as the only logical conclusion for two people who can no longer exist in this world. He leaves it open as to whether this world is worth existing in or not.
To reiterate, I’m no Oshima expert, and on the basis of these two films (I’ve also seen Taboo, but some years ago), I’m not even sure if he is the “master” that Rosenbaum, Burch and James Quandt might have us believe he is. There seems to me limitations to such an acerbic world view, not the least of which is a kind of anti-social belief that we are beyond hope – if the world is a horrible place, and always will be, then what’s the point? Senses apocalyptic ending is almost romantic, in a sick kind of way, but Pleasures of the Flesh is particularly unsatisfying in its final moments. Like a kind of twisted variation on a Twilight Zone episode, fate conspires against our teacher in an avalanche of ironic futility – he finds out that his blackmailer has died in prison, meaning he would never have to give the money back. Unfortunately, he’s spent it all already, just before his long lost love come crawling to him, desperate for a loan, ready and willing to subjugate herself to him. He’s then implicated in a murder that he didn’t commit, fingered by his old student and woman of his dreams, only to inadvertently confess to the murder he actually committed. Used up and empty, our protagonist has played his part in Oshima’s cosmic dance of futility. It is an interesting question, and one that critic Robin Wood discusses with some frequency – does violence erupt logically from the perceived break down of society, or do the two in fact inform and perpetuate each other? Or, to put it another way, do we in fact have the right to be violently angry? I look forward to delving deeper into Oshima, without any pre-conceived notion that these mysteries will be resolved/reconciled.
Coming up next, Cruel Story of Youth (1959) and Night and Fog in Japan (1960).Cruel Story follows a group of disaffected young people in a bombed out, post-WWII landscape, and critic Dave Kehr describes Night and Fog as a stylistic precursor to Godard’s Maoist period – color me excited.

2008 Top Ten (or so)...

2009-01-25T18:02:00.000-06:00

In the mad rush to stay on the cutting edge, we sometimes forget that cinephilia is a fulltime job. While a huge number of end-of-the-year-best lists have come down the pipe line (and here’s another), most of us tend to scrutinize the previous year in contemporary, present-tense terms. Certainly, this is understandable: as a kind of postmortem, it can be useful to see where we’ve been, where we are going, and who has emerged on the scene: those occasional figures that come out of nowhere and shock us with their originality and insight – we might call them artists. But before diving into the year in the strictly present tense, I must confess that some of the best times I had this year in a theatre - the most educational, the most entertaining and the most edifying – didn’t necessarily have anything to do with what we might call “now”. As I hope the below list will illustrate, I’m not deriding the year’s crop of current film, nor am I bemoaning some state of current affairs - I couldn’t stand to encounter yet another “not as good as 2007” list – far from it. But I think it is massively important to recognize the experiences that enrich our film knowledge and allow us to interact with, and communicate with, a kind of past-tense.

With Oscar night right around the corner, the media-industrial complex would like to have us believe that there are only 5 or 6 movies worth talking about for the next month (although there doesn’t seem to me much to discuss - certainly, they don’t offer much to think about). But 2008 brought a series of masterpieces, week in and week out, to the Gene Siskel Film Center, courtesy of Jonathan Rosenbaum and his First/Great Transition series. I can’t think of any place I would have rather been during those Wednesday nights, soaking in Scarface, The Big Sky, Shadows, Playtime, Mr. Freedom, The Rules of the Game, Sylvia Scarlett, Make Way For Tomorrow, Man’s Castle, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!, amongst two dozen others. It is an excellent reminder that not everything is available for consumption on home video (the Mizoguchi, Klein and Hawks, for starters), and that even the films that are readily available still have a power on the big screen that’s missing from even the most high tech home system. Anyone who lives in Chicago and doesn’t take full advantage of such programming is missing out.

My vote for the best dvd release of the year is Sony’s “Films of Budd Boetticher” box set. Five films, all starring Randolph Scott, all set in a dusty, barren landscape that is the American Frontier. Not one of the films clocks in at longer that 78 minutes, but the complexity and briskness of the storytelling puts the current Oscar bait White Elephants to shame. While I might complain about people watching films on dvd instead of on film, one has to admit that the sheer number of gems that are getting released has deepened our collective knowledge of film history in an age when repertory programming has all but ceased to exist. Certainly, this release will allow Boetticher’s reputation to sit along side Ford, Hawks, Walsh and Mann as one of the key masters of the Western genre.

I was also extremely excited (thanks Jake) to finally visit The Nightingale, an alternative screening venue right off of the Milwaukee Blue Line. Closely aligned with Patrick Friel’s White Lights Cinema and Gabe Klinger’s Chicago Cinema Forum, the space is a triumph of small scale, DIY inventiveness. I attended a screening of Lewis Klahr’s experimental animation, themselves a stunning example of no budget, hand crafted and deeply personal avant-garde film making. My one New Year’s resolution, and it should be easy to keep, is to attend as many programs here as possible. There’s a palpable sense of community and discovery that goes hand in hand with these almost secretive, off the beaten path screenings, and it’s always encouraging to know that one is not alone.

It’s always difficult to make a broad assumption about why one likes what they do – there’s no easy, overarching frame work that will easily encapsulate everything that’s going on in the world or why we respond to one film and not another. If some of my favorite films of the year seem esoteric, several are simply great entertainments that have fallen through the cracks. I think people largely limit what they are willing to see by blindly following publicity of one form or another, and without large advertising budgets, totally accessible and user friendly films get smothered by blockbusters or mini-majors that have some kind of dubious cultural allure attached to them. It can be a lose/lose situation for a lot of films that don’t easily fit into predetermined notions of “entertainment” or “art”, at least in the sense that “art” increasingly means “pseudo-significance”. I saw a lot of films this past year, and these are the ones that meant the most to me. I can only hope that my enthusiasm goes some ways towards highlighting the ones that got away, and, if cinephilia could be considered along the lines of always playing catch up – catching up to the past, as it where – the we’ve all got a lot of work to do. I, for one, can’t wait.

Still Life

Dong

24 City (Jia Zhangke): a banner year Zhangke fans, with the (belated) release of Still Life and several screenings of 24 City during the Chicago International Film Festival. Dong, something of a companion piece to Still Life (shot around the same time, using the same locations, although more straightforward in its documentary ambitions), is available on the just released dvd version of Still Life as an extra feature (I fear that the film’s relegation to supplemental material might insinuate that it is somehow lesser than Still Life – this is not the case at all. I would argue that the two films create a fascinating dialectical conversation about similar subject matter, and Dong is, in its own right, essential). Zhangke strikes me as a filmmaker for right now, in much the same way that Godard encapsulated the 60’s and Kiarostami the 90’s – in each case, these filmmakers were aware of what it meant/means to be part of the world in a particular moment, in all of its complexity. The shifting current of commerce has radically altered our world’s landscape, both literally and figuratively, and it is these seismic shifts and the resulting displacement of huge masses of people that fascinates Zhangke. He also intuitively understands how the past and present commingle into a tapestry, to the point that one cannot simply dismiss out right a history of communism as “bad” and a capitalistic future as “good”. We usually associate “progress” with a positive connotation, but Zangke views it with hesitancy and distance – what is progress for some is eradication for others.

Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa): I’m not sure I can agree with the critical assertion that Tokyo Sonata is a huge change of pace for Kurosawa – he’s still obsessed with the apocalypse, but here he has located it deep in the heart of a typically dysfunctional family. The film’s sense of ennui and isolation hark back to the aimless youth of Bright Future, and a left turn late in the narrative threatens to turn the film into one of his horror efforts. But Kurosawa ends the film deftly, with a musical performance that leaves the film’s mysteries intact while still suggesting that there might be a glimmer of hope after all.

The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette): a relatively accessible Rivette – clocking in at just under two and a half hours, from a classic novel and replete with the period trappings so familiar to the art house – that nonetheless remains elusive and mysterious, almost opaque. Essentially a will-they or won’t-they battle of the sexes, Rivette’s snaking camera constantly shifts our point of view, usually several times within one shot. At least partially, the film is about role playing, a subject so dear to Rivette’s heart, as well as a kind of stubborn insistence on individual autonomy – neither character is prepared to surrender any part of themselves to the other. Rivette infuses the period costume drama with an ambiguous darkness missing from most post-Merchant/Ivory productions (certainly, not to be confused with The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley).

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin): a joyful movie, full of dizzying cinematic invention, about a dysfunctional family and the despair of a deceased son/brother that hangs over it. Only Desplechin could orchestrate such an endeavor, leaving this viewer bowled over by just how much life can be crammed into one film. This would make an outstanding double bill with Rachel Getting Married.

In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin): 2007 introduced me to the great Pedro Costa. I’ll remember 2008 as the year I saw my first Guerin film. A talent to be reckoned with, Guerin possesses an understanding of mood and pace keenly attuned to romantic longing. Mr. Alex Dowd has written eloquently about the film here, certainly better than I’m able to.

The Witnesses (Andre Techine): Techine continues his one man mission to chart a counter history of contemporary life and love – his is a sexually polymorphous world where there are no real distinctions between gay or straight, just human beings living in a sometimes beautiful, sometimes uncaring world.

Wall-E (Andrew Stanton): the year’s most humane entertainment, pessimistic about what we have done and where we might wind up, but optimistic about what we are capable of as human beings. Those giant binocular eyes reflect back more about us than we might care to admit, but see things we desperately need to embrace.

The Pool (Chris Smith): documentarian Smith tries his hand at a fiction feature and seems to have finally arrived as a fully achieved artist. American Movie and Home Movie always struck me as deeply conflicted works, coming dangerously close to mocking their quirky subjects while trying to simultaneously celebrate their uniqueness. With The Pool, Smith lets his story unfold naturally, with an eye for letting scenes play out in real time. Far from the third-world porn of City of God and its ilk, here we get a genuine sense of what it’s like to be poor, but not miserable - preparing a bed roll to sleep on the floor, packing all of ones possessions into an impossibly tiny knapsack, washing sheets by hand and hanging them to drip dry, scrubbing a bathroom floor on your hands and knees, or hustling on the street selling plastic bags to tourists. The titular pool undergoes several transformations as free floating metaphor, first as a symbol of wealth and longed for upward mobility, then as a mysterious, portentous symbol for an undisclosed tragedy, and finally a static, unquantifiable object to watch over, as unknowable as the future.

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant): Van Sant made two films this year. One of them is very good. The other is a masterpiece.

Reprise (Joachim Trier): probably the best film I’ve ever seen about being a young artist terrified of putting themselves and their work out there for the world to see (and judge). It’s also got the best use of a Joy Division song that I’ve come across. Trier gets it, plain and simple.

Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme): Demme is always at his best when he allows himself to observe and linger over ordinary events, hence the perverseness of his last couple of remakes. But he’s been plugging away on documentaries at the same time, constituting a kind of parallel shadow career. It is these docs (Man From Plains, Heart of Gold, Storefront Hitchcock, The Agronomist) that reveal his real strengths and seem to have informed most of his aesthetic decisions involving Rachel Getting Married.

Frownland (Ronald Bronstein): an extreme, if logical, end point for the navel gazing “mumblecore” pseudo-movement. Amy Taubin did a pretty good job hammering the final nail into this particular coffin, with a special distaste for Joe Swanberg, in a Film Comment essay some months back. But Bronstein’s film accomplishes essentially the same thing, albeit with less eloquence and a grating sense of humor that quickly goes overboard into a mesmerizing train wreck of neurosis and alienation. The film asks us to spend a couple of hours with quite possibly the most unlikable character is recent memory (think woody Allen minus the gags and artistic pretension and ten times more annoying). As critic JR Jones has written: “Like its protagonist the film is difficult to watch, but it’s even more difficult to forget, asking us to locate the limits of our humanity.”

Bachelor Machines Part 1 (Rosalind Nashashibi): read about it here.

O’er the Land (Deborah Stratman): read about it here. I’ll add here only how excited I was that Ms. Stratman got her film accepted into Sundance - it is most likely the best film playing there this year. Here’s hoping the coming year greets her with even more success.

Gran Tarino (Clint Eastwood): a lumbering sledgehammer of a film – Eastwood isn’t much of a thinker, but he feels deeply and, at his best, demonstrates an unabashed, simple minded humanism that links him with Fuller. Indeed, this is his most Fuller-esque film, and one that seems to self consciously engage with most of Eastwood’s oeuvre as an actor, director and icon. Eastwood is, for all intents and purposes, his own history of violence, and he slyly subverts our expectations of what a man of action can be capable of. Sometimes crude, sometimes simplistic, but always infused with sincerity and an acute sense of aging – if this is, as has been rumored, Eastwood’s last film, he’s done a helluva job of putting his last will and testament on celluloid.

Sparrow (Johnnie To):

Mad Detective (Johnnie To & Ka-Fai Wai): Sparrow is director To’s lightest film; following on the heels of his epic 2 part Election series and the death obsessed, apocalyptic Exiled, I initially assumed it was slight. But there is a kind of sensual appreciation of movement and the human body that infuses the film with grace, both in concept and execution. A gang of pick pockets fall in love with the same mysterious woman, only to find out that she is using them to escape from her gangster warlord husband. Intimations of the New Wave, and Demy in particular, give the whole production a sense of playfulness, and the intricate wallet-lifting choreography threatens to erupt into a musical number at any given moment. Mad Detective begins as a kind of lark, with a ridiculous premise that presumably sprang from the mind of co-director Wai (he worked with To on Running on Karma, which, up until Sparrow, was the quirky odd-man-out in To’s oeuvre). A gifted detective solves crimes by getting inside the heads of criminals and parsing out various personalities, which To shows on screen by alternating between shots of an actor/character with shots of their alter egos (for instance, a fellow officer who has lost his suspect becomes personified, visually, by a crying child). The premise is funny enough for a while, but To ups the ante by suggesting that the detective is simply insane, and the climax of the film is less about catching the criminal and more about revealing whether or not our hero is crazy or a genius. Both films cement To’s status as a supreme master of choreographing spatial relationships, not just during slam bang action scenes, but the more mundane scenes of conversation, or just simply sitting down to dinner, that most directors flub with simplistic shot-counter shot. One gets the sense that each new film is To’s way of creating a problem for himself, some sort of challenge, and then figuring out unique ways of solving said problem. As a craftsman, any director could learn a lot from him.

Some thoughts on 2008, with an eye towards the year to come:

2008-12-22T02:21:00.000-06:00

When all is said in done, there are quite a few reasons to believe that virtually no films where released in 2008 - at least none as important as current affairs: between the death of film criticism, a tanking economy, and perhaps the most important presidential election of (most of) our lives, it was easy to overlook the multiplex. Unless, of course, that multiplex was playing the Dark Knight, the second most popular film of all time (if one judges such things by box office gross; and lets face it, most do).

Most pertinent to myself is the ongoing debate as to the state of criticism. At the risk of boring non-specialists with the details, lets just say that a combination of crumbling print empires and their decreasing classified revenues, philistine movie executives pandering to a younger demographic with disposable income, and, by implication, an increasingly disenfranchised movie going public that would just rather stay home, has all lead to an irrevocable decline in the conversation surrounding film as art. But perhaps it’s too easy to make such broad justifications – after all, as several recent releases have shown, notwithstanding The Dark Knight factor, people seem more than willing to come out to theatres, assuming there is something worth seeing. Regardless of quality, or what this critic might think, people are turning out in droves for Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Frost/Nixon and Gran Torino, as well as, to a lesser degree, Doubt. So we might amend the above to read something like ‘audiences don’t go to movies anymore, unless they do’, ‘the studios don’t make films for adults, except when they do’, and, with regards to critical analysis, ‘critics don’t matter, except when they do’. As we steadily approach awards season, those critics that the studios usually shun suddenly start getting their quotes plastered all over the place, the studios looking for affirmation that their product can deliver the goods to a discerning crowd (the crowd that, lets remember, doesn’t usually exist, at least before November).

So what does this all mean? Simply put, there are too many opinion pieces out there and not enough, well, criticism. After spending all year bemoaning the state of the art, we are suddenly relevant again, but instead of taking full advantage of it, we've just started repeating ourselves. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen at least four different op ed pieces on the current slate of WWII/Holocaust dramas that have been/are set for release from the studios, as well as a slew of accolades for most, if not all, of the above mentioned films. But I must admit that I am ambivalent for two reasons: one being that, as I see it, good criticism has been on the decline for a while, not just in the wake of recent job loss, and two, that the remaining old guard has easily slipped into the role of studio adjunct publicist. What else to make of the myriad number of top ten lists and critic’s association awards that have already started making the rounds? Chock full of films that most of us won’t be able to see for several weeks, if not months, they don’t serve much of a purpose beyond hyping product that already has substantial marketing in place, as well as the usual banal Oscar short listing. I, for one, don’t see much point in predicting what’s going to win awards that, beyond the uselessness of such an endeavor, doesn’t do much to critically grapple with the films in question (I might add that the above mentioned flood of Holocaust overkill pictures essays all include films not already in release (Valkyrie), and some not even set for release before the end of the year (Good, Defiance), essentially giving free publicity to films invoking a trend the various critics are supposedly bemoaning). With this in mind, I’m not particularly saddened by a few industry stool pigeons loosing their lively hood. I also hasten to add that the list just posted by Slant Magazine goes some ways toward avoiding most of the pitfalls I’ve mentioned, instead focusing on, you know, actual films.

I’m not suggesting that critics don’t actually like or care about the films they choose to place on their lists, but I am suggesting that what they have to choose from exists only within clearly delineated parameters, parameters more often than not set by studio publicity machines. As usual, Roger Ebert’s annual top ten list is a pretty clear indicator of enthusiastic, if unremarkable, middle brow taste. Barring a few legitimate American indies, like Ballast and Shotgun Stories, the presence of the usual Miramax Oscar bait prestige dominates. To reiterate, I’m not suggesting that Ebert doesn’t actually like the films that he is endorsing, only the fact that what he is promoting is so limited in scope as to be laughable (I might add that several of the legitimate independent films he lists will also be screening during his next Ebertfest, suggesting that his promoting of such films is also promoting his film festival and, by extension, himself). By way of comparison, the most recent issue of Art Forum offers several top ten films of the year lists, one by the incomparable James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto. Mr. Quandt is largely responsible for organizing the first major traveling retrospective of Robert Bresson, as well as retrospectives of Kon Ichikawa, Shohei Imamura and OshimaNagisa, and major articles on Pedro Costa, Edward Yang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In other words, the guy is smart. But when blogger Girish Sambu posted some preliminary thoughts on Quandt’s list, he immediately invited some incredulous comments about elitism and esoteric festival pandering – the idea being, as far as I can tell, that if something is unavailable in the American market place it is not only useless to talk about it, but it is also an affront to good taste. Never mind that Quandt could teach us all a thing or two about the art of film. But his choices aren’t available as commodities (at least yet), and that offends and scares some people. (just a few days after I typed these words, the collective group of critics over at the Onion published their own top ten lists. Basically a variation on the IndieWire system, in which films get ranked on a points system, these supposedly cutting edge taste makers eschew anything and everything not scheduled to open in NY/LA by years end, despite the fact that they are, essentially, a product of the Mid West. To further cement my skepticism, several critics mention films that they saw at festivals, but only those festival films (The Wrestler, Che, Benjamin Button), that have some currency as upcoming releases. The point being, again, that most critics, whether willingly or not, limit themselves to the role of publicist. Even more insulting is their “crosstalk”, essentially a few thousands words patting themselves on the back for not seeking out more adventurous fare during 2008).

I would also direct you to a recent lambasting of NY Times critic Manohla Dargis, in an article from the Los Angles Times that is clearly designed to damn her with faint praise. Scoot on over and read it for yourself – to my mind, the fact that she has no interest in playing the publicity game is all the ammunition some people need to suggest that she just simply doesn’t like movies, life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Never mind the fact that her own recently published top ten list clearly indicates not just good taste (obviously a subjective judgment on my part), but a general optimism with regards to the state of the art form. This is clearly quite a leap from the cranky curmudgeon that Patrick Goldstein paints her to be (it is equally fascinating to watch Goldstein try to simultaneously critique Dargis while attempting to not appear entirely as a studio mouthpiece, an effort in which he fails quite spectacularly).

* * *

This was, by design, to be an introduction to what would have been my top ten films of the year, an undertaking I subscribe to only in as much as it fulfills a certain pedagogic function. With that in mind, I’m instead going to hype a handful of films that I’m particularly excited to see, some already set for some kind of distribution, however limited, and some that might premiere only on dvd or never at all. At the risk of succumbing to the very thing I’ve been decrying, I can only say that virtually none of these films are going to receive a fraction of the advertising or print that accompanies the average release from TWC, Miramax, or Sony Pictures Classics.

Right off the bat, I’m happy to see that Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” hits the Music Box late next month, as well as Soderbergh’s “Che” and Laurent Cantet’s “The Class” at the Landmark. Here are some more to keep your eyes peeled for:

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas) – as far as I know, the film is already set for some kind of distribution, but when it will hit our local screens is another matter entirely. I wasn’t particularly satisfied by Assayas’ last film, Boarding Gate, but he remains one of my favorite filmmakers and a major player in the international scene. This is the first, but not the last, of my most anticipated features listed by James Quandt in his top ten list.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) – perhaps cinema’s most opaque, quixotic visionary, any new film by Denis is a cause for celebration. Her film “Trouble Every Day” never saw the light of day here in Chicago, and has never been released on dvd. Her last (and best) feature, The Intruder, enjoyed one single screening at the Film Center before getting dumpoed onto a shoddy dvd by Wellspring, just before they went under. Lets hope the same fate doesn’t befall her most recent film, which is garnering effusive praise from everyone who’s seen it.

Hunger (Steve McQueen) – this played most recently at the Chicago International film Festival, after making the rounds at Cannes, Toronto and Berlin, picking up accolades as it went along. I was immensely sorry to miss the CIFF screenings, but very happy to hear that they all sold out. Apparently, there are some people out there that take critical acclaim seriously enough to try something new. No word on if the film will reach our shores: despite the virtually universal acclaim, the film failed to generate much business in limited runs in NY and LA, making its further distribution decidedly… undecided.

The Hurt Locker (Katherine Bigelow) – the director of Point Break, Near Dark and Strange Days has, by all accounts, made the toughest, and most daring, of the Iraqi War docu-dramas. As near as I can tell, everyone who sees it loves it, but the recent spate of war related commercial flops (do I need to reiterate the list?) makes it less and less likely that the film will see the light of day. It would be a shame if it went straight to dvd, as the chance to see a Bigelow film on the big screen hasn’t come around much recently.

RR & Casting a Glance (James Benning) – two recent works by a great filmmaker, and one of the few contemporary experimental directors who has managed to garner a (small but loyal) fan base. By all accounts, Chicago Filmmakers is working hard to show both of these films, although the chances of it happening in the next few months are slim. Considering how long it took his last couple of features to make it here, a few months would be mercifully short.

Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel) – after the relatively crowd pleasing Regular Lovers, Garrel has apparently drifted back into inconsequence. His previous film’s (minor) success got his new one into competition at Cannes, but it seems that no one was watching. Lets hope we get a chance to see it and decide for ourselves.

Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso) – it took Alonso’s last film, La Muerto, about three years to arrive at Facets Cinemateque. By all accounts, his newest feature is even better, and I, for one, would love to see it. Any distributors reading?

United Red Army (Koji Wkamatsu) – Quandt’s take: “as a first hand account of leftist infighting and auto-immolation, it readily joins Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan and Godard’s La Chinoise.” I’m sold.

Lorna’s Silence/le Silence de Lorna (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) – advance word is that the Dardenne’s are repeating themselves and that their newest feature is somehow old hat. I’m personally of the opinion that they are modern masters, and therefore look forward to the opportunity to judge for myself. I’m also particularly distrustful of industry insiders who seem to think that they’ve got their finger on the pulse – of commerce, perhaps (or maybe not, considering the stupid decisions being constantly made), but not the film community.

Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain) – the film about a Travolta/Saturday Night Fever obsessed murderer in Pinochet’s Chile. The pop and the political collide in what is already a derisive love-it-or-hate-it proposition.

The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel) – Martel is a singular directorial voice; her only other two features, La Cienaga and The Holy Girly, reveal a unique talent keyed to the low key desperation and solitude of contemporary Argentina’s bourgeoisie that is structured by claustrophobic, geometrically severe compositions and free floating, opaque visual metaphors. The film involves a vehicular homicide and a woman who can’t remember what she may or may not have done. Sounds intriguing, no?

Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater) – several Welles’ scholars (a particularly touchy bunch, given the damage they’ve had to repair to his misunderstood legacy) have given the film a clean bill of health. I maintain that Linklater is our generation’s key humanist filmmaker, and any new work is not only a cause for celebration, but likely to put a smile on one’s face. Despite its (reportedly) crowd pleasing disposition, the film has yet to garner any North American distribution.

Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo) – a new film by the director of “Woman is the Future of Man” and “Woman on the Beach”? Yes, please.

Pontypool (Bruce McDonald) – from what I’ve read, the film is about zombies (but not really), that infect other people not through physical contact or bodily fluids, but through spoken words. That’s right, language itself is the infecting agent. What sounds like an ingenious micro-budget indie is picking up fans everywhere it screens, and it sounds a bit like a cross between Primer, Dawn of the Dead, and a particularly perverse reading of Lacan.

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito) – full disclosure – Glabe Klinger’s Chicago Cinema Forum hosted a screening of this film just a few months ago at the Film Center, and I was unable to attend. There’s little chance of this evocative ode to past pioneers in civil liberties getting screened anywhere besides the Film Center or Chicago Filmmakers, but maybe I’ll get a second chance to catch up with this one.

Adoration (Atom Egoyan) – Egoyan’s last few films have left much to be desired, and if the review in last month’s Cinemascope is to be believed, this films is his biggest misstep yet. Still, a minor and flawed work from an interesting, and sometimes great, filmmaker is always welcome.

Two Documentaries that are changing narrative expectations:

2008-12-06T16:05:00.000-06:00

“Most of us begin with a cliché – not always, but most of the time – and that’s fine, but you have to look at it from all sides and clarify it. So you start with the idea of discovery… Then you ask yourself, but why? It will inhibit the viewer’s imagination instead of opening it up… and so you renounce, slowly. Then one fine day… one fine day you realize that it’s better to see as little as possible. You have a sort of… reduction, only it’s not a reduction – it’s a concentration and it actually says more.”

Jean-Marie Straub, quoted in Pedro Costa’s “Where lies your hidden smile?”

Two recent films that are revitalizing/reconstituting/rethinking/recontextualizing the place of narrative in contemporary documentary film, and deserving of placement along side the pantheon – essayists like Dziga-Vertov era Godard, Marker, late period Kiarostami, Costa, Zhangke, early Weerasethakul - Deborah Stratman’s “O’er the Land” and Rosalind Nashashibi’s “Bachelor Machines Part 1”.

* * *

Beginning with a long quotation on the nature of heroism (by a Lt. Col. William Rankin - a real person, although I wasn’t sure of it until later in the film), then moving to a forest strewn with carefully placed and obviously staged smoking debris, then segueing into a group of Revolutionary War re-enactors, “O’er the Land” starts out of the gate with a series of allusions and paralleling rhymes, virtually demanding its audience to put two and two together. The artfully arranged debris, coupled with another kind of staged event, that of reenacted warfare, seems to juxtapose two kinds of audiences: a paying public that is watching another public watching a staged recreation of historical events that Stratman catches on camera. Next is a series of shots at a high school football game, and we see a tightly choreographed marching band performing, as well as cheerleaders and the players themselves (along with yet another implied audience). Stratman refuses to orient us with any kind of tangible information; there are no dates, times or places, nor do there seem to be any recurring “characters” or a single train of thought. But we have a quotation from a celebrated military man, the aftermath of some destructive event, and the uniformity of various costumed groups – the fake military garb becomes synonymous with the football jersey or cheerleading outfit, and the civilian garb takes on some of the associations of military dress. In effect, one becomes less sinister while the others become more so.

But before we can settle too comfortably into some assumptions about what the film is showing us, we continue to receive more visual information. An RV dealership comes onscreen, accompanied by voice over describing the unfettered freedom such a vehicle can provide. The voiceover is trying to sell a lifestyle on wheels, without borders, free to roam. We then cut to a US Border Patrol station, with an ominous sign warning us that the national threat level is currently “orange” (I’m a little rusty on my Homeland Security propaganda, but if memory serves, orange is relatively low). A Border Patrol truck drives around, describing the various tracks left behind from people crossing into the U.S. illegally. Certain indentures into the ground indicate who is crawling, or what kind of shoes they are wearing, or if someone is on there knees and elbows in an attempt not to leave tracks. We also see the Border Patrol guys covering up the tracks that their trucks leave, in a weird kind of symbiosis (the trackers not wanting to be tracked?). In one of the film’s few close ups, a raging river churns up dirt and mud in its powerful current, suggesting the difficulty and sheer physicality of crossing over into the U.S. It is an interesting rejoinder to the guard’s seeming nonchalance, as well as a stunning juxtaposition with the previous section’s RV dealership – apparently, a lifestyle of unfettered freedom and unlimited travel only extends to a certain few. There is a jarring cut from the raging water to a calm night sky, and as the camera holds on this picturesque composition, a voice over begins. We get a detailed description of a soldier (Rankin’s words, as it turns out - a long passage from his biography, being spoken by someone else) parachuting from a malfunctioning jet miles above the Earth’s surface. It is a harrowing account - he speaks of velocity and g-force in such a way as to make the dangers immediately palpable, and describes parachuting through a thunder storm. But it is a disembodied voice – no archival footage or photographs - just words and images of a cloudy sky. In the film’s most stunning sequence, Stratman’s camera travels to a machine gun festival. And it is exactly what it sounds like. Throngs of people line up to check out weapons, run an obstacle course, shoot at random burnt out cars and trucks, do target practice, and traverse what looks like a series of huts and shacks, shooting at everything in sight (except other people, I might add). While bulldozers and cranes clean up the destroyed objects, a voice over describes the festival as a last bastion for gun rights and constitutional freedom. There is a final, haunting epilogue to the sequence, as men with flamethrowers put on an exhibition for a rapturous audience. Echoes of Herzog’s “Lessons of Darkness” abound, as great swaths of orange engulf the screen, and burning embers float peacefully back to Earth against a tranquil night sky. It is evocative, certainly, of a kind of abstract beauty, but also apocalyptic in its destructive fulmination.

* * *

Men speak without subtitles – that we understand what they are saying is not so important as is the tone of voice, the vocal inflection that indicates conversation, orders, argument, or joking. Various men constantly look offscreen while speaking – they might be the only one in the frame, but they are not the only one in the room. There is no non-diagetic sound, and the occasional intrusion of music establishes, partially, the mood and tenor of a scene. What we have here is a contiguous sense on space, extending beyond the parameters of the filmed frame and suggesting an entire parallel world. The point seems clear: it is an acceptance of the camera’s, and the filmmaker’s, limitations, and a suggestion to the audience that we actively engage in what we are not being shown (certainly, this is Bressonian to the extreme).

This notion of accepting the limitations of technology and genre informs the narrative as well (although narrative, in this context, might be better described as fractured, minimal, or even maximal, depending on one’s personal predilection). A series of 25 scenes, complete with fade to black intermediaries and with a brief, elliptical prologue, suggests any number of possible permutations – that we are seeing only 25 possible moments out of any number of theoretical scenes, that we should read the scenes linearly, like a book, or even that the scenes have been selected at random, haphazardly. What seems most immediate is that we must reconfigure our relationship to the narrative documentary and create our own interpretation, relying on sensory impressions that rhyme, to be sure, but do not necessarily congeal. There is no thesis, and even to suggest that the film is about isolation and mechanized impersonality is to impose a personal reading, and is not supported by “facts”. Such is the radical agenda of Rosalind Nashashibi’s poetic documentary.

Much like “O’er the Land”, “Bachelor Machines Part 1” does not orient us with any contextual, factual information. The filmmaker’s website, along with an accompanying dvd booklet, gives us some specifics, that these sailors are on a cargo ship “sailing from Southern Italy to Sweden via Portugal, Britain, and Ireland.” But other than supplying a clue as to what language these men are speaking, it is arguable that such information is entirely inconsequential, even disruptive to the film’s abstract diegesis – the film ultimately stands outside of such concerns, instead offering a glimpse of another world that is simultaneously strange and familiar. The first scene following a brief prologue is a simple composition, but it does much to inform the viewer conceptually; a long metal pole with some hanging rope cuts across the frame from upper right to lower left, intersecting an image of the sun setting behind clouds. The pole remains fixed, the camera along with it, while the postcard ready image bobs and weaves with the natural movement of the ship. We are immediately oriented to the physical sensation of standing still on a moving object, and recognize that the camera is, for all intents and purposes, going to be fixed along side us. Indeed, the only images we get outside of the ship are occasional nighttime detours into large cargo holds or shots of the sea or sky as seen through windows and portholes.

Much of the film is spent prowling long, empty corridors, and visually, the symmetry of isolation recalls Kubrick or Ackerman. Several critics have commented on the “anthropomorphic” nature of some compositions, where the ship itself seems to take on a face. Onion City Festival programmer Patrick Friel mentions this in the festival’s accompanying program, and obviously others have picked up on it as well. But, for this viewer, these graph-like, symmetrical compositions come across as cold metal geometry, impersonal and imposing. At one point, while filming what looks to be an argument, a crew member stands up and slides a door closed in front of the camera. The image lingers after the shot has changed - what was once an image of people has been replaced, superimposed, obliterated, by a simple, austere flatness. If anything, the cumbersome, bulky metal textures of the ship encourages a disconnect between flesh and blood people and this environment that envelopes them. Another interpretation: this disconnection as metaphor for advanced globalization in our modern era of capitalism; the inseparability of man and machine.

* * *

I’ve grown increasingly wary of the notion of “narrative” in the last few months. As our most recent presidential election has illuminated, much of people’s decision making process was contingent upon accepting this or that narrative and rejecting the, presumably opposite or incompatible, other (David Bordwell has a fascinating entry on this subject here). But aside from buzz words, more often than not opaque and aloof themselves, these particular narratives obfuscated more than they illuminated, with both parties presenting simplification in lieu of complexity. It might seem odd then, or even counter intuitive, to present these obviously abstracted films as a rejoinder to the simplified notion of narrative that is increasingly presented to an increasingly receptive populous, weaned on serial television shows to look for a beginning, middle and end in a predetermined chunk of time; narrative closure as bite sized emotional edification. But whatever these two films lack in factual specificity, they more than compensate with the demands and rigors placed on their respective audience: the necessity to glean metaphoric and dialectical relationships in Stratman’s piece, which invites the pondering of violent incursions into land, sky and the mind; and the devastating emotional isolation of Nashashibi’s mysterious and evocative conjuring of oceanic travel as a journey into the unknown.

A brief text on Synecdoche, New York, just for fun:

2008-11-20T14:23:00.000-06:00

The creation of the need, and the desire, to see things again is part of the method of Sans Soleil, and also, perhaps, its real subject. What Marker means to communicate to us is the solitude of the film editor at his machinery, his reverie over the footage he’s shot… the scenes he watches over and over again. He wants to explain… how images are replayed as memories, as obsessions, and as the troubled dreams of travelers.

The creation of the need, and the desire, to see things again is part of the method of Synecdoche, New York, and also, perhaps, its real subject. What Kaufman means to communicate to us is the solitude of the film writer at his machinery, his anxiety over the words he’s written, the words he reads over and over again. He wants to explain how memories are replayed as images, as obsessions, and as the troubled dreams of artists.

Sans Soleil seems… to be generating its own questions in the audience, like: Where are we now? Is this a film about Japan? About Guinea-Bissau? These stupid questions (which are also the sort we might ask of a bad, incoherent film), strangely, help pull us along through the movie: we keep following the subject, feeling that it’s almost in our grasp if only the speeding images would slow down a bit, if only those passages that look and sound like summations would allow us to linger before they rush us on to new information, new syntheses. And the stupid questions turn out to be the right ones. Sans Soleil is the diary of a return, a return which induces – naturally – retrospection, reverie, the need to account for the distances travelled in coming back: a review of notes from other places…

Synecdoche, New York seems to be generating its own questions in the audience, like: Where/when are we now? Is this a film about America? About Charlie Kaufman? These stupid questions (which are also the sort we might ask of a good, incoherent film), strangely, help pull us along through the movie: we keep following the subject, feeling that it’s almost in our grasp if only the speeding ideas would slow down a bit, if only those passages that look and sound like summations would allow us to linger before they rush on to new ideas, new syntheses. And the stupid questions turn out to be the right ones. Synecdoche, New York is the diary of a constant present, a present which induces – naturally – retrospection, nausea, the need to account for the distances traveled in standing still: a review of ideas from other places…

Several random thoughts:

We might consider Synecdoche, New York an essay film, not a narrative film.
Charlie Kaufman wants to be Woody Allen.
Charlie Kaufman is smarter, and more interesting, than Woody Allen.
If the act of creation is fear of a blank page, then Synecdoche, New York is the largest blank canvas Kaufman could find. He must fill it up.
He is afraid to fill it up.
Kaufman craves rejection and fears recognition
Kaufman craves recognition and fears rejection

(The above italicized texts are from a Terrence Rafferty article on Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil in Sight and Sound magazine, autumn 1984. My variations on his words, and how they relate to Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York, are in the non-italicized font.)

24 City

2008-11-01T18:00:00.000-05:00

“…given that there are different ways of writing History, your film should really be considered more as an archaeology of cinema in Foucault’s sense, not in the usual sense of an archeology that examines traces from the past to establish the factual genesis of things, but one that uses different moments and monuments as the basis for constructs that may seem questionable. It deals with essential relations even though these are not found purely in the world of anterior facts, like a sequence of events.”

“Cinema has this archive aspect because it’s about recording. That’s why, you say, there ought to be equality and fraternity between reality and fiction in cinema. Because it’s both things together, cinema can bear witness. Even independently of the war news, a simple 35 mm rectangle saves the honor of reality, you say; every film is a news document. Cinema only films the past, meaning what passes. It is memory and the refuge of time.”

Youssef Ishaghpour in conversation with Jean-Luc Godard

“An experienced event is finite – at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it”

Walter Benjamin on Proust

“…we backed away from that moment again and again, circling it, stalking it, until we had it cornered and began to tame it with words.”

Ian McEwan, “Enduring Love”

In my mind, there isn’t as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.

Abbas Kiarostami

The cinema is particularly well suited to notions of remembrance – the act of filming is in fact the capturing of moment, a kind of embalming; a film is, at the very least, a record of its own making, particular to that time and that place. Most importantly, it is something that we can return to, revisit, rewatch (and now rewind). We think of newsreels, the home movie (now the home video), the snapshot, a family album consisting of fragmented shards of experience. This is personal, yes, but also a part of history – a history not (only) of dates and facts but infused with the experiences of those who have passed through it and remember. I think this is what Jonathan Rosenbaum is referring to when he says that Jia Zhangke “has been able to create works of historical relevance partly because he considers this theme from the vantage point of a socialism that, far from being theoretical, is part of a complex lived experience.”

24 City is Zhangke’s latest chronicle of a country in transition, recounting roughly the last 50 years of Chinese history through personal interviews with former workers at a military factory, designated “420”, that is being torn down to make way for a new, state of the art living and recreational facility – the titular 24 City. But far from a recounting of dates or numbers, it is a personalized recounting, as each interviewee digresses into stories of girlfriends, mentors, parents, their travels, etc. Hanging over the proceedings is the ominous presence and structuring absence of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the gradual shift towards a free market capitalism, and modern dislocation.

The film features 8 or so interviews, with recurring punctuation between each segment – the screen will fade to black and Zhangke will play a pop song or display text on the screen. We also see the occasional scene of the factory being demolished and the construction of 24 City (the name 24 City is derived from a popular poem about the city of Chengdu, where both the factory and the new development are located). We sit through several interview segments before Zhangke’s formal strategy becomes clear – that is, we are gradually, with each successive interviewee, traveling forward in time, inexorably marching towards present day, a place were memories and the “now” finally catch up to each other and begin to intertwine. The first interviewee recounts tales of his foreman, a tough man who demanded that the workers use their tools until they were ground down into nothing – there could be no waste. The retired worker becomes nostalgic for the past and laments that he has not visited his elder in some time. We follow him to the foreman’s home and witness their encounter – two elderly men, reunited after decades, their way of life vanished and their usefulness gone. It is a bitter sweet moment, and the palpable sense of solidarity belies any criticisms of an oppressive Communism. We then see a woman on a bus who recounts tales of growing up with her mother, also a factory worker, and their inability to travel to their maternal grandparent’s home. This is the first, but not last, mention of a geographical isolation that ruptures the familial unit. The woman laments the impossibility of travel, but also that the size and demands of the factory, coupled with economic depression and lack of jobs, compelled workers from all over the country to travel to Factory 420. We also hear the tale of woman who, while on a ship en route to 420, looses her child while the ship is at port for a designated rest period. Despite a frantic search period, the boat cannot, or will not, deviate from its time table and departs, the child now lost (forever?). This action is justified in as much as we are told that the factory was doing very important work, supplying military armaments to the front line against “American Imperialists”. One can only assume that this is happening during the Korean War, when China was providing arms to North Korea, although there are also some allusions to the Sino-Japanese War as well. Part of Zhangke’s strategy is this withholding of detail; things are not spelled out, nor do we ever get a date or reference on screen. His intention seems, reasonably enough, to record the passing of time from specific personal experiences, recounting the macro through the micro.

A man seated at a bar speaks about growing up in the factory – due to its immensity, the grounds had their own school, shopping, movie theatre, etc. The children did not often mingle with the townspeople, and when they did it was usually to fight. He begins to speak of first love and his eyes turn away from the camera as he drifts away into a silent repose – a memory unable to be articulated in words. We gradually come to our last two interviewees, and the film has completed its trajectory into the modern. A young television newscaster recounts his few days of work in the factory; the back breaking tedium and repetition is too much to handle and he leaves, despite the disappointment to his parents. A young woman speaks about her mother, and that witnessing her working conditions brought her to tears. Her dream – to save enough money to buy her parents a condo in the new 24 City (the young woman is a “personal buyer”, a shopper for rich women who are too busy, or lazy, to purchase things for themselves).

Perhaps I’ve gone to long without mentioning that three of the eight interviews that make up the bulk of the film are actually reconstructions using actors (Zhangke regulars Lu Liping and Zhao Tao, as well as superstar Joan Chen.) I must confess that the recreations blend so seamlessly with the actual interviews that, with the exception of Joan Chen’s segment, I couldn’t tell which was which. This has led some commentators to reject Zhangke’s entire project, the notion being, I assume, that he has tipped his hand and that we must view the entire film as a fiction. This is a simple and easy way of sidestepping the entire point of the film, at least in as much as what I take the film to be about. You’ll forgive the long quotes at the start of this piece but it seems important to at least attempt to grapple with the complex issues of film, history and cultural memory/identity. As the 20^th Century’s most popular art form, how can we not recognize that movies play an integral part in how we construct a narrative of the past, present and future? Joan Chen’s interview segment involves her recounting her arrival at 420 and the bestowing of her nickname, “Little Flower”. Of course, Little Flower is the 1980 film that made her name as an actress, so Zhangke is dabbling in a kind of mobius strip that circles back on itself continuously: an actress playing a woman named after a character made famous by the actress. As a narrative conceit the idea is perhaps too cute, too self consciously winking at the audience. But Zhangke has been blurring the line between “Fiction” and “Documentary” for some time now, and he is aware of Chen’s own complicated relationship with China. Her character is the only one to blatantly mention the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, although not by name – she casually recalls family members returning from the countryside where they had been relocated only to find that their home was now overcrowded. Chen herself began her acting career in propaganda films after being “selected” for the job. The point being that, far from some idiotic notion of cinematic “quoting” or similar nonsense, Zhangke is incredibly interested in teasing out that thin line where filmed narratives threaten to supplant our own identities and personal narratives. In a very real sense, most of our ideas on World War II and “The Greatest Generation” have been formulated for us by films. Our knowledge of late 60’s radical uprisings comes from Godard et al, while the birth of our nation and the forward march of expansion has been laid out, quite explicitly, by Griffith and Ford.

It’s interesting to me that critics have read the film as a paean to communism and, conversely, as an ode to capitalism and modernization. Zhangke has no interest, I think, in either extreme, and it is to his credit that no party line is established. Instead, we see people living, with all the complexity that comes with it. We see faces, gestures, emotions – the solidity of the human, not the opaqueness of facts and figures. The camera is locked to a face, and we come to know it in the time that it is on screen. Much as Zhangke’s The World is about the state of modern communication, linking us together as it simultaneously enables increased isolation, it is also, like Still Life and 24 City, about a kind of literal and metaphoric displacement. The Three Gorges Dam is a marvel of human engineering and ingenuity, but that might be little comfort to an estimated one million people forced to relocate while their home are flooded; similarly, the sleek steel and glass structures of 24 City might be beautiful, and even become a home to the people who can afford it, but this might be little comfort to the thousands of people who no longer have a job at Factory 420. The forced relocations of city dwellers to the countryside is now reversed – the ideologies are different, but the human cost remains the same. A great leap forward indeed.

In the most recent issue of the essential film journal Cinemascope, critic Michael Sicinski lays out a fascinating deconstruction of the recent Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony. He makes several comments that strike me as particularly relevant to the film at hand. I’ll quote briefly: “with (director) Zhang Yimou at the helm, the entire world fell in line, panel by panel. This, in a sense, was the ideal endpoint for the display as a whole, since if one theme could be said to predominate, it was, of course, the total and unproblematic absorption of the individual into the anonymous mass.” He continues, “When we watch Yimou and his cultural assembly line, it is vital that those masses appear as remote as possible, lest we grasp the late-capitalist punchline. Those are the faces of production; their congealed labour power surrounds us every moment of the day; we are little more than anonymous, identical nodes of congealed consumptive power…”. Jia Zhangke gives these sweeping historical, political, and economic tidal waves a name, a face and a memory – we must rail against anonymity. Truly, the personal is the political, and we would all do well to remember that.

The First Transition Week 4: M

2008-10-24T02:08:00.000-05:00

Rightly considered the ultimate serial killer film, as well as one of the best police procedurals of all time, Fritz Lang’s M is perhaps the greatest thriller ever constructed. But neither genre designation goes much way towards actually appreciating what Lang has constructed. While his famously acerbic world view was already firmly in place, M goes further than any other film of the period (or any period, for that matter) to create an atmosphere of dread, fear, paranoia and, by film’s end, a kind of existential terror at not only the unknowability of evil, but the banality of it as well.

It’s a common misconception of silent films that assumes a certain kind of static and stage-like imagery, and that the sound film introduced a fluid and mobile camera. This fallacy has finally been redressed, thanks largely in part to the release of a number of silents on dvd. In fact, the end of the silent era saw a complete mastery of camera movement and visual expression, while the birth of the sound film introduced a whole slew of technical and aesthetic problems, resulting in largely (yes) static camera set ups and infrequent camera movement (see the relatively recent special edition of The Jazz Singer for a truly banal movie going experience – a historical marker, to be sure, and not much else). Lang would side step both problems with his first sound film, and M is both a stunning example of Bresson’s sound dictums (certainly, Lang would have influenced him) as well as a breathtaking use of visual trickery to accomplish what we would now call tracking (dolly) shots, or long takes that would nowadays be rendered with a steadicam. Lang would eschew much of the opulence and pageantry with which he had made his name in the Silent Era, but it would be incorrect to assume that M represents any kind of “dry realism”. There are bold stylistic choices on display in the film, but most are in service of a dark, depressing, and contemporary story – in other words, no elaborate castle sets, papier-mâché dragons, studio constructed forests, flying cars or rocket ships, etc. It’s a modestly scaled stylization, tempered more towards brooding than opulence.

The most innovative feature of M is Lang’s devotion to sound design. There is a constant use of sound queues preceding the introduction of an event or person. Indeed, the beginning of the film is aural, as opposed to visual - we hear children’s voices over a black screen, the actual image of children singing and playing appearing a few beats afterwards. They are singing one of those grotesque songs about death that they can neither fully understand nor appreciate – one of Lang’s dark ironies. As mothers complain about the “awful song”, one mentions that “as long as we can hear them (the children), we know that they are safe”. Offscreen, a cuckoo clock begins ringing, a sound that segues into school bells clanging as children leave class for the day. We are then introduced to the killer in a series of visual and aural gestures – we hear a whistling (the killer’s, as it happens, in a recurring aural motif that signifies his arrival at any given scene and that will ultimately provide the means for his capture) as the camera settles on a public notice warning about the murders. A profile appears, imposed over the posting, and the voice speaks. It’s a fascinating choice, creepily effective, and suggesting, at this point, that not only can we not bear to look at such a monster, but that such a person can only exist in shadows (of course, the end of the film will suggest the exact opposite, the murderer-as-helpless man child - another of Lang’s ironies. It certainly helps that Peter Lorre’s puffy, soft cheeks and big round eyes create the sensation of observing an over-sized ten year who thinks he’s just pulling the wings off of flies.).

The first murder scene, much like the killer’s introduction to the film, is designed and executed entirely through visual suggestion. Lorre walks around town with a little girl who is bouncing a ball. They stop, and he purchases her a novelty balloon from a blind man. We cut back to one of the mothers from the film’s beginning, who can no longer “hear her child playing” (the inversion here is important – the lack of a sound queue alerts the audience to an absence). As she frantically calls her daughter’s name and asks neighbors if they have seen her come home from school, Lang cuts to brief shots of an empty attic, stairwell, a dinner plate, and then finally, to a shot of the girl’s ball rolling away and the balloon ensnared in power lines. The novelty balloon, which has the shape of a small, cartoonish person, is, visually and symbolically, being strangled by the horizontal power lines. Much of the scene’s effectiveness stems not only from the geometric design of these relatively empty spaces, spaces that the girl should be occupying, or the symbolic extensions of the child rolling or drifting away into nothingness, but also from the sound design – or, in this case, the lack thereof. Up to this point, we’ve been virtually bombarded with noises of all kind, and these two brief sequence shots match their visual void with an aural one - this aural void representing the silencing, as it where, of the victim.

After the revelation of the murder, Lang begins the next scene with a close up of a posting about the missing girl – a man’s voice reads the text aloud as the camera slowly moves back to reveal, gradually, a huge crowd of people gathered about. Their loud murmuring, which grows louder as the camera reveals more of them, carries over into the next scene of men gathered around a table, arguing with each other as to the identity of the killer. As fear and anxiety grows throughout the community, ordinary citizens begin to accuse each other. Meanwhile, in an increasingly desperate manhunt, the police force begins cracking down on ordinary criminals. As the plot thickens, we begin to see how Lang’s techniques inform the basic plot: more than a simple technical device, Lang’s use of sound produces (at least) two distinct effects 1. as with the first murder scene, the preceding of an event with a sound that introduces it creates a sense of predetermination, not unlike the viewer being drawn towards some kind of inevitability. It’s a kind of cosmic dread which Lang will use consistently through his career, and it permeates an increasingly fearful populace, fueling their hysteria. 2. The use of elaborate sound bridges to link the criminal and the public official into an intertwined co-existence. These sound bridges, coupled with Lang’s use of parallel editing, are incredibly important in suturing the two disparate sectors of societal power into one entity – criminals and cops become one, for all intents and purposes. The point is not to contrast the two groups, nor even to suggest, banally, that the public officials are just as bad as the criminals (or vice versa, that the criminals are actually good at heart). In Lang’s universe, their groups are exactly the same, functioning with, roughly speaking, the same moral and financial systems. Lang will cross cut between the two groups discussing what exactly to do about the monster: the criminals are upset that their business is being disrupted by an increasingly frustrated police force, while the police force is angered at the public’s complete inability to assist them – no one can remember details correctly, different people give conflicting accounts of various events, people give them idiotic false leads by accusing each other. Lang positions both groups as powerful entities that operate beyond society - In other words, they each have a complimentary agenda that is only minimally concerned with the “good of the public”.

In the film’s final moments, with things presumably “returning to normal”, Lang leaves us with the bitter notion that a normal, functioning society inherently breeds criminals; he also makes us wallow in the aftermath of our judgment upon them. In the wake of staggering economic depression and the rising power of the Nazi party, Lang’s fixation on murder, mob rule and powerful criminals seems particularly incendiary (the Nazis would ban the film in ’34). It’s a popularly held notion, post- Kracauer, that Lang’s Mabuse films presaged, if not outright predicted, the rise of Hitler. J. Hoberman writes: “Mabuse was employed to epitomize the postwar period of political instability, social turmoil, and crazed hyperinflation. In the person of Mabuse, Lang gave Germany’s breakdown a single cause.” But, as Hoberman goes on to suggest, Lang’s films are often more about paranoia and disorder than fascism, and the weak populace that falls helplessly into the grip of a child like madman seems less an indictment of Hitler (who would not be voted into power for a few more years) than a more generalized condemnation of a failed society. It is a world view that Lang would import wholesale to our shores after fleeing the Nazis and invading Hollywood. Not by coincidence did Land help create what we now call film noir – his bleak cynicism and world weariness in the face of man’s seemingly limitless capacity to inflict horrors upon each other fitted neatly into America’s post-war depression.

Rivette's Out 1:

2008-10-04T15:12:00.001-05:00

Much like my thoughts on Playtime from some weeks ago, this piece was originally intended to be finished and posted much earlier in the summer. As usual, personal obligations obliged me to put it on the backburner. So, for better or for worse, here it is now, only 5 months or so late. Also, this piece is dedicated to those who shared in the adventure – Jake, Sara, Miguel and Ignatius.

As the Summer season of Hollywood blockbusters limps to a close, it seems an adequate time to reflect on a truly momentous event, the likes of which trump any of the over hyped, over marketed and over discussed “product” of the last few months. It’s been a little over one year since a group of Chicago cinephilles gathered around a holy grail of cinema – Jacques Rivette’s nearly 13 hour masterpiece from 1970, Out 1 (this main title is often followed in print by “Noli me tangere”, a subtitle which never actually appears on screen during the film). Screened as part of a (incomplete) Rivette retrospective at the Film Center, Out 1 bears little resemblance to any other film ever made – this distinction is an intrinsic part of the film’s vitality and contrarian notion of what a film constitutes, in direct opposition to the kind of churned out factory dreck we’re constantly subjected to. Ironically, given the film’s fascination with dread, paranoia and the disintegration of communal relationships between friends and lovers, it was a resoundingly positive communal experience for the audience. Further irony: Rivette was arguably the key chronicler of a post May ‘68 cultural malaise in Parisian society, a culture transitioning from Godard’s playfully confused optimism of solidarity to a fractured, hostile climate of intellectuals self destructing in increasingly conspiratorial narratives (for his part, Godard largely abandoned France after ‘68, leading to a ghost period with the Dziga Vertov Group, which is largely ignored even now, much like Rivette’s work; two phantom oeuvres constituting a kind of alternate film history). Jonathan Rosenbaum has described the key motif linking all of Rivette’s work as “collectivity vs solitude”, which could readily be described as the aftermath of that failed revolution world wide. Rivette’s marginalized status even during the height of the New Wave’s popularity no doubt extended not only from his film’s lengths and improvised natures, but also a certain lack of fashion; that is, he wasn’t overtly political at a time when political filmmaking was all the rage (however briefly). His 1968 feature “L’amour fou” didn’t do much to help his reputation; it is as doom laden and unreasonably long as Rivette’s other early works (it’s also another marginalized masterpiece). It is then perhaps fitting that, in retrospect, this spectre of a filmmaker might wind up telling us more about that particular time and place than those presumed to be more “with it”. Appropriately, we’ve just recently marked the 40^th anniversary of May ’68.

Like a lot of Chicago film buffs, I discovered Out 1, and Rivette in general, through Jonathan Rosenbaum’s unabashed cheerleading. In the summer of 1999, I tore through two Rosenbaum collections, Placing Movies and Movies as Politics. The two books each contained an essay on Rivette, respectively “Work and Play in the House of Fiction: on Jacques Rivette” and “Tih-Minh, Out 1: on the Non-Reception of Two French Serials”. Rosenbaum’s intro to the latter essay speaks for itself:

“What connections can be found between two French serials made almost half a century apart? Aside from the fact that both of them appear on my most recent "top ten" list, I'm equally concerned with the issue of why such pleasurable, evocative, enduring, multifaceted, and incontestably beautiful works should remain so resolutely marginal -- unseen, unavailable, and virtually written out of most film histories except for occasional guest appearances as the vaguest of reference points. The problem isn't simply an American or an academic one; although no print of either serial exists in the United States, it can't be said that either film has received much attention in France either -- or elsewhere, for that matter. Yet both are major testaments to the joys of spontaneous filmmaking and the complex adventures these entail, for their viewers as well as for their makers.”

I can look back now and see that the genesis of virtually every idea I hold about film connoisseurship and its relation to politics and society was contained in this brief opening salvo. That something could be pleasurable and unavailable made no sense to me at the time- it seemed not only counterintuitive but just plain stupid: why not release films that people might want to see? The vast web of interconnected causal factors that work to marginalize undesirable works or ideas would eventually come to light, at least for this once naïve, perhaps now to cynical, viewer. I might add (cynically) that many years after Rosenbaum’s essay neither work is any more available than it was back then (nor is the rest of Rivette’s output; not one of his first 9 features is available on DVD in the US, although I have a crummy vhs copy of Celine and Julie Go Boating, his 6^th film). But (optimistically) while I bemoan Out 1’s still marginalized status, I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that even one screening of this mysterious film monument is a step in the right direction, and ample proof that criticism of Rosenbaum’s kind can and should perform a pedagogic function above and beyond the strictures of the Sunday leisure section.

Rivette’s first feature, “Paris Belongs to Us”, could be said to lay the template for Rivette’s early work – improvisatory, cobbled together, low budget and in black and white, with a rare feel for location shooting that defamiliarizes while retaining a semblance of realism, a network of characters that interact in sometimes recognizable, sometimes bizarre ways. I’ve never seen his second feature, The Nun, based on a Dideroit novel and which I understand was something of a bid for respectability, perhaps comparable to Welle’s “The Stranger”. Most Rivette enthusiasts don’t speak very highly of the film, but I would imagine that it’s worth a look. L’amour fou comes next, a searing account of a theatre director trying to stage an adaptation of Racine’s Andromaque while keeping his leading lady sane. Eventually, they both succumb to a kind of madness, culminating in an extended sequence of them hold up together in an apartment, destroying it and themselves in some kind of purging orgy of self laceration (a gossipy aside: apparently this scene was inspired by an actual event, Godard breaking down after a lovers quarrel). It should not be surprising that the scenes are played broadly, if not necessarily for laughs, and that Bulle Ogier’s Claire comes through with a new found clarity and purposefulness, while the director, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, descends further and further into madness. Such is Rivette’s vision of artistic creation and destruction: a dialectic of confused emotions. Rosenbaum writes:

“Rightly described by Dave Kehr as Jacques Rivette’s “breakthrough film, the first of his features to employ extreme length (252 minutes), a high degree of improvisation, and a formal contrast between film and theater,” this rarely screened 1968 masterpiece is one of the great French films of its era. It centers on rehearsals for a production of Racine’s Andromaque and the doomed yet passionate relationship between the director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his actress wife (Bulle Ogier, in her finest performance), who leaves the production at the start of the film and then festers in paranoid isolation. The rehearsals, filmed by Rivette (in 35-millimeter) and TV documentarist Andre S. Labarthe (in 16), are real, and the relationship between Kalfon and Ogier is fictional, but this only begins to describe the powerful interfacing of life and art that takes place over the film’s hypnotic, epic unfolding; watching this is a life experience as much as a film experience.”

The last sentence of this brief review seems necessary to understanding the importance of Out 1, this notion of “life and art interfacing”, “epic unfolding” and a “life experience as much as a film experience”. Inevitably, when one speaks of Out 1, they are immediately questioned as to why one would subject themselves to such a “task”, the presumption being that spending that much time with a work of art is a waste of precious time. Critic Robin Wood equates this notion to a capitalistic determination of film-as-commerce, i.e., if time is money, then anything that takes up that time must prove itself worthy of our monetary expenditure. He also mentions that, pace the film’s avant garde aspirations, that such a length is not even justified by an epic narrative, ala The Deer Hunter, Gone With the Wind, The Godfather, etc. Wood writes: “the “unjustified” length of the film(s), then represents an act of cultural transgression. The question, “why this length?” should immediately provoke a reciprocal one: why the standard length?” His point is clear: the standard length of films is largely determined by business considerations, as well as an underlying assumption that films should be more “entertaining” than say, a novel, or anything that requires more than one sitting to consume. I should add that any of the time based mediums, theatre, opera, even dance recitals, are subject to this tyranny of assumption based thinking; the novel, under the assumption that few people will read one from cover to cover in a matter of hours, gets a little more leeway with regards to length, yet people still balk at the notion of a “long” novel, presumably something over 800 or 1000 pages. But part of Out 1’s significance is this notion of a life experience – spending so much time with a certain set of people, fictional or otherwise, creates a new kind of understanding and complicity that is impossible to create using shorthand. I’ll let Rosenbaum briefly describe the film’s structure:

“Each of the serial’s eight episodes is titled as a relay between two characters, suggesting a chain of successive links: “From Lili to Thomas,” “From Thomas to Frederique,” “From Frederique to Sarah,” “From Sarah to Colin,” and so on. The explanation of who these people are is much of the story–and because their identities keep changing, we’re often confounded. Lili (Michele Moretti) and Thomas (Michel Lonsdale) are in separate theater groups, each preparing plays by Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Unbound. Thomas is the director of his state-run company; Lili’s is an independent, directorless collective. Frederique (Juliet Berto) is a solitary working-class flirt who cons people out of money. Sarah (Bernadette Lafont) is a novelist working in a country house near the ocean (and an old pal of Thomas). Colin (Jean-Pierre Leaud)–a deaf mute who communicates with a harmonica–begs for money in cafes until a member of Lili’s collective, for no stated reason, hands him a slip of paper with an enigmatic message, and Colin, alone in his furnished room, undertakes to decode it.”

Each of these sections take up about an hour or so a piece, using incredible long takes with a usually mobile, but sometimes static, camera set up. The film begins with two different rehearsal scenes, and my limited understanding of theatre history perhaps hampers any full understanding of the proceedings, but it is clear that narrative is not particularly relevant here. The actors writhe about, scream, and in the case of the Prometheus group, involve converging on a mannequin done up in a bizarre costume. These seem to be avant garde acting exercises, and Rivette’s connection to underground theatre has been well documented. Admittedly, these are the most difficult scenes in the film to sit through, and there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason behind their duration. In other words, if these scenes were arranged differently, or were shorter and/or longer, the film would still function in much the same way. Nevertheless, is it our position to chide the filmmaker for a perceived inconvenience, or is it an audience’s job to try, instead, to understand why the artist has placed a particular scene in a particular place?

Of the various story threads, several are quite interesting, even if the never eventually add up to an adequate resolution – resolution and closure being so important to our notion of narrative, and one more thing that Rivette is determined to undermine. The two theatre groups eventually abandon their rehearsals and become involved in a mystery involving someone who has stolen money from them. Michael Lonsdale, his large, bulky frame suggesting simultaneously a sedentary yet spry figure, will eventually be revealed as part of the conspiracy that plagues Jean Pierre Leaud’s Colin, and yet it is a conspiracy that means nothing to us: we don’t know the rules, the players, or the consequences. Juliet Berto has never been better than in Rivette films (see also Celine and Julie Go Boating); by contrast, I’ve never felt that Godard knew what to do with her and her particular brand of energy (specifically, he renders her quite bland in La Chinoise). Her interactions with her various marks are highly enjoyable, not in the least because she seems to be having so much fun herself. Eventually, Berto’s part of the narrative is interrupted by her character’s abrupt murder. Jean Pierre Leaud is typically charming. His early scenes, blowing a harmonica loudly into people’s faces until they give him their change, are hilarious. And it’s just another case of subterfuge when his deaf-mute character begins speaking quite clearly. His obvious romantic interest in Bulle Ogier’s café/bookstore/radical character leads to much conversation, but nothing else, and his increasingly dark obsession with unraveling a mystery cum riddle that might not even exist seems a reasonable counterpoint to the audience – sitting there in the dark, wondering what to make of all of this. Bulle Ogier and Lonsdale will eventually make their way to a sea side villa, where another mystery, involving a missing man and a locked room, come to light. Critic Jonathan Romney has put it quite succinctly: “Out 1 is magnificently uncontainable: too many characters to track, too many connections between them, too many blind alleys, and, above all, too much contradiction.”

What then, you might ask, is the point? Certainly, you wouldn’t suggest a film that doesn’t mean anything? A film that takes an entire day to watch? That is willfully, even perversely, anti-narrative, and that ends pretty much where it started? As critic Fred Camper mentioned after the screening to an incredulous fellow viewer, one who couldn’t believe what he had just sat through, “Out 1 is like all the great films – it is trying to make sense of the world we live in”.

The First Transition Week 3: City Lights

2008-10-01T15:53:00.000-05:00

Only Chaplin has known how to span a third of a century of cinema, and this because his genius was truly exceptional

Above all, certain situations can only be said to exist cinematographically to the extent that that their spatial unity is established, especially comedy situations that are based on the relations between human beings and things… If slapstick comedy succeeded before the days of Griffith and montage, it is because most of its gags derived from a comedy of space, from the relation of man to things and to the surrounding world. In The Circus, Chaplin is truly in the lion’s cage and both are enclosed within the framework of the screen.

Andre Bazin

* * *

Nothing sucks the joy out of comedy quicker than trying to quantify, describe, explain it. It would take a better critic than myself to convince you that Chaplin is great without boring you. And yet, I try. The hubris… The point is not the film’s humor (of which there is plenty, perhaps more than one person can handle), but how that humor is achieved. Call it the mechanics of comedy if you will. Chaplin’s Tramp bumbles around the city, falling in love with a blind girl and finding a rich drunk (labeled “the eccentric millionaire” in the film’s opening credits) and realizing that he can parlay the drunkard’s gifts of cash into a better life for his blind muse. That’s about all there is of the film’s plot, and yet the process of getting from point A to point B, etc is one of such endless invention and grace that the critic is daunted in his task. The film is constantly shifting incidents around in a careful modulation of scale – one can only imagine that such an ability is innate, as if handed down from high above and gifted to only one man (Keaton and Lloyd not withstanding). Gags begin small, even telegraphed (someone standing close to water is predestined to take a spill), but grow gradually in scope, eventually encompassing an element of time as to cement the (im)possibility of what we are seeing. The Tramp mistakes a piece of party streamer for a noodle and proceeds to chow down – a mild gag, placed amidst a dozen others (most more complicated in their choreography) during a nightclub scene, and yet Chaplin fully commits to it. After what seems like several hours of chewing, we realize that Chaplin is actually eating this stuff. There is nothing hidden in an edit, no time ellipses to assure the performer’s comfort or to elide the fact that someone is just spitting the stuff out. It is a comedic process born of a fidelity to the realism of a time based actuality.

Bazin’s notions of realism have been much commented upon, and are undoubtedly some of the more important formulations in film criticism. But no where do they seem (to me) more important than in the comedy genre (and the action genre as well, the two being basically similar in their construction, if ultimately differing in what kind of response they hope to elicit – either way, both genres are interested in a kind of physical exhilaration). When Chaplin climbs over a rail to perch precariously on a ledge while peering into a window, that is him in actuality. The choreography of groups of people becomes that much more impressive when, as in the above mentioned night club scene, dozens of performers are involved in simultaneous gags that blend with and evolve organically into the next – the swapping of chairs, the lighting of cigars, accidentally lighting a woman’s posterior on fire, drunkenly dancing with a stranger – all arranged in a kind of expanding tableau. It seems to me that the classical Hollywood musical could not exist without Chaplin (and certainly not something like Tati’s Playtime).

City Lights is a fascinating companion piece to Hawks’ Scarface, and an outstanding curatorial choice on Rosenbaum’s part. If Scarface offers an ironic fulfillment of the American Dream as nightmare – money, power, possession of objects, all leading inevitably to violent death – then City Lights is its ironic counterpoint. The Tramp, a beggar with nothing but his pride, is a nobody (with regards to capitalistic achievement) yet the film is full of joy and hope, all leading inevitably to an affirmation of life. Not for nothing is the “eccentric millionaire” portrayed as suicidal, deprived of friendship and starved for human connection (Chaplin’s next film, modern times, is equally concerned with human relationships being disrupted by modern commerce/ mechanization, and Monsieur Verdoux is considered by many to be an explicit critique of capitalism). In an era of economic depression, we see in these films an implicit critique of a capitalistic economy that equates human happiness with money, as well as an inherent belief in human goodness. A valuable lesson, and one we would do well to remember in our current state of economic affairs.

The First Transition Week 2: I Was Born, But...

2008-09-24T14:28:00.000-05:00

It’s taken some time, and much reconsideration, to dismiss (clarify?) some of the more prevalent misconceptions of Ozu’s work. We can forgive most of the early generalizations: that his films have no camera movement, that his stationary camera is always placed low to the ground in an imitation of a sitting position, that his films deal with family issues and middle class malaise, that he is so inherently Japanese (as opposed to say, Mizoguchi or Kurosawa) that his films are inappropriate/inaccessible to Western audiences and therefore rarely seen (Ozu was in fact quite enamored with American film, and it is generally accepted that Leo McCarey’s “Make Way For Tomorrow” was a primary inspiration for Ozu’s “breakthrough” film in the West, Tokyo Story; furthermore, to suggest that his films were “typically Japanese” neglects all sorts of social levels – where these unrepresented peoples “less” Japanese?). Early formulations on Ozu’s work were, obviously, largely shaped by a certain inaccessibility, with infrequent distribution in the West and gaping holes in between the works that were seen (critics were missing the connecting tissue, as it where). A quick perusal of my Ozu dvds confirm most of the above assumptions – the liner notes for Criterion’s Good Morning describes the film as “a wild card in his career… where he (Ozu) sees the world through children’s eyes” (in fact, Ozu is considered by many to be the best director of children in film, an opinion based on the dozen or so films he made from children’s points of view). The liner notes also make a broad assumption about the key motifs of the 50’s and 60’s, where his films were all about “the attempt by an aging parent to marry off a dutiful daughter…” Critic Michael Atkinson admits that “it’s a cliché now to posit Ozu as the “most Japanese” of that nation’s great directors, but it still seems true” while reinforcing himself the cliché that Ozu’s films are “zen-like”.

Now, with his reputation firmly established and more than a few works of intrepid scholarship (Donald Ritchie, frequently credited as Ozu’s key proponent, has revised much of his earlier formulations, see also Bordwell, Burch, Rosenbaum and Wood), several traveling retrospectives and a general tendency towards archival screenings, as well as the decent amount of films readily available on home video formats, we novices, the uninitiated, can finally come to grips with a large and varied body of work. Far from suggesting that I’m some sort of Ozu expert (I’ve only seen seven of his 50+ films), I am, instead, extremely excited to delve into that oeuvre.

I Was Born, But… seems only atypical if measured against the above (hopefully adequately refuted) presumptions. In actuality, it is a key early work that shows a director in total command of his visual vocabulary and social commentary – in short, it is a masterwork. The Yoshii family has moved out to the suburbs of Tokyo, presumably for the father to be closer to his boss and work (David Bordwell explains the term batsu: a clique of co-workers who also socialize in other aspects of life, forming a kind of familial unit based entirely around company life and the gradual accumulation of more status). The two Yoshii sons quickly become entangled with the local bully and his little mob. Hoping to avoid a fight, the sons skip school and forge an assignment, only to have a teacher report back to their father that they were not in class. Eventually forced to return to school, the Yoshii boys (with the help of an older delivery boy) vanquish the bully and take control of the little gang. From their new found position of power, the boys are shocked to see their father bowing (subjugating) himself to the boss (who’s son is the tiniest member of the gang). While viewing home movies one evening, the Yoshii boys see footage of their father acting like a clown for the boss’ amusement. Angered by their father’s embarrassing play-acting, the boys go on a hunger strike. The next morning, they eventually succumb to hunger and break bread with their father. Familial unity has been restored. And yet still there is unease.

My efforts at plot synopsis are hopelessly inadequate to confer even part of the humor, sensitivity and subversive nature of the film. I Was Born, But… is essentially an examination of social power struggles. The father’s position at work is constantly juxtaposed with/commented on by the sons’ struggles with the local bully. In the children’s world, order and regimentation are based on quantifiable, tangible abilities – size, strength, speed. When the Yoshii son’s realize that they can’t best the bully, they make the logical conclusion to find someone bigger than themselves (the older delivery boy) to fight fort hem. But the father’s world is ruled by status and money – abstract ideas to these small boys who are convinced that, since their father is the “greatest”, he should grovel to no one. Ozu positions both ideas, concrete/intangible, into a kind of dialectic of power – a position articulated by an astounding sequence that segues into an astonishing camera movement. In the school courtyard, a large group of boys are (arranged in what looks like a military formation) doing their morning exercises. As the formation carries out its movements, Ozu gets some laughs from a boy who just can’t seem to stay in step with the group, turning left while the others turn right and so on. The boys are then arranged into a single file line, and as they turn to march off screen to the left, the camera begins a lateral tracking movement to the right. As it tracks, the scene cuts (almost seamlessly, an astounding technical achievement); the camera now moves across a row of men seated at desks in an office. We pass a series of these men before the camera stops and tracks back the way it came, resting momentarily on a man struggling to stay awake. It lingers for just a moment before restarting its path towards the boss’ office. The young boy who so amusingly could not keep up with his fellow students is now linked visually to the tired office worker – what was for a moment funny is now, retrospectively, a depressing projection into the future of this boy/man who will never be able to follow in step with his surroundings. Furthermore, the scene links the notion of rigid formation and following orders from the school yard to the office, a dire trajectory for the Yoshii boys. Later in the film, as the parents lament their own failures and wonder aloud if their children will succeed where they have not, we think back to this defining scene in the film and realize the full weight of what the children are struggling against. Paternal authority haunts the school yard, the play ground, and the office. Indeed, the unease at the end of the film, despite the reconstitution of the family, is the underlining sense that the powerful social dynamics of the capitalized world have been laid bare. If nothing has really changed, there is in fact, a sense that the boys have willfully accepted the need to subjugate oneself in order to survive (as the father tries to explain, with increasing frustration, that the boss is the one who pays him and allows the boys to go to school).
Critic Gabe Klinger filled in for Rosenbaum on this screening (Rosenbaum was attending TIFF) and made some cursory introductory remarks culled mostly from Rosenbaum’s essay entitled “Is Ozu Slow?”. I offer here some of what Gabe read aloud, as well as a bit more context from the essay itself:
“Stockhausen has the following to say about what he calls Japanese timing: "Where timing is concerned, the European is absolutely mediocre. Which means he has settled down somewhere in the middle of his range of potential tempi. It is a very narrow range, compared with the extremely fast reactions that a Japanese [person] might have at a certain moment, and to the extremely slow reaction that he might show on another occasion. He has a poor middle range compared to the European." Stockhausen also implies that this distinction is in danger of being effaced or at least eroded by the Westernization and Americanization of Japan. This is a delicate matter, because we know from the persuasive arguments in Shigehiko Hasumi's book on Ozu, Yasujiro Ozu (available in its entirety only in Japanese and French, though the beautiful final chapter, "Sunny Skies," can be found in David Desser's 1997 collection of critical pieces devoted to Tokyo Story published by Cambridge University Press), that Ozu's work also reflects to some degree the impact of America on Japanese culture. But because Hasumi is a Japanese critic looking at American influence and I'm an American critic looking at Japanese elements, we see things with a somewhat different emphasis. In any case, I would like to suggest--and this is my second hypothesis--that the fast reactions in Japanese spectators implied in Ozu's filmmaking practice often correspond to standing and walking, and that the slow reactions implied in his filmmaking practice often correspond to sitting.”

He goes further regarding, specifically, I Was Born, But…

“… this is a film in which social behavior and social conditioning are at least as important as reflection, and the issue of speed is relevant to all three activities. Early in the film, after the boys skip school out of fear of getting beaten up and have their lunch in the field, one of the brothers reminds the other, "We're supposed to get an A in writing today." Soon afterwards they both stand up to finish their lunch on their feet, an action which implies, as much else in the film does, that getting ahead in the world requires alertness and motion, both of which are usually more obtainable from a standing position.”

He concludes his essay with:

“One conclusion that can be drawn from this is that speed is relative--all the more so in a film where coexistence and relativity are central to the style as well as the subject. For this reason, we can't answer the question, "Is Ozu slow?" in a single way. The work is too rich and too varied for such a question to have any meaning. Indeed, it's part of the function of the greatest artists to dissolve such questions, or at the very least transform them into other questions. For what finally matters most in Ozu is not how slow or fast he is but how slow or fast we are in keeping up with him.”

You can read the entire essay here – I would recommend it, as Rosenbaum’s analysis of the above mentioned tracking shot clarifies and enhances my own thoughts on the matter

Burn After Reading (or before viewing)

2008-09-23T02:11:00.000-05:00

“There is also… a way of reacting to a crisis – perhaps this way belongs to a later phase in which hope and will have been put aside. I refer to the impassive reflection of the absurdities which become the accepted realities of daily life, as well as the emblems of its disorder. The projection of these absurdities according to their own logic produces an art of impenetrable farce, farce being the final form, as Marx noted in one of his Hegelian moments, of action in a situation that has become untenable.”

Harold Rosenberg

* * *

“Keep an eye on them until it all makes sense.”

The camera zooms down through the heavens, breaking through blue skies and clouds, descending upon a Google Earth version of Washington D.C. It’s a god’s eye view that uncomfortably suggests that the Coen Bros. are descending down from their vaunted seat in the critical elite, members of the pantheon about to bestow wisdom upon us mere mortals. We will learn that what they have to teach us is this: none of it makes sense, it’s all a cosmic joke of idiotic, self serving hubris, greed, misunderstandings, and rage. So why not just sit back and enjoy the ride?

* * *

“What did we learn here?”

(pause) “Not to do it again?”

(longer pause) “But what the fuck did we do?”

The Coen’s have always dodged accusations of being pop-nihilists; pick a label - that they are self-consciously hip; glib, sarcastic, condescending, anti-humanist; their films are populated by caricatures (and (un)usually grotesque ones at that); that they are anti-intellectuals who talk down to their audience while, simultaneously and paradoxically, flattering them. To all of which we might now add, with Burn After Reading: they are officially anti-film.
How do I begin to describe a film populated by idiots (a “league of morons”, as is oft quoted in the film) that engage in dubious and ill-advised affairs (sabotage, subterfuge, blackmail, breaking and entering, adultery, alcoholism, murder) in the midst of a lugubrious, twisting plot that gleefully leads nowhere – the lack of closure at the end of No Country that seemed (at the time) to mean so much has now been transformed into a joke itself – an entire film in which the plot and characters are one huge, unprecedented macguffin, coupled with a denouement that unabashedly acknowledges that we’ve all just been sold a bill of goods. To which a defender might suggest: but that’s the joke, don’t you get it? Yes, I suppose it’s all very clever. But what does it all mean? Or does it have to mean anything at all? Perhaps not, unless one actually seeks edification and engagement with works of art. It is confusing to me, the whole thing. Why make films at all? Genre deconstruction? Perhaps; and yet it seems to me that Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There and No Country for Old Men operate all too smoothly within genre parameters to acquire such a label (not to mention unabashed homages like Intolerable Cruelty and The Hudsucker Proxy, or a simple remake like The Ladykillers). No, it seems to me, at least, that the Coen’s tackle a subject/genre to both mock it and prove their mastery of it (and in the process patting us on the back for being clever enough to follow along – we confirm our own mastery over the material through them).
And what of their much vaunted technical prowess? It’s certainly not on display here – there is such a lack of visual distinction that one is forced to wonder how much they’ve really leaned on Deakins (or Sonnenfeld before him). DP Emmanuel Lubezki seems to be filling in the blanks, especially after his work with Cuaron, Malick and Mann. Most of the film’s humor comes from the Coen’s cutting on an action or a face, abruptly ending the shot just before or after it might usually end. It creates a certain amount of tension, to be sure, and they get some ok comedic mileage out of Pitt and Clooney, but the idea gets old quickly and they don’t offer much of anything else. Otherwise, it’s pretty standard film grammar, full of shot-counter-shot and matching eyelines. When in doubt, the Coen’s frame something symmetrically or hold the camera in a fixed position for just a beat or two after a scene has ended, in effect leaving the character stranded in a kind of negative space that exists purely for their discomfort (and our sour satisfaction) . The actors all seem game – much like Woody Allen, another highly mediocre and over praised critic’s darling, A-list stars keep falling all offer themselves to be in a Coen Bros film. There must be something there, some perception that one is going to work with a master and/or really push the boundaries of one’s craft. But Clooney is relegated here to steadily repeated punch lines (“I should try to get in a run” used almost as frequently, and with equally diminishing returns, as “We’re in a tight spot here boys!” or “I’m a Dapper Dan man!” or, to go back to earlier examples, “It’s for kids!” or “It really tied the room together!”). Pitt fairs somewhat better, as he seems to have wandered in from an entirely different film, and yet even he winds up regurgitating the same lines over and over again (repeating the name “Osborne Cox….” ad naseum, the presumption being that hearing the word “cox” repeatedly is amusing) and is summarily dispatched in yet another violent-scene-as-punctuation that the Coen’s have become so adept at. If you think your audience might be getting bored, or if you just need a quick shock tactic, spray some viscera on the wall (arterial spray also gets a work out). It’s indicative of their world view that the one character who actually acts like a human being gets shot and hacked to bits with a hatchet. So what’s it all about?

Critic Glenn Kenny (someone who, I might add, I admire quite a bit) offers this:

“Complaining that the Coen Brothers can be a little too smart-alecky is like bitching that de Sica was excessively humanistic: more than a little obvious, and completely beside the point. They am what they am, and putting aside the proposition that there's some moral/ethical prerogative to privilege humanism over smart-aleck-ness, how well you'll appreciate/enjoy these filmmakers' works depends on how readily you're willing to key into (which doesn't necessarily mean agree with) their perspectives.”

He makes at least one good point: we don’t need to agree with it. And do we frequently "key into" perspectives with which we disagree? I might add that, while it’s not particularly fashionable to suggest that there is a kind of moral/ethical prerogative: if there's not, then what’s the point? And what are we fighting for in November? Instead, we find ourselves with Rosenberg's notion of circular, self perpetuating farce. What does it mean if we look into the void and simply shrug? That sounds an awful lot, to me at least, like giving up. Perhaps that's the Coen's contribution to our modern dystopia - permission to acquiesce.

Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet

2008-09-10T14:23:00.000-05:00

A fascinating new critical symposium has appeared online and in print in the newest issue of the essential quarterly film magazine Cineaste. I would assume that the recent spate of critic firings is of vital interest to just about anyone who would be bothering to read this post, and the influence of online film writing is certainly germane to the situation. “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet” seeks to explore some of the issues at stake for the future of an increasingly unstable form of discourse - the passionate, informed discussion of film as an art form. A quick glance at mainstream film coverage suggests the depths to which we’ve sunk – last I saw, People Magazine’s film coverage had been reduced to a hundred word capsule review and a large color photo, along with a list of what was currently playing. And the less said about Entertainment Weekly, the better. I offer the beginning of the editorial that opens the symposium:

“In introducing the Critical Symposium on “International Film Criticism Today” in our Winter 2005 issue, we maintained, with a certain resigned pride, that “critics at independent film magazines have virtually complete freedom, and a generous amount of space, to express their opinions if they are willing to endure the relative (or, in some cases, total) penury that results from being unaligned with the corporate media.” In recent months, American critics, having been fired, downsized, or bought out by a host of publications, are realizing that even making compromises with their corporate employers does not guarantee them a job. Given the current economic malaise, the role of online criticism has become increasingly prominent. There has also been, at least in certain quarters, an intensification of the occasional friction between print critics and the denizens of the blogosphere. In a typically ungracious broadside in The New York Press, Armond White wailed that “Internetters…express their ‘expertise,’ which essentially is either their contempt or idiocy about films, filmmakers, or professional critics. The joke inherent in the Internet horde is that they chip away at the professionalism they envy, all the time diminishing critical discourse.”

Below are the questions sent out to a myriad number of critics/bloggers, either professionals, amateurs, online or in print publications, or, increasingly, some combination of all of these things. The list of contributers includes Glenn Kenny, Mike D’Angelo, J. Hoberman, Kent Jones, Adrian Martin, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Amy Taubin, Steve Erickson and Richard Shickel, among many others:

We posed the following question to our respondents, suggesting that they could choose either to answer the individual questions, or to use them as departure points for their own essay.

1) Has Internet criticism made a significant contribution to film culture? Does it tend to supplement print criticism or can it actually carve out critical terrain that is distinctive from traditional print criticism? Which Internet critics and bloggers do you read on a regular basis?

2) How would you characterize the strengths and weaknesses of critics’ blogs? Which blogs do you consult on a regular basis—and which are you drawn to in terms of content and style? Do you prefer blogs written by professional critics or those by amateur cinephiles?

3) Internet boosters tend to hail its “participatory” aspects—e.g., message boards, the ability to connect with other cinephiles through critics’ forums and email, etc. Do you believe this “participatory” aspect of Internet criticism (film critics form the bulk of the membership lists of message boards such as a film by and Politics and Film) has helped to create a genuinely new kind of “cinematic community” or are such claims overblown?

4) Jasmina Kallay, writing in Film Ireland (September-October 2007), has claimed that, in the age of the Internet, the “traditional film critic… is losing his stature and authority.” Do you agree or disagree with this claim? If you agree, do you regard this as a regrettable or salutary phenomenon?

In the spirit of the internet’s “participatory” aspects, take a stab at answering these questions for yourself in the comments below. You can read the entire (it is lengthy) article here.

The First Transition Week 1: Scarface

2008-09-10T13:29:00.000-05:00

Rosenbaum’s First transition screening/lecture series started with a bang this semester, with a showing of Howard Hawks’ gangster classic Scarface. The rise and fall of an American criminal is, at this point (and was, perhaps, even years ago) a tried a true formula, the particular parameters well known to just about everyone. Yet, despite its age and (by now) familiarity, Hawks’ film still mesmerizes. Rosenbaum prefaced the screening with some brief comments, such as Hawk’s dissatisfaction with the previous studio he was working for, which lead him to Hollywood outsider/bad boy producer Howard Hughes – apparently both where in the mood to shake things up and make a film that would push the boundaries of respectability. This led, inevitably, to numerous battles with the censors, necessitating cutting, reshoots, and substituting discarded takes for final shots. The version that still exists to this day is all we’ve got, and no one, even in the 30’s, saw Hawks’ original version in all its gruesome glory. Surprisingly, what remains is enormously provocative – fast paced, sexy, violent, elegant – leading me to wonder as to the extremity of what was removed. Rosenbaum also mentioned that Hawks is one of his five favorite American directors (along with Ford, Hitchcock, Welles and Chaplin) but that it took him longer to appreciate the particulars of his oeuvre than the other directors mentioned. He’s not the first critic to mention such a difficulty – I remember a conversation with Fred Camper many years ago, before I had seen any Hawks films, in which Camper (unsuccessfully, at the time) tried to sell me on Hawks’ peculiar, unassuming genius (I’ve since been converted).

That elusive style is what has always fascinated me about Hawks. In what we could call a system of meaning, or a thematic collection of sorts, Hawks’ most famous period (post ’39 and the release of Only Angels Have Winds) posits an incredibly specific and consistent set of concerns: an emphasis on groups of men, professionals, the best at what they do to the exclusion of all else, be it pilots, lawmen, gunfighters, race car drivers, fur traders or big game hunters. There is usually a fallen comrade, someone who has, through carelessness, stupidity, hubris, or because of a woman, let the group down and must redeem themselves. In Hawks’ world, friendship and professionalism is all that counts and this process of redemption is handled matter-of-factly (see Dean Martin’s redemption in Rio Bravo for the purest example of this process). If someone dies, it is simply because they just weren’t good enough. Women can become a part of the group, but only after they’ve proved that they are tough enough, good enough to stand toe to toe with the men. Then there is, of course, the dialectic between the men dominated action film and the women dominated comedies – a complex dialectic that is perhaps best left for a different essay. But beyond these thematic concerns, there is always the formal – how do the films operate visually? Hawks, quite naturally, frames people in these groups, emphasizing the entire body in motion – gesture, the way someone walks, enters a room, or mounts a horse are all extremely important. Even when not shooting an entire group of people, Hawks almost always includes at least two people – appropriately called a two-shot, and, as Robin Wood has noted, “balancing two characters equally on screen”. Wood also notices that, like almost all of the adventure films, “Rio Bravo contains remarkably few clear point-of-view shots”. We have what is essentially a fascination with equality, where minor characters get as much screen time, and perhaps even more personality, than the film’s ostensible star, and a group dynamic, to the exclusion of all else, is considered the highest ideal one can strive for. An idealized democracy? Absolutely.

As an early work, Scarface fits very few of the above (admittedly loosely sketched) criteria. What we have here is a hard, bitter film (lending credence to Rosenbaum’s suggestion that Hawks is ultimately a pessimistic nihilist). In its brief running time, Tony guns down dozens of men, murders his best friend, gets his sister killed, and finally dies in agony (of interest: an alternate ending included on the dvd of Tony being tried, convicted, and executed; apparently getting gunned down while running from the police didn’t adequately portray our justice system at work). The film is much more expressionistic than later Hawks – at this point Murnau and cinematographer Karl Freund had already been in Hollywood for several years, Sunrise had won the first (and only) Academy Award for artistic achievement, and Universal had begun its now classic monster movie cycle, cementing the infiltration of German Expressionism into an American visual vernacular. Certain scenes even suggest Von Sternberg, as Hawks will frame a shot through miscellaneous bric a brac; the scene that introduces Tony’s sister (Ann Dvorak as “Cesca”) to his best friend (George Raft as “Guino”) finds her looking down at him from her window as he stands on the street – she is framed by an elaborate kind of fire escape railing, creating visually the impression that she is trapped behind bars (essentially true, as Tony is fiercely, inappropriately protective of her) and that Guino clearly represents a kind of freedom. Hawks will also open a scene with a sinewy tracking shot that begins close up on an object before snaking its way up to a more proper framing (his later films almost entirely eschew the close up). Shadows are at constant play here – the celebrated “St. Valentines Day Massacre” scene is one of the more expressionistic moments in Hawks’ career, as far as I know. The camera moves down over a lattice work of X’s that create a dark horizontal band across the top of the frame. The camera moves further down to a white wall and we see the silhouette of several men lined up. Some one orders them to turn around put their hands up, and they obey, all relayed to the audience via shadow. Then, the wall erupts with bullet holes, the shadows crumple, and the camera moves back up the way it came, again crossing the series of X’s that initially framed the scene. It’s an elaborate scene of violent eruption that’s created entirely in the mind’s eye, akin to Dreyer’s (arguably more poetic) use of shadows as an alternate plane of corrupted, horrific reality in Vampyr. Of note, Rosenbaum drew the audience’s attention to the recurring use of these X’s, a motif/joke inspired by old newspapers practice of putting an X where a corpse would be in a photograph. By all accounts, it became a sort of game where members of the cast/crew could suggest different ways of incorporating an X into any of the film’s many, many murder scenes.

Paul Muni’s Tony is all jaw and brow, with sunken, beady eyes to boot – he looks simultaneously like a beaten down wrestler and a petulant youth. Hawks will frequently shoot his face so that thick eyebrows create a kind of horizon line under the brim of a hat and cleaves the face in two. Tony’s gestures are all over the place, a bundle of tics as he constantly winks, scrunches his face, grabs at women or guns – all nervous, combustible energy (and sarcastic at that). When he shoots a pistol, his arm juts back and forth, like a punch or a pelvic thrust. Graduating to a tommy gun, the thrust becomes an orgiastic spray of bullets.

I’m not sure Hawks could make a film where only the protagonist is of importance – even in Scarface, while Tony is essentially the main character and drives forward the film’s actions, he is surrounded by fascinating supporting characters, each with an interesting persona all their own. Ann Dvorak is alternately gawky and elegant, depending on how she slants her shoulders or tilts her head, and George Raft is all quiet menace as he stands around flipping a coin. Boris Karloff turns up as an emaciated, gaunt looking gangster on the run from Tony and his crew – Karloff’s tall, lanky frame looking like it might collapse under the strain at any moment.

Thematically, the film is a nightmare extension of capitalism – the American dream gone sour, the immigrant experience as infiltrating, marauding other. Money is everything, you can’t have enough wealth or enough things – Tony is constantly showing off his newest suits and ties, or his new house with retractable metal shudders. Even the much discussed incestuous relationship with his sister seems to me less sexualized than an elaboration of Tony’s possessive nature – he wants to own her like everything else. The hard working Italian immigrant becomes the hard working American gangster, assimilated whole cloth into a tapestry of disaster capitalism (to appropriate a suitable phrase). We have here, to my mind, a masterpiece of the gangster genre, much like Hawks would master the noir with The Big Sleep and the musical with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, before moving on to refine, and then redefine, the Western.