Another Green World

Bava and the spectacular

2010-07-18T09:04:00.003-05:00

It isn't easy going back to normal movies after watching a few by Mario Bava. The exquisitely delicate (yet always, always kind of tacky and garish - lovely) color and lighting design seems to mark Bava as one of the few filmmakers who really learned something from Eisenstein's second Ivan the Terrible.

Watching Blood and Black Lace last week, on something of a whim, I very quickly realized that there was no way I could avoid discussing Bava and the Italians. I had avoided jumping into the gialli because I know little of the genre and had never had much enthusiasm for Argento. Horror is a genre that attracts ardent and very knowledgeable fans - or, rather, it's subgenres do. Tackling J-horror is a heady enough task for a project devoted largely to American output, but at least that consists of a much smaller archive of both films and writings about the films (particularly in English). The Italian horror film is such a large topic, with so much written and such expert devotees, that I feel a little overwhelmed, and more than a little like a dilettante. But I think that I've decided I need to focus largely on Bava, whose relationship to both the American slasher genre and, to a less explicit extent, the Japanese horror films of the 90s make him immediately relevant to my project. His spatialization of the threat and his concern with the unseen becoming seen makes him both a direct progenitor (especially, I'm told, of the Friday the 13th films) and a valuable contrast with the later films. Blood and Black Lace was made in Italy in 1964 and would have clearly fit in with perfectly with American films of 15 years later, much more than it would fit in with the Americans of the time or of the intervening years. Here's where I start to create more work for myself, of course, because the Italian context would seem to be essential to understanding where Bava's coming from. But, first, I have more Bava to watch.

From the few Bava films that I have seen, it's clear that Bava is much more concerned with visual tableaux than he is with narrative or even suspense, which sets him apart from the Americans but perhaps not as much from someone like Argento. The American horror films (and I included the Canadian Cronenberg here, as his films enter very clearly into the conversation between North American horror filmmakers in the 70s and 80s, even if his non-USA background is equally important to grasping his filmography) concern themselves with visual spectacle primarily when the scene is one of what I'm tentatively calling "spectacular abjection" - a half-paradoxical term that nicely sums up the motivation for much of the gore that started dominating the genre after Romero's opening salvo.

The other kind of tableaux one sees in the American horror film has a clear genesis in the genre's earliest entries: the monster, particularly his face. Robert Spadoni's writing on the face of Frankenstein's monster doesn't need to be elaborated on, as it's a brilliant explanation of both the power of monsters' images as well as the cinema's fascination with the human face - not to mention one of the best pieces written on early sound film. In the post-Night of the Living Dead modern horror film, you tend to see this more in the larger budget horror film. Regan in The Exorcist - but even there the abject substances being oozed and expelled by the monster mark its modern pedigree. I have an awful tendency to efface films like that because they're much less interesting and - more shamefully, also explaining the former a bit - they don't fit my arguments or the frameworks I've developed for reading modern horror; I keep telling myself to be less afraid of engaging these films head on, because they don't invalidate my arguments and can actually be made to strengthen them, but with an attention paid to films that I actively dislike, i.e. The Exorcist. (I aggressively roll my eyes at trashy genre films that try to rationalize their trashiness through high-minded thematic discussions. For a theological horror film that takes theology seriously, try John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which is far creepier and way more fun.)

The abject tableaux and the localized suspense of the stalking sequence are matched in the slasher film, where the abject display of graphically opened bodies frequently resolves the suspense of the stalking sequence. It is, I think, very significant that the visual spectacle is based in the attack and the victim rather than the monster/killer. DePalma might be the primary practitioner of Bava's style of spectacle in the following decades of American horror.

Bava's stalking sequences are themselves elaborate visual spectacles in which lighting, color, and movements of both camera and actress (usually) engage in a complex choreography. They are gorgeous, remarkable eye candy that is arch and perverse but most of all it is spectacular (to keep re-using the same word over and over again until it's run into the ground... sigh). That is, suspense provides an ideal vehicle for structuring the sequence, but Bava's stalking sequences are overpowered by the visuals - tableaux isn't the right word because they're rarely without movement, but it's close because there's a sort of frozen, posed quality to everything. Bava's a master at injecting life and movement into the stillness of the tableau, of course, because his compositions manage to be rough and sloppy while remaining intricately controlled (and, to repeat myself, choreographed). But the reason why the stalking sequence makes the ideal subject for someone like Bava gets right to the heart of the appeal of the horror film for its makers and its audiences: there is a deep, visceral reaction to these scenes of terror and suffering that are unique among film genres. For a stylist like Bava to tackle narratives of abject (ahem) terror is to inject a gut-level emotional response into the film that gives even the most cerebral exercise in style a powerful pull for an audience. And Bava's films seem to fail if considered only in larger narrative terms. They string together remarkable set pieces and brilliant, highly effective individual sequences, and momentum between these sequences tends to lag. If the viewer foregrounds the visual progression of the film and to appreciate the rhythm of the intense (stylistically and dramatically) sequences within themselves and as a sort of rhythmic composition throughout the film, then they work.

Bava is an important, influential figure in the genre, I think, largely because the power of his images shift the spectacle away from the monster to the act of stalking and killing. Romero and the 70s filmmakers, and then the gore-comedians of the 80s like Raimi, Stuart Gordon and Peter Jackson, would shift the emphasis even more to the body of the victim. The slasher films would do so as well, but not because they don't try to emphasize the stalking - it's just that Tom Savini and co.'s makeup effects are much more effective and powerful than the editing or mise-en-scene of everyone besides Carpenter and Craven (which leaves about 6 years of relying on gruesome makeup before Nightmare on Elm St. reinvigorated the genre and the sub-genre).

The film of Bava's that works the best narratively is also one of his most striking visually. The Wurdulak section of Black Sabbath is only about 30 minutes long, and is a perfect film. Reminiscent of The Leopard, and the sort of garish, astonishing melodrama that Fassbinder would have admired, it's another horror story in which the aging, vaguely aristocratic patriarchy turns monstrous and preys on the young. Here, the vampire Boris Karloff's greatest thirst is for those he loves the most, and he begins with his grandson. He shows affection for the boy, before it's clear he's a vampire, in a way that seems both caring and dangerously predatory - in a way that threatens bodily harm, bodily consumption, more than sexuality. The film works so well narratively because it basically builds up to a single stalking sequence, one that is more elongated and geographically dispersed than most stalking sequences but rhythmically and structurally that is the best way to understand it. It shows a narrative economy that suggests Bava's gifts as a storyteller come when he can focus on visual solutions to dramatic problems rather than building characters. The progressive menace of Karloff's patriarch is performed subtly and strikingly, while Bava's features tend to wander when characters have to discuss points important to the plot and to their own placement within it.

Call for Papers

2007-11-25T19:45:00.000-06:00

Alternative Non-Fictions: Essay Films, Hybrids, and Experimental Documentaries

Fifth annual cinema and media studies graduate-student conference

University of Chicago
Conference Date: April 5, 2008
Keynote Address: Richard Neer (University of Chicago)

Deadline for Abstracts: January 1, 2008

Alternative Non-Fiction: Essay Films, Hybrids, and Experimental Documentaries will be the fifth Graduate Cinema Conference at the University of Chicago, a one-day event that will bring together graduate students on cinematic theory and practice. Vaguely defined and broadly inclusive, the term “essay film” has been used in popular and academic discourse to describe a wide variety of alternative nonfiction films and filmmakers that defy easy categorization. The term has been applied to the practices as diverse as Chris Marker’s philosophical travelogues, Michael Moore’s incisive polemics, William E. Jones’s queer archaeological ruminations, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s explorations of post-colonial embodiment, Ross McElwee’s filmed diaries, and Jean-Luc Godard’s meditations on art and cinema. While certainly alternative and innovative in form, these practices have historically been used to address social and political issues, as well as intensely personal visions, in ways that are not often open to conventional filmmaking.

With the rise of documentary in both mainstream and avant-garde film and media practices, alternative nonfiction forms have taken on an increasingly important place in filmmaking today. These practices have served as supplements to and refutations of traditional modes of cinematic rhetoric and representation—bringing to the fore issues of medium specificity, textual hybridity, and narrative conveyance. In this spirit, the conference aims to examine the discourses that have arisen in these alternative non-fiction practices and their implications for the wider field of cinema studies.

We invite papers on a wide range of topics including, but not limited to:

--Conceptual frameworks for analyzing alternative nonfiction filmmaking.
--Formal and expressive possibilities afforded by alternative nonfiction.
--Filmmakers including: Vertov, Godard, Marker, Welles, Rappaport, Farocki, Kluge, Akerman, Friedrich, Trinh, Errol Morris, Derek Jarman, Ross McElwee, Cheryl Dunye, William E. Jones.
--Presentations and representations of minority subjectivities, including but not limited to racial, postcolonial, sexual, and gendered minorities.
--Figurations of alternative desires (feminist, queer, postcolonial, and otherwise).
--Politics and polemics in essay films.
--The social, political, and critical constructions of the traditional/alternative dichotomy.
--Essayistic practices in narrative filmmaking.
--Cinematic essays in new media.
--First person documentaries and the diary film.
--Fiction and non-fiction hybrid films.
--The essay film and the underground/avant-garde traditions.
--Literary practices and essay filmmaking.
--And the larger issues raised by alternative nonfiction (originality, public domain, aesthetic categories like romanticism and modernism, cinematic ontology, indexicality in cinematic and digital images).

The keynote speaker will be Richard Neer, Department of Art History, University of Chicago. Professor Neer has recently published an article in Critical Inquiry titled “Godard Counts” on questions of cinematic evidence in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma. Working on the relationship between style and politics, he has published widely on classical art, historiography, Poussin, and French cinema.

Limited financial assistance for travel may be available for international students.

Saw and Irrational Fear

2007-08-13T01:08:00.000-05:00

Wanting something without much of a plot that I could let play in the background while finishing up my paper, I put on Saw. I dislike any kind of shock-driven horror, and haven't seen any of the so called "torture porn" films (although Takashi Miike's The Audition would be close - and that one scarred me, deeply).

Like so many films in the past decade or so, Saw's narrative comes in part from a video game structure - it's all about succeeding within the rules of a game and graduating to the next level, with an eventual goal of "beating the game." These films achieve whatever resonance they have by playing with or destabilizing these rules - the world of the characters is first shrunk to the parameters of whatever game they're supposed to be playing, then it's revealed that those rules, which would be the one dependable element of their existence, are in fact not dependable.

What's interesting about the film from a cinematic standpoint is the lengths it goes to in order to mobilize the traditional cinematic horror devices. The horror comes from the same place it has in any film since Psycho or Halloween - the film depends on its ability to maintain its villain's status as being essentially disembodied: the separation of voice from body and, when the body is shown, giving it as few human characteristics as possible (particularly a mouth). When Danny Glover first encounters the killer, he has no chance of controlling him, because he has no human vulnerability or identity. At this point in the film, he's basically supernatural. He starts to lose his invulnerability little by little: first we see his fingers, then we see a little bit of his face (and probably figure out who it is), then his identity is revealed.

A man with a rifle in a well-lit room might be more certain to kill you in an attack than a skinny psychopath lurking in the shadows with a power tool, but horror films mobilize in the audience an irrational fear of the unknown and incomprehensible. You saw it in (again) Psycho and in Halloween, villains who have no clear origin for their monstrosity. With Psycho, however, the villain is human, sort of, and vulnerable as soon as his/her true face is shown. Michael Myers's face is never shown, and he never becomes vulnerable - what causes the monster's psychological drive to kill or his inhuman invulnerability is never explained. He never becomes human, or comprehensible in any physical or psychological way, and therefore the characters' attempts to fight, cure, reason, etc. are at best temporary solutions. Michel Chion's writings about the "acousmetre" - the bodiless voice - are essential to understanding the mechanics of the horror film. In a horror film, particularly a slasher film, the filmmakers go to ridiculous extremes to not only hide the villain's face, but to maintain a disjunction between the voice and the mouth from which it issues. Audio distortion (since Scream?) is a favorite, so are masks, phones ("I don't want to alarm you, but the call is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!"), shadowy cloaks and robes. Or how about all of them, plus a doll, in the case of the Saw films.

Roger Ebert, in his review of Saw, writes this: "As for the (possible) Jigsaw Killer, he of course is glimpsed imperfectly in some kind of a techno-torture lair, doing obscure things to control or observe the events he has so painstakingly fabricated. We also see another version of the killer, also annoying: Jigsaw (or someone) disguises himself as a grotesque clown-like doll on a tricycle. Uh, huh. Whenever a movie shows me obscure, partial, oblique, fragmented shots of a murderous mastermind, or gives him a mask, I ask myself -- why? Since the camera is right there in the lair, why not just show us his face? The answer of course is that he is deliberately obscured because he's being saved up for the big revelatory climax at the end."

It's this irrationality - both in the threat and in the structure of the narrative - that separates what we think of as "horror" films from suspense films or thrillers. I know very little about the history of the genre, but this seems to be a recent development. In Hitchcock's day, it wasn't unheard of to refer to his films as horror films. The giant monster or alien invasion films of the fifties - what we would consider strict science-fiction - were also horror films, sort of. If the Universal horror films (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man) are still considered "horror" today, it's because their monsters are human-like but still inhuman, and are supernatural in that rational methods of defense against them don't work, at least initially. (Viewed today, James Whale's films are more comedies or melodramas than horror, or even science fiction - but the monsters of the Universal films are so iconic that when they are considered in cultural terms today, the tragic figures from which they've descended are less important than the subsequent iconography.)

The irrationality of these horror villains is constantly being thematized in these films. You see it again and again, victims being put in a perilous situation and trying to work their way out of it by figuring out the exact nature of the threat. Once the threat is supposedly decoded, the villain is suddenly less supernatural and seemingly vulnerable - but the last big twist of these films is usually something that reveals these efforts to be in vain. Naomi Watts figures out the little girl's story and thinks she's discovered out how to end the cycle of supernatural violence, the action lulls and then all of a sudden it comes roaring back as she and the audience realize that no one understands anyhing. That is, in The Ring as in Saw, the audience is placed in the same position of trying to translate an irrational, supernatural threat into something rational and concrete that can be dealt with. In Zizekian-Lacanian terms, horror films are scary because they traffic in this irreducible kernel of irrationality, which can't be verbalized or reasoned away. It's an irrational kernel within our own make-up (Zizek would say, and maybe he does somewhere or other), one that is simultaneously within us and not part of our reasoning ego - both an internal and external threat.

The Saw films, with drastically diminishing returns, become less like horror films as the series progresses and the killer becomes more prominent and more humanized. Their ridiculousness, and their moral offensiveness, comes from the way the films humanize Jigsaw and turn him into a moral authority - that is, when the killer's face is revealed, when his voice is wedded to his mouth, he no longer becomes a source of horror, danger, violence. The film's can't conceive of that irreducible irrational threat as existing within a flesh and blood human being, and so it displaces the responsibility for the crimes onto the victims. The horrific irony is that the victims become less human, more caricature, as "Jigsaw" becomes more human.

Mon Oncle

2007-07-22T01:25:00.000-05:00

I'm currently working my way through a paper-sized chunk of my ongoing Tati project. France underwent a process of remarkably rapid modernization in the postwar years. Reaching its peak in the late 50s, around the time Tati made Mon Oncle, France's modernization brought the basic necessities of modern living (electricity, indoor plumbing, etc) to the people, but was incredibly destructive. Massive rebuilding projects changed the overall structure of Paris while expelling workers and poor foreigners from the city's center. This neo-Hausmannization placed the great unwashed into modernist apartment blocks in the outskirts, luring them through affordable rents and the promise of modern amenites - mainly, though, the poorer classes had to relocate to the banlieus because it was the only alternative to the older apartment buildings the city was tearing down left and right. In short, between the rebuilding of France's rubble and the creation of new rubble, France was making drastic changes in how its people lived, how its cities were structured, how classes interacted, and how it looked.

In writing about Tati, I've been digging into the work of Henri Lefebvre. As Jameson points out, Lefebvre was a modernist (whose writings are first and foremost a response to the modernization of France), but as many have observed, he is (like, I would say, Tati) a forerunner of postmodern theory, even a transitional figure. He was fascinated with space and saw everything through that prism: how space is created, how it is utilized (and who controls it), how one kind of space differentiates itself from another, how it shapes and limits the behavior within it, what sorts of rhythms it contains or produces, etc. His writings on "everyday life" remain hugely influential, as does his Production of Space - little else, however, has received an adequate (i.e. grammatically coherent) translation into English. For the purposes of this paper, I wasn't able to get as deep into his writings (translated only - my French is serviceable but not up to the demands of sociological theory) as I would have liked, but what I did read indicated an intense sympathy between Tati and Lefebvre. Working at the same time, both obsessed with space and spatial practice, they seem to have looked on France's new way forward from a similar perspective. Both were acutely aware of what was being lost in France's modernization, and although one could accuse both (Tati more than Lefebvre) of indulging in sentimental nostalgia, to do is almost besides the point. Both worked with an eye towards the future, and both were explicit in their desire to change actual societal behavior with their work: Tati wanted to teach audiences how to look at spaces differently, how to recognize the human and organic in a mechanical/electrical world; Lefebvre, of course, wished to see results in actual city planning. While Lefebvre had to be aware of Tati's films - they were enormous successes and Tati was, after Mon Oncle, something of a national hero - hee never mentions Tati and hardly touches the cinema at all. It's conceivable (probable) that Tati never heard of Lefebvre. Tati once told a collaborator that books made his head hurt.

Anyway, much of my paper is (or, ahem, will be) a close reading of Mon Oncle with Lefebvre, along with Barthes, Kristin Ross's Fast Cars, Clean Bodies and a few others providing context, backup, inspiration, etc. It isn't a "Lefebvrian reading" per se; Lefebvre's writings offer theoretical articulation very similar to Tati's artistic one, and so are serving to highlight formal and diegetic details and their significance within the larger cultural context. Hopefully I'll post something more concrete in the next couple days. One thing that's clear is that everything I'd like to discuss won't make it into the paper.I think a major reception study needs to be done on the film. It was embraced wholeheartedly by the French public at a time in which modernization and loss of national identity was of huge cultural concern, a time in which the debate between the old ways and the new was a constant in the newspapers, magazines and literature of the time. The film's sympathies clearly lie with the artisanal village life of the old town rather than the loud and colorless existence of the Arpels and the new town, a position that fueled the sentimental self-regard in one (large) portion of the population, and was seen by another portion as a reactionary work that resisted modernization and modernity. Both sides have some truth to them, but neither can adequately encompass the density or specificity of the film's critique, nor its clear-eyed acknowledgement that the life of the old town has already passed. But I have done a little bit of digging, Chicago's sparse periodicals holdings notwithstanding. For now, I'd like to talk about sound and Tati's most eloquent, insightful interpreter, Andre Bazin.

Several Tati collaborators have mentioned in interviews that Tati was particularly sensitive to bad reviews (another reason why a reception study could be crucial). If you read the interview he did with Bazin and Truffaut in 1958 carefully, you notice two things: 1) it's clear at which point the admiring Bazin ceases to the the interviewer and the petulant Truffaut takes over; and, 2)Tati has read Bazin's review of Les Vacances de M. Hulot (when he says "you saw in Les Vacances" he doesn't mean the generic/hypothetical "you" but Bazin specifically, referring to a comment made in the essay "M. Hulot and Time"). I mention this because the sensitivity to criticism becomes apparent once again when Tati starts conducting interviews for Playtime. He claims that he lost his way with Mon Oncle, that the film is too narrative and has too traditional a message for his liking. This echoes the criticisms levelled at the film by its detractors and indicates (along with the exclusive use of long and medium-long shots, and the ideological rationale behind it) that Tati's conception of his art was perhaps shaped to some degree by the Cahiers critics and, especially, Bazin. The original title of "M. Hulot and Time" was, by the way, "Pas de scenario pour M. Hulot," referring to Bazin's description of Hulot as a character who could not exist in a traditional story, with a job and a normal life.

The interaction between Bazin and Tati is an essay in and of itself, but for the moment I want to concentrate on the soundtrack to Mon Oncle. One of the most beautiful passages in all of Bazin's work is the lengthy discussion of sound in Les Vacances that concludes:

"It’s the sound which gives M. Hulot’s universe its depth, its moral prominence. Ask yourself where that overwhelming sadness, that inordinate disenchantment comes from at the end of the film, and you may find that it comes from silence. Throughout the film, the playful cries of children inevitably accompany shots of the beach, and their abrupt silence signifies the end of the holiday."

Similarly, the sounds of a busy village square occupy the soundtrack of Mon Oncle during any visit to the old town. Heavy on children's voices and vendors hawking their wares, little is intelligible in this pleasant noise. However, there's a difference between the endless expanse of the beach and a small, largely enclosed village space. Although you can occasionally hear bits and pieces of a conversation between characters, most of the voices on the soundtrack in these crowd scenes are never attached to any specific mouth. There's a ghostlike quality to this free-floating jumbling of voices. And Tati again ends with the silencing of these voices, this time camouflaged somewhat by the umpteenth reprise of the film's main theme. However, without any diegetic motivation, the final shots of the old town are deserted (people-wise), and the very last shot of the film is taken, for some reason, from inside an unknown building overlooking the main square. The square can be seen through a window that's largely covered by a sheer curtain swaying in the breeze for a shroudlike effect in this portrait of the iconic and practical center of the village life.

What I'm getting at is that there's a similar melancholy at the end of Mon Oncle, and that again the soundtrack plays a central role, perhaps more pointedly this time. In Les Vacances it's the just-finished holiday being mourned, but Mon Oncle is an elegy for an era that may have already passed. That ghostly chorus of shouts and chatter in the background gives the whole community a slightly unreal quality. Sound behaves differently in the new town, where the sound of every little step or shift in a chair booms and machines emit all manner of abrasive squawks and squeaks. It's very concrete and literal minded - realistic in character if not volume. I don't hold the film's sentimentality against it: Tati isn't making a reactionary choice between "traditional" France and the onslaught of modernity, but rather paying tribute to a way of life that is dying out if it hasn't passed already.

Zabriskie Point

2007-07-01T10:43:00.001-05:00

I don't know of another film for which the ridiculousness of the plot, dialogue, performances, etc, seems to neither negate nor even work against the film's beauty or the ideological critique at its base. Though supposedly set in then-contemporary Los Angeles (although the characters make a little more sense if you pretend they're Italians), Zabriskie Point is in many ways belongs to the post-apocalyptic genre. If there's something millenial to all of Antonioni's films, Zabriskie Point's vast stretches of desert landscape suggest an end to urban society, a destruction of/escape from a human population represented in the film by campus radicals, police, and businessmen. But really, the society is mostly represented through billboards and advertisements, with the human aspect - aside from the three leads - seeming almost incidental manifestations of a faceless mass of opressive capitalist society.

Filmed in a visual style closer to early 70's Altman than the Antonioni of L'Avventura and Red Desert: hand-held 35mm scope, color, lots of close-ups and slight zooms. The near-frenetic camera style indicates a different kind of relationship to his subject than in the ennui-laden trilogy, with Antonioni no longer investigating the image with such meditative intensity. The city presents nothing but surfaces, images being held up by nothing, with nothing behind them - his characters are not much deeper, but they at least realize that something's wrong. The desert offers a chance to think, where the city is all noise and ads. And the desert is where the camera starts to settle down a little bit, not exactly empty landscapes but inhuman ones.

Whatever the hippie-dippie blather spouted by the characters ("Pretend your mind's a plant. Would it be a forest or a well-ordered garden?" "It'd be a jungle." ... That's a paraphrase, but pretty close - there's something perversely admirable to Antonioni's refusal to clean up the characters' dialogue as well - how many hippies do you know who can articulate their rebelliousness without making you cringe?), the film's actual critique is aesthetic. Billboards, advertisements, brand names are everywhere, and if there's a message to the film it's that, as proven by the jaw-dropping beauty of the final scene, consumer products are more beautiful when exploding than when put being put on display or advertized, or even when being used. The city's photographed almost exclusively through the windows of moving cars, reminding me of nothing as much as Fred Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself, while echoes of the desert scenes can be found in The Road Warrior.

Watching Zabriskie Point and L'Eclisse while elbow-deep in a paper on Mon oncle, I made a startling observation: Michelangelo Antonioni is a huge Tati fan. Rod Taylor's office building in Zabriskie Point is straight out of Playtime, and his desert house reminds me, though less explicitly, of the Arpel's modernist home. In L'Eclisse, after a Mon oncle-ish episode in which a domesticated family dog goes for a romp around the neighborhood with a pack of roaming mutts, Monica Vitti whistles at a random person on the street while hiding behind a pole.

Coeurs

2007-06-13T15:06:00.000-05:00

Alain Resnais's Coeurs (aka Private Fears in Public Places) finds Resnais in full operetta mode - although there aren't any musical numbers, with the pleasantly artificial sets and carefully-designed interactions and transactions between the different characters and sets, it certainly wouldn't be out of place for someone to burst into song. The film is light-hearted enough that an indoor snowstorm works quite nicely as metaphorical punctuation for the understated climax.

Because Resnais is working in what feels like such familiar territory, when the film strays from classical romantic formula there's something of a shock effect. As in Hollywood's grandest romantic tradition, characters are paired off from the very beginning of the film - obliquely at first, more directly later. Resnais understands perfectly well how invested the viewer becomes in an ending that is not just "happy," but the sort of happy ending in which romantic pairings are all finalized by the end of the film - and so the departures from this formula take the audience out of its comfort zone, and made me, for one, feel a little uneasy leaving the theater.

I think the play with conventions (which I'm assuming - and please correct me if I'm wrong - comes from the original theater piece from which the film is adapted) is pointed, in that it serves what appears to be a very specific purpose. Nobody ends up together, romantically-speaking, but the ending isn't really a sad one. The romantic loneliness spread among (most of) the characters does give the ending a melancholy feel, but my impression is that the ending offers an intervention that's not exactly cheerful but is nonetheless necessary. That is, Resnais's characters lean on the possibility of romantic fulfillment (and, more than that, on the potential of a relationship that hasn't yet begun) as the sole object and outlet for their own happiness. As a relationship falls apart, one partner finds a replacement without pausing for breath. A woman spends every night answering personal ads. An older man pines after a co-worker who has inadvertently left him naked footage of herself on a borrowed video. Romance (or rather, the possibility of romance) serves a different specific function for each, but in each case it's an all-purpose solution, an escape from whatever problems they have in their daily lives. The resolution forces the characters to return to the lives they're running away from, and signals that they need to be secure in their own lives before they start chasing fairy tales. As cynical as that sounds, the film is strong in both optimism and humanism - Resnais isn't condemning his characters to loneliness, but forcing them to start over. It should be noted that the proposed pairings would make for terrible relationships, the kind born out of convenience, proximity and desperation. What makes it truly optimistic is the sense all the characters will be okay, that they'll learn to exist in their own situations before seeking to enter someone else's (or that they'll stay single, and that might be fine as well). Coeurs is an extraordinarily mature, humane film. It's also a lot of fun.

Spiderman 3

2007-06-09T00:04:00.000-05:00

An instructive, if ridiculous and slightly unfair, point of comparison for Out 1, the 2.5 hour Spiderman 3 is packed with plot and very fast-moving but feels slight, and does get a little boring. Out 1 buries its (questionable, and occasionally nonexistent) plot points underneath the rhythms and minutiae of everyday life, while Spiderman is so dominated by narrative and so full of action that we never get the chance to know any of the characters. Watching Spiderman is like gathering together a year's worth of comic books and working your way through the pile in 20 minutes, glancing at the pictures while flipping through the pages. It's an outline for a movie whose script remains to be written, filled with high concept plot points but lacking enough details to make it interesting to humans.

Sam Raimi doesn't seem all that into it anymore, except for a single scene in which Tobey Macguire (as an evil, emo-looking Peter Parker) performs a song-and-dance routine - a scene that reminded me of something Raimi said (possibly from my favorite book of interviews ever) about how the climactic fight scene in Army of Darkness was originally supposed to be a grandly choreographed dance. The second Spiderman movie was a wonderfully shameless melodrama, and the first wasn't bad even if it wasn't especially memorable. Raimi's put his time in at the studios and has done quite well for himself. Speaking as a well-wisher and admirer who appreciates the chaotic humor and transparent production of his genre films as well as the taut intelligence of his "serious" prestige indies (though I prefer one over the other, naturally), let's hope Raimi can and will return to more personal projects. As is the case with Peter Jackson, I've given up hope that he will return to the endearing shabbiness of his roots, the slapped-together horror films that had so much humor and energy and seemed willing to try anything. And maybe someday he'll parlay that studio goodwill into a Sam Raimi musical. I'd say he's earned the opportunity, and, regardless of the project, this hypothetical musical already sounds like more fun than all three Spidermans combined with Darkman.

The high point of the film is its quietest section: as the Sandman awakens from a science experiment-inspired loss of consciousness to discover that he's now made of sand, there's an extended sequence of sand moving and shifting and slowly forming into a human-like figure, which then crumbles instantly on contact with anything else. After a while, of course, they have to get on with it because there's so much more narrative to zip through. (Four villains. Five if you count evil Peter Parker.) But before its premature and definite resolution about five minutes in, the scene was quite beautiful and evocative and eery - which is five more minutes of poetry than could be found in the last X-Men movie.

[I caught Spiderman last Friday at the pleasantly shabby - some would say ratty - bargain cinema in Logan Square. The theaters are asymmetrical enough that the best seat in the house is sometimes (depending on which theater you're in) up against the wall to the far left, but the rows don't really line up so your knees might be in for a surprise if you make your way down the wrong row without paying attention. They're notorious for starting films 5-10 minutes early, you have to check your backpack before entering, and the restrooms have single-serving toilet paper - but the folks at the Logan don't hold back with the air conditioning and the $3 ticket price does go a long way towards curing me of indifference towards recent multiplex fare.]

Out 1

2007-05-29T11:18:00.000-05:00

This weekend was spent submerged in Jacques Rivette's Out 1. A massive work with a slender plot, the sheer length of the film/mini-series allows an acclimation to the rhythms of the film and of its characters that other, more plot-driven epics can't. As a result, Out 1 grows more engrossing as it progresses, as opposed to Lord of the Rings or even a 3-hour Hollywood blockbuster, which can be hugely exhausting experiences.

Out 1 starts out with extended quasi-documentary footage of two theater troupes rehearsing plays by Aeschylus. Both interpretations are radical, to say the least - high modernist attempts to deconstruct the text to the point at which the author is incidental, and the performance is everything. The performances never leads anywhere; as in Paris Belongs to Us and L'Amour fou (and arguably Celine and Julie as well) the characters engage in rehearsal, without the payoff of any actual public performance. (Which, in an unintended irony, would be the fate of Out 1 itself.) I'm not sure what to do with that just yet, but the act of rehearsal is particularly bizarre. It isn't what we normally think of as performance, which has an audience to justify its occurrence. Instead, it's grown men and women pretending to be other people, like a game, but one that only works if all parties involved are absolutely serious.

It's difficult to wrap my head around a full twelve hours, even if several of those hours contain extended theatrical improvisations - some of which are truly brilliant, some of which fall flat, but all of which are fascinating. Over twelve hours, the usual standards of good and bad don't really apply anymore. At a certain point, the details of the film become fact, and it seems no more valid to criticize (or notice) fluctuations in "quality" or "success" than it would to do so in your daily life. Which isn't to say that the details aren't important: the incidental observations vastly overwhelm the portions of the film that contribute to the narrative(s). The film becomes a place the viewer inhabits. This weekend is Out 1: Spectre, and I'll have more to say after having seen the, ahem, sleeker four-hour version.

Brand Upon the Brain!

2007-05-24T03:00:00.001-05:00

One of the more unique experiences I've ever had in a movie theater was Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, which played the Music Box in full regalia last weekend. On the one hand, I worked on the film. My official title is "Set Journalist" but as it ended up I didn't do any of that - Guy Maddin likes to have somebody write a production diary that he can use for press kits or maybe give to the cast and crew, etc. I ended up as more of a garden-variety Production Assistant, being as helpful as I could, always planning on catching up with the writing later. The truth is, though, that during those ten days 2+ years ago I was busy and tired, and the whole set diary thing felt horribly redundant. It was the most well-documented set I've ever encountered (not that I've really been on that many sets), with an official photographer, an official videographer, and several unofficial videographers. Plus I hate diaries, in principle. So I kept busy instead. Anyway, I was there for just about everything, and that meant that I couldn't watch the film last Friday without recalling the actual shooting of each individual scene or set-up. Which I think makes me a little too distracted to adequately judge the film on its own.

As a spectacle, though, I can with confidence say that the experience (extravaganza) was top notch. Crispin Glover narrated and four extremely skilled foley artists provided sound effects in front of the screen right next to an 11-piece orchestra playing Jason Stazcek's score. And there was a castrato - who was lip-synching, obviously, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt anyway. (I'm a willing dupe, what can I say?)

Jason's score was distractingly good, Crispin Glover was great but occasionally just distracting, and I loved everything about the foley artists and their sound effects. They were off to the side and I tried to watch them out of the corner of my eye. There were plates being thrown, gigantic aluminum sheets being gonged, etc. The production of the little noises was clever, the big ones often had big gestures, and of course those were the most fun (i.e. the plates).

I remember reading an early draft of the script - at which point the main character was named "Bruno" rather than "Guy Maddin" - and thinking of it as Maddin's (very) rough approximation of Proust. The film's all about memory and nostalgia, but it's a physical, tactile sort of memory. With Maddin the dreaminess is a style and a logic, but at base his stuff remains flesh-bound. Brand is extremely literal-minded when it comes to memory: Guy (the character) touches a rock and instantly brings up a memory in his head and on screen, and it's the same memory every time he finds that rock. He wanders the landscape trying to find the right combination of objects to conjure up the girl he loved - and when she materializes she's both there and not there, a fleshy apparition somehow more "real" than the other memories wandering the island but nonetheless insubstantial, only partly there. The nostalgia of Guy's mother for her own childhood is enacted by an actual, physical return to childhood thanks to a mysterious "nectar," drained from the brains of orphans, that makes her young again. In other words, Maddin takes a literal approach to non-literal ideas, and it's all based in play with the medium - these conjurings and youth serums are, at base, nothing more than flashbacks or fantasies that can be seen by the characters as well as the audience.

The film is pleasantly skewed, like all of Maddin's films, but its fever-dream logic is not as intensely focused as it was in Cowards, and its baroqueness is not as grandiose as it was in Saddest Music in the World. Other than Dracula, it's the least melodramatic of Maddin's films, more intent on a very contemporary kind of self-pity than on Sirkean hyperbole. It's interesting that as his style becomes denser and, in a sense, more guarded, his films start to move away from genre and towards a confessional mode. Plotwise, the central mystery, about draining the orphans' brains, feel insufficiently explored, and the big revelations not as shocking as they maybe should be. The teen detective subplot was a huge audience pleaser, and Chance/Wendy was the most compelling character, an indication that perhaps the narrative focus was either misplaced or was inadvertently hijacked by the more interesting sub-story.

Maddin's fond of blank-faced heroes, but here his hero is divided into two actors (grown-up Guy, who isn't on screen all that much and young Guy) and neither is given the chance to display much personality. The girls take over the movie, but the dramatic focus is on Guy, and this shared focus lessens the narrative's melodramatic impact - the miserablism that replaces the melodramatic structure doesn't have a dominant figure of association, it's all dissipated among four different actors. And it's my own particular quirk that I dislike framing devices, and for me the framing portion with adult Guy and his elderly mother drags us away from the main story without adding all that much to the flow of the film. Of course, Maddin's project requires that focus on remembrance, and he does a wonderful job of integrating the frame and flashback. The past bleeds into the present in all sorts of ways, but the narrative momentum nonetheless comes from the flashback portion of the film. And the frame is, in that sense, a sort of distraction.

As much fun as the big show was, I'd like to watch the wider release version - which would be on 35 rather than the (I think) video projected at the Music Box. My experience on the set already draws me out of the typical viewer experience more than most, and the further (awesome) distractions of Crispin Glover and company pulled me out even more. The thing is, I love Maddin's films and it's curious to me that I see a difference between this one and his earlier films, but the reviews seem to be about the same, describing it in the same terms and loving it or hating it for the same reasons they always do. So, is it me, or is it the film?

The trailer:

I believe this is the "official" behind-the-scenes video, with Guy narrating:

Guy Maddin talking in very Eisensteinian terms about the film:

It looks like the distributor's Vitagraph, whose notoriousness (which I can personally attest to) is such that I'm pretty sure I won't be able to talk Doc into bringing the film to campus for a second-run screening. Uggh.

Tarkovsky's Stalker

2007-05-18T00:18:00.000-05:00

Watching a gorgeous 35mm print of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker last Sunday, I involuntary pronounced the words "Oh my God" twice in the film. The first time it was in response to an image of a wall. The second time, a doorway. Beauty in Stalker is a revelation, found in decay and disintegration, a heavy relief that seems to push the images forward from the screen. The film is no less mysterious than any of Tarkovsky's films (with the probable exception of Ivan's Childhood), but is emotionally accessible, its characters coherent and empathetic. And its visual beauty is astonishing, striking enough that the images themselves seem heavy, weighing down the characters wading through the settings that overwhelm them. Tarkovsky's mysticism is fascinating to me, even though his deadly seriousness means his films are constantly on the verge of self-parody. It's especially interesting that, in Stalker, the supposedly supernatural settings never really manifest themselves as such (besides a single unexplained voice) - it's like a children's game, with the participants pretending that they're in a dangerous otherworldly place. It isn't until the very end of the film, when the Stalker's daughter moves a glass across the dining room table through telekinesis, that any evidence of the mystical is shown on screen. These moments of telekinesis or levitation that dot Tarkovsky's films always astonish me. And they're always so beautifully filmed, so meticulously composed, that it can't help but feel like the natural order of things.

Paris Belongs to Us

2007-05-15T23:56:00.000-05:00

Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us (Paris nous appartient) was an exhilirating experience. A very nice BFI print played to an appreciative crowd at the Siskel as part of the Rivette retrospective (I already have my tickets for Out 1). The first ten minutes of the film is packed with Hitchcock references: the credits roll over images of Paris shot from a train (which for Rivette is by definition Hitchcockian), the first post-credits shot is taken directly from Rear Window, a production of Shakespeare's Pericles keeps replaying a scene including the phrase "South by Southwest" (the title "North by Northwest" comes from Hamlet), and, of course, the heroine is immediately surrounding by paranoia-feeding conspiracies of murder, suicide and international intrigue. The heroine, Anne (Betty Schneider), is just on the periphery of a dense and convoluted web of mystery and violence, which seems to involve her brother and seems to involve a man with whom she's fallen in love. Everyone has secrets, except for Anne. Anne's a student who doesn't bother showing up for her exams. She tries acting, but ends up losing her part and losing interest in the whole endeavor. She tries to get to the bottom of these intrigues and secrets, but never quite figures it out and fails to save anyone (or even to accurately predict who's in danger).

Paris Belongs To Us, with Anne at its center, is like a Hitchcock film told from the perspective of the Pat Hitchcock character - the peripheral little sister figure not implicated in but curious about the mysteries and the dangers just to the side of her; acting nosey and butting into the complicated, enigmatic plots. Anne even looks like Pat Hitchock: slightly plump ("movie plump") but still pretty, poofy 50s hair, smiley and kind of bookish. (And I could swear that Rivette modeled Anne's wardrobe after Pat Hitchcock's.) She's never personally threatened, and never witnesses or finds evidence of any crimes. She finds herself frustratingly outside of the sinister elements swirling around her - like a film lover who walks into a movie, but she can't find the good parts on her own.

Betty Schneider, the actress who plays Anne, is wonderful. She only appeared in a handful of movies, but has one other major screen credit. Major to me, anyway. She was in Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle playing the daughter of Hulot's landlady. We see her grow up as the film progresses. Her seemingly innocent crush on Hulot at the beginning of the film provokes a paternal pat on the head. At the end of the film, she's mature enough (and dressing accordingly) that Hulot's too embarassed to treat her like a child (and definitely too embarassed to treat her like a woman...). He gives his customary paternal greeting to her mother instead.

Syndromes and a Century

2007-05-12T08:07:00.000-05:00

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century is a wonderful movie, a truly great film whose monumental status will become clear, I suspect, once the initial rush of its charming modesty wears off - that is, if enough people start paying attention. Although its narrative structure is radically experimental, with a rupture midway that is never explained or resolved, everything about the film feels warm, casual and stridently humanistic. Apichatpong loves his characters and their milieu and attentively explores the details of both without ever letting them overwhelm the bigger pictures of which they are always a part. It's also his funniest film, and its humor is the laugh-out-loud kind: an elderly female doctor pulls a hidden bottle of alcohol out of a spare prosthetic leg, a dentist serenades a monk while working on his teeth, a young woman spots her painfully lovesick would-be suitor peeking out at her from behind a Buddha statue. It's a film of moments and details compiled into disjointed, interrupted and unfinished narratives, held together by Apichatpong's immense affection for the people and places he films, and by an elegant structure whose overall shape is elusive enough to remain just out of the viewer's grasp until well after the theater lights come up.

I have more to say about the film and about Apichatpong's films in general, particularly his habit of splitting films in two, with one story cutting off midway through as another starts up. Syndromes is bracingly virtuosic in this regard, with the second half constantly returning to and echoing the first in surprising ways. Apichatpong even incorporates (almost) exact repetitions, which make up some of the most delightful moments of the film - the new angles, changed settings and slight alterations (mistakes?) provide welcome and humorous supplements to the earlier scenes. I'd like to think more about the film before getting into it much more, possibly making it down to the Siskel for a second screening before it leaves on Thursday.

Syndromes and a Century int'l trailer:

mote

2007-04-29T23:36:00.000-05:00

The Sonic Youth show at the Roseland last summer was amazing, and Lee's performance of "mote" was undoubtedly (for me) the highlight. Somehow, a soundboard recording of the full concert hit the internet and I managed to snag a copy. I haven't done a particularly thorough search, but it seems that the only high quality recording of any of the dates on their Rather Ripped tour is from Portland. Sonic Youth live is a necessarily lived experience - a live recording doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The voices never quite make it all the way to the right notes (though they get close), and the lyrics can be even more difficult to parse. But live - and I listen to the recordings now, basically, to re-live - they're electrifying. Competing noises and tones fill the concert space, and, to permit myself an understatement, they rock.

Entertain

2007-04-27T02:26:00.001-05:00

"Comedy"

2007-04-24T23:34:00.000-05:00

Have you watched Rich Little's routine from the White House Correspondents' Dinner? He dives right into the impressions. Before doing the presidents, he does John McCain (a fairly poor impression), Arnold Schwarzenegger (in which Arnold actually does refer to himself as "the governator"), Johnny Carson (to tell a joke about lawyers and there's something about wheelchairs) and ANDY ROONEY (which allows him the opportunity to offer such choice nuggets as: "If you choke a Smurf, what color does he turn?" and "If you overdose on Viagra, do you have trouble getting the coffin lid closed?"). Then the presidents: Ronald Reagan (a man he "loves"), Jimmy Carter (which requires false teeth, also inspires a joke about how as a peanut farmer he had "the biggest and best nuts in the country"), George H.W. Bush in conversation with Bill Clinton (basically to tell the following joke: "All they have in Chicago are hookers and hockey players." "You know, Hillary's from Chicago." "What team did she play for?" It takes Little about four minutes to get to that punchline), George W. Bush (the worst impression of the bunch) and Nixon. Nixon was supposed to be the highlight of the routine, but he rambled on forever without really remembering to add any jokes - although there was a lot of jowel shaking and something about how in order to win a Nobel prize you have to be "out standing in your field," which he says when he's supposed to be outside, in a field. Then ended singing "My Way." He tried to get the crowd to sing along, but they wouldn't bite.

There's also the song about how he's "gonna poke a lot of fun/ poke a lot of fun at Washington." He sings it in between each presidential impersonation. Groan. And yet, I can't turn away - the fascination of painfully unfunny comedy is remarkable. Oh, and he cracks himself up when he says the word "ass."

Andy Rooney, seriously.

Morris Brown

2007-04-23T13:05:00.000-05:00

My favorite song of 2006, which has one of the most audaciously tacky, who-thought-this-was-a-good-idea music videos of all time:

Dancing midget televisions? A pink poodle (and does the purple dog remind anyone else of Clifford the Big Red Dog)? An amusement park? And are those Big Boi's label recruits riding the Ferris wheel? My biggest problem is, I think, the large number of things with faces singing along: the sun, the flowers, the car, the walls, the dog... Wow. I'm pretty sure this was directed by the same guy who made Big Boi's video for "I Like the Way You Move," except this time he let the whimsy run wild. It's a shame, because the song's phenomenal. So's the album, by the way. Aside from the pointless final track - which I can safely say is the lowpoint in Outkast's entire discography - the album's consistently excellent, and drags rarely, despite what the music police would have you think.

Fassbinder on understanding/portraying human behavior

2007-04-23T00:39:00.000-05:00

On Chabrol:

“Chabrol’s eye is not that of an entomologist, as is often claimed, but that of a child who keeps a number of insects in a glass jar and observes the strange behavior of his little creatures with a mixture of amazement, horror, and pleasure. […] He doesn’t do research with them. Otherwise he could, and would have to, discover reasons for their brutal behavior, and convey these to us. Never mind that there have to be some little creatures who are less colorful than the others, less showy, but the vast majority of them are completely colorless creatures that provide the basis for the existence of the more beautiful ones. But these are completely overlooked by the child, who doesn’t do scientific observation but only looks, allowing himself to be dazzled by the glittering, special ones; he overlooks them, and therefore can’t really understand the behavior of his favorites.”

A Hubley Sunday

2007-04-22T10:24:00.000-05:00

Cockaboody

Emily's animation for Hedwig:

Emily animates the dB's:

Georgia singing one of the slow, pretty ones from I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass:

Georgia sing the acoustic version of Tom Courtenay:

Finally, John Hubley directs A Date with Dizzy:

"Hey Pete! Let's eat! More meat!"

Crosseyed and Painless

2007-04-21T10:45:00.000-05:00

Daytona 500

2007-04-20T13:44:00.001-05:00

The Invisible Man

2007-04-19T23:08:00.000-05:00

Although I didn't really have the time, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see James Whale's Invisible Man at Doc Films tonight. I'd previously only seen Whale's Frankenstein movies, and while Bride of Frankenstein might be the filmmaker's ultimate blend of comedy and classical horror, The Invisible Man is grotesque and unabashedly slapstick, with a remarkably advanced camp sensibility. It's as if Whale knew that his laughs would outlive his scares, and planned accordingly. Or, perhaps more likely, he was just making himself laugh.

Really, The Invisible Man hardly qualifies as a horror movie, especially since most of the violence is utterly ridiculous, with Rains childishly taunting his victims while they fall all over themselves. It's hard to think of the episode where the invisible man steals a policeman's pants as anything but hilarious. A horrible train wreck half way through the movie seems curiously out of place, tossed in to the film to justify the manpower that would be expended on catching the invisible man in the second half - but Whale executes the crash so unrealistically and with such precise comic timing that I couldn't help but chuckle. Most of the actors don't seem to be fully in on the joke, although even the more wooden and clueless among are obviously enjoying themselves (with one or two very notable exceptions in the prosthetic ingenue Gloria Stuart and the cowardly William Harrigan). Claude Rains as "The Invisible One" (as per the credits) is all covered up and can't play for sympathy like Karloff in the Frankenstein movies, keeping the film firmly within the realm of farce. There's one actress who knows exactly what kind of movie James Whale was making, and that's character actress Una O'Connor. Running the tavern/inn where Claude Rains holes up to seek an antidote, she's the first to discover Rains's horrible secret - a discovery that sets off a series of periodic shrieks of shock, disbelief, fear, discomfort... really anything that might merit a reaction of any kind. Whale is so enamored of her rather hilarious scream that he had her do it over and over and over again, occasionally with almost no provocation whatsoever. Maybe my favorite thing about the film is that, without really dipping into irony, Whale isn't above utilizing the weaknesses of his script or his actors for laughs (just look at his casting of Henry Travers - Clarence the angel from It's a Wonderful Life - as respected scientist Dr. Cranley if you have any doubt as to Whale's intentions). As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that a fully competent cast would have weighed it down. As it is, I haven't had more fun in a movie theater in ages.

The big reveal:

Video link

2007-04-16T00:00:00.000-05:00

Matt McCormick's got a new video for the Shins song on his website here: http://www.rodeofilmco.com/films/video_australia.php

It's fun. Enjoy.

One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later

2007-04-15T13:41:00.000-05:00

We screened James Benning's One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later last night at the Film Studies Center, the first show of the spring for the "Experimental Film Club" (coming up: the new print of Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic and Jonas Mekas's documentary Birth of a Nation). Made in 1977, One Way Boogie Woogie is comprised of 60 one-minute shots of Benning's hometown of Milwaukee - some staged, some captured on the fly, all meticulously and cleverly composed. 27 Years Later is designed to be screened on the same program (without intermission - one flows into the other with only a very brief pause between the two). It's a sort of attempt at a shot-for-shot remake of the original from 2004, but of course the city has changed considerably since the seventies. Benning plants the camera as close to its original position as he can and points it in roughly the same direction. When possible, the original people (actors?) are used again to perform the same simple actions, with frames seemingly remaining unpopulated instead of using any sort of substitution. The original soundtrack plays over the new images, sometimes matching up, sometimes not.

The effect of the two films is markedly different. Both are "structuralist," of course, with their dedication to formal guidelines, and both are nicely playful about and around their constraints. The original strikes me as the more satisfying experience, not least because the constraints of 27 Years Later mean that the camera positions of the original aren't adjusted to achieve the same careful composition and balance. The play with structure in Boogie Woogie has a lot to do with the limits of the frame: the viewer can't help but try to figure out what's just off screen (with Benning encouraging our speculation by occasionally throwing sudden intrusions into the mix, with people or objects suddenly entering the frame, objects being hurled in front of the camera, etc); and, similarly, the viewer reflexively attempts to decode the meaning of the soundtrack and the relationship of these sounds (which sometimes are diegetic in the sense that they can be assigned to something happening on screen, even if its far in the distance in the very corner of the screen, and sometimes are not: music, radio broadcasts, etc) to the image. The other major source of conflict and play has to do with the carefulness and abstraction of the images on screen, the disruption of these lines and shapes by people (and trees, the other non-symmetrical figures that constantly reappear). 27 Years Later is equally witty and playful, but most of the play has to do with the differences and changes from the viewer's partial recollections of OWBW. The second film does help to illuminate the delicacy of the original compositions, and the dependence on a unique perspective for their creation (i.e. the images are in a sense created, and not just "found"). 27 Years Later is an aesthetic game, not a social one, and it's about general change rather than decay or gentrification or neglect. The original wittily questioned the basic assumptions of the medium about form, and although the "remake" retains the wit, the stakes are lower. That doesn't change the fact, however, that the general consensus in the cinema was that 27 Years Later seemed to move faster than Boogie Woogie - I guess some games are more fun than others. The first time around, anyway - I have the feeling that the next time I see the film the original will still have plenty of surprises to impart while its follow-up, though not necessarily less enjoyable, will be considerably less mysterious.

Leni Riefenstahl

2007-03-25T21:23:00.000-05:00

I have no desire to defend Leni Riefenstahl, but can somebody please tell Clive James to stop writing about movies? [Registration Req'd] A week or two ago, a level-headed review that was really quite well-written parsed the Riefenstahl problem in the NYT arts pages. The piece, by NYT's regular reviewer Michiko Katukani, herself not exactly a "film person," actually discussed the books in question, managed to register the historical importance of Riefenstahl's work along with the historically evolving arguments about her relative merits as an artist/human being. She distinguishes between the strengths of both authors and suggests how they are similarly valuable by establishing a historical tradition against which the writers are working, and she does just about everything else you could expect from an average book review. Her piece also contained a nicely succinct summation of Riefenstahl's politcal situation, from the new biography by Steven Bach: "the ‘horror of history’ in which her apologists thought her ‘imprisoned’ was a narrative of her own making about which she remained nostalgic and unrepentant. It was richly rewarded and free of any compulsion save ambition. She did not suffer from it but profited and to suggest otherwise — as she often did — is an insult to the millions who died at the hands of a regime she took pride in glorifying, using and enabling.”

That quote from Bach manages to perfectly capture the full repugnancy of Riefenstahl's situation without resorting to discussion-ending insult hurlings.

The last time James wrote about a film book for the NYT, some righteous anger was unleashed on the world wide web. James would seem to be a sort of cosmopolitan catty writer, the kind that keep New Yorker readers entertained and self-satisfied, and yet the sort of snobbery that James wishes to preach is childish, at best. Name-calling, opinions existing only at the far extremes or not at all, adopting a tone that can best be characterized as 'taunting.' And woefully underinformed and incurious. Clive James traffics in generalities and partial information so that he himself may offer the definitive assessment. And in this particular article his judgement inflates its own authority by making his attack on Nazism about the personal deficiencies of one of its foremost figures - and in the process seeming to wage a personal vendetta against his subject rather than offering any sort of useful historical, biographical or artistic critique, though disguising his argument as all three.

Take a look at his Riefenstahl review. Notice how he takes to calling her "Leni" instead of the Times-approved "Ms. Riefenstahl," or how he manages to throw in an insult about her looks (her eyes were "too close together"). (Also notice how he says "cineaste" when he means "cinephile" - it would be nice if writers about film at least accquainted themselves with the basic vocabulary before proclaiming generalities about the entire medium.) Blatantly misogynist and patronizing, the moral of the review is that we shouldn't be thinking about Riefenstahl at all because she was stupid and only got where she was because she used her "feminine wiles" to get there. James paints her as someone who's not quite intelligent enough to have a morally complex response to Germany's crimes against humanity, but she eventually is "distressed" and then starts lying "until people got tired, or old, or died."

For those who aren't insulted twice by any of the above, I believe James is taking (unwittingly, I hope) a broad swipe not only at Riefenstahl (take THAT!) but at Susan Sontag and the feminist movement that adopted Riefenstahl as a pet cause (briefly) when they went looking for significant female film artists and found one in a pure aesthete who, it seemed, didn't care one way or another about the Nazis as long as she got to make her movies. It probably could have only happened when it did, in the late 60s/early 70s, when critics were willing to remove material from its historical situation a lot more readily than they were before or have been since. In essence, James is saying not only that she isn't a good filmmaker (she's got "no real brain" and no talent), but that she slept her way to the top (or, rather, bottom, as James says when claiming she only got her parts by sleeping with filmmakers: "there was no director, however illustrious, whom she could not hurl herself beneath wearing no clothes at all"). Even if you overlook the whole Nazi thing, Riefenstahl was nothing more than a slutty opportunist. Slutty and too dumb to recognize questions of morality - and she wasn't even all that attractive!

Other head-scratching claims include the almost non-sensical one about how this documentarian possessed "almost no sense of story," which he evidences by pointed out that she had to work through a "mountain of footage." To hear James tell it, Triumph of the Will was Albert Speer's film, "Leni" only filmed it. And Olympia offers the opportunity to be catty about her promiscuity once again - it's hardly even a movie, really, it's just a beautiful event that Riefenstahl managed to adequately capture based on the logical choices anyone would have made. The following passage deserves being fully reproduced:

"She wasn’t having a thing with [Jesse] Owens. She was having that with another American, the decathlete Glenn Morris, whom she obliged to add an 11th discipline to his event. But she filmed Owens with loving appreciation. It’s a shameful consideration that no Hollywood director would have been encouraged to do the same, at the time. Owens in repose looked lovely anyway, and on the move he was poetic, but it took a fine eye and a lot of knowledge to get the poetry on film, and Leni knew how to do that with him and with many another athlete. It was only logical for the camera to climb the tower with the diver, for example, but she figured out how to do it.

"Susan Sontag later made a serious mistake in arguing that “Olympia” was entirely steeped in fascist worship of the beautiful body. But it’s nature that worships the beautiful body. Fascism is natural. That’s what’s wrong with it: it’s nothing else. Despite the too often prevailing calisthenic mass maneuvers, as if Busby Berkeley had met Praxiteles, much of the reputation Olympia has for beauty can thus safely be endorsed, but always with the proviso that a lot of the athletic events were beautiful anyway, and that her technical inventions for capturing them would eventually suffer the fate of all technical inventions and be superseded: everything she did in Berlin in 1936 was topped by what Kon Ichikawa did in Tokyo in 1964. Nevertheless, Leni, with her raw material handed to her on a plate, and unhampered by those requirements of invented narrative that she could never manage, had made quite a movie for its time."

Again, why the preoccupation with Riefenstahl's sexuality (or, rather, sluttiness)? Insulting female sexuality is the first refuge for the chauvinist looking to attack a woman, and James can't seem to find a way to criticize nazism without calling its practitioner a nymphomaniac - and I could possibly see ways in which that could make an interesting piece of rhetoric, except that James isn't introducing the whole slut thing to connect perversion to fascism (which is, like, way popular in movies), but just to make Riefenstahl into a sexually marginalized woman. Who should be evidently be ashamed of her (sexual) behavior. Is it just me, or does it sound like Riefenstahl turned James down for a date to the Homecoming dance? (How's that for a personal attack?)

Back to the review. The next sentence is another something a reviewer should be ashamed of. After reading TWO biographies of the woman and writing with such dismissive authority about her, he says that she "had probably always had one eye on Hollywood." Probably? Based on what, exactly? More generalities, this time not even bothering to hide them. And of course this generality conforms perfectly to the gold-digging opportunist narrative he's been cultivating.

Basically, James read two books he was supposed to review, and instead of reviewing them, he did a book report. Almost no relative evaluations of the two works and their strengths and weaknesses, never crediting one book or the other when discussing a piece of information. His familiarity with the topic seems to be based mostly on the two books, but he adopts a tone of total authority. I'm pretty sure that he hasn't seen most of Riefenstahl's films, and that he knows next to nothing about Weimar cinema, about early documentaries, or anything else having to do with film. So, luckily for him, when it comes to having extreme opinions there's not a whole lot of facts or historical information to get in the way. He avoids even attempting to explain why Riefenstahl has remained such a fascinating figure to critics, cinephiles (or, as James would say, "cineastes") and the general public, or why her films, as opposed to all the other propaganda pieces produced during the Third Reich, are still the subject of passionate discussion. Instead of moralistically calling her a "liar" (repeatedly), perhaps he could have explained how Riefenstahl continued to insist on blatant falsehoods even in the face of the most undeniable evidence. She wasn't just a lying, lying liar, her denials became pathological and ridiculous, and her need to rewrite her past would consume the rest of her life. Which is particularly interesting when you think of it this way: Riefenstahl was 31 when she finished Triumph of the Will, 34 at the time of the Berlin Olympics and 43 when she was arrested. She lived SIXTY MORE YEARS, nearly all of which was devoted to attempting to retain the achievements of those twelve years while denying their implications. Yes, there's not a whole lot of moral redemption in there, but there's one hell of a story. Could it be that James has a similar "sense of story" to the one he ascribes to Riefenstahl, i.e. none? He can only describe her in the most hideously exaggerated cliches, and then houses her character in the most rigidly archetypal narrative.

And when it comes to writing about film (which I keep returning to because, really, this is what pisses me off the most) , James is the kind of viewer that undergraduate film textbooks try to address in their introductions, as the authors explain slowly and carefully that films don't "just happen" but are the result of all sorts of choices behind and in front of the camera, in the editing room, during the sound mix, etc. For James, Olympia was "handed [to Riefenstahl] on a plate" and she was the mere technical engineer who executed it. She had "a good eye" for capturing male beauty - which James comes *this close* to insinuating was only possible because she wanted to "throw herself under them."

Also illuminating: "Final Cut, the best-ever book about a film director." Clive, care to fill us in on what other books about film directors you've read? Or which of "Leni"'s films you've actually seen, versus the ones you've read about? And how the hell did you manage to make me feel defensive about Leni Riefenstahl?

My own opinion of Riefenstahl is much less passionate, mainly because I don't buy her bodies the same way I do the bodies of Berkeley or Claire Denis. There's nothing seductive about them - it's a cold beauty, pneumatic (to use Andre Bazin's favorite erotic description, which he swiped from Huxley), overly reverent and concerned with the classical and divine, as if appreciation of the human body required intellectual justification. I think that, more than any other of the filmmakers experimenting with documentary at the time (and this has come up in discussions about Vertov several times in my experience), we can't see her images with the same eyes audiences did in the 1930s. The impact of her compositions is largely lost on me, and I've become far too used to her techniques to be engaged, let alone persuaded, by her propaganda. Triumph of the Will is a sickening experience, truly, and the images, which are fascist to their very core, are disturbing but never stirring.

I do find her to be a fascinating figure, though, and think the documentary on her (The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl) is endlessly absorbing, and there are plenty of reasons why biographers continue to write about her after her death. Personally, I don't hold her in a particularly high place artistically or in terms of historical importance, however, and for me it's important not to exaggerate either of those. The impulse to glorify women filmmakers from the past is certainly understandable and, to a certain extent, necessary. However, it isn't like this problem has disappeared - directing is still overwhelmingly dominated by men and talented women filmmakers rarely get the attention or opportunities they deserve. Better to own up to the problem and figure out how to deal with it (and to keep making the efforts to discover more great women filmmakers - Claire Denis, Samira Makhmalbaf, Agnes Varda, Francoise Romand, Chantal Akerman, Lynne Ramsay, etc) than to only focus on the positive. And if there was ever a filmmaker whose reputation was born of cinephiles only focusing on the positive, it's Riefenstahl.

Why I wish I had a digital camera

2007-03-24T22:47:00.000-05:00

Travelling alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway today on the bus, we past a large truck whose cargo was stacked inside a sort of mesh, net-like container. It was carrying at least two dozen flattened cars. And that's why I wish I had a digital camera.

Warhol on space

2007-03-23T16:03:00.000-05:00

Today's inspirational verse, from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again):

"When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it. If I see a chair in a beautiful space, no matter how beautiful the chair is, it can never be as beautiful to me as the plain space.

"My favorite piece of sculpture is a solid wall with a hole in it to frame the space on the other side."

Querelle

2007-03-20T19:59:00.000-05:00

To call Querelle, Fassbinder's final film (finished before his death but released posthumously), "strange" is a bit of an understatement. Andy Warhol visited the set, and attended one of the early festival screenings, supposedly told the filmmaker that he found the movie to be "strange" - although it's unclear whether or not he watched the film through to its conclusion. There are photographs of posters Warhol made for the film's initial release here, if you're curious. These posters, although they don't come from any of the images in the finished film, pick up on what I'm discussing in the essay I'm currently writing: the image depicted emphasizes the mouth and the ear in a film that pushes speech into the background in favor of the more urgent focus on looking and being looked at.

The film's images are aestheticized to a point that occasionally nears stasis, posed and composed tableaux that are, to paraphrase Shaviro, almost wholly irreal yet possessing a compelling weight. Their artificiality owes much to Sirk (particularly in its lighting, but Sirk's stylistic influence hangs over all of Querelle's visual style), and it's useful to remember a quote of Sirk's that Fassbinder picked up on and liked to repeat: "camera angles are my thoughts, and lighting my philosophy." (And Fassbinder has a lot to say about Sirk's lighting and interiors.) The act of looking is foregrounded even more in this film than elsewhere in Fassbinder, with characters lurking in nearly every scene whose only purpose is to be ostentatiously watching, and they're usually watching the sailor Querelle, whether or not he's doing anything interesting.

But the images are, in terms of conventional narrative construction, inscrutable. In transposing Genet's story to film, Fassbinder decontextualizes much of the action, refusing to explicitly reveal the motivations behind his characters' actions, leaving it up to the viewers to "read" the images. The film provides a variety of (partial) readings on the soundtrack through various diegetic and non-diegetic commentaries (which I've discussed, briefly, in earlier posts), but not only do these fail to explain the images in full, they often seem to be incorrect. Sometimes, as with Lysiane's tarot readings, the voice has the power to control the action on some level. The verbal professions of masculinity and denials of homosexuality are essential elements of the sexual performance found in the film, a ritual seemingly necessary for sex to actually take place. But it's rare that the voice is actually demonstrably correct - the traditional position of the narrator is one in which the voice seems to be controlling the flow of images, but in Querelle the narrator, along with the other voices, isn't concerned with what is shown but what is seen. That is, these voices tell the viewer what he should be reading in the image, but that information is often contradictory, unintuitive, or unelaborated by what we see (i.e. a narrator making pronouncements about the inner state of an expressionless character).

The depiction of watching places the viewer on the same level as the several characters whose main function is to observe, and I think that both these characters and the viewer identify with the object of their look, which here is almost invariably the sailor Querelle. (Does the narrator, never located within the diegesis, do the same? Is that the explanation for some of the more surprising interpretations he offers?) I think, furthermore, that this act of attempting to impose a narrative on the images is shared by these different voices with the viewer.

But, with an image that is so artificial, so "irreal," what exactly are these voices attempting to describe?

Claire Denis

2007-03-15T13:10:00.000-05:00

I've been needing to fill a Claire Denis fix for a while, and have been having a particular hankering for her horribly underrated 2001 masterpiece Trouble Every Day.

In the meantime, however, I came across
this online.

There's a link to Denis' gorgeous video for Sonic Youth's "Incinerate" from last year's Rather Ripped. And I believe that the "Jams Run Free" videos are hers as well.

Procrastination can occasionally be productive, if you employ a rather broadly expanded definition of "productivity."

Back to Fassbinder.

Spring Screenings

2007-03-07T08:52:00.000-06:00

Michelle P. and I are putting together two screenings for the spring for the Experimental Film Club, and it looks like, barring the unforeseen, everything's going ahead as planned.

We'll be screening James Benning's One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later on April 14 and a new print of Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic on May 12, both screenings taking place at the Film Studies Center in UChicago's Cobb Hall 307.

I'm starting to put together next year's schedule, which looks to include a visit from Matt M., who's got a new project (a few details here).

This weekend is the SCMS conference, which I won't have any time for whatsoever. I'm going to try to make it to the Godard panel and to at least one or two of the talks given by folks from UC or UW, but I'm not even optimistic about that. A hard and fast paper deadline's looming next Monday and I'm going to need to go on high alert to get everything done in time. I might even have to skip a talk/screening by Sadie Benning tonight to prepare for it. Uggh.

Godard/Fassbinder

2007-03-05T20:00:00.000-06:00

I've decided on general topics for the two essays I have to write in the next couple weeks. For Jim's Classical Film Theory, I'm writing about Bazin and Godard, focusing in particular on the Histoire(s) and Bazin's lovely essay "Death Every Afternoon." There, as well as in an essay on eroticism in the cinema, Bazin discusses the "ontological pornography" of actual death on screen (a term more conditional than you might expect from anyone but Bazin). Godard's fascination with the depiction of death and catastrophe, juxtaposed with fictional films, his repeated allusions to Raymond Queneau's "L'instant fatal," as well as a connection between his discussions of sex and violence, in real life and in the cinema, make for ideal points of comparison with Bazin. I should say that's currently the focus, before I've started writing. There are elements of Bazin's writings on eroticism, on his "Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema," and much of What Is Cinema?'s first English-language volume that's of similar relevance - I just can't quite get my head around exactly how to approach them. I've already rewatched the Histoire(s) once, and I get the feeling it will continue to become more impressive with each subsequent viewing. The montage, and the arguments are incredibly intricate: they make sense on a purely aesthetic level your first viewing, and each time you revisit it the full implications become clearer.

The other paper will be a sort of elaboration on the Fassbinder paper I wrote last quarter, this time focusing more exclusively on Querelle. I think my interest lies more with In a Year of 13 Moons, but this being a class on "adaptation" I have to incorporate at least something of a concession towards the class topic. Still, the paper is on Fassbinder, not Genet. Querelle is a unique adaptation in that it claims to be "about" Genet's novel, not a version or adaptation of it - something like Straub as a postmodernist. It looks like the speech and the look will be the focus. Fassbinder's characters are constantly staring at each other and it's just as much their act of looking as what they're looking at that's being captured by the camera, and they all seem to have a sort of awareness of being looked at that probably comes from Fassbinder's origins in experimental theater but takes on whole new meanings when projected on film. Speech has several different registers in the film, all of which vie for some sort of control over perception (of a character's image, of his sexuality, of the basic facts of the narrative, etc). There's the dialogue, highly-stylized in both form and delivery, which is often a disavowal of what we can see to be true. There's Seblon's recorded diary, a literal removal of his voice from his body that eventually wins over Querelle when he discovers the tape recorder. There are the two offscreen narrators, the voice-over and the intertitles. The voice-over occasionally seems to contradict what we're seeing, and neither is at all evident from the image. Finally, there's Jeanne Moreau's Lysiane, who basically introduces the narrative by reading Robert's fortune and predicting trouble to come. The story ends as Lysiane read's Robert's cards again and effectively erases the whole of the film by declaring that she was mistaken, and that Robert doesn't even have a brother. Suddenly, the bar Querelle has left in devastation goes back to normal and Robert looks as if nothing had happened. Querelle's ship leaves with the exact same shot it arrived, this time projected in reverse. Lots to talk about, and I have to develop a small chunk of it for a presentation on Thursday.

The Host

2007-03-04T08:13:00.000-06:00

It's been a long, busy quarter. There are a lot of things that I've been meaning to write about - primarily visiting filmmakers Thom Anderson, Billy Woodberry, 17-yr-old videomaker Kyle Canterbury, Leighton Pierce, etc - but I guess I'll just have to move backwards trying to catch up. Final paper season is upon us once again, so I expect I'll be looking for the procrastination-ish outlet and will try to make my way through the backlog.

On Saturday, filmmaker Bong Joon-ho was on campus to present Memories of Murder and his latest film, The Host. I've been a fan of Memories of Murder since I saw it at SIFF several years ago, and agitated for putting it on the NWFF calendar as soon as Palm Pictures announced its dvd release (we had to talk them into it, which a handful of other art house-type cinemas were doing at the same time). Of course, as has been the case for all Korean films given commercial runs in Seattle (in my experience), almost nobody showed up - and that we had to program it during SIFF certainly didn't help. But I don't doubt that the film found a sizable audience through the festival screenings and early arrival import dvds at Scarecrow. It's nice to know that, in the tide of Asian serial killer movies, one of the few I've come across that manages to do something clever and original with the format has found its niche. And The Host will certainly shed more light on it for cinephiles.

Bong spoke after the screening of his "love-hate" relationship with genre, and of his desire to "explode" the conventions of whatever genre he's working in. With both Memories of Murder and The Host, a familiar generic structure provides the set-up while the execution moves along a thin line between parody, social realism, political critique, etc - the films almost perversely refuse to align themselves with or against the genre or the heroes, and the subversion of genre expectations never quite materializes as wholly mocking or as a more serious-minded criticism of narrative conventions. The protagonists in Memories of Murder are almost a classic comedy team of bungling cops, except that their incompetence is dangerous. Perhaps the film's greatest audacity is to avoid the perceived sophistications of a dark, comedic satire; instead, the humor is broad and slapstick-y, while the overall narrative remains grisly and opressive. And the humor is never without complications. Some of the funnier scenes in the film amount to little more than the physical and emotional abuse of a mentally-retarded boy, and the ramifications of the actions, while funny, are never pushed out of the foreground. And in The Host, the most prominent, sustained scene of physical comedy is a mass funeral. (Bong said he particularly enjoyed films that make sudden, drastic changes in tone, offering Jonathan Demme's sublime Something Wild as an example, a statement that I most definitely agree with.)

But Bong's films don't just use genre as a convenient backdrop, nor is it a ploy to get viewers involved with issues that are normally associated with stark pronouncements of cinematic outrage. From his comments after the screening, I gathered that Bong makes a monster or serial killer movie because that's the kind of movie that he likes. The "explosion" of genre he spoke of isn't a desire to do away with it altogether, but to realign the parameters to agree with both what he wants to make and what he wants to see.

The Host is a monster movie in the tradition of 50's Hollywood sci-fi, and it's the sort of movie that Howard Hawks could appreciate. Even more full of goofball, low-brow humor than its predecessor, but also darker and more thrilling. Without resorting to glibness, the death toll's higher, the narrative follows a more traditional path, and there's actually a resolution, of sorts. Bong introduced it by saying that he saw it as a family drama, which it is. There's also, as in Memories, a central awareness of how the political situation impacts the characters, which here translates to logistical incompetence on the part of the Koreans and what appears to be willful, deadly ignorance on the part of the American army. That is, I think, the greatest value of genre to Bong - it allows him to explore, rather inconspicuously, a wide spectrum of subjects. To bring in the US army to a film about a dysfunctional lower-class Korean family would be absurd without the inherent global inclusiveness of a monster film.

About his depiction of the US - which at least one American reviewer was particularly sensitive to in last spring's Cannes reports - Bong claimed that he was not trying to demonize America (or, as he put it in an awkardly poetic neologism: "monsterize). And he's right, in that the Americans get the same broadly comic treatment everyone else in the film does. He's also pretty astute, depicting an exagerrated military response that endangers the local population, all for reasons whose twisted logics serve as justifications in themselves. And while I don't think Bong is directly equating the film's monster (one of the more impressive CG creations I've seen) with American military Imperialism, a visual rhyme between the monster's first appearance and the machine that dispenses the US Army's "Agent Yellow" into a crowd unmistakably underlines the similarity of the two threats.

Bong's films highlight the value of South Korean cinema, which, it seems to me, often attempts to incorporate genres or approaches often held to be contradictory. And it's a cinema that doesn't value glibness, so its exemplary works really do feel challenging in a way that something like Pulp Fiction or Miller's Crossing, thrilling though they may be, don't achieve.

Video Art

2007-01-05T19:12:00.000-06:00

I'm considering taking a class on early video art, but one week into the quarter remain undecided. The decision hinges mainly on logistics, but the class has got me thinking about my love-it-or-really-really-really-hate-it attitude towards video art. While I've seen plenty of genuinely exciting, innovative uses of video, I'm still generally ambivalent towards the whole damn medium. From my own (partially informed) perspective, the problem isn't just that a lot of gallery-based video art instantly arouses my bullshit detector, or even that sooo much of the stuff you see in museums (possibly more than what I've seen in galleries) seems to be a video version of a final essay in an art history class ("the performance symbolizes x, while the music on the soundtrack references y, which comments on z"), or even that fine arts types privilege technically-incurious video artists over any and all shades of cinema-bound experimental filmmakers. My biggest objection to video art has to do with its current status as the commodity form of performance art on the one hand and experimental filmmaking on the other - that is, it's performance art or experimental filmmaking crammed into a collectible/sell-able package, and not-infrequently fails to engage even a little bit with the properties of video as a medium. Part of me wants to say that's great, because any way that an artist can make money off his art is good for the culture because it keeps him making art. Part of me also wants to point out that performance art was at least partially born out of anarchic, anti-consumerist, anti-art establishment impulses.

It seems to me that video art collection is exclusive and exclusionary, and I have a real problem with the sort of habits it's encouraging. Although complexity (technical, narrative, visual, dialectic, sonic) isn't necessarily discouraged, much of what I've seen falls under the "high concept" category that makes for nice little explanatory notes from the curator. I've spoken with one filmmaker who makes narrative animations that are unusual but still highly accessible who prefers to sell her pieces as video art. Of course, the decision is financial - and I should quickly add that I'm very glad she has that option because I like her work a lot. What else is a maker of short films to do? But she does this instead of trying to screen them in cinemas, which wouldn't be particularly lucrative even in the best circumstances - even if there were large-ish, solid audiences, a short film program means there are several other filmmakers to split the door with. Unless you do a retrospective of your own short works, in which case you have to be well-known enough to draw a crowd, as there are few local publications that devote much space to experimental film screenings.

(Again, before I start to sound too shrill I should mention once again that I have seen some mind-melding videos and video-based installations, and am considering taking this class because of an interest in the classics of the medium. And pretty much everything I saw at the Henry in Seattle was interesting-to-great.)

But I'm interested in video art because I'm interested in the moving image, and because, logically, it seems like the line between video and film art should be blurring, rather than falling into such distinct, seemingly incompatible categories. Why isn't it blurring? Why is the art world now completely uninterested in experimental film, leaving experimental filmmakers even more broke now than ever before, and competing for grant money with art school hotshots videotaping themselves lip-synching to songs by the Backstreet Boys (to be as shrill as I possibly can in conjuring up an example). The hard truth is that experimental film is floundering in this country, because there's less and less money and smaller and smaller audiences. Noble attempts by Matt McCormick's Peripheral Produce, Other Cinema DVD, Microcinema and a couple others to put experimental films out on dvd has managed to make old and new classics available to the interested, but none of them has succeeded in making experimental filmmaking financially sustainable.

Not too long ago I saw two multi-channel video pieces by a highly respected artist. Scanning through the dvd, I watched one piece in its "installation view" and the other in "video view." The "installation view" chronicled what was, to me, a chaotic jumble of distinct experimental semi-narratives (five channels projected onto a wall) that failed to play off one another visually even as one performer could be seen on two channels simultaneously. The "video view" was a single-channel version of a different piece, or rather, it was the original video that would be divided among separate projectors for gallery display. It was shot on 16mm, and worked much better as a more experimental film-ish single channel piece than the other one did as a video/gallery art-ish multi-channel piece. I don't want to claim that I know the artist's motivation, but it's clear that galleries have a worldwide support system that for experimental film largely consists of three or four festivals, university courses and Anthology Film Archives. That is, it doesn't pay to be an experimental filmmaker, and I suspect that the desire/need to play up gallery-ready aspects of an artwork might be detrimental to the art itself. Watching the single-channel video, I found myself wanting to see it on film and in a cinema, rather than watching excerpts on a tv screen.

Also, the communal experience of a gallery is different from that of a cinema. I tend to think that the cinema is more prone to community-building, which is particularly important for experimental film. So often experimental filmmaking is done in isolation, one obsessive working alone, and one of the reasons why the 60s was so rich a time in experimental/underground film is that the NYC filmmakers had a community of artists in which they could screen their work, and see everyone else's films, bouncing ideas and new techniques off one another.

I'm of the one-world philosophy that believes that experimental cinema histories should be expanded to include video artists, but also that video art histories should take into account monumental cinema artists like Godard, Marker and Kiarostami as they explore digital terrain. And when important contemporary experimental or underground filmmakers like Jem Cohen and Matt McCormick alternate between film and video (while both can be seen on video either through Netflix or the VDB), we need to adapt our frame of reference along with the medium.

Oh, and, for me, Histoire(s) du cinema is, for me, the single most remarkable piece of video art ever made.

Kung Fu Hustle

2006-12-23T17:56:00.000-06:00

Kristi came down for a nice little visit this past week, and just before she left we watched Kung Fu Hustle, which might be her all-time favorite movie. With her and on my own I've probably seen the film a good four or five times now, and I'm a little surprised how little has been lost in the repeat viewings - it actually gets more enjoyable every time I see it. I like the way the film mixes and shuffles genres, which jumps not just from comedy to action to melodrama, but from Warner Brothers cartoon-style slapstick to traditional kung fu action tropes to more contemporary Yuen Wo-Ping/Matrix-y fight scenes, etc. It's pretty great how the film jumps between references and genres without ever being dragged down into Leslie Nielson territory. The allusions are never central to the plot or even to the film's enjoyment (and rarely even central to the joke - as witnessed by the huge popularity of the film among people like myself and Kristi who miss every single one of the kung fu genre references that many HK audiences would recognize instantly). The allusions are just kind of there, without any apparent purpose other than to ensure that the proceedings never get too serious - which they certainly could with the death of likeable major characters, the harsh social/economic conditions of "Pig-Sty Alley" and the unheroic protagonists who keep trying to do bad things to the film's most charismatic characters.

The film's about as close in feel to the classic slapstick of the silent era as anything since Tati, with the focus going completely the opposite direction of a film like Playtime. While the gentlemanly Tati oriented his films increasingly away from the body (particularly his own) and towards perception as the source of his comedy, Stephen Chow throws bodies all over the screen like a CGI'ed Buster Keaton. The interesting thing is that the old slapstick comedians are funny because they really dropped houses on themselves, or pole-vaulted into windows, or climbed the sides of skyscrapers. You take away that trust in the image and half the jokes aren't funny anymore. Think back to your favorite Buster Keaton film - would you have laughed if that drop from the two-story building into the villain's car, or the perfect timing that allowed the train to avoid the obstrutction, etc if there wasn't the implicit possibility that it might not actually work out, or that it might even be dangerous? That tension, which can make us squirm in our seats in anticipation, is central to the humor of those films. Bergson thought that humor came from infusing man with the properties of objects and objects with human properties, an part of what makes Keaton or Chaplin funny is their ability to perform truly inhuman acrobatic feats. They couldn't have been funny in the same way if they were digitally aided, because they wouldn't be humans acting like objects, but images/objects acting like objects.

But Chow is all about the CGI, enough that Kung Fu Hustle is practically a cartoon. So how is Kung Fu Hustle funny when digital gags in other films usually fall flat the moment the CG becomes apparent? (Or when, in another register, another film's CG monster isn't scary, or another film's CG action scene isn't exhilirating?) Again, I think that the allusions have a little something to do with it - the characters live in a movie world, so it's only naturally that they obey the rules of other movies, which in this case extends to slapstick and cartoons and kung fu action scenes and superhero movies all at once. And there's a certain consistency to the film's cartoonish logic, which only affects certain characters and only enters the action in certain kinds of scenes, and the consistent cartoonish-ness of it all means that the CGI never makes an especially jarring introduction. Because it's so much like a cartoon, the physical comedy is enjoyed as if it were a cartoon rather than classical slapstick, except that the cartoons are more detailed and familiar than most animations drawn by hand or computer because they're based originally on photography.

There's an insistence on the body throughout the film as well that is central to the physical, cartoonish humor. Not only is the body twisted, contorted and hurled across the screen through CGI, but there are repeated jokes about characters' appearances. It expresses a lot of anxiety about the body generally, in its jokes about the overweight landlady and the jiggling fat of Chow's sidekick, or buck-toothed Jane, or the general preponderance of seemingly mis-matched physiques, and also in the harsh grotesqueness of its violence (sliced limbs, body-throwing shotgun blasts, decapitations, etc). This location of cartoonish elasticity in the body feels like a part of the film's general thrust towards reassurance, and an unrealistic transformation of the body that's more akin to the Matrix and American superhero conventions (like in Spider-Man, which is referenced) than the physical sacrifice-heavy kung fu films. While the jokes are clearly parodic, in that they're intended to refer to a "normal" state of the body, the film tends to highlight them in order to minimize their ultimate importance. (One shouldn't overstate the case - the film doesn't dismiss them, and that line between "normal" and "abnormal" is most definitely present. It should also be noted that the most "normal-bodied" characters in the film are the axe gang members, who are anonymous, practically featureless, and don't have access to the cartoon exaggerations of the kung fu masters.)

Of course, there's a problem with the Bergsonian-ish (emphasizing the "ish") formulation above that equates images and objects. They are entirely different. Perhaps most CGI effects aren't effective because they treat images as images, mere pixels arranged on screen to resemble something vaguely photographic. That is, regardless of what it's depicting, what's on screen is just an image, and CGI remains faithful to that. Altering the Bergson-ish formulation just a little bit, you could say that it doesn't pit human-ness against object-ness, but that slapstick brings to the forefront the object-ness of a person (with Keaton being the embodiment par excellance). This slightly revised formulation is not reversible in the same way as the original, but we could say that infusing objects with human qualities is comedic partially because it blurs the lines between human and object, naturally a source of anxiety in the machine age. So, when an object takes on human traits, it's as if it were a human whose object-ness had all but drowned out its human qualities - or at least that's the way a human relates to it. So, Chow's film emphasizes the image-specific qualities of characters, and, conversely, finds familiar, human-ness in even its most ridiculous images, rather than letting the film devolve into a mere string of 2-d images.

PS - I don't know Bergson all that well and I'm guessing I've misremembered, misunderstood or not taken into account important points that should have been addressed (or should have been differently addressed).

That's much more than I intended to say about the film. I guess the relaxation of this vacation has turned to boredom and restlessness, and, perhaps, idle speculation. Maybe I just like typing.

Powell's

2006-12-20T14:40:00.000-06:00

I lugged in a large bag of books, which I sold, and still managed to make a significan dent in my credit card at Powell's this week. My level of indoctrination into the whole graduate school whatever can be measured by my excitement over the purchases I made, some of which are for a specific class, some of which are "for fun" (also because I know I'll need them and might as well buy them now, not that I have an excess of spending money or anything, just that I know they'll come in handy and Powell's had some good deals). I love Powell's, so much. The most I spend on any one of those books was $16.95, which was for required reading for the first week of class. The rest were all under or around $10. So goddamn great.

In Chicago the only used book store I know of is, actually, Powell's. It's the original Powell's, located in Hyde Park about a mile from my place. It's a different order of book store, small-ish and built for informal browsing rather than the Portland model, which is so large that you kind of need to know what you want beforehand (or stick to one of the poorly-stocked sections, like the entire film, art and music floor). You go to stores like the Portland Powell's in search of specific books, with a little browsing on top of that (and, naturally, careful inspection og all the "on sale" displays), while the Hyde Park version isn't large enough to reliably carry any specific title. But it's fun to spend an hour sifting through the poorly organized shelves of film books, breezing past the various randomly assigned sections on the ways in and out. Real good place. Even though I might prefer this to any one of Seattle's used book stores, I miss the variety and options you have there. Not that there aren't other great book stores in Chicago: Hyde Park's Seminary Co-Op, only five or so blocks from my apartment, is easily one of the best stores for new books I know of, but I can't justify a $25 new book purchase to myself as easily as I can four used books at $6.95 each, which you could find at any one of three places in the U-District and a couple on Capitol Hill. And Hyde Park's known as "the book district," sort of - I get the feeling that's intended as a vaguely derisory invocation of what the NYT called the neighborhood's, ahem, "nerdiness."

For the curious, the story behind the two Powell's is supposedly that Mr. Powell started the store in Chicago first, then moved to Portland. He sold the original store to somebody else, who kept the somewhat established Powell's name. The two developed independently of each other, with one attaining national prominence as the best book store on the West Coast, and the other being a fun, quirky hole in the wall that caters to the pointy-headed U of C crowd. I guess the biggest similarity for me is that I spend too much money at both.

And.... done.

2006-12-18T21:35:00.000-06:00

And I'm now through with my first quarter of graduate school, recuperating in the delightfully uneventful city of Vancouver, WA. I'm enjoying the couch as much as I can. I guess it's a good thing I won't get my stipend check until I get back to Chicago, because otherwise I'd be spending a good chunk of it at Powell's. Already been once. Going back tomorrow with two bags of books that I don't really want to get rid of, but I realized that if I don't sell them they'll just sit in this house until my parents move (which might suddenly be a possibility for the not-too-distant future). Haven't bothered rereading the essay since I handed it in - too scared that I'll discover glaring, laughable mistakes all over the place. After shrinking the font and narrowing the spacing to 1.5 instead of the advised double spacing, the paper was a dense 16 pages that I hope to god are coherent, at least somewhat.

Overwhelming-ness

2006-12-14T12:51:00.000-06:00

I just discovered a good little note I'd jotted down a couple days ago in a discussion of Fassbinder's use of mirrors: Fassbinder's constant use of mirrors indicates what might be read as a heavy reliance of the acousmetre; by attaching voices to their 2-d mirror representations rather than the "real" subject on screen, Fassbinder grants many of his characters the status of semi-acousmetres. This both allows them to slip more easily into full acousmetric presences (such as the voice/body split that occurs in the slaughterhouse early in 13 Moons - also, in Fassbinder, as in Fellini, the voice dubbing is loosely synchronized, and, as Chion explains, "these post-synched voices float around bodies" rather than inhabiting them), but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, Fassbinder's conception of the image grants it so much power/primacy/control/whatever that the only way to compensate for that, and to compete with it, is by granting the voice a certain degree of acousmatic powers (hints of omniscience, omnipotence) that come from separating it from the mouth/body. The word I originally used to describe the image's power as Fassbinder conceives it was "overwhelming-ness" which is kind of poetic, in an awkward, accidental sort of way.

My favorite explanation of the acousmetric properties comes in Chion's discussion of Ordet (p. 129-30 of The Voice in Cinema, 1999):

"At the end of Dreyer's Ordet, the madman Johannes pronounces before the body of Inger the words that are supposed to bring the young woman back to life. Dreyer could have filmed this scene in either of two ways. He could have shown the face of Inger when the offscreen words of Johannes are heard, or the camera could remain on Johannes as the latter declaims the words of life.

"The first solution would be more magical - Johnanne's voice would function as an acousmatic voice with all the power of acousmetres. The second solution keeps thing in the human dimension - Johannes is nothing but a man, and the words have no power other than by the grace of God. That is the solution Dreyer chose. In the entire film, vocal production is filmd directly, head-on, with very few offscreen voices. Speech draws on the symbolic force of 'embodied' language here, not on the black magic of disembodied voices."

Beginnings

2006-12-13T16:23:00.000-06:00

I think I've finally figured out where to start the Fassbinder paper - I've been writing and writing and writing, all in rough draft/note form and all relatively unstructured; the key hurdle has been trying to figure out that point of entry into everything, and then all of these notes I've been compulsively scribbling instead of actually writing this goddamned essay will be much easier to fit together. The theory, anyway, is that they'll all fall in line, magically, once I figure out where to start. The thing is, because I'm covering so much ground with this thing, the direction set by this first little bit can make a huge difference, up to and including which films the paper focuses on and which critics and theorists are privileged over others: the plan was to write about In a Year of 13 Moons and Michel Chion, utilizing eeeeeeeverything else as support, but I'm thinking a better intro might come from discussing Petra von Kant and a notion of cinematic space that comes mainly from Bordwell and Bazin. That doesn't mean that my main points can't still be Chion/13 Moons-related, but it's hard to make those the home bases around which the other arguments rotate if I'm unable to work them in until page 2 or 3. But I've kind of made up my mind, I guess. I was hoping that by concentrating on one film and one theorist and relegating the rest to supporting roles I might give off the (false?) impression of overall structural coherance rather than the anything-goes jumble I'm worried it will be.

The intro I'm currently thinking of ties the artificial-ness of Fassbinder's filmic space in general - the posing for the camera, the excessive audio-visual stimulation placed throughout the frame, the lack of 360-degree spatial representation (or, as I argue, the lack of 360-degree space, period; his films are shot along 180-degree perspectives, for the most part, although that's an assertion that requires some justification, evidence, etc), the self-awareness and emphasis on looking and the look, the lack of motivation on both the micro and macro levels, and the general (superficial) unreality of the acting - with the "abstract, unlocalized space" that opens so many of his films. In Beware of a Holy Whore, an actor delivers a lengthy monologue, filmed from below with a featureless blue sky his only background. In Petra von Kant, two cats rest on a set of steps, with no indication of whether this is occurring inside or outside. In 13 Moons, the shots alternate between extreme long shot and extreme close-up, a disorienting tactic that allows the viewer to follow the basic action but not to identify with any specificity the characters or, more importantly, how this space will relate to the rest of the story (it doesn't, standing out, paradoxically, as the most "natural" setting of the whole film). The American Soldier opens with three rough-looking men playing cards around a table, with a single overhead light illuminating the men and their cards, but everything behind them being hidden in total darkness. Fassbinder's first film, Love Is Colder than Death, opens in a more literally "abstract" space, with the walls either blank or covered over in solid-colored fabric.

Why this disorientation? Well, that's one of the big questions I need to answer, although the "why" is slightly less interesting to me than the "so what." My argument for the "why" portion of the paper has a lot to do with a similarly abstract notion of time, in which, for example, the past is thoroughly abstracted so as to exist only through its present representations (that's where 13 Moons comes in, as Elvira's past is literally carved onto her body). The temporal relationship between one shot/scene and the next is just as uncertain as the spatial one - which explains Fassbinder's tendency towards long takes when certainty is what a scene calls for. (That uncertainty is something that I'm still working through, but I'm tying it, at least in part, to the ways that space is actually explored in Fassbinder, mainly through the network of looks, stares and glances that play throughout his films.)

The "so what" is where the look/voice split comes in, in how the film cues the audience to interpret the sometimes "illegible" (according to Corrigan) scenes and construct spatio-temporal relationships between one character/shot/scene and another.

When it comes right down to it, though, Fassbinder's films take place in this kind of abstraction because space really doesn't matter. His conception of space is closer to the postmodern one that Corrigan describes, where geographical/physical distance cedes primacy to stress being placed on the hierarchy of information that populates any location. To be more specific, though, I think Fassbinder's films are organized (spatially, but also temporally/chronologically and occasionally dramatically) around sensations, around audio-visual experience of frame/image, of character, of location, etc. While not going so far as to say that, for example, his characters are mere placeholders in a greater aestheticized narrative, I'm going to fall back on the old postmodern cliche and say that his aestheticization - the highly theatrical posing, the audio-visual surplus, etc - is utilized neither in support of nor in ironic counterpoint to the narrative. It exists alongside it as an end in and of itself. A seeming paradox that lets Fassbinder have it both ways, so to speak - his films scream out their status as mere images, as cinema, but that doesn't mean they can't be "authentic."

Right now (cup of coffee #4 of the day, with the first two being very, very large - I guess I'm in place in which clock time doesn't matter all that much; my time is currently measured by pages left to write, caffeine consumed, and hours of sleep gotten), I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed because there's about five pages worth of arguments that I want to make just on Fassbinder's use of mirrors. But, if my dense ramblings above are any indication, I need to be more concise. So, here's the shortest possible explanation for all of the points I feel I should make about Fassbinder's insistent use on both filming in mirrors and on having characters look into mirrors:

1)a mirror reduces whatever it contains into a 2-d image, placing a character looking into one at same level as film viewer (sort of - the character can turn around at any time and see the rest of the scene, the camera cannot because Fassbinder composes his action for the frame rather than embracing Bazinian 360-degree realism... okay, that was too long)
2)mirrors distance characters from one another, wrapping frames around faces and bodies that separate them from the rest of the decor
3)mirrors double the character's image on screen - a typically German preoccupation, except that for Fassbinder this doubling produces both the character and his image, again drawing parallel to the viewer's perspective
4)looking at oneself in a mirror allows a character to understand and rehearse how others see him/her, and to try to control that in some way (a huge motivation throughout Fassbinder's work); plus, it allows characters to see themselves in relation to other people in the scene
5)this is my favorite one, and where I'm cutting off the list: the look has an especially important place in Fassbinder's cinema, and a character looking at someone else is not only communicative and revealing, but the fact that he/she is looking is usually more important than whatever's being looked at - which is a total reversal from traditional subject/object, shot/reverse-shot organization in the classical cinema. That's all been said before, much more eloquently (and packed with Lacanian jargon) than I ever could. The part I'm excited about is my realization that characters rarely lock eyes in Fassbinder, and when they do it's usually right before an outburst (usually very physical) or something climactic. Looks are mostly one-way, and conversations are staged with both characters looking towards the camera, or one staring at the back of the other's head. There's something far too intimate, and powerful, about the returned gaze to allow it casual use. So mirrors are kind of like those little boxes you use to watch a solar eclipse - they let a character see another character's face without actually having to look him in the eyes and meet his gaze. Bam. And it's directly related to 1.

Not the brightest bulb.

2006-12-12T12:34:00.000-06:00

Have you ever used the bathroom in the middle of the night and, once you've finished, you flip the light switch instead of anything connected to the toilet? And then, because you realize your mistake, you try to be more alert and as you walk out the room you just stare at the light switch, not flipping it off, because you don't want to make the same mistake twice? Wild guess as to whether that happened to me early this morning

Not dark yet...

2006-12-10T19:31:00.000-06:00

But it's getting there. So, as a timewasting distraction before jumping back into my paper (which, I realized last night, only needs to be 15 pages, whereas I have notes for a paper that would be, oh, 50 or 60 pages - double-spaced, that is), I'm staring at the computer screen and doing my best to be non-productive and restful before writing a paper that will, undoubtedly, revolutionize R.W. Fassbinder scholarship... hehe, heh, *sigh*. I just kept watching, and just kept reading, and just have this huge surplus of disconnected notes about the relationship between voice (new!) and gaze (it's been done), and the weird abstract space/image/time in some, maybe most, of his films. The idea to connect Michel Chion's concept of the acousmetre (well, I guess it's a Pierre Schaeffer concept, but Chion's the one who applied it to film) to the semi-diegetic narrations of In a Year of 13 Moons was kind of a late-breaking lightning bolt that added an extra day to the writing and an extra $23.05 to my credit card bill (for Chion's The Voice in Cinema). The acousmetre is basically a voice that's not tied to a visible source, or, more specifically, a mouth. And, because it isn't attached to a body, it doesn't have to obey the same physical rules as an actual person, often taking on a kind of vaguely omniscient, omnipotent, panoptic quality - as in the old horror movie saw where the phone rings and the threatening caller tells the helpless, virginal blonde that "I'm watching you right now!!!" and then appears from out of nowhere brandishing a gigantic, sharp phallic object of some sort, like a knife or a harpoon.

And by expanding the Lacan-bating emphasis on the look and to-be-looked-at-ness in Fassbinder's films to the voice-inclusive idea of "perception," which explains not only the nicely avant garde feeling that his characters often seem to be posing for the camera, but that they often have a compulsive need to talk, usually either telling their own stories or talking either themselves or someone else into something. The visual is, of course, much more effective, and more trusted - by both characters and the audience. So, any time there's a reliance on the voice, usually as the alternative to an unseen image but sometimes when characters are trying to talk away visuals that are evident if not obvious, Fassbinder overcompensates. That overcompensation can come in the form of dramatic histrionics (though rarely if ever from the protagonist, with Petra von Kant being the most obvious exception), but usually this comes in the form of an excess of audio-visual artifacts and mannerisms scattered around the screen: cluttered frames, busy and distracting soundtracks, allusions to other films, music, etc.

Since I started writing, I've noticed sometimes, as with Querelle, In a Year of 13 Moons and Katzelmacher, Fassbinder seems to be pitting the voice explicitly against the image. In Querelle, the narration goes above and beyond what we're shown, commenting on the action without confirming or contradicting the image; the characters go through a ritualistic verbal denial of their own sexuality throughout the film, even when their pants are around their ankles; finally, Jeanne Moreau's character reads tarot cards at the beginning of the film, launching the action by mentioning Querelle, and then again at the end - when she discovers on her second reading that she was mistaken, with the words "I was wrong. You never had a brother!" she effectively erases the entire film as nothing more than a "mistake," a fever dream that never happened. But even though these various kind of verbal commentary actually do take control of the narrative, the vivid, hallucinatory images are powerful in an entirely different way, one that can't be erased by mere words. Etc.

Coffee-ness

2006-12-07T09:33:00.000-06:00

I spent much of the past week at the Bourgeois Pig, overcaffeinating myself in an attempt to stimulate my brain into, you know, working. Depending on who you ask, it's been effective, sort of. But I've been fundamentally exhausted in such a way that I get home from reading on the north side and fall asleep, or staying conscious in a state of near-sleep. Which is making it hard, and the solution is either more caffeine or less caffeine. Almost there, almost through with the quarter. One small paper down, one larger-ish paper left to go. In the meantime, my apartment's a disaster area (if only I could watch these Fassbinder dvds in an occasionally loud, crowded coffeeshop, I don't think I'd ever leave). I've been slacking on the swimming, too, which is bad, but the stupid little side effect of that is that when I do go, I'm completely rested and feel all in shape and stuff (which my finals-week diet most definitely does not do - based on a highly scientific informal poll, graduate students' cheese intake increases threefold in the final two weeks of the quarter).

Watching Fassbinder, I'm struck by how amazingly good this stuff is, and the thing is that the weirder films, i.e. Querelle and In a Year of 13 Moons, get more fascinating with each viewing. They're very dense films, and they grew denser as his output slowed to, you know, less than 7 per year (yeah, he actually made seven feature films in 1970). I've got a couple days to write, oh, 15-20 pages on this stuff, and I think I'm depending on coffee to provide me with inspiration, ideas, concentration. And I've been listening to a lot of Ornette Coleman, which I've discovered is the ultimate study music for me, more than Eno and his ambient/electro-brethren, more than classical strings, more than the soothing samba music favored by the Bourgeois Pig, etc. I suspect that something like "Lonely Woman" might be the kind of music we'd listen to if we were big, mutant, pulsating, disembodied brains (that somehow have ears?).

Until a week or so ago, I'd had maybe one cup of coffee in about six weeks. And now, now that my system's no longer accustomed to the daily coffee influx, that caffeine packs a punch. So, if you notice that I'm a little, um, jittery, think nothing of it. It's natural.

Today's inspirational verse, courtesy of Stephen Colbert:

"So the Christian Coalition are afraid they'll be called liberals. I don't blame them. After all, there's nothing more Christian than refusing to do good works because you might get called a name."

Gunvor Nelson

2006-11-25T09:19:00.000-06:00

Experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson came to campus last week for a screening of three very personal films: her tribute to her daughter My Name Is Oona (which the screening notes claim might be her best known film), the experimental mother/daughter/mother fiction Red Shift, and an absolutely devastating documentary portrait of her dying mother that I believe was called Mother. I'm not sure how representative these films are of the rest of her work, but her impressionistic, flowing montage is truly remarkable. And, I have to say, the experimental canon is such a boys' club, Nelson's films are a wonderful balance to the cumulative testosterone of her fellow filmmakers. Feminine without being overtly feminist, Nelson's more concerned with exploring ideas of immediate relevance to women without (explicitly) positioning her work against any conventions or traditions. My Name Is Oona and Mother are undoubtedly the most beautiful, affecting films of their kind that I've seen. There's something hypnotic in Nelson's images, and she's got a remarkable eye for the extreme close-up. The extreme close-up, used liberally in Red Shift, strikes me as a key technique to understanding her films, even if it was rarely used in the other two films last night. With Red Shift's magnified portraits of features and body parts, and Oona's endless, overlapping repetition of the name on the soundtrack, there's a sense in which Nelson's films fetishize the smallest, most tangible details (or at least they attempt to make these details tangible through the film) as a sort of defense mechanism, a way of understanding powerful and possibly painful relationships to her subjects (her daughter, her mother, aging, death) piece by piece, keeping them immediately comprehensible while allowing the montage to express the complexities and ambiguities (and the various inexpressibles) she feels towards them.

Atom Egoyan

2006-11-11T17:58:00.000-06:00

Atom Egoyan was at Chicago last week. He came to our German class, just sat there listening for an hour. (I didn't say anything remotely smart while he was there, in case you were wondering - but as soon as he left...) He spoke at the Mass Culture Workshop about physical relationships with technology in his work, but really more generally than that. He's done several pieces - films and installations - in which old-fashioned tape recorders play a central role, and he's fascinated with them because the user does have such a physical relationship with the machine, a relationship that's one a wholly different order than the one with a computer, an mp3 player or any other kind of digital technology. Old analogue machinery creates an impression of having some sort of physical manifestation of its processes - you can, to a certain extent, see it working. In other words, Egoyan is incredibly sensitive to the postmodern (which I bring up because I'm finally the tiniest bit confident as to one specific aspect of the most poorly-defined word in the English language), and nostalgic for the modernist. You can see this in his films, which are structured/styled in a manner that's often characterized as "postmodern" and yet place an extra emphasis on physical transit - think of the body hunt in Exotica, the bus crash in The Sweet Hereafter, and all those customs agents that keep reappearing from film to film.
I'm kind of obsessed with the way that space is organized and categorized on screen, and have a vague suspicion about the possible relevance of Manuel Castells's "space of flows," which is, in my own horribly incomplete understanding, similar to Egoyan's conception of digital technology: space that's organized by informational logic rather than physical, geographical logic, and in which physical distance is less a factor than access within the network. My further vague suspicion is that, not only does the cinema have a similar relationship now to postmodernism that it did in the 20s and 30s to modernism, but that the cinema has been one of the central places where we've been working through that transition from modern to post, and that there's something fundamentally postmodern (in that incomplete "space of flows" definition I tried to explain above) about the onscreen organization of space, which would therefore lead one to conclude that the cinema has not only reflected that transition but, in some sense, led the charge.

George Kuchar

2006-11-05T08:45:00.000-06:00

Attended a screening of George Kuchar's most recent videos at the Siskel on Thursday with Pam and her housemate Emily, both of whom I think enjoyed themselves or at least found it interesting, but I loved it unconditionally. As he did when we brought him out to Seattle, George showed several of his diary videos, all of which were wonderful, and followed it with a ridiculously overblown campy melodrama that he made with his students at the Art Institute in SF, and which went on way too long. Of course, just as much as the actual work, the filmmaker was the draw and the biggest source of entertainment, and he didn't disappoint.

The program started on the wrong note when whoever it was that introduced Kuchar read a portion of an essay calling him "one of the great artists in the history of the medium," or something like that. Kuchar's films don't require such hyperbole. His place, along with his brother's, in the history of film, underground or otherwise, has much more to do with the amazing surplus of goodwill the rest of the film world feels towards him/them. His films are easy to like in a very fundamental way. The Kuchar brothers are both quintessential New York characters, lovably eccentric and wholly non-threatening (which is particularly important when you take into consideration the lurid subject matter of so many of their most influential films) - and their movies have a similar appeal. Amateurish, occasionally overearnest, delightfully strange, what-the-hell random, the Kuchars are perhaps unfairly treated something akin to outsider artists in the history of experimental filmmaking - the "perhaps" is there because when placed alongside Jacobs, Brakhage, even Jack Smith, it's clear that the Kuchars have a different, much less deliberately confrontational, relationship with the medium.

George Kuchar's diary videos on Thursday, all of which he shot over the summer and had recently finished editing, are truly delightful (to repeat myself), free-flowing jumbles. His presence at the center of all of them is key to their appeal, along with their endearing over-utilization of editing tricks (George has Final Cut Pro now, evidently). And I love the very basic philosophy of his video-making, that he carries a camera with him whenever he feels like filming something and then just turns it on, whether that's taking his aging mother around the block, visiting John Waters or Robert Breer, having dinner at a friend's house, or watching Mother Angelica on late night television. He'll jump from one location to another, and even, in one film, alternate between documentary and fiction, with no apparent motivation (narrative or otherwise). All this can be done because Kuchar creates a space that neither mythologizes nor belittles the everyday, but is instead an investigation of the quotidian for the sometimes faint traces of the stuff of melodramas and movie spectacles. But Kuchar makes no effort to compile them into one grand lurid narrative (even his grand lurid narratives are disjointed enough that they can't really be considered as such), he realizes they exist as bits and pieces and doesn't try to force them into any other formation.

Briefly

2006-10-28T10:27:00.000-05:00

Briefly, as if I want to go swimming today I have to leave in ten or so minutes. I'm writing this blog because the format suits me and because it gives me a means of procrastination that feels not entirely unproductive (because, I'm, like, you know, thinking through things, and shit). I often wonder, however, just how much of a tree-falling-in-the-woods effort this is. So, if you read this, please let me know. Danke shoen.

Animations

2006-10-26T21:23:00.000-05:00

Went to a program of short animated films by Adam Beckett at the Siskel today. Beckett's five films in the program (he only completed six before dying in a fire at age 29), were all kinds of amazing. They were at their best when they were least psychedelic, a compulsive rotation of evolving shapes and patterns, some of which felt downright heroic for their ingenuity and the pencil hours it must have taken to produce them. The films were paired with other abstract/weird animations curated by Jim Trainor, including Oskar Fischinger's Motion Painting #1, which I'll never tire of seeing. There's a pseudo festival of animation around the city this weekend, including an appearance from Naomi Uman (which I can't make it to, unfortunately). I'm definitely going to the Sunday afternoon program of films by Robert Breer and his daughter (whose films are fantastic, by the way) Emily.

Wavelength

2006-10-26T00:22:00.000-05:00

Watched Michael Snow's Wavelength the other night for a class (on 16mm, other screenings this week: Weekend and Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). Can't get it out of my head, really, although I'm not really sure how to describe it. Fascinating, and I think I've starting to get a handle on what exactly fascinates me about it, but it's hard. So much of film analysis is based on the concrete and tangible (form in service of narrative, of theme, of argument), that switching over to something that doesn't articulate any sort of argument, in which narrative might as well be nonexistent, and in which the theme is ambiguous at best, can feel utterly alien. They're often described in terms of technique, much like painting or sculpture, but that's most definitely outside my own area of expertise, if you can call it an expertise. What I like about it is what's been occupying a lot of my brain, or at least that portion that fantasizes about what I will one day (soon) be studying instead of actually doing any studying: the way that space and distance are coded, particularly how they're infused with so much substance and significance by the oh-so-slow zoom in. And then there's the resolution, that final transporting image that the film spends 45 minutes explaining as an image (a photograph on the wall constantly at the center of the frame), but that functions, somehow, as a "real" escape from the confines of the room.

Randomness and Alternative Time Usage (aka Harder Better Faster Blogger)

2006-10-14T01:45:00.000-05:00

Have a lot of work to catch up on over the weekend. Lots and lots, much of it dense psychoanalytic theory. I have to admit that I giggle occasionally at some of the assertions, which have abstracted themselves from experiential or observational analysis so much as to seem ridiculous on first glance, second glance too. A Lacanian's specialty, as I understand it from the little I understand of recent psychoanalytic criticism.

I really want to get Lynne Tillman's new book, American Genius. I know nothing about it except for that kickass title. I of course have no time for leisure reading right now, and have several large piles of books that I've been planning on reading one of these, with a not-all-that-small pile of "nightstand books" (quotation marks as in, I don't have an actual nightstand, just two cardboard boxes piled on top of each other) that I've been "planning on reading next" for who knows how long. As with several of my other favorite authors, Tilmman's books, no matter how much ridiculously gushing praise they get, are released in paperback only - good for me, the poor, broke grad student who feeds all his money into the library printers, but it would be nice if the author of No Lease on Life got a little respect from the industry.

The Kleptones have two albums available for download from their website (www.kleptones.com), neither of which I was aware of. Steven Shaviro turned me on to the Kleptones' Night at the Hip-Hopera on his blog, The Pinocchio Theory (www.shaviro.com/Blog). So far, the two post-Hip-Hopera albums seem to be more conventional mash-ups, in the a+b=c format (of course adding sprinklings of d, e, f). Night at the Hip-Hopera collapsed a veritable history of hip hop into the collected works of Queen, interesting conceptually in a fundamental way, for its play with issues of race and masculinity (in addition to playing black music in an extremely white way, Queen were swaggering poster boys of leather-bound masculinity, with a small but relevant secret - now juxtapose that with hip hop; Shaviro covers similar ground much more eloquently on his blog, by the way). 24 Hours, the album I'm currently listening to, is certainly energetic and always keeps the mix surprising and clever, and definitely has something to say (lots about money, especially; also quotes McCluhan more than once, with the "all-at-onceness" line sample standing out very early on disc 1 - not sure, but that may come from Waking Life). The standout track so far is "Daft Purple," a mash of my second favorite Daft Punk song, "Harder Better Faster Stronger" and Deep Purple's "Fireball," along with a "Money" interlude, some Jethro Tull, something by a rapper named Hijack, and the aforementioned McCluhan alongside dialogue from The Breakfast Club, and more, I'm sure. I've heard that Daft Punk song dozens of times, but had never figured out that it was an ironic endorsement of company life, of buying into and living for the system. I'd always just assumed it was about dancing. Vocodered Frenchmen aren't all that easy to understand, so I have an excuse.

Still haven't gotten sick of Wild Honey, or Love You. Trying to pick a favorite Sonic Youth song, for time-wasting purposes, realized that Rather Ripped's Jams Run Free is most definitely in the running. Possibly on the bill for next monday, JLG's Passion plus... wait for it... JLG's jeans commercials, a dozen of them. Jeans, by Jean-Luc Godard. I'm sure he made himself utilise prostitution as a metaphor for the capitalist system in his next feature as penance. Saw Psycho on 35mm last Monday for a class, had to skip Sauve qui peut (la vie) in order to do so. It was fucking great. The little bit of theory I've read so far this year has focused so heavily on Hitchcock that I feel increasingly aware of what to look for in his films, and am consistently surprised to find his films even more meticulously crafted than even the theorist's give him credit for (or deny him credit for, depending on what you're reading). There's always more to look for in a Hitchcock film. Which is good, because we've already watched four Hitchcocks, and we're supposed to have watched Strangers on a Train three times, and I have to do a detailed analysis of The Lady Vanishes that will require three full viewings at least and a shot-by-shot deciphering of a scene. It's a lot of Hitchcock to take in all at once, but better him than just about anyone else, I suppose. It was Kristi's birthday on Thursday, and in addition to a surprise package still on its way, I've been cheerily spending time making birthday mixes. I have to watch myself, though, because I'm making her a whole box set of mixes (7 and counting), and as I run out of my original ideas for a Mix For Kristi, I drift into my own tastes more and more, and lately those are running towards the darker, more dissonant, skronk end of the semi-popular music spectrum.

The Beach Boys love you

2006-10-11T08:54:00.000-05:00

I've been listening compulsively to post-Smile(y Smile) Beach Boys for the past couple days, particularly the albums Wild Honey and Love You. The former is a sparkling little gem, much more rocking than anything the group had done before, with a distinct r&b swing to it. The soft and bittersweet prettiness of Pet Sounds left behind for something that is perhaps less distinct, and, indeed, the sound calls less attention to itself as a "sound" and acts primarily in support of the songwriting (rather than being an integral part of the songwriting process, or vice-versa). But the songs are irresistible. With 11 songs, each lasting less than three minutes and several clocking in at under two, the disc is brief, and it feels slight: the layered harmonizing has been pushed into the background, and there's a general absence of Pet Sounds' deeply felt adolescent questioning. It's possibly most famous as being the first Beach Boys album on which Brian Wilson didn't write all the songs - but "Kokomo" this ain't; the 1:58 "How She Boogalooed It" is a nice little palate cleanser that leans more on its rhythm than its melody and works just fine as such. As Robert Christgau puts it, there isn't "a bad second" on the album, with each song whittled down to the most basic nuggets of pop perfection, which applies to the sonic as well as compositional qualities of the music. With both this and Love You (and much of the 70s output), Brian and whoever else was sitting in the mixing room (and there was somebody else sitting in the mixing room) shifted the focus to the production, rather than the performance, and it's all for the best. The instruments, electronic and otherwise, feel much more integral to their music than they ever had before, and the slightly off-key, not-quite-harmonic singing is mixed until it sounds pretty damn good and actually on pitch. And that's not because they were becoming better singers.

For what it's worth, Love You is a masterpiece as well, even if it feels like a sort of last stand for Brian Wilson - and it would be, as Wilson's last moment of undeniable musical genius until Smile (which I've also been listening to lately). The music is brilliant, reaching back to Wilson's earliest style of songwriting (but, again, with superior 70s production - and I do think the 70s production is superior), but the lyrics are what make the album most memorable, not in a good way. If 60s songs like "God Only Knows" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice" come from a a young man's anxieties and uncertainties about growing up, Love You seems to come from an adult who hasn't quite gotten it right. Every word on the album is painfully sincere, but whether they're singing about Johnny Carson's greatness, the planets of the Solar System or awkardly processed adult relationships ("pat, pat, pat her on the butt, butt, butt/she's almost asleep") it can be a little embarassing. It seems to be a missive from Wilson on a slide downhill, an attempt at the warmth and love (for girls girls girls, for surfing, for cars, for teenage life) he once wrote about that now seems out of place, or somehow mis-placed, at least in an adult, mature world. But the music is buoyant, joyful and immensely enjoyable. And songs like "Mona" and "Roller Skating Child" are just as catchy as "Help Me Rhonda" and "I Get Around," really they are. And to add to the hyperbole, I'd go so far as to say that song for song, recording for recording, Wild Honey is up to the level of any pre-Pet Sounds greatest hits collection you could put together. Brian Wilson just wasn't made for those/these times, unfortunately. And it is unfortunate, but also lends a great deal of poignancy to the whole of the Beach Boys' output. That vague sense of out-of-place-ness infuses Wild Honey and Love You as much as it does Pet Sounds, giving even the silliest lyric a resonance that reaches down into your gut.

Pooling

2006-10-07T09:31:00.000-05:00

I've been swimming a lot lately. It's calming in a nicely repetitive way, like riding a bike, or mowing the lawn. I'm starting to get pretty good, and have usually been able to keep up with even the serious-looking swimmers to the sides of me - until two days ago, when the girl next to me who may or may not have had an invisible rocket strapped to her back, kept gliding by me at what seemed to be twice my speed. She was going as fast or faster than I was even when she was using a kickboard (i.e. no hands). I shrugged it off, as she appeared to be one giant muscle in the shape of a small-ish redhead, except that other people in the pool seemed to be going faster than me as well. Same thing yesterday. Now, it's not that big a deal, except that when people are blowing by you, you really become aware of your own lack of speed and the large number of laps you have to do to make swimming a worthwhile exercise - well, each one feels long, and each set of ten feels longer, and then each half mile takes forever. Maybe I just need to focus more. That would make sense, I have been having trouble focusing for the course readings. In that case, though, I just figured that laziness was the culprit.

I won't be swimming for a couple days, at least until I can find new trunks. My once dark green swimming trunks - which had, thanks to repeated exposure to the most poisonously chlorinated water I've ever swam in, turned a sort of peach-y color - developed a tiny hole on one of the legs. I had to cut my laps short yesterday, as somehow that tiny hole had developed into a gigantic rip. I slammed the shorts into the locker room trash can, and I'm pretty sure that I had a frustrated and/or perturbed look on my face as I was doing it.

Laziness

2006-10-06T16:46:00.000-05:00

Or maybe fatigue, who knows. I'm two weeks in to the quarter and already behind. The reading keeps piling higher and higher, but it's all interesting, with much of it being very interesting. Movies to watch, articles to read, hair to get cut, hopefully can squeeze some swimming in there - it doesn't help that the sheer amount of extracurriculur activities is so staggering, especially now that the CIFF is stacked on top of the normal great film programming on campus and around town. I get the feeling that I'm not drinking enough, just in terms of trying to fit in among my fellow Chicagoans. To watch: Rebecca (at the Film Studies Center), Strangers on a Train (again), Vertigo (Monday, on film), Syndromes of a Century (CIFF), also the TWO Apichatpong Weerasethakul shorts programs next week, Invisible Waves (CIFF), Taxidermia (CIFF), Climates (CIFF), hopefully Griffith's Intolerance, Shadow of a Doubt, and My Sex Life, or How I Got Into an Argument, my three Netflix films that are only sorta kinda related to coursework, and can be watched at any time. I've gotten nothing done today, though. And I'm going to give myself just a little bit more nothing, just for a little while longer.

The story of Yo La Tengo

2006-10-06T15:21:00.000-05:00

Saw Yo La Tengo at the Vic last night. My favorite band - I realized a couple weeks ago that I did actually have an answer for the "what's your favorite band?" question - puts on one hell of a show. As much as I love them, I'd never really noticed Ira Kaplan's guitar god status. Even their ten-plus minute noise-groove digressions rocked pretty goddamn hard, for the whole ten-plus minutes. The slow songs were painfully pretty, in their signature not-quite-ecstatic way. (To be a little purple - blue? - YLT's feedback-radiating grooves are structured as almost tantric sublimations of that pop music, hook-driven tendency towards ecstatic melodic resolutions, directing the pop instinct inwards on itself instead of outwards towards the feet and hips; it occurred to me not long ago that YLT is actually a groove band, except that they're the least funky - er, whitest, New Jersey-ist - groove band ever.) Their live sound was remarkably similar to their album sound(s), with the only noticeable difference being the total dominance of the strings over the keyboards. There were four instruments used on stage - guitar, bass, keyboards, drums - and both James and Ira played all four, Georgia played at least three (didn't notice if she played the bass as well, although she very well could have).

After nine well-played songs, including a quick and perfect "Stockholm Syndrome," they sent the crowd screaming when they tore up "Cherry Chapstick," followed by "Watch Out For Me Ronnie" and "I Should Have Known Better," the most energetic tracks of their 60s-inflected new album. The set's high point carried over into the next song, a transcendent "Tom Courtenay" (electric, sung by Ira). Three and a half minutes of blissful heaven. "The Story of Yo La Tango"[sic], their latest album-ending rave up and maybe their poppiest, brought the house down, starting off slow and swirly and suddenly surging forward with that driving energy they manage to keep up for the full however many minutes.

Their last song before the encores was Painful's marathon groove finale "I Heard You Looking." During Ira's guitar/noise/feedback performance, he got as theatrical as Yo La Tengo gets, going so far as to wave his guitar in the air - a cliched rock'n'roll move, to be sure, until I figured out instead that he was directing it towards and around the speakers, trying to orchestrate the speaker feedback (which he did amazingly well, as if he's been doing it for decades).

The band played three encores, with the third coming because they wanted to convene backstage to discuss their final song selection (they opened it up to the audience to decide between three tracks from Fakebook, and ended up with "Yellow Sarong" - a decision my own yelling and screaming had a little something to do with). Their encores were mainly covers, the only other one I recognized was "Speeding Motorcycle" - chosen by audience request, by which I mean there was one guy standing near me who was screaming "Screaming Motorcycle!!!" throughout the show.

And if anyone hasn't seen their classic "Sugarcube" video, I just want to say "I love you, YouTube."'

One of their encore selections they chose because their "friend Mark" (Kozelek?) was in the audience, which I'm assuming he wrote. On another, a Dream Syndicate cover, they brought another Rick Rizzo, who they'd "been playing with since before most of you were born."

Oh, and somebody - the "Speeding Motorcycle" guy, maybe - yelled out "I love you Georgia." Ira ignored him until he yelled it again, then looks up from the drums (he and Georgia were playing drums in tandem) and says: "Not as much as me."

How can you not love this band?

In case anyone is curious, now that I have an iPod I'm able to keep track of what I'm listening to the most. After the break, a short list of most-playeds.

Belle and Sebastian - I'm a Cuckoo
D.N.A. - Blonde Redhead
Orange Juice - Rip It Up
Flipper - Generic (full album, "Ever" most of all)
They Might Be Giants - Doctor Worm
The [English] Beat - Save It For Later
The Box Tops - Soul Deep
Yo La Tengo - River of Water
Cut Chemist - Lesson 4: The Radio
Brian Eno - The Big Ship
Otis Redding - Cigarettes and Coffee
Kelly Clarkson - Since U Been Gone
X - Adult Books
The Blue Hearts - Linda Linda
Double Dee + Steinski - Lesson 1 (The Payoff Mix)
Michael Hurley/The Unholy Modal Rounders - Griselda
Sonic Youth - Sunday
Kraftwerk - Trans Europa Express
Husker Du - Sorry Somehow
Bob Dylan - Workingman's Blues

Bargain shows in Logan Square

2006-09-06T23:38:00.000-05:00

I've been going to movies lately. There's a three dollar bargain theater right down the street from here, and it's amazing what you'll talk yourself into seeing when you have no tv, no stereo, and it's only three bucks. In reverse chronological order:

Accepted is ridiculous in that its basic fundamental premise has to do with potential college students that have plenty of money and want to go to school, except no school will accept them. Evidently nobody writing (and there were quite a few writers who collected a paycheck for the screenplay), directing or producing this film has ever heard of community college. Also, how hard is it to get into a school if money's not an issue? Now, if the fake college in this movie preached school being free for everyone, that might be a good start for a legitimate and nicely subversive comedy. Also, I haven't seen this much surgical enhancement (female only, of course) in a movie since... since... ummm, never mind. Further evidence that the film cares nothing for reality, and so it exists in a sort of vacuum, a pneumatic effort to throw a random assortment of jokes at the audience and see if any stick. When Lewis Black is on screen, pretty much all of them do.

Monster House is a good little movie sprung from the Spielberg/Zemeckis philosophy that death and terror should be a major part of any movie for children (call it the Hansel and Gretel approach). So, it was made using the same motion capture animation that made The Polar Express so astonishingly creepy, except they decided to sidestep the uncanny valley by giving all the characters giant cartoon heads. The effect is not unlike a Chris Cunningham film: normal, ultra-realistic bodies and deformed gigantic heads (it's also not unlike a cartoon-characters-on-ice performance, in which the performer is given normally-proportioned costuming except for a giant head to place over his own).

X-Men 3... what can be said about Brett Ratner that does him justice? That he's the most mediocre prominent filmmaker working today? More than Michael Bay, who at least has a personal stamp of ridiculousness and frenetic stabs at iconic imaging and then some quips? Watching a Ratner is like a Film School 101 class, with every directorial decision (or lack thereof) prompting the viewer to ask him or herself, "Okay, what could a filmmaker do to add intelligence, personality, originality, dramatic tension, or to further explore the characters here?" It's filmmaking on autopilot - you can sing along even if you've never seen the film before. I'll just add that a major character dies halfway through - perhaps THE major character of the first two movies and of the comic book series in general - and another major character dies in the first twenty minutes; and yet, not only does it not leave much of an impression emotionally, both times it feels like a somewhat minor plot point. Brett Ratner's films are like pages out of a coloring book - you can tell what the picture's supposed to be, but we're still waiting for somebody to color it in to make it watchable.

Also seen: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, last night, at the Music Box. Bliss, although a little clunkier than I remembered. This isn't fair to the film, but it feels a little bit like a rehearsal for some of Almodovar's less frantic recent work.

Sleater-Kinney's last show

2006-08-13T23:48:00.000-05:00

Friday night I was at the first of Sleater-Kinney's two farewell-for-now performances at Portland's Crystal Ballroom. My ears are still ringing, and it's just as much from the crowd as from the atrociously distorted speakers - there were two or three songs that I couldn't identify because I couldn't hear the vocals, sigh.

No matter, though. Sleater-Kinney rocked the fucking house. No speakers (except, I guess, the lack of speakers that occasionally afflicted their 100 degree+ East Coast concerts last month)could keep down that kind of rockingness. I'm pretty sure the walls starting shaking during "Entertain," a bone-shattering, hard-rocking highlight approached but not equalled until (predictably) the second-to-last song of the night, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone. This was a particularly devoted crowd, of course, with hundreds of people in the audience screaming notes they (ahem, we) couldn't reach under even optimal circumstances, and Corin Tucker at a couple points during the show seemed to consider handing the chorus over until thinking better of it at the last second and lunging into the microphone.

I was well-positioned for viewing purposes, and there's something about the Crystal Ballroom and it's roll-on stage that makes it seem remarkably intimate, despite the jarring sound problems. Matt M. was there with a Bolex and I kept trying to get his attention to see if maybe he could slip me into the roped-off area, but no such luck. Still, I was able to watch all three ladies very closely (and I watched, especially during the parts where I couldn't really listen), particularly Corin Tucker, a subtle performer whose embellishments largely consist of facial expressions of the sort she probably can't be sure an audience would even notice. Meanwhile, to her right, the more traditionally rawking rock goddess Carrie Brownstein jumped and kicked her way around the stage as she crunched away on her guitar or worked herself into a controlled frenzy to reach those screaming high notes, and Janet Weiss threw her whole body into her drums. (There was a throwaway line in the Voice about how disturbed the critic was that one of the best drummers on the planet now only belonged to one band... and it's Quasi. Not to knock Quasi, but mopey old Sam Coomes could get by with me sitting in on drums.)

Tucker and Brownstein come off as very down to earth, very approachable, and very, well, normal. In spite of their always mind-blowing performances on stage, they do seem the slightest bit guarded, even uncomfortable, in front of an audience. They don't talk very much during the set, and even though their music is often startling in its honesty and intimacy, there are few if any actual biographical details - on stage they are performers, who they are in private remains, in some sense, private (Tucker's husband, Lance Bangs, crouched behind a speaker about ten feet from her with his video camera out for the entire show but I never saw her, even when she dedicated the final song of the evening to him, glance or smile in his direction). On Friday they looked happy and even a little thrilled. I like to think that maybe the realization hit, that they couldn't help but understand that they had been, for a time, the best band on the planet. There was something about the half-suppressed smiles on Tucker's face that I'll remember for as long as I listen to music.

Ghost Dog

2006-07-29T00:05:00.000-05:00

Rewatching it today, Ghost Dog feels like minor Jarmusch, and yet it's probably his most immediately accessible film, and one of his most enjoyable. It is, of course, a willful aesthetic stretch for a filmmaker pigeonholed into an extremely narrow genre (the 'broke hipsters talking to each other' genre). I love the film, even though it seems to gloss over many of the lessons of Jarmusch's previous film, the definitively major Dead Man. But that's significant, as I think it may reveal Jarmusch as being less interested in making all-encompassing statements (in this case about death and violence) and more in accessing the wider range of resonances and responses.

Jarmusch is a master of big picture thinking - the only contemporary filmmaker I can think of who is comparably attuned to structure is Takeshi Kitano, but his constructions are nowhere near as elegant. Think back to Strangers in Paradise, Down by Law, Dead Man, Coffee and Cigarettes or Broken Flowers and chart out the film's narrative progression in your head - each one contains a concise, beautiful story outline based on rather simple reversals, doublings, staged progressions (Jarmusch studied poetry at NYU, which doubtless had something to do with it). The inarticulate, aimless characters that populate his films are, in a sense, smoke screens that distract from the plot to make its ambling progression feel natural and organic. It occurs to me that perhaps without such lack of direction in the characters themselves the story might feel overdetermined, or at least heavily determined in the Stanley Kubrick sense. As it is, very little in his films feels inevitable until just before it happens, or just after (which, I'd argue, is even the case for Blake's death in Dead Man - an outcome predicted so early in the film that when and if he is killed becomes the central problem of the plot, and while the film maintains an atmosphere of impending doom the ultimate ending is still held up as a question).

I left Ghost Dog off that list above because I think that its failings can be found in the structure, which has less poetic/mythic resonance than most of his other films (which is strange, because it's his first attempt to create a traditional mythic hero). The opening quote announces the hero as dead, and, indeed, the film that follows is a long march towards death at the hands of a man to whom Ghost Dog owes his life - but the similarities to Dead Man shouldn't be overemphasized, as Jarmusch doesn't pursue that aspect of the film besides staging the hit at a house being represented by "Aligheri Realtors" (as well as an interesting flashback depicting a sort of death and resurrection). Ghost Dog is unchanging and devoted to his code, but the secondary characters who do change and progress through the film (in response to him) are very secondary, and there's no real insight into their evolution. There's no Nobody.

The real conflict in the film is between two warrior codes that are both dying out. Against Ghost Dog are small-time Italian gangsters - badly aging, broke, and in terrible shape. It's a nonsensical interpretation of the mobster code that kicks off the plot, and an almost nonsensical (if significantly more noble, in the film's terms) interpretation of the Samurai code that ends it. But there's no balance and no real clash of beliefs in the meat of the film. I love this movie, but watching it reminds me why I love Dead Man and Down By Law more, and what makes them truly great and this one merely intelligent, enjoyable and compulsively watchable.

Clerks II

2006-07-28T23:53:00.000-05:00

I saw Clerks II last night. I went in with low expectations and still managed to be disappointed. The charm of the first film came from its modesty, from a crude screenplay that Smith quite obviously loved writing, and from the film's lucid depiction of the soul-deadening aimlessness of customer service jobs. The convenience store job was one that everyone could relate to and similar to something most viewers had probably experienced first hand - the heroes' impotent acts of rebellion against their jobs were the stuff of the sympathetic viewers' more low-key fantasies. Clerks was packed with little ideas, one after the other. Some were clever, some were not, and they were rarely tied together in any way, meaningful or otherwise. But that, along with the equally (suitably) crude performances and plunk-it-wherever camerawork, I think were actually what made the film kind of likeable. Every so often it would surprise you with a genuinely clever (or, at least, surprising) turn or joke. But even as subsequent films made his failings as a filmmaker abundantly clear, I think the focus on Smith's increasingly prominent fumblings with actors, staging, editing and cinematography distracted people from the fact that the holes in his writing have never been rectified.

Clerks II is missing everything that made me want to root for the first movie, except for Jeff Anderson as Randal and Jason Mewes as Jay. The convenience store setting of the first Clerks was recognizable and familiar, which made it ring true(ish) even in its more absurd moments. Nobody, ever, has worked at a business like the Mooby's fast food joint of the new film. It's supposedly a huge chain, but there are a total of four employees (all of whom, evidently, are scheduled to work the entire day) and, oh yeah, there's no pressure for speed or productivity or cleanliness. As in the first film, schlubby hero Dante is stuck between two women, except that again the familiarity of the first film is tossed out the window for a fairly complete lack of believability. This time, Dante's faced with a choice between Rosario Dawson and Playboy model Mrs. Kevin Smith. These aren't real women, of course, they are fantasy creatures that look and smell an awful lot like women as you and I know them, except that the things they do and the words that come out of their mouths bear no resemblance to anyone you or I have ever known. And there's no real dilemma, either. The deck is stacked against the blonde, who is the Platonic ideal of a chauvinist's worst nightmare (she's trying to "control" him). By Dante's third or fourth dewey gaze in Ms. Dawson's direction, we get the idea already, even though Dawson's character seems like the equally questionable flip side of the blonde harpy - the good fantasy girl of someone who, I can only assume, has never actually spoken to a woman before. Worse, Smith's attempts to plant doubt as to whether whoever Dante chooses would love him in return are lame and unconvincing. Instead of the plotless meanderings of the first film, here the plot mechanics kick in after fifteen minutes, everything proceeding according to expectations with a few insubstantial twists thrown in here and there. Not even horse fucking - and, I'll just say that it never occurred to me that bestiality could be predictable - can distract from the corny, cliched rigidity of the storyline.

Even the dialogue, once upon a time Smith's claim to fame, is dull, largely based on one character saying something outrageous and then another character groaning and shaking his head in disbelief. It's lazy lazy writing, and it's not funny, particularly after whatever sharpness may have been there is deadened by Smith's baldly incompetent editing.

I find the differences between the two films' relative charm enlightening, and Smith's continued popularity is a mystery to me. Even more mysterious is why this sentence is allowed to exist: "Written, Directed, Produced and Edited by Kevin Smith." Smith has some pretty clever ideas for how to make boring white Jersey a little more exciting (which is the basis for all his plots and, I suppose, his motivation for the actt of filmmaking), but this script is a first draft that somebody else should have edited and rewritten, and that somebody else should have directed. Somebody with a feel for people as well as dialogue, with the ability to tell a story that doesn't rely on the moldiest cliches in the book as basic building blocks, and with some aptitude for the staging and rhythms of comedy (and, for God's sake, someone who knows what to do with actors). My suggestion? Betty Thomas might be available. She's consistently given shit scripts and making the most of them. You might say that she specializes in films that should, by all accounts, be total disasters (The Brady Bunch, Howard Stern's Private Parts, Dr. Dolittle, etc) and making them watchable, with a few very good moments thrown in here and there. Maybe someday she'll make a good movie, rather than a suprisingly not-bad one, but everything she does well is missing from Kevin Smith's repertoire. At the very least she could flesh out his half-baked characters on both sides of the gender line, could show him how to put together gags both obvious and subtle, could instruct his actors on how to give a humorous line reading, and could bring a few more distractions of her own to cover up the hulking inevitabilities of the eye-rolling story.

Dennis Cooper's Try

2006-07-07T00:18:00.000-05:00

I recently reread Dennis Cooper's "Try," which I had once thought of as one of his weaker books. Cooper's extraordinary generosity as an artist is located mainly in his two continual projects: humanizing the vilest monsters imaginable and also humanizing their victims. What struck me this time around is the extraordinary catharthis Cooper manages to wring out of the most mundane of moments (mundane, and often also disgusting or horrific if uneventful). It's a wonderful book, with the Bressonian austerity he preaches fitting nicely with the hesitating, inarticulate muddle of his subjects' thoughts and voices. When needed, he musters up passages of extreme honesty and clarity that will knock you on your ass if you're not prepared for them. The cast is larger in this one, which I like, and with strong, compelling female characters, who I wanted to know more about - which is actually exactly what the narrative requires you to feel. The grueling parts of Cooper's work always reveal themselves to be more tragic than sensational once the shock wears off (I nearly cried during "The Sluts" despite the fact that its most affecting passages describe acts more repulsive than anything I could ever conceive of). And the tragic parts manage to contain some faint (or, occasionally, not so faint) glimmer of hope that I can never quite locate. It's the moments in which nothing is happening - miniature revelations that might not even register on a character's face - when the most stirring sentiments are unearthed.

Mission: Impossible

2006-05-06T00:26:00.000-05:00

I watched Mission: Impossible the first last night while working. I think it's held up very well and it's remarkable how much Brian DePalma has stamped himself all over it - I mean, he does it in the same obvious ways he always does (and God bless him for it), but it certainly didn't seem so at the time. It seemed like another Untouchables/Casualties of War effort at quality, cold, impersonal quality. But in addition to a setpiece that hasn't lost an ounce of impact a decade later, it is such a Brian DePalma film. It isn't terribly smart - although we like DePalma for his brilliance, not his intelligence - but it does everything that he does and does them extremely well. I remember watching it in high school and being the only person who wasn't confused by the plot - not because I figured anything out, but because I'm DePalma's ideal audience member, registering the self-referentiality without holding it against him and granting him those leaps in logic ("leaps" perhaps being too mild a word) because I like being carried along a story like that. I just didn't pay attention to the parts that didn't make sense.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself comparing Tom Cruise to the cartoon characters in that Robert Zemeckis movie I avoided so vehemently, The Polar Express. The "Uncanny Valley" theory describes likenesses that come very close to reproducing the real thing, but of course aren't the real thing. CGI animators figured out early on that making the design and movements of characters too close to real human movements, is, well, pretty damn creepy. Tom Cruise is like that. He performs all the actions required of an actor/human being, but there's something about his performances, loud or emotive as they may be, that just isn't right. He's like an acting machine, with a hollowness that allows in neither bits and pieces of actual humanity, nor the stylized cartoonisms animators adapt to sidestep the valley. He creeps me out.

Moby

2006-04-24T00:37:00.000-05:00

I've been spending a lot of time in coffee shops lately (there's no heat in my office; there is heat in Uptown Espresso). But South Lake Union is not Capitol Hill, and hipsters don't control the cd players in these parts. It was nice to get some Stevie Wonder, but a compilation that ended before "I Just Called to Say I Love You" would have been nicer. The main thing that got me thinking, though, was Moby. I listened to Moby's "Play" start to finish and absolutely loved it. I haven't listened to that album in years - somewhere along the way my enthusiasm waned, likely around the time the frat boy set caught on to it (and recommended it to me personally), but I wore that cd out for a year or more when it hit the stores. Moby has very few defenders nowadays. He went from underground favorite to giganto-star (electromusic's first real personality, in the TRL celebrity sense) - and with his weirdest record, although it's true this was grounded in more familiar American musical traditions than the Eurosleaze pop-techno of "Everything Is Wrong." And then, nothing. An album that nobody really seemed to like barely ventured higher than his still-selling previous album and some eye rolling sloganeering. Some B-Sides. Etc. If Moby was a rapper, he would have made the transition from music to sitcom/film by now.

But Moby, despite his once solid underground cred, has never been cool. (I do realize that that cred came more from clueless indie kids than the electronic crowd, by the way.) As techno gained steam in the nineties it did so with stomping, soaring rockingness, while Moby's forays into tuneless rawk never fooled anyone, his squishy synthesizers and swishy 3rd-gen pop r&b - what Pitchfork disses as "soda pop froth" - were not all that hard hitting. And his stuff that does hit pretty hard, like the awesome James Bond reworking, wasn't what made him popular. No, Moby became a superstar because he is the missing link between Brian Eno and Enya. He was destined to become unhip. His reputation was based on being brainy, but listening to his stuff now, it sounds pretty simple compared to the more cerebral electronic stylings that have networked their way into the indie consciousness one laptop at a time. And simple in a way that can never be mistaken for "minimalism" or "essentialism" or "neo-primitivism" (you can try to make that case if you want, but I've got three albums of sugary synths that say otherwise).

I liked Moby's other stuff, particularly a few tracks from the hit-and-miss "I Like to Score", the gently bumpy wallpaper of "Ambient" and the fast ones on "Everything Is Wrong." (His contribution to "Schoolhouse Rock Rocks" was pretty fun.) But "Play" was something else. A fun album that introduced the unitiated to that sort of sample-based composition, where Shadow & co. utilized found audio as the material for largely unrecognizable music, Moby was basically doing remixes. A thump here, a squirk there. But wholly reliant on the original recording. But he does it well, and the New Age-y cuts on the album, although they haven't aged as well, are just as good as "Honey" and "Run On."

Moby is pop, and he always has been pop. Seen as a mainstream popper injecting very unpop ideas into the realm of mass music (though perhaps not as effectively as Timbaland), he becomes infinitely more interesting. His best stuff - and his best stuff is when he's honest with himself about his poppish leanings - is hard to resist. He is, at base, a remix artist anyway. "Go" is basically a (brilliant) remix of the "Twin Peaks" theme. It's true that the ones he writes don't have the same heft, but he knows how to tweak. An album as purely pleasurable as "Play" is rare, and I'm guessing that it's all Moby will be remembered for. But I don't think it will ever get any less fun.