"...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"
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
JLG/JLG
“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.
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.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Carax's "Merde"
Emerging from the sewers of Tokyo Tokyo USA
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
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Some News:
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".
-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".
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Obituary:
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).
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).
Monday, February 9, 2009
Oshima @ The Film Center
“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.
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.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
2008 Top Ten (or so)...
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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