tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10411183335267968222023-12-20T00:09:21.535-08:00motion within motion"No more gorgeous thing has ever been offered on the the screen. It has motion within motion, action within action, and it builds up to crashing climaxes with all that superb definition which makes Mr. Griffith first and always the showman."
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--<i> Moving Picture World</i> on <i> Orphans of the Storm</i>, 1922Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-32351586209406485822011-03-23T18:12:00.000-07:002011-03-23T18:23:12.923-07:00Movie Crazy (1932)<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><style>
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</style> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sitting in the archives at this very moment are hundreds, if not thousands, of one- and two-reel silent comedies. At one time, these slapsticks were presumed the only silents worth excavating—the lone unembarrassing artifacts of a primitive, prepubescent era. The comedies found their praises sung by every film expert from James Agee to Jim Broughton. No less than the head of UCLA’s film school declared the “Obsolescence of the Silent Film” and dared his readers to “[t]ry to see, if you can, any silent film—except a comedy with Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, Raymond Griffith or Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon or Laurel and Hardy—and you will wonder why people thought it at all bearable, let alone great.” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The scales have shifted since—not least through our perpetual acquaintance with these films on 16mm and 8mm. (Dig through any film collector’s basement and it won’t be long till you find a dupe or two or three of <i>Easy Street</i> or <i>Cops</i>.) It’s the discoveries—the once “presumed lost” titles from studios not usually known for comedies—that really strain. Run two or three of them back-to-back and let the derangement begin. (May I suggest <i>His Baby Doll</i> and <i>The Camera Cure</i>, both Triangles from 1917?) Try to remember where one ends and the next begins. Slap another title on the head and you can barely tell the difference. It all feels vaguely second-hand, if not plagiarized, but from what?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Take two steps back, and patterns emerge. You can’t follow the plot, but you notice how overstuffed everything is. Silent comedies propose an infinite supply of bodies, always another available to jam into a cramped room or fling at the end of a line. There are always more than necessary for a gag to come off, buzzing with a negative, supposedly manic, energy in the background. The more the funnier. One cannot help but stumble away with the conclusion that human life and labor are cheap. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Even in the major productions, the essential and awesome interchangeability of parts and persons, especially women, is evident. What does Merna Kennedy have that Marion Mack does not? Fact is, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd rarely cast actresses who provided any serious competition as personalities. These days, I find myself admiring the production values in their features much more readily than the underlying dynamics and routines. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The gratifying exception is, not coincidentally, a Lloyd talkie—<i>Movie Crazy </i>(1932), surely his best talkie and probably his best film overall. Watching Lloyd—nearly forty and, what’s more, always a businessman first and a comedian second—play a fan magazine-addled yokel inspires incredulous mirth all on its own. His on-screen partner, Constance Cummings, is something else—a real and ambitious actress who ably develops her own characterizations independent of his foibles. She’s quicker than he is, constantly and consciously evaluating her allegiances, scheming and then finding herself dangerously unprepared for the spoils. It’s a fully-formed personality and a performance that actively repudiates the perfunctory history of her predecessors. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Cummings even negotiates something of a dual role—up-and-coming actress Mary Sears (sufficiently up to afford a colored maid and coming enough to have a modest mansion) and her on-set alter ego, a ridiculous imitation of a Mexican love interest. (Part of the pleasure of Cummings’s performance comes from her self-awareness and punk insouciance as regards this ethnic theater.) That Lloyd’s Harold Hall cannot recognize the two women as one suggests some indigenous melting pot calamity, as well as, incidentally, a kind of <i>That Obscure Object of Desire</i> in reverse. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Indeed, a Buñuelian air hangs over the whole picture, from the remarkably blank non-performances of Lloyd’s parents (veteran character players De Witt Jennings and Lucy Beaumont, dead-eyed and serious, devoid of any mugging) to the repetition of certain elements (doves, broken glass) which forfeit their efficiency as gags until they loom as Surrealist totems. Palm trees line every alleyway in Harold’s sunny Hollywood and screen tests speed themselves up to mock the innocent. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Clyde Bruckman plays the credited director, though he was purportedly too drunk to helm the show most days, with Lloyd taking over his duties. (Nevertheless, a pesky auteurist question: how can the man who signed <i>The General</i>, <i>Movie Crazy</i>, and <i>The Man on the Flying Trapeze</i> be regarded as a footnote to his own career?) Either way, <i>Movie Crazy</i> is intermittently, impressively (accidentally?) fluid. There are five or six very elaborate tracking shots here that burrow their way straight ahead with conspicuous and casual professionalism. They’re like nothing else in Lloyd’s work—or Bruckman’s. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As in Lloyd’s previous effort, <i>Feet First</i>, a loose reworking of <i>Safety Last </i>that illustrated how sound and its naturalism automatically confers on any situation qualities of starkness and violence that silence muted, <i>Movie Crazy </i>abounds in harsh, flat sound effects: the crumbling of a straw hat, the screeching of a revolving coat rack. There may be more sound than talk. This is a crudity that is resilient and resplendent. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><a href="http://www.northwestchicagofilmsociety.org/2011/03/17/movie-crazy/"> Cross-posted</a> at the Northwest Chicago Film Society <a href="http://www.northwestchicagofilmsociety.org/blog/">blog</a>. </i></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-70479915396892663852009-10-05T23:49:00.000-07:002011-03-23T18:16:49.606-07:00Social Justice Night at the Drive-In: The Phenix City Story (1955)<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Movies have never been an especially responsible purveyor of news, generally arriving too late and distorting the facts they happen to trip over. Whether it’s Edison staging Cuban atrocities or anonymous Hollywood cameramen finding raspy layabouts to extol the gubernatorial bid of Upton Sinclair the record is generally inauspicious. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And so Phil Karlson’s <i>The Phenix City Story</i>, a feature-length piece of semi-dramatized cine-journalism, stands as a peculiar artifact. In recounting the slaying of Albert Patterson, the straight-arrow Democratic nominee for Alabama Attorney General, <i>The Phenix City Story</i> is unusually clear-eyed and uncowed. The bulk of the footage was actually shot in Phenix City scarcely a year after the assassination—or, as the poster would have it, ‘Filmed on the spot in the sin town IT TOOK THE MILITARY TO SUBDUE!’ </div></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Phenix City Story</i> never reaches any kind of détente between these warring impulses, and that’s one of the reasons I like it. It is simultaneously a socially concerned docudrama and a riled-up piece of pugilist drive-in junk. More charitably, it demonstrates the latter’s capacity to achieve the former, a genre filmmaking apologia if you will. Karlson is obviously more comfortable with the pulpy exploitation side of the picture, where swish pans follow the punches and the body of a murdered child is nonchalantly tossed from a sedan in an outrageous square-up. The mixing of Hollywood professionals and local amateurs on the acting rolls is both successful enough and awkward. The scenery-chewing potential of an actor like John McIntire (on ample display in the same year’s <i>The Far Country</i>) is muzzled like a misguided and condescending bid at responsibility, as if a stripped-down performance free of tics and business would match the presumed plainness of the nonprofessionals. McIntire’s Albert Patterson is a colorless conduit of righteousness, the ur-Atticus Finch forced into action.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As muckraking the film is restrained only by the need to turn the real-life thugs into composite heavies, the names changed to protect the guilty. Still, <i>The Phenix City Story</i> sits just this side of libel in its crusading zeal, which is remarkable considering it was shot during the trial. The curious thirteen-minute prologue that purports to bring to the screen some real-life witnesses (including Patterson’s widow) courts credibility by citing <i>Newsweek</i> and the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i> and explicitly evokes television journalism, as if the movies could seriously co-opt the aesthetic and import of the competition. (Indeed, what is <i>The Phenix City Story</i> but the next step in the evolution of the semi-documentary fiction film, taking the lessons of <i>The Fight for Life</i> and <i>Call Northside 777 </i>and working out the style’s relevance in a new media landscape?) <i>Variety</i> noted in its 1955 review that Allied Artists left it up to exhibitors to decide whether they wanted to screen the prologue reel—a fascinating detail that means theater owners could effectively make <i>The Phenix City Story</i> either a studious piece of edifying civic entertainment or a crackerjack thriller with topical echoes. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Prologue or no, Karlson’s film is still uncommonly direct about the complacency of the local authorities and the brand of racial violence and general animus so prevalent in Southern society. That <i>The Phenix City Story</i> foregrounds these issues but answers them only with calls for democracy and patriotic engagement suggests a calculated naïveté that would quickly be disproven by subsequent events.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">That <i>The Phenix City Story</i> nevertheless seems notable today for its essential, if prurient, truthfulness is really more of an indictment of contemporaneous American films than any enduring argument for Karlson’s efforts. In no way did <i>The Phenix City Story</i> give its audience any information about the social realities of Alabama that was not already available from other news outlets. Yet it is genuinely bold and bracing in comparison with something like M-G-M’s roughly contemporaneous <i>Bad Day at Black Rock</i>, which so contorts its well-intentioned liberalism that it winds up sabotaging every fiber of its credibility and value. Recently John Sturges’s slack Cinemascope compositions have sparked something of a revival of that film’s critical reputation, but they hardly compensate for <i>Black Rock</i>’s perverse ‘lesson’ about wartime treatment of Japanese-Americans: the state may have acted rashly, but the real criminals were isolated hicks and assorted ‘bad apples’ who took the law into their own hands. On balance that kind of whitewash actually leaves us understanding less about Japanese internment and the politics of the era than we did before. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Southern justice, of course, has been a trusty cinema standby since at least <i>The Birth of a Nation</i>. The Production Code and the threat of hissy fits from Southern exhibitors always calmed front office enthusiasm for honest headline-ripping conscience-raising screeds. The history of evasions is instructive and fascinating. In a film like <i>Fury</i> (1936) the business of phony resurrections and conspiracies of revenge beg to be read as feats of wild compensatory displacement, absurd plot twists that all but acknowledge the tepid courage required to protest the mob murder of an innocent white man. Its central moral dilemma—shall Spencer Tracy continue to play dead so that a posse of lynch-minded vigilantes can be executed for a crime that they, by the barest contingency, did not commit, and, if so, would that not make him something of a murderer, too?—is so abstractly and fussily irrelevant, so far removed from all of the issues at play in the region at that moment that this chutzpah almost comes off as a canny wink in the direction of that ballsier, hypothetical movie we should be watching instead. In <i>The Ox Bow Incident </i>(1943) the lynching ‘problem’ is again explored through hopped-up mob violence directed at entirely innocent victims and condemned in a high-minded, artful manner—mass hysteria on screen that too easily instills mass wisdom in its spectators. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Against these examples, a Warners anti-lynching effort like Mervyn LeRoy’s <i>They Won’t Forget </i>(1937), made during the last gasp of that studio’s rambunctious social consciousness, looks sober and fair, despite the fact that its plea for moderation and historically-informed pacifism comes from a grizzly Confederate veteran. It posits an American judicial system where none of the players—lawyers, politicians, jurors, radio announcers, newspaper men, citizens—find any incentive to bother weighing evidence or forsaking prejudice before proclaiming the accused guilty. It’s the most sincere and concerned sort of cynicism, pointing at specific structural reasons that abet, if not actively encourage, miscarriages of justice. Further, <i>They Won’t Forget</i> trades in brusque narrative ellipses that tend to militate against audience involvement in plot minutiae when there are more important arguments afoot. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And yet <i>The Phenix City Story</i> still feels like something new and honest—the hustling sadist jig that stumbled into history. It trades on the same sultry underworld dealings and leggy distractions that might easily be the background for any B picture; indeed, it works from the assumption that a steady flow of Bs is just about the only prerequisite for understanding political corruption. The message, such as it is, feels grafted on to avert accusations of exploitation, rather than, as in all the other examples, like the raison d’etre, like the temporary bouts of moral clarity that sometimes befell the moguls. The fact it was shot on location accounts for only a fraction of its authenticity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-10510515102222056012009-09-26T18:29:00.000-07:002009-09-27T22:06:46.182-07:00Book Review: British Cinemas and their Audiences<div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Once I get outside a cinema I return to real life, and though I may have enjoyed a film immensely, it does not, and never has affected my everyday existence, with the exception of the shoes and the impressions of fear which I have experienced. – “No. 4” <o:p></o:p> </span><br />
</div></blockquote><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">In the case of film history, this impulse speaks to obvious and wholly legitimate lines of inquiry: how did audiences really feel about the films they watched and about the whole apparatus itself? How did they regard this complete transformation of the order of things and why did they so quickly adopt cinema as a regular and serious pastime? <o:p></o:p> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">To ask these questions is not only a matter of curiosity but inevitably an implicit corrective to earlier versions of film history. Anglo-American pioneers in this field, such as Terry Ramsaye, Benjamin Hampton, Paul Rotha, and Lewis Jacobs quite plainly did not re-view the films they wrote about and often just gussied up their own memories with trade articles and newspaper clippings. Probably apocryphal anecdotes—like the bumpkins running in terror at the projection of an approaching train—became part of the very fabric of film history with minimal effort. The end result, obviously unintended by the first generation of historians, was a tendency to transform every snap misinterpretation of an old film into evidence of the feeble primitiveness of these artifacts and their audiences. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">And so we arrive at the value of an unassuming title like <i>British Cinemas and their Audiences: Sociological Studies</i>, a 1948 volume compiled by one J.P. Mayer and published by Dennis Dobson, Ltd. This is the kind of book that isn’t discussed much or found in most bibliographies, that is not ever actively sought out but nevertheless leaps from the shelf at the Larry Edmunds Bookshop, where it probably sat unmolested for thirty years. It’s a simple book—sixty ‘motion picture autobiographies’ and fifty short essays on ‘motion picture preferences’ collected in Britain in 1945, along with brief interpretations. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Mayer was far from the first to undertake such a project. Many of the professors involved in the eight-volume Payne Fund Studies (officially <i>Motion Pictures and Youth</i>) in the early ‘30s procured their data about cinema and its relation to children’s morals, sleep patterns, delinquency, etc., through similar means. What sets Mayer apart is his project’s complete removal from academic decorum and other niceties of twentieth century sociology. He solicited his accounts in the fan magazine <i>Picturegoer</i> in 1945 and offered £3, 3 shillings for the prize entry. Whether this meant the liveliest, the wittiest, the grimmest, or the strangest remains unclear.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The reasons that we should be interested in these accounts today are quite different from Mayer’s aims in collecting them. In the introduction he spot-checks Seneca, Jaspers, Burke, and Rilke (among others) before settling on Pascal as his empathetically Christian model. Reading Mayer’s accompanying commentary is often frustrating, for he willfully ignores many nuances to arrive at pre-ordained conclusions about the need to keep children away from horror films and such. Needless to say, Mayer’s enterprise is ill-equipped to deal with an extraordinary passage like this one from a 22-year-old medical student: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">I remember vividly a scene in Laurel & Hardy’s <i>The Bohemian Girl</i> where the gypsy girl was being dragged out to be whipped. She was stripped & lashed to a post. Of course, she was saved at the last minute. That scene stimulated me a great deal, & I would enact over & over again in the privacy of my own bedroom any scenes like that, with me playing the heroine, of course I usually altered it so that I was not saved so promptly. My saviour was never the film hero, but the particular boy in my class at school that my imagination had fastened on for the time being. This effect of being excited by a scene of a girl being badly treated went on for a long time, until I was 16 at least, I am sure. It gradually faded, but it can be still reactivated occasionally. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">It is doubtful Mayer had the vocabulary, much less the inclination, to understand such unrepentant and suggestive kink. Similarly, he cautions that ‘it is quite impossible even to attempt to isolate the effect on the writer of his attendance at the cinema and the effect of other circumstances’ when confronted this totally swish response from a 15-year-old schoolboy: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">I have imitated many things from the films but mostly my hair has suffered. Yes suffered. I used to Bleach it when in the bathroom. I copied smoking from the films. I started at nine and am still going strong. When courting at school I used to put flowers in my sweethearts desk.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">My film idol is Errol Flynn and I fell madly in love with him after seeing <i>Dawn Patrol</i>. I think about him at nights, pretend I am with him and dream about him. I have never felt about a film actress in this way.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">I would not know much about love making. Although I may say that most love making goes on in the pictures.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">A 30-year-old clerk (female) recounts excursions to see ‘sex films’—though it’s not clear whether she means sex hygiene exploitation pictures or something closer to DeMille’s comedies: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"> At twelve I wondered <i>what </i>sort of films they were that I was never allowed to see, and played truant from school one afternoon—with another small and curious-minded friend—to see my first ‘sex’ film. It was of the trials and temptations of a rather blowsy continental actress, and puzzled us for weeks, setting us wondering about things we had never before bothered about. <i>Did</i> men kiss women like that, and <i>did </i>babies come unwanted, from such episodes and behaviour? So my curiosity aroused, from Ken Maynard at age eight I sneaked off at twelve—now unescorted—to see all the extravagant and unreal epics of sex and high living I could find. Did it do me any harm? Yes—I’m afraid so. Children should never be allowed to see at such an early age, the ugly side of life and I have only myself to blame … Now boys seemed tame who couldn’t hug and kiss like the exaggerated figures on the screen, and being silent films, I always imagined the dialogue to be more fiery than any the censor would pass.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">An 18-year-old shorthand typist (female) writes about a prototypical and evocative moment of displacement that nearly earns a place in our euphemistic lexicon:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">My enthusiasm [for films] became so infectious that my parents decided to take me to an adult show, and so with many warnings about being quiet and threats that I’d get a pasting if I wasn’t, we sallied forth equipped with a bag of bullseyes and an extremely large and juicy orange.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">Of that first adult film I remember nothing except the fact that just as the hero kissed the heroine I commenced to suck my orange. Never again vowed my parents, and so back I went to my weekly twopenny rush.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">By and large, however, most of the responses printed in Mayer’s book are considerably tamer. They tell of being frightened by <i>Dracula </i>or <i>The Black Room </i>(but no mention of <a href="http://motionwithinmotion.blogspot.com/2009/09/on-tod-slaughter.html">Tod Slaughter</a>, unfortunately) or finding great escape in Betty Grable and Deanna Durbin pictures. Some of the respondents are more articulate than others about their tastes. A 23-year-old R.A.F. veteran and letter sorter submits an eloquent apologia for Hollywood:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">Broadly speaking, I suppose that of the number of films I have seen over the past five or six years, very few can be called to mind as deserving a lode of brickbats. Let it not be thought, however, that all the rest brought me applauding to my feet. Truth to tell, most of them are completely forgotten, yet they possess virtue even in oblivion. The inability of some of the most recent films I have seen to stir my memory must surely prove that they served a purely relaxative kind. If they were meant by their producers for nothing more, then, on the whole, those gentlemen have succeeded in their modest aims. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And a 23-1/2-year-old housewife succinctly defines the difference between life and art, the former only turning into the latter through the infusion of craft: </span><br />
</div><blockquote><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">One can have too much reality—e.g., <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>—I thought it was an unusual film, brilliantly acted, but it was not entertainment. It was the sort of thing that happens to many of us, without the touches of humour or grand drama or sinister twist that would make it entertainment. One <i>lives</i> that sort of thing, and does not go to the cinema to meet it again, but to get away from it.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Unfortunately, though, when the cases get down to the specifics we are left wanting more. The largely low-income, white-collar professionals who read <i>Picturegoer</i> proved quite homogeneous in their taste. Worse, they are cursed by short memories, with a mixed bag of a dozen or so then-recent films like <i>A Song to Remember</i>, <i>Henry V</i>, <i>Waterloo Road</i>, <i>Frenchman’s Creek</i>, <i>This Happy Breed</i>, <i>The Lamp Still Burns</i>, and <i>Laura</i> cited repeatedly. Two or three iconoclasts praise <i>Citizen Kane</i> and <i>The Magnificent Ambersons</i>. Respondents are divided roughly evenly between those who find Hollywood pictures inferior to British productions and those who prefer Hollywood to their own drab provincial lives. Many confess an urge to travel prompted by Fitzpatrick Traveltalks and Jon Hall-Maria Montez vehicles! <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">We see, nevertheless, that many complaints oft-voiced today are not new. A 25-year-old clerk (male) reports:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">I went to see the re-issue of <i>Dodsworth</i>. The cinema announcements gave the stars as David Niven, Paul Lukas, and Walter Huston. Yes, in that order. No mention at all of Ruth Chatterton, whose brilliant portrayal of Fran Dodsworth was in the nature of a swansong to a distinguished career.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">To add to the irony of the situation, a young Waaf (though not so very much younger than I) remarked to her companion: ‘She’s good, isn’t she? I wonder who she is. Mary Pickford or somebody.’<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">Yes—somebody, indeed.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Another 22-year-old cinephile (a jack-of-all-trades who served as an errand boy to a clerk and later an underground pit worker and G.P.O. employee) laments that his girlfriend ignores critical opinion and earnestly invokes cinema lecturer-spokesman Roger Manvell: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">My girl friend is only eighteen years of age and to a large extent judges a good or bad film according to the facial attributes of the male stars … My girl states that she is really interested in films and expect [sic?] that she considers taking a film book each week and writing fan letters to be a practical sign of her interest. (It was whilst reading her film book that I learnt of your request) I recently bought two copies of the book <i>Film </i>by Roger Manvell, if her copy ever gets opened it will surprise me<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">As brief evidence of how film societies, <i>Close-Up</i>, Soviet films, and the like fit into Britons’ workaday lives, a handful of these accounts are invaluable. Others, though, are so tantalizing as to be cruel, such as one artist’s very protracted bit about the influence the now-lost Technicolor <i>Gold Diggers of Broadway</i> had on his design work. The 39-year-old secretary (female) whose quote opens this review recounts this:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">I was four years old when I saw my first film. It was given in a tent at a Vicarage fete and to me its principal feature was a train. When a close-up was shewn of the engine, I piped: ‘I hope it doesn’t come out of the picture’ and was rather frightened, but only momentarily.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">And then proceeds to write, like almost everyone else, about that season’s junk without setting down her unique historical insights in any greater detail! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Another entry, from a 20-year-old short-hand typist (female) shows great promise:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">Only once have I seen an experimental film made in America. It was badly made and the story was piecey, but there was enthusiasm oozing through the lens of the camera. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">What had the girl seen? A Maya Deren? <i>The Last Moment</i>? <i>Geography of the Body</i>?<i> <o:p></o:p></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial;">The Seventh Victim</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"> was the title—I have yet to find out who the second victim was. This film was trying to break away from the usual run of mysteries, to bring its art to the man in the street and if they failed, it was through no fault of trying. Taking all defects into consideration, I admired the work put into it and the acting of the unknown young actors and actresses who had been given a chance to show what they could do. That chance means a great deal when you are striking out for yourself. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">This is a fascinating contribution to our understanding of both the Lewton unit and American avant-garde cinema of the 1940s. B-movies really were, as exhibitor Arthur Mayer (no relation) claimed in <i>Hollywood Quarterly</i>, formative, ‘experimental’ productions that brought innovation to the industry as a whole, whatever their ‘defects.’ And the films on Amos Vogel's Cinema 16 programs (and those of the dozens of film societies Vogel spawned) were promoted as off-market novelties with the emphasis on ingenuity as often as it was on provocation. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">British Cinemas and their Audiences</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"> is short on such insights but long on elaborations of what it meant to go to the movies in 1945 in England. That’s more than we usually get. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">• • •<o:p></o:p> </span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Have I ever fallen in love with my screen idol—what is love? I don’t know. My ‘favourite’ at the moment is Bing Crosby. He is my favourite actor, crooner, singer, comedian, radio artist, human being, everything. I think of him constantly: I wonder what his reactions are to certain news items; I try to imagine what he is doing at different times during the day; I plan various films for him, and think up ideas for his radio show. I wonder how his wife and kids are, and I wish I could meet him some day before he gets any older.</span><o:p></o:p></span> <br />
</blockquote></div><div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">I listen to people’s conversation about him, read every news item about him, study the daily newspapers to see what he is broadcasting, and plan my day as far as possible not to interfere with my listening. When two programmes, which might possibly feature Bing, are broadcast simultaneously, on different wave-lengths, I wear out the dial on the radio switching from one programme to another, in case I should miss any ‘Bing’ time.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</blockquote></div></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I worry over his publicity, note whether he gets top billing etc. I would rather hear Bing sing not too well, than hear anybody else sing superlatively. I enjoy a Crosby musical flop better than anybody else’s hit. I love the sound of his speaking voice.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div></blockquote><blockquote style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">When I read that Mr Crosby is standoffish to press-men I defend him; some call him lazy but I applaud his unwillingness to be pushed around. In the same way that Sinatra causes ‘teen-age ‘bobby-socks’ to swoon, so Bing produces a comparable limp when I hear him; relaxed and soothed. His voice makes me happy so that I smile and feel I want to laugh out loud. When I see Bing on the screen my heart thumps and I want desperately for everyone to like him.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div></blockquote><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">– No. 2, 18-year-old female, no occupation. </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-69513141077116027002009-09-21T22:15:00.000-07:002011-03-23T18:18:23.866-07:00On Tod Slaughter<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Some time ago I came to the conclusion that the cinephilia we find most familiar and legible—the Sirk auteurists and the Tarantino fanboys, the art house connoisseurs and the chick flick loyalists, the western buffs and silent scholars—are not necessarily those with the deepest roots. Time and again I have been impressed by the quite genuine commitment of the original cultists—the horror aficionados. I’m talking here about those who grew up watching Lugosi and Karloff on local television stations and remember these transmissions with undiminished affection. Nowhere will you find less careerism or pretense. In my experience those who propound the virtues of <i>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre </i>or <i>I Spit on Your Grave</i> are often exceedingly sweet and sincere. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Unfortunately there are many discoveries of the horror archeologists that are not generally disseminated. The subject of today’s post is preposterously little known and invisible to the general film histories. One would think that a horror star with a name like Tod Slaughter would be hipster catnip.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Truth be told, I did not learn about Slaughter or his very interesting films <i>Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street </i>(1936) and <i>Crimes in the Dark House </i>(1940) until Dave Kehr’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/movies/homevideo/30dvds.html">column</a> last year:<o:p></o:p></span></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Slaughter, born in 1885, was a Victorian by birth as well as by sensibility: his grandly theatrical acting style reflects decades of touring the hinterlands in road company productions of shopworn melodramas. To hear his demented chuckle as he strangles a helpless victim or chases a shrieking virgin up the stairs, to watch as he literally rubs his hands together in evil glee or smoothes down the ends of his handlebar mustache, is to be transported back to an era of footlights and greasepaint. This is not camp exaggeration but a genuine relic of the time before Ibsen’s naturalism tamed the stage.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">This is a broadly accurate account of Slaughter’s appeal. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">I might add that the primitivism of Slaughter’s films remains their most absorbing quality. His victims may plot and strategize and concoct fantastic schemes to expose his villainy, but Slaughter approaches every obstacle in a remarkably consistent, untroubled way. No matter the threat, he strangles the bloke, or bludgeons him, or slits his throat. Strictly speaking, there’s no suspense on offer: Slaughter simply steps out of the shadows and eliminates his victim with sadistic relish. These nearly pre-narrative pleasures would be strikingly anti-social if the violence happened on anything resembling a social plane, but again Slaughter sidesteps the issue: despite the scenes being laid down in a specific historical milieu, Slaughter is a generic caveman mercenary. He makes lustful advances but thinks nothing of killing the busty biddie at the hint of an imagined threat. He plunders from his cadavers but has no nouveau riche ambitions. One supposes that he seeks only to implicate in situations with maximal potential for terror.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Which is all a way of saying that Slaughter is not only an assault on spectators’ stomachs but a formal affront to narrative cinema itself. His <i>Sweeney Todd </i>dates from 1936, but it feels more like a film from 1929 in its incessant, underdetermined underscoring. The same jaunty theme accompanies most every scene in the first half, whether expository or ghastly in its content. There is positively no attempt made to marshal the power of sound to foreshadow events or dictate a shift in audience emotion. This is not some aesthetic deficiency, for it clarifies the fundamental aim of the enterprise, namely to present a series of loosely connected, semi-narrativized feats of violence as if from some gruesome music hall revue. There are production values (low-budget but decent) and scripts and other characters, but these are formalities, concessions to more delicate sensibilities. We all know what we’re here for. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">If anything, the violence in <i>Sweeney Todd</i> is even more liberated and comical than it is in something like Hawks’s <i>Scarface</i>. Children are abused with Fieldsian abandon. Every murder is performed with a smile. The audience is most definitely in on the whole dirty thing. One late scene finds a policeman obliviously eating one of Mrs. Lovett’s pastries. That the cannibalistic flavor of these baked goods is never explicitly spelled out in the film (and how could it be?) matters little, for anyone familiar with the legend of Todd is already complicit in this joke. The movie demands a certain knowing incredulousness that is not so far removed from leering at a railway disaster.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Crimes at the Dark House </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">is, if anything, more vile, opening as it does with Slaughter driving a spike into a sleeping prospector’s ear. The camera’s quick pan away from this disgusting act is among the most transparent moments of feigned tastefulness in film history. There is also the intrusion of false etherealness, represented by an elusive woman in white who materializes by the window off and on. But lyricism is basically incompatible with lines like “I’ll feed your entrails to a pig!” As well it should be, I suppose. In the very least, Slaughter’s films represent some kind of outer limit for the number of convolutions and facades that a respectable, highly regimented production system thought necessary to present the lowest of thrills. <o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-56390223472248621262009-09-18T13:13:00.000-07:002011-03-23T18:19:05.160-07:00There'll Be No Distinction There: The Blood of Jesus (1941)<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">When Washington Phillips, probably the greatest of the preacher-troubadours captured in the recording industry’s first flush of Southern gospel fever, begins “Lift Him Up That’s All” with the line, “When Jesus was around here / on this land …” one senses that he’s not kidding. Phillips isn’t singing about Palestine in the time of Christ—he’s singing as if the very dirt beneath his feet still bears Christ’s footprints. It’s a sentiment related to the indelible Mormon conviction that Christ visited America’s shores, but the stress falls on something quite different—not asserting a literal reordering of history but rather claiming a personal, easygoing, intimate, and thoroughly unremarkable relationship with the Son of God, as if he were just another buddy from down the road apiece. This strikes me as a particularly American tendency, not limited to any one denomination—an unpretentious democratic divine.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Spencer Williams’s consistently extraordinary directorial debut, <i>The Blood of Jesus</i>, exhibits this quality with clear-eyed, undiluted devotion. Yet no amount of scholarly attention can ever assimilate this film into the American canon—it’s too ruddy and rough, too incidental and leavening, too small-scaled and magnificent. The morals are commonplace and one-note: a scorn of material things, a condemnation of hot temptation, the consequences of lazy unbelief. Indeed, everything about <i>The Blood of Jesus</i> is second-hand: its actors tired, its refrains repeated, its costumes cheap, its special effects pilfered from other movies and softened through gauze. A magical gunshot in close-up is seemingly achieved through scratching out the emulsion.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The story is simplicity itself: a rural woman (Cathryn Caviness) finds herself at death’s door after her layabout husband (Williams) accidentally discharges his hunting rifle. The local faithful pray over her while a cosmic morality play plays outs: an angel guides her through a ghostly cemetery but satan’s envoy impresses her with a new dress. But all enticements come with a price, in this case the expectation that our heroine with all become a wallet-lifting whore in a basement dance hall.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The Blood of Jesus </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">proved enormously successful on the race film circuit—the black movie theaters, churches, and meeting halls cited by many a progressive white liberal in their day, even as their products remained invisible to the very same commentators—and yet commercial polish is nowhere in evidence. There’s no profit motive in sight, just a film arising from convictions so plain and honest that they require minimal critical clarification. It looks like it was spliced together with sweat alone, if it even passed through human hands in the first place. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">We glimpse heaven as a moving diorama, hell as a real-life juke joint. Purgatory is a sunlit garden that looks out upon stock shots of a neon downtown at midnight. These profound dislocations harm neither continuity nor comprehension—each image works on its own terms. Naturally these unearthly places are approximated no better with a million-dollar budget than with the rather limited resources of the Sack Amusement Co. Indeed Williams’s itinerary is exuberantly, ridiculously Christian, finding grace in every craggly dune and valley path. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">What, if anything, do we gain by claiming <i>The Blood of Jesus</i> as a piece of American folk art? Would not such a declaration prematurely concede the film’s crudity as a legitimate mark of defining difference, as something that must be ‘excused’ at the outset lest someone charge routine incompetence viz ‘real’ cinema? Williams’s work is markedly more ‘authentic’ than the still-outstanding and not dissimilar <i>Cabin in the Sky </i>but besting M-G-M at verisimilitude was never a very high hurdle.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">My inclination to affix this ‘folk art’ label has more to do with how plainly unaccountable <i>The Blood of Jesus </i>is. There is no exposition offered or any symbols to be parsed: we’re invited to witness a spiritual struggle on the most literal level. Late in the film, a cross suddenly materializes in the countryside, marking a fork in the road: HELL in one direction, ZION in the other. Caviness collapses in front of it and her pursuers, angry juke joint patrons with rocks in hand, beg God to allow their stoning to proceed. “But she stole my wallet, Lord!” exclaims one, making Him party not only to prayers but also to personal grievances, timorous excuses, and all manner of half-assed tribulations. Sensing the score, the devil rides away in his rickety pick-up truck as his ad hoc jug band of sin disperses. Soon the eponymous Blood of Jesus drips from the cross.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">In other words, <i>The Blood of Jesus</i> aggressively elevates the vernacular, forcing it to take on the character, air, and hayseed grandeur of something rather more mysterious. Like that other great work of American folk art, James Hampton’s <i>Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly</i>, <i>The Blood of Jesus </i>begins with painfully material objects and renders them ineffable, as artifacts outside mortal purposes. It’s about getting to heaven with what you got, in the terms you talk. <o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-5240227815486551272009-09-13T10:10:00.000-07:002011-03-23T18:19:46.315-07:00The Limits of Control (2009)<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Is it not somehow appropriate that Jim Jarmusch’s latest film vanished from theaters with barely a word of notice, as if it were some hot piece of contraband? Though undeniably of greater interest than <i>Coffee and Cigarettes</i> or <i>Broken Flowers</i>, <i>The Limits of Control</i><i>Dead Man</i>. All this despite a masterful trailer, an awesome one-sheet, and a hipster nod to Boorman’s <i>Point Blank</i>. Unlike that Lee Marvin classic, though, <i>The Limits of Control </i>scarcely revels in violence and, more unforgivable, attempts nothing like a wholesale appropriation and satire of the more vulgarian strains of its day.</span> provoked critical rebukes like nothing since </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Indeed the most startling quality of <i>The Limits of Control</i> is its muted coolness. It proceeds by evocations so sanguine that even Bill Murray’s neocon villain feels like a breezy afterthought. That’s a compliment; so many American films of the last eight years have either ignored the gravity of the Bush administration malfeasance or ‘addressed’ it with incoherent and ultimately cowardly speechifying (c.f., <i>Lions for Lambs</i>). It’s refreshing that Jarmusch simply takes this ideology as a given, something that can be detected, understood, and condemned through temperament alone—that is, as a pervasive and arrogant fact of the modern political landscape. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">It is too simple (and generous), however, to regard <i>The Limits of Control</i> as a leftist revenge fantasy. If this is a revolutionary call to arms, it is one delivered in pictograms. Faux antique matchboxes act as conduits for international intrigue, pervasive enough here to inspire a semiological tract. Boring, barely whispered conversations impart clues dangerous enough to imperil lives. Above all, <i>The Limits of Control</i> comes across as the illegitimate great grandchild of Louis Feuillade’s serials. Jarmusch achieves the same fugitive quality as <i>Fantômas</i> or <i>Les Vampires</i>, as if the pedestrian material of mere reality had been coerced into smuggling all manner of obscure terror. The café, the train station, the hotel—these are sites of unconscious menace. J. Hoberman once invoked the poet Paul Éluard—“There is another world, but it is in this one”—to describe Feuillade; that surrealist epigram applies no less to <i>The Limits of Control</i>, where two espressos portend a global conspiracy and “I don’t speak Spanish” stands in for the devil’s passkey. </span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-33345568835550025592009-09-10T22:02:00.000-07:002011-03-23T18:20:23.779-07:00Three-Card Monte: This Is Cinerama (1952)<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">I have slowly come to suspect that most of what we believe we know about the early CinemaScope productions—that they’re turgid and static and none too exciting, and thus, implicitly, an anomaly of film history that forces us to conclude that the audiences who flocked to them must have been dupes—is either wrong or grossly misconceived. No amount of empathy will make Biblical pageants profound or explain Victor Mature’s brief bout of widescreen superstardom, but at some point we must admit that for many years these films were available in nothing like their original states: crisp Technicolor IB prints from original Eastmancolor elements, with four-channel magnetic sound and a full 2.55:1 aspect ratio. It was not simply an experience akin to seeing a modern release print in a good-sized multiplex; the color was deeper, the sound mix was decidedly, even eccentrically, geared towards demonstrating discrete and directional stereophonic effects, and the screen was rather larger than the one found at the nearest downtown house. (Even picture palaces of several thousand seats boasted screens that look modest today; in the forties Radio City Music Hall screened features at </span><span style="font-size: small;">22' 8" x 31' 3".</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">) Obviously little of this grandeur translates well to TV, or even to a basic, no frills 35mm preservation. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Yet these genuine problems look like quibbling caveats next to the impediments that stand between us and a fair accounting of the Cinerama experience. Only three venues worldwide—the <a href="http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/FilmAndImax/home.asp">National Media Museum</a> in Bradford, England, the <a href="http://cinerama.com/TemplateMain.aspx?contentId=9">Cinerama Theatre</a> in Seattle and Pacific’s <a href="https://www.arclightcinemas.com/static/Dome.html">Cinerama Dome</a> in Hollywood—can exhibit this unwieldy three-projector, five-projectionist, six-perforation, seven-channel, twenty-six-frames-per-second, one-hundred-and-forty-six-degree-curvature peripheral vision parody today. It was not without some justice that CinemaScope was considered a poor man’s Cinerama.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Today the rare Cinerama screening—only seven true three-panel Cinerama films were made before the trade name was re-appropriated for single-strip 70mm presentations like <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> and only two of these seem to be available these days in restored prints—is met with a predictable audience: kids, nostalgia buffs, and the walking encyclopedias of Cinerama exhibition history. You will know them by their Theatre Historical Society or Cinerama t-shirts. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Yesterday’s presentation of <i>This Is Cinerama</i> at the Cinerama Dome (ironically, a venue built for the 70mm single-strip <i>It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World</i> and never home to <i>This Is Cinerama</i> during its original Los Angeles run) held up surprisingly well, the limitations of the medium being a small price for the clarity and brilliance of this truly high-definition experiment. The seams joining the three images were always evident, like a fold-out map folding in on itself, with creased peaks and concave valleys. Indifferently placed editorial splices were gapingly present on screen. Lens flares appeared once or twice—nearly two decades before this ‘mistake’ became fashionable in the New Hollywood. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">These ruptures were all somehow appropriate. Suspension of disbelief was never the name of the game with Cinerama. <i>This Is Cinerama</i>, in fact, foregrounds self-conscious spectacle. Producer-investor-narrator Lowell Thomas opens the film with a (pre)history-of-cinema prologue presented in a tinny, black-and-white small screen set-up. Zoetropes, Muybridge’s horses, a Fractured Flickers tribute to <i>The Great Train Robbery</i>—“and <i>This</i> -- Is -- Cinerama -- !” The curtains fly open and we’re in a roller coaster car, with all manner of whispers, carnival music, ambient sound jumping from one speaker to another at random. (The sound in this impressive segment is closer to Harry Partch than Westrex Noiseless Recording.) It’s a thoroughly technological kind of pleasure, though one image that follows shortly thereafter is a different sort of stunner: a view of Niagara Falls and a seemingly prosperous Upstate New York! <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The first, and somewhat less interesting, half of <i>This Is Cinerama </i>takes a circuitous Grand Tour of Europe. Aside from the canals of Venice, all of the attractions are disarmingly unembarrassed retreads of Vitaphone and Movietone material: operas, boys’ choirs, Catholic solemnity. Unlike the early soundies, though, these segments inscribe the audience within the scene—indeed, the sight and scale of the gracious crowds are an integral aspect of the spectacle. With the tempo being as slow as it is, the attentive masses suggest the whole enterprise aspires more to being an implacable monument than a mere movie. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Following an intermission the Cinerama demonstration continues, but with the added interest of an undiluted Pax Americana flavor. Thomas boasts that his travels have taken him across this great country, but even he has never seen it like <i>this</i>. Cinerama is realer, and more legitimate, than real life—a crackpot version of peripheral vision that could only reach its apotheosis in the USA. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">A digression: it rankles me when baby boomers of my acquaintance happen upon an episode of <i>Leave it to Beaver</i> and declare something like, “Boy, look how backwards things were in the fifties.” Backwards as the fifties most certainly were, it gives sitcoms, pinups, magazine advertisements, and similar kitsch too much credit to presume they offer an, at best, slightly exaggerated reflection of how people really felt and acted in that time. It’s more productive and honest to regard these things as artifacts of commercial calculation, what rich people believed middle- and lower-class people wanted (or would swallow) and what men thought they understood about women. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Thus the danger in looking at a film like <i>This Is Cinerama</i> almost sixty years on is in taking it at face value. It’s too easy to accept its ideological convolutions and patriotic pyrotechnics as an accurate distillation of national sentiment, as something that prompts derision today but did not back then. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">What remains is a spectacle of breathtaking candidness, with the seeds of archetypes taken to the logical conclusions few would dare speak. Here are sun-kissed Southern belles who cavort by the Everglades, pure in morals and free from history, fully-formed dream visions made flesh. After preening hither and yon, and with no irony whatsoever, they shed their dresses and become bathing beauties, pliable bikini props for a round of water stunts. <i>This Is Cinerama</i> is, of course, hardly the only film to register femininity as the fulfillment of so many puerile clichés, but it goes about this with especially cardboard conviction.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Not for nothing does Thomas describe the Arches National Park as “pure fantasy”—the American wilderness itself being nothing if not the literal embodiment of manifest destiny. Indeed, <i>This Is Cinerama</i> achieves an astounding reversal: the American psyche is the canvas, natural wonders its artful contrivances. We do not project feelings onto landscape; landscape is, perversely, the projection of our dreams and desires. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">A seven-channel stereophonic rendition of “America the Beautiful”—the ultimate product we never knew we needed until now—accompanies a helicopter tour of Square America. “This is how it feels to land a plane at the Kansas City Airport,” booms Thomas, presumably answering some imaginary, oft-voiced children’s prayer. Whilst in Washington, D.C., we glide silently past the White House and the Washington Monument, but the Pentagon receives a lengthy, purple prose tribute. By the time we reach Gary, Indiana, <i>This Is Cinerama </i>feels like the world’s most interminable and improbable slideshow, images from the family ‘vacation’ taken by the Junior Vice President in Charge of Marketing, Midwest Territory. They are the landmarks so bland and industrial that they barely rank as fifth-tier emblems of Americana.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Luckily Lowell Thomas finds an American Zion to wrap things up—literally, the Zion National Park in Springdale, Utah. From there, up and up to the pearly, soft clouds of the heavens. Of course. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">This Is Cinerama</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"> presents a stunning collection of half-believed postures. As an artifact of imperial belligerence, directed within, it is appropriately rousing. It presents principles too essential for mere conversation or civic discourse. The purpose is not to persuade or indoctrinate, per se; indeed, the case for “America, the Beautiful” is incoherent, poorly researched, and insufficiently prescriptive. The object of this conquest is vision itself, the subject matter only the most uncontroversial, inconsequential approximation of mass feeling that could be harnessed to attain that bounty. With a title like that, who’d have guessed that <i>This Is Cinerama</i> is, at heart, only an advertisement for itself? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-76958194097245320822009-09-04T12:15:00.000-07:002011-03-23T18:21:19.501-07:00Reply to Jason Guthartz: Film as Object, a contrarian view<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"><o:p> </o:p></span> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">My recent <a href="http://motionwithinmotion.blogspot.com/2009/08/lacma-and-crisis-of-repertory-cinema.html">post</a> about LACMA prompted an extended <a href="http://motionwithinmotion.blogspot.com/2009/08/lacma-and-crisis-of-repertory-cinema.html?showComment=1251482440223#c4579303846744340719">comment</a> from my friend <a href="http://www.restructures.net/chicago/film.htm">Jason Guthartz</a>, who raised a few issues (which seemed admittedly rather specialized for my initial piece) that demand a post all on their own:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I think there's a much deeper cultural issue here, more pronounced in popular culture but more problematic within film culture. LACMA would never close their modern painting wing due to the availability of posters of Pollocks and Rothkos, and the public wouldn't accept it either. So there's a basic question of where the "art" and aesthetic value is seen to reside within a particular medium. If film is seen as primarily a story-telling medium, then who cares if you're watching something on 35mm, TV, or DVD. If film is seen, per Brakhage, as "on-off illumination of individual still images in sequence," that creates a different attitude towards the medium and a deeper appreciation of the need to see films in their "original" (print issues notwithstanding). </span><br />
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<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">A respected archivist once told me that he would welcome the (probably imminent) day when all first-run houses project content digitally. Only then, he reasoned, would archives and museums have a rightful claim to something special—the cinema as it was meant to be seen. Now, he was no elitist, mind, but he had no problem with film exhibition taking on a more rarefied air either; it would be like going to the concert hall to attend an opera or going to the museum to study a painting, he thought. Tickets might be $25 and the venue might be paying $1,500 for the rental of this 35mm “museum artifact.” (We’re <a href="https://www.arclightcinemas.com/">close</a> <a href="http://www.goldclasscinemas.com/">enough</a> to the $25 ticket already.) It would be a trade-off, no doubt, but it would be the only reasonable recipe for survival.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">I’m uneasy about this path, largely for the reasons that Jason outlines above. Simply stated, I do not believe that critics, academics, archivists, and exhibitors have adequately laid the medium-specific foundation for such a pitch to rest upon. Admittedly, this is a harder case with motion pictures, one without ready parallel. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Reproductions and ancillary forms are not inherently bad. Recorded sound has not brought about the extinction of live opera or symphony performances but most anyone can succinctly differentiate between a CD and a live performance of the same. Paintings are reproduced all the time (and often badly) but, again, most anyone can distinguish between a photocopy and a canvas. The availability of these substitutes does not deter people from seeking out the real things—and, indeed, a preference for the real thing marks one as a connoisseur. No one has ever questioned a tourist’s interest in visiting the Louvre—or maintained it was unnecessary because a poster of the <i>Mona Lisa</i> already hangs over the credenza. Brushstrokes and texture and the third dimension upon which they intrude are not incidental elements of a painting.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">But arguments about film and video are not so common sensical; invoking them often invites semi-sympathetic nods of agreement. Fact is, the great majority cannot tell the difference between a beautiful 35mm print and a projected DVD, even when the latter is shown on the same screen via an LCD projector better suited to PowerPoint slides and corporate adverts. Part of this problem doubtless arises from home theater, whose enthusiasts tend to place a premium on superficially sharp, plastic images and view scratches and grain as the unacceptable artifacts of outmoded technology. Consequently, cinema audiences tend to complain more about an elfin base scratch than they do about a reel projected out-of-focus—the unspoken presumption being that film never could give us High Definition detail in the first place and its tendency to fray and scratch deservedly hastens its obsolescence. And so we begin to hear that the DVD of a particular film definitely <a href="http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2007/08/saturday_night.php">looks better</a> than that groddy print that a theater deigned to show last week. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Can anyone imagine an art critic praising a postcard in the museum store at the expense of a canvas in the gallery? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">In short, film prints are not generally seen as art objects and there is a considerably high burden of proof to be surmounted when we assert that they are. Perhaps it is even legitimate to insist that the performances of actors, the unfolding of stories, the delivery of witty dialogue, the atmosphere advanced through music cues and familiar editing schemes lifted from serial television, etc. are conveyed perfectly well in a video reproduction. So long as a film is valued on these terms alone there is indeed little reason to prop up the over-engineered and cumbersome celluloid delivery system. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The only argument for medium-specificity, and one well-worth making, has to do with material integrity and its aesthetic implications. It has to do with grain being an active and crucial element of the film image, really <i>the</i> mediating aspect of the medium itself. Screen movement and color and light are, instead, will o’ the wisp approximations of the real things perceived as fluctuations in the density of discrete, irreducible units of visual data. They congeal before our eyes, but their character and quality are essentially random—the constituent elements of an initial impression modified, augmented, and inflected at each stage of the photoduplication chain and reflecting the peculiar circumstances of how photochemical emulsion reacted to each successive exposure. Film grain is indeed an artifact—the immutable evidence of material intervention and contamination, the unassailable reminder of film’s physicality and its place in our physical world. It is the remnant of a process and, until now, an inherent aesthetic quality. Artifact, then, should not be taken as a slur. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Now, when the above is applied to a feature-length narrative film it indeed sounds pretty silly at first blush. Indeed, it is presently a minority position. I once complained to a veteran projectionist that the innovation of digital intermediate post-production work, coupled with the subtler grain level achieved through Kodak’s proprietary T-grain emulsions, tended to make release prints look much less film-like. Grain <i>is</i> the image, I said, to which he replied, “Nah. Grain is just the thing we used in the old days to make sure the image was in focus.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">(Even this, though, is not nothing; grain is, among other things, an artifact of labor and its survival as an index of this labor—the human judgment intrinsic to exhibiting a product correctly and the means by which this was achieved in a particular time and place—is important, too.) <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">The case is plainer with avant-garde films such as Paul Sharits’s appropriately named <i>Axiomatic Granularity</i> from 1973. Strictly speaking, there are no images in the twenty-odd minutes of this extraordinary film, only the hints of grain recorded onto exposed emulsion through colored filters. For all that it is not a static film, but instead one marked by intractable swirls of activity and a concrete suggestion of mass. Sharits inconveniently proposes that this information is indeed axiomatic—that even a film “without images” contains a complex, inexhaustible sequence of images created by grain alone. Presumably films with more assertive “content” impart images beneath images (or perhaps even motion within motion). Indeed, this fascinating film plays out concurrently with every other film we encounter. This is not merely a pernicious accident of history or the problematic residue that marks pre-video objects, for the presence of grain makes the other films we enjoy more experientially, aesthetically, and, yes, emotionally complex rather than less. The stasis of an Antonioni, a Stroheim, a Hou, a Benning, a late period Minnelli is markedly more complicated and mysterious because it is transposed over an ever-shifting backdrop of restless material transformation. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">A filmmaker possesses a sort of general control over grain, selecting a particular camera negative stock and the corresponding shooting parameters that will yield a certain ‘look.’ But beyond that grain is a product of industrial, rather than artistic, logic. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">This industrial character of all film production is precisely what leads to the problems that Jason outlines here: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Isn't film undervalued at such institutions precisely because it is so cheap? There being no "original" as there is in painting or sculpture, a film print can't be commodified. And to the extent that a work's value in the art </span><i style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">market</i><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> influences (and can be influenced by) it's value in art </span><i style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">culture</i><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">, I'm afraid film will always be the black sheep (cheap whore?) in the art family. Which is why the whole repertory system -- even calling it "repertory" is a weird concession to market logic -- is being sustained on life support by those few individuals […] who remain dedicated to the medium rather than the market.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">These issues are not new. Benjamin taught us long ago that works subject to mechanical reproduction lose aura, vulgarly translated in market terms to the monetary value of the piece in question. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">If anything, film curatorship and collecting should be liberated by the fact that they do not carry this baggage. In all but a few <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/arts/design/20anti.html?_r=2&ref=arts">extraordinary</a> circumstances, films are not worth more than the stock they’re printed on. Few film archives have a robust acquisition budget—and even those that do command the barest fraction of funds that might more lavishly be applied towards once-in-an-institutional-lifetime art opportunities at Christie’s. Contra countless people who find an 8mm reel in the attic and presume that they might lure a few archives into a bidding war, film is stubbornly resistant to commodification. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">This is ironic, of course, as the film industry is obviously dedicated towards creating durable, highly profitable commodities. The fact that all but a handful of individual prints are destroyed or recycled into other prints a few months after a film’s initial run would seem to bode well for film-print-as-commodity. Yet demand does not sufficiently outstrip this handful of surviving prints to make a film anything resembling an investment for a collecting institution. The studio could always make another print. And even if the studio lost the ability to make another print, it would still own the copyright to the film, effectively preventing our collecting institution from capitalizing on its rare material. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">I repeat that this is an almost wholly positive thing. When a collection is only as good as the endowment an institution can marshal to outbid a peer institution, we are scarcely in the realm of history and scholarship. A film archive can acquire a cinematic masterpiece or an anonymous piece of poverty row hackwork for the same price provided a new print of either requires the same amount of work for the film laboratory. (If anything, the danger is that a film archive, constrained only by price-per-foot rather than the inflated costs that accompany stature, focuses too strenuously on masterpieces and fails to collect a broad portfolio of lesser works.) <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">This should make the whole work of film conservation, preservation, scholarship, and exhibition more convivial and less corrupt. Dare I suggest that film may not belong in a museum after all and might be better off for it? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Insisting again and again that film is a museum object does not make it so. An acquisition number and provenance record do not transform a print into a valuable art world commodity. If film remains in a museum, it certainly affects a radically different appearance and provokes an entirely new set of assumptions from the assets that surround it. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">To an extent this is already acknowledged and confirmed by many august institutions, which scarcely treat films like any museum object I know. How often are exhibitions of paintings, photographs, sculptures, and the like supplemented with film clips, delivered in indifferent aspect ratios on a video monitor off in the corner of a gallery? It is as if museums used the slippery reproductive character of film to justify any and all ‘educational’ ancillary alterations to it. Film, video, magnetic or digital signals—they’re all essentially interchangeable. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">In this climate the medium specificity argument is indeed a difficult, if not impossible, one to mount. The only plausible case entails accounting for film as an industrial object with its own mass consumption implications. I would even go so far as to say that Jason’s concerns about the rhetoric of the debate being ceded to ‘market logic’ misstates a fundamental aspect of film. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Film is art. Film is entertainment. Film is history. But above all, film is a particularly industrial triumph, a medium that quite literally dominated twentieth century communication and thought. Film had no daguerreotype period—its logic always dictated a mass audience with an infinitely reproducible product. The enormous expense of film manufacture, the precision of perforation, the pressure to produce a consistent and convincing facsimile of motion at every projection under whatever circumstances an exhibitor could afford—all of these factors meant that filmmaking for private pleasure or local consumption could never justify the development of this new system. Those things came later after the development of a market infrastructure. (One wonders about a passage in Patricia Zimmerman’s otherwise quite informative <i>Reel Families</i> when the author denounces Kodak’s successful efforts to dominate the 16mm field and laments that its early monopoly on the gauge prevented the preposterous if beguiling possibility of artisanal production of raw small gauge stock.) Film needed volume to succeed—it needed to colonize every territory and become a conduit for entertainment, advertising, information, and experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">Surely there have been films made without any concern for the market, but they nevertheless look and sound the way they do due in no small to market trends. Rarely do we consider Markopolous’s early films as masterpieces in Kodachrome and vindicate that process or Warhol’s talkies as (admittedly perverse) demonstrations of Auricon’s 16mm sound reversal system. These films had to be made within the material parameters that had been developed for other purposes. And the labs that processed these films were not philanthropies either—they took on independents but made their real money (and justified the enormous investment in equipment) from industrial, educational, and advertising clients. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">This is not an apology for Kodak or Edison or ERPI or M-G-M, but instead an assertion that a responsible accounting of film-as-art (and especially film-as-art-object) must come to terms to fact that any film is irrevocably complicated by its place at the intersection of technology, mass consumption, and industrial logic. It is not only that film has no original fit for display (when was the last time a museum hung an original camera negative on its walls?) but that the display of any film artifact entails a creeping destruction that is fully consonant with the dictates of the form. A single exhibition of a film requires more human and mechanical intervention (and hence, more risk) than it takes to leave a painting hanging for six months. And because we consider a new print produced by any quality lab as an adequate substitute, and sometimes an agreeable replacement, for an original print itself produced by whatever anonymous lab the filmmaker or studio contracted with—as opposed to, say, valuing a photographic print only because it was personally printed and developed by the artist—we’re in quite a bind as the art world goes. To commodify the individual print beyond the going rate it would take to print it again would be a betrayal of the whole industrial basis of cinema. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: small;">This is only the sketch of an argument. But I don’t know another one that works. <o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-66058133929814228022009-08-29T23:40:00.000-07:002009-08-30T00:06:42.393-07:00The Exiles (1961)<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>These program notes were written for the Rochester premiere of</em> <a href="http://www.exilesfilm.com/">The Exiles</a><em> on 21 and 22 November 2008 at the </em><a href="http://dryden.eastmanhouse.org/"><em>Dryden Theater</em></a><em> at the George Eastman House. The always intrepid <a href="http://www.milestonefilms.com/movie.php/exiles/">Milestone</a> will be releasing a DVD of </em>The Exiles<em>, which will include four (!) Mackenzie short films and too many other supplements to list here, on 17 November 2009.</em></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Exiles</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>Production Credits</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Director/Writer/Producer: Kent Mackenzie ● </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Photography: Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman, John Morrill ● </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Music: The Revels</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>Principal Cast</strong> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Yvonne William, Homer Nish, Tommy Reynolds<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>Country of Origin:</strong> USA ● <strong>Year:</strong> 1961 ● <strong>Running Time:</strong> 72 minutes</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Because <em>The Exiles</em> has finally received its first theatrical release some forty-seven years after its completion, it is tempting to regard it as a film understood better now than then, a recovered masterpiece. Yet as an independent production from the early 1960s The Exiles is hardly an aberration. The erosion of the studio system during the 1950s had allowed talented upstarts like Stanley Kubrick and Samuel Fuller to land studio contracts after attention-grabbing low-budget successes. This was the period that saw resolutely challenging films from the likes of Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie and relatively more commercial incursions from John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, and Lionel Rogosin. The film festival circuit was growing each year and every film school student had a shot at the big time.</span> <br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In this respect <em>The Exiles</em> achieved almost blessed success. How many student films receive a world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, go on to festival engagements in Mannheim, San Francisco, London, Chicago, and Edinburgh, and land on the cover of <em>Film Quarterly</em>? This for a film begun by a group of friends from the USC Cinema Program holding down workaday jobs on the margins of the industry and shot piecemeal over the course of almost three and a half years. If anything, <em>The Exiles</em> would serve as an inspiration to film students everywhere—indeed, the Screen Director’s Guild gave Mackenzie a $1,200 scholarship to write a master’s thesis on his theory and practice. By that time Mackenzie had already liquidated his savings to finance the film and secured donations from his brother-in-law, his barber, and countless others. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Although <em>The Exiles</em> is in many ways a prime exemplar of its vibrant moment it is also quite an exceptional piece. Many independent landmarks of the period were shot with lightweight, flexible 16mm cameras but Mackenzie and his cinematographers made The Exiles in 35mm with a borrowed camera. They shot some 50,000 feet of negative from unused 300-foot scraps purportedly salvaged from Desilu Studios and, on another occasion, a plane crash. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">How Mackenzie and his crew procured the means of production makes a curious anecdote; what they did with it proved more interesting. <em>The Exiles</em> has been described as a piece of documentary fiction—and indeed Mackenzie’s free-form compositions and his unorthodox way of letting them flow together is quite unlike anything seen in Hollywood narrative films in 1961. It is not wrong to compare Mackenzie to Jean Rouch or Jean Vigo or any number of other then-influential French filmmakers whose films danced on the line separating documentary from fiction. It is not wrong but not right either. At first glance many shots in <em>The Exiles</em> seem like marvelous feats of guerrilla filmmaking—scenes coaxed out of any available light in a dank bar or an alley. In fact these scenes were highly choreographed and their lighting meticulously planned to give the impression of documentary naturalism. There is also the matter of the rather dense soundtrack: all the dialogue was dubbed in a studio, months or years after the scenes had been photographed. The music, seemingly all tunes overheard from the radio, is all the work of one high school band, The Revels, here accorded the illusion of zeitgeist cachet. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Mackenzie’s account of his method confounds as much as it clarifies: “No theatrical or documentary approach—in which a problem is stated and the decisions and actions of the characters proceed either to achieve or suggest a pat solution—seemed suitable for the film. The situation in which these people are involved could not be brought to a stage and reenacted. The thousands of details involved in their environment could never be duplicated …. We sought to photograph the infinite details surrounding these people, to let them speak for themselves, and to let the fragments mount up. Then, instead of supplying a resolution, we hoped that somewhere in the showing, the picture would become, to the viewer, a revelation of a condition about which he will either do something, or not — whichever his own reaction dictates.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>The Exiles</em> oscillates between social inquiry and professional calling card: it’s a film that critiques the inadequacies of the documentary idiom while striving to emulate it. The film is not unlike a master’s thesis: it demonstrates the depth of the candidate’s research (Mackenzie boasted of his anthropological surveys and his data from civic groups, government agencies, and interested observers) and his formal sensitivity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">How much <em>The Exiles</em> can actually teach us about its ostensible subjects—American Indians, life off the reservation, working class struggles at midcentury, or a Bunker Hill soon made unrecognizable by urban renewal—is up for debate. (For his part, Mackenzie maintained the Indians did not regard him as an outsider or an opportunist. “It was more important that we’d promised them a party,” he said.) The political reaction on the festival circuit was mixed: an award in Venice and skepticism elsewhere, with reports that audiences found the Indians “unpleasant” and “distasteful,” the portrayal of their plight “unsympathetic.” The U. S. State Department was no fan either.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Mackenzie continued to work on <em>The Exiles</em> for some years; in a bid for distribution he chopped the film from 77 to 72 minutes and added a (heavy-handed) prologue about the Indian in America illustrated with some Edward S. Curtis photographs. In 1964 <em>The Exiles</em> received a slot in the inaugural New York Film Festival line-up, but the distributors remained largely indifferent; Pathe Contemporary made 16mm prints available to the classroom market but did not entertain a theatrical run. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Thus while <em>The Exiles</em> has always been with us in a subterranean way (similar, in fact, to the fate of <em>Killer of Sheep</em>) it was not widely seen or remarked upon. Thom Andersen’s approving citation of the film in his 2003 video essay <em>Los Angeles Play Itself</em> sparked renewed interest in Mackenzie’s work. The original 35mm elements were found in a USC archive and brought to UCLA Film & Television Archive, whom we have to thank for the present sparkling restoration. Today, ironically, <em>The Exiles’</em> value as a not-quite-documentary record of a vanished lifestyle substantially outweighs the limitations of its affectations. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>For Further Reading</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Hunter, Benjamin, “Film Review” [<em>The Exiles</em>]. <em>Film Quarterly</em>, Spring 1962, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 59-62</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-6045449376287017552009-08-26T21:59:00.002-07:002011-03-23T18:22:20.166-07:00Woman is the Future of Man: El Sexo Fuerte (1946)<div style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I suspect that we do not have the critical vocabulary or temperament to adequately understand this unaccountable Mexican film. It is too ridiculous to be confused with art and too colored by legitimate social feelings to be dismissed as camp. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">That some political message was built into <i>El Sexo Fuerte</i> (The Strong Sex, which screened last week at UCLA) and then tugged and slapped to within an inch of its life is apparent. Two men from modern day Mexico wash up in the Kingdom of Eden, a futuristic art deco fiefdom ruled by sexless harpies who nevertheless maintain harems made up of no less than seven bearded codgers old and harmless enough to be their grandfathers. The clean-shaven hombres are sold at auction (with one fetching an all-time high of 2,000 cows)—only to be “nationalized” and made to serve as royal manicurist and waiter. But a revolution is afoot: the Party of Authoritarian Masculinity stalks the underground and plots a patriarchal restoration. The queen’s cabinet falls prey to animal instincts and the whole kingdom is swept up in a mango epidemic (!) that can only be cured by locking lips. Soon the Masculinists have achieved their coup and embarked on a re-education campaign that emphasizes proper Mexican courting rituals and domestic duties.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The final scene goes further still. Patriarchy has been restored and the first couple enacts a typical domestic scene. The woman breathlessly renounces self-determination at every turn but henpecks her husband into kinky submission. Ceding the political sphere but retaining an entirely different (and, it is suggested, more important) will to power, this woman embodies the stealthy power of hearth and home. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">This quite abbreviated summary lends perhaps too conventional a sense of structure to <i>El Sexo Fuerte</i>. It smoothes out the abrupt and incoherent ideological ruptures. It begins as a satiric spectacle of the contrafactual; visions of men crocheting and meekly conspiring towards civil rights are too absurd to be interpreted as anything but a critique of the ruling order. The cognitive dissonance cannot help but radicalize even the most conservative viewer. But before long it becomes an apparently reactionary tribune of nationalist machismo, a cozy affirmation of the very things it has already indicted. Women can trounce around like statesmen and soldiers and carry cardboard ray guns but men can never be feminized. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">More than a polemic, <i>El Sexo Fuerte</i> exceeds the value of any pure tract—it is an unconscious catalogue of free-floating sentimental resentments, imagined anxieties, repressed acknowledgments, half-truths and projections. It is more than a document of contradictory attitudes. It’s closer to sincere self-critique on an industrial scale—a national monument to feelings that cannot be uttered aloud. For a film that fails to stake out any ideological position for more than ten minutes, it nevertheless manages to put forward gender as performance, sex as the currency of political economy, entertainment as the apparatus for indoctrinating femininity, and half a dozen other subterranean avant-la-lettre feminist critiques.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">There is no mise en scene to speak of. The same five or six sets are recycled and pilloried for every incident. The actors suppress so many internal contradictions to make up for the muted external dynamism. At its best <i>El Sexo Fuerte</i> comes across as a sporadically committed fusion of a Flash Gordon serial and <i>Female</i>, the infamous Warner pre-Coder that finds mankilling auto titan Ruth Chatterton unexpectedly renouncing corporate largesse for romance. It is as much about sexual politics as it is about the erotic thrill of caressing polystyrene shoulder pads. Its world is modernity’s deranged imagination of itself, with gears and gurneys and industrial film junk irrationally re-appropriated for interior design. Model cars whiz along the miniature highway. The costumes permit a leering gaze at purportedly post-sexual women. A line of sombrero-clad mariachi chorines emerges as the ultimate image of reconciliation. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The director of record is Emilio Gómez Muriel, either a major unrecognized talent or the most damning refutation of the auteur theory yet unearthed. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>POSTSCRIPT</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://aaronburgh.tumblr.com/">Aaron Greenberg</a>—who likes the film as much as, if not more than, I do—adds the following thoughts: </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Women in power upset the natural order. No sex, no romance; just emotionless and powerful. But the movie also recognizes the arbitrariness of the situation – who counts as powerful and weak, man and woman, depends not on essential biology, but political contest. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">To my mind the film’s most radical conceit comes in its exaggeration of gender inequalities, which also makes its later sanctioning of it so interesting. The women constantly remind the frightened, monkish men that their situation is natural and (therefore?) attractive – something that men in power don’t even need to do! </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">So, on the one hand, the movie recognizes that gender and power are mobile and move together. But <i>everyone</i> suffers with women in power; they’re ice queens and prudes who deny sexual and romantic life – which makes you wonder why they have so many men around at all, especially given that there’s no fucking or birthing going on. [It is asserted at one point that the women order babies from Paris, just like any luxe commodity. – K.A.W.] But with <i>men </i>in power, natural (or familiar?) romance and sexuality are restored: women get want they want, men get what they need. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The ideological acrobatics are amazing: the film both ironizes the “naturalness” of different power arrangements, but still resolves to patriarchy. Gender might be performance or convention, but (anatomical?) men are men and (anatomical?) women are women. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The film both yields moments of radical recognition and remains very interested in getting the audience off. In yet another register, it participates in exactly the attitudes it seems to be calling into question. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The women probably haven’t had sex since the revolution, and they hardly have to impress their cuckolded husbands, but they still run around in mini-skirts and high-heels to titillate the male audience. But this makes so much sense given the film’s strange logic: genders are mobile but (anatomical) women still need manicures and perms. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The ending puts women in their place, out of political power, but in possession of their natural powers of persuasion. Even when men rule, women still <i>have power</i> because men are stuck needing them, wanting them, and hating them all at once. The film mistakes men’s affective attitudes towards women for women’s real, structural power. </span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-12187005245156467172009-08-22T13:36:00.011-07:002009-08-23T18:03:02.881-07:00LACMA and the Crisis of Repertory Cinema Advocacy<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Arial',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has aroused <a href="http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/2009/07/30/lacma-jettisons-film-program/">considerable</a> and <a href="http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118006693.html?categoryId=5&cs=1">well-deserved</a> <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-critic-lacma30-2009jul30,0,5900670.story">controversy</a> in the wake of its<a href="http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=32386"> 28 July announcement</a> that it would be shuttering its <a href="http://lacma.org/programs/FilmSeriesSchedule.aspx">film program</a> after 41 years. Senior matinees may remain and a nebulous thing called “artist-created films” might return at a later date.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The program’s financial loss--$100,000 annually (though some well-connected sources peg this closer to $70,000) and $1 million over the last decade—is cited by Museum Director Michael Govan as the reason for dismantling the one-man Film Department. Having run a <a href="http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/">repertory cinema</a> that screened a different film every night, those figures strike me as frankly trumped up for a program that runs a few nights a week and often offsets rental and shipping costs of international material through third party sponsorship. Might they also include building maintenance costs dropped onto the Film Department’s balance sheet? Is programmer Ian Birnie’s salary counted as a loss?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">This raises other questions, of course: would curators of painting, sculpture, or even photography face similar pressures? Would their departments be shuttered on the basis of low foot traffic? Would a six-figure shortfall in those instances be called a loss or the cost of doing business? Calling it the former is already something of an ideological concession. Operating expenses are precisely that—the cost of an institution fulfilling its <a href="http://lacma.org/about/AboutLACMA.aspx">mission</a>, in this case “[t]o serve the public through the collection, conservation, exhibition, and interpretation of significant works of art from a broad range of cultures and historical periods.” Which the film program does. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">But let’s return for a minute to the matter of money. Institutions around the country that rely in large part on donations and endowments for their operating budgets—universities, art museums, and the like—are certainly in dire straits in the current economy. Donations have dramatically decreased and many endowments have lost a large portion of their value or have become frozen, meaning that their interest cannot be tapped to cover budget shortfalls. Layoffs are common in the non-profit sector these days.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">For all that, $100,000 is still a comparatively small sum for a museum. Insurance policies for so-called blockbuster <a href="http://www.lacma.org/art/ExhibRenoir.aspx">exhibitions</a> exceed it many times over.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> But even assuming that $100,000 is the correct figure, it still constitutes less than two-tenths of one percent of the Museum’s $74 million annual operating budget. Without being too crude about it, LACMA does not feel that film screenings constitute even two-tenths of one percent of its mission.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Which is to say that LACMA does not feel that film belongs at its museum. No major component of a museum would be sacrificed in a time of fiscal difficulty if it were not valued in the first place.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Ignore for a moment Govan’s lavish salary ($6 million over five years, plus benefits) and focus instead on the language found in the recent <i>Los Angeles Times</i> <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-lacma18-2009aug18,0,7489611.story">article</a> that disclosed this salary: </span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">"The reputation of LACMA was not a good one," said Bobby Kotick, a trustee who heads the company Activision Blizzard, maker of the video game Guitar Hero. "There was definitely skepticism whether L.A. was committed to building a cultural institution that would be on par with the Met and MOMA. . . . Compensation was one way to overcome that."</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Indeed. And it follows that another way of overcoming this reputation was axing an extraordinarily cheap program that obviously does not have the approval of the trustees. Such an action demonstrates exactly where the Museum’s priorities lie and cannot be interpreted otherwise.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">As repertory cinemas go, LACMA was quite successful, recently hosting four sold-out screenings of Carlos Reygadas’s austere but beautiful masterpiece <i>Silent Light</i>, the only thing resembling a ‘run’ that that film received in Los Angeles. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Govan has spoken of finding a donor to underwrite the film program. Resentful <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-letters15-2009aug15,0,7677114.story">letter writers</a> and <a href="http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/protest-grows-to-protect-lacma-film-program/#comments">blog commenters</a> have advanced the idea that Hollywood studio heads or rascals like <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/08/martin-scorsese-an-open-letter-to-michael-govan-and-lacma.html">Martin Scorsese</a> should pony up instead of being typical showbiz hypocrites. (In the case of Scorsese, this is quite a charge; his <a href="http://film-foundation.org/">Film Foundation</a> dispersed over $1.4 million for film preservation in 2008 <a href="http://www.film-foundation.org/common/11004/info_request2.cfm?clientID=11004&subnav=who&subnavtitle=who.gif">alone</a>.) These sentiments and overtures are disingenuous. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">In 2008 LACMA <a href="http://www.lacma.org/info/pdf/museum08.pdf">reported</a> over $129 million in gifts, including over $6.5 million in unrestricted gifts. (These are the donations that are mercifully, as the name implies, unrestricted and can be used to meet general operating expenses without the stipulations placed on the great majority of donations.) Doubtless LACMA has already found urgent needs to which these unrestricted funds may happily be applied. Even in this economy, though, $100,000 funneled to the film program is a drop in the bucket. But the point remains and by now defies credulity: </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>The future of the film program at LACMA is not at the mercy of individual donors and their heroic deeds. The dismantling of the film program, which requires a truly miniscule portion of the Museum’s operating budget, is not an unfortunate accident but instead an ideological prerogative. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">What can be done about this? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">In the short term, there is a <a href="http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-LACMA-film">petition</a> online that presently has close to 2,500 signatures. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The effort is sponsored by a blog, <a href="http://savefilmatlacma.blogspot.com/">savefilmatlacma.blogspot.com</a>. It has an affiliated <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Film-at-LACMA/129340742194">facebook group </a>and <a href="http://twitter.com/savefilmlacma">twitter feed</a>. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Given LACMA’s obvious mistrust of film, however, I fear that these efforts might not be sufficient. This is not a slight towards the petition, nor the blog, but rather a call for something larger.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">As demonstrated by the <a href="http://lookingaround.blogs.time.com/2009/08/19/the-lost-weekend/">national</a> (and indeed, <a href="http://savefilmatlacma.blogspot.com/2009/08/toward-dictatorship-of-ignorance.html">international</a>) rebukes of this move, the implications of the dismantling of LACMA’s film program are wider than Los Angeles County or the L.A. repertory scene. Articles forecasting the demise of repertory cinema are not <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/11/MNVVURG40.DTL&type=movies">uncommon</a>. The venues concerned are often left to fend for themselves, proclaiming that movies are better on a big screen or with a crowd than they are at home on video. These aspects are important and surely the most easily-voiced refutations of that “Why can’t you just get it on DVD and shut up?” canard. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Far fewer column inches are given over to a more complicated but better argument, one that entails an understanding of repertory film infrastructure. Simply stated, no studio is getting rich from circulating 35mm prints to LACMA and its cohorts. There is obviously some value in preserving corporate assets for posterity and future revenue and all the major studios have acceded to this reality. DVD, BluRay, satellite, and download are significant revenue streams. But modern telecine units—the machines responsible for digitizing film material—are calibrated to get the best results from pre-print material: camera originals or restored internegatives or low-contrast master positives. Which is a roundabout way of saying that a film can be preserved and readied for digital distribution channels without the luxury of making a release print for nominal circulation at a relative handful of theaters. Some studios have essentially turned a blind eye to this market altogether, proceeding with expensive digital restorations without bothering to return a single circulating film print to the repertory market. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">We are today able to go to venues like the <a href="http://www.artic.edu/webspaces/siskelfilmcenter/">Gene Siskel Film Center</a> or <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/">Film Forum</a> or <a href="http://cinefamily.org/">CineFamily</a> (and maybe LACMA) because most studios still possess at least one individual who believes in supporting a library of titles in 35mm. This is a particular and perilous thing and in no way a given. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The situation for foreign films is even worse. American rights to screen films like this are often renewed on a seven-year basis; at the end of that term, it’s often stipulated that a distributor not renewing the rights must destroy all prints of a given title. The implications of mounting attrition are obvious—and hence many foreign classics are also invisible on film screens, unless a print is imported at heavy cost by a wealthy venue, as sometimes happens. (To pick a particularly egregious example, Antonioni’s <i>L’Avventura</i>, <i>La Notte</i>, and <i>L’Eclisse</i> do not circulate in 35mm in this country. Nor do any Mikio Naruse films. Nor </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Ordet</i>, nor <i>Stalker</i>, nor <i>Le Plaisir</i>. The list goes on. It’s not the fault of American stalwarts like Janus or Kino, who must wrangle with the impossible demands of foreign rightsholders and the virtual disappearance of the specialty laboratory.) </span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Literally every venue capable of screening archival prints with professional standards is essential to the whole delicate infrastructure of repertory cinema. These should be the terms of the argument. We cannot rely solely on appeals based on “the big screen,” “real movie theater butter,” “the communal experience”—ultimately there are ways to circumvent those. After all, these pleas could easily be addressed by showing projected DVDs in a public space, which does rather less to support the kind of infrastructure I’m talking about. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Simply stated, the whole history of cinema is not available on DVD. It cannot be studied adequately in the comforts of one’s home. And that home repertory is no substitute for a curated program that responds to and is influenced by local sensibilities and tempers. It has a character distinct from the nation’s Netflix queue. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">This is a hard message but perhaps not so hard. It is broadly analogous to ‘Buy Local,’ a slogan of informed consumerism that is <a href="http://sfbayguardian.com/entry.php?entry_id=8863&catid=&volume_id=398&issue_id=440&volume_num=43&issue_num=42">easily understood and practiced</a> by a substantial portion of our population. It is implicitly understood that a purchase represents not only an exchange of money for goods but an affirmative vote for a certain way of living and all of the productive infrastructure that will sustain it. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">In the same way, repertory film-goers cannot be motivated by nostalgia alone. They must be made to recognize that they are stakeholders sustaining a wider movement greater than any individual institution. Museums, of course, could not mount lavish exhibitions or comprehensive retrospectives without collective action—touring programs, collaborations with peer institutions, and the like. It’s the same story for film. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Returning to the matter of LACMA, this argument is already being made to a degree. Critics have noted that it is particularly cruel to strip Los Angeles, the film capital of the world, of one of its major film venues. It is a matter of civic pride. It is a local outrage with national repercussions. </span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-77546847841546379202007-10-07T09:54:00.004-07:002009-08-29T23:51:32.634-07:00Sembene Retrospective: Black Girl (1966)<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;">The June death of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene aroused little notice here compared to the subsequent <a href="http://motionwithinmotion.blogspot.com/2007/08/on-bergman-and-antonioni.html">passing</a> of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. There are a number of probable reasons for this neglect, though not one of them is good enough to justify it: the long interval between Sembene’s later features, the unfamiliar actors that inhabited his characters, the political thrust of his work, and, not least, the difficulty of projecting the fashionable, existential doubts of western intellectuals onto his scenarios. His pictures were well-reviewed, so it would be presumptuous and misleading to attribute this neglect to the simple racial preferences of New York taste-makers. The film canon is remarkably European, but I suspect another, more pedestrian problem than racism accounts for that: the tattered state of foreign film distribution in the United States. What is African Cinema? To most, it’s the kind of thing that’s more easily read about than experienced directly. You’re more likely to find African titles screened on decades-old VHS tapes in dingy student unions than on 35mm prints in movie theaters. With a few exceptions, like Cissé’s <i>Yeleen</i> or Sissako’s <i>Bamako</i>, these titles are released not through art house distributors but social justice outfits like California Newsreel that aim their products at library shelves instead of paying audiences. </span><span style="font-size: small;">(For what it’s worth, check out Amadou Saalum Seck’s <i>Saaraba</i> from 1988—available only on tape at present from California Newsreel—if you ever get the chance.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Sembene has actually fared better in this respect. Daniel Talbot’s New Yorker Films has aggressively promoted Sembene’s work throughout his career. New Yorker has been slow in releasing the films to DVD, though, so for most cinephiles his work may as well not exist at all. Hopefully recent and upcoming retrospectives of Sembene’s complete features in <a href="http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2007fall/sembene.html">Boston</a>, <a href="http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:_TJ-VX2cwM0J:docfilms.uchicago.edu/calendar/thursday1.shtml+doc+films+sembene&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us">Chicago</a>, <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/comingsoon.html">New York</a>, and elsewhere will change the situation. These screenings provide an opportunity to see Sembene’s work properly so as to test the vague assumptions that stem from the curious circumstances outlined above. For the next two months I’ll be righting my own lamentable ignorance of Sembene’s career and posting thoughts on the films as they come.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Sembene’s short <i>Borom Sarret </i>(1966)<i> </i>and his feature <i>Black Girl </i>(<i>La noir de…</i>, 1966) are famous early efforts, often cited as the first films about sub-Saharan Africans made by an indigenous filmmaker, rather than the colonialists, travelogue photographers, dubious anthropologists, and other exploiters. I don’t know of any solid scholarship verifying those claims; what’s more, <i>Black Girl </i>takes place mostly in France with all of the dialogue spoken in French, so, as is often the case with talented filmmakers from non-Western countries, the charge of exotic pandering to bourgeois audiences in the West is not an altogether irrelevant one. <i>Black Girl </i>was a success at Cannes, winning the Prix Jean Vigo and arousing a certain degree of enthusiasm about Third World Cinema. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Is <i>Black Girl </i>the beginning of African Cinema? That concept should be interrogated at some length before continuing the discussion of the film itself, if for no other reason than that Sembene’s handling of the political implications and ambiguities of narration, authorship, and subjectivity constitute one of the film’s more brilliant achievements. Most cultures have some strand of poetic forms, mythic situations, and visual archetypes that might broadly be called heritage. These elements, their appearances traced backwards until the point of obscurity, are the ones sought out, rightfully or wrongfully, when trying to determine whether a work is an authentic expression of a culture or an unctuous and contaminated attempt to cash in. So we talk about national traditions of literature and music and theater and painting. But the cinema has been an international medium from the start—invented almost simultaneously in France and America and farmed out to other territories at the whim of the patent-holders. To say that any film does not follow a national tradition either overemphasizes the autonomy of the national film industries or misplaces film products in a longer trajectory of art-making for which they might not be fit. Today even American films are scarcely that, for they are shot anywhere around the globe, often with significant monies from multinational corporations and other ambiguous sources. And festival favorites from the last twenty years, whether officially from Iran or Taiwan or Romania, were often funded by pan-European art patrons like France’s Marin Karmitz. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">In this context, it seems appropriate to situate Sembene in a broader history of cinema (Western and otherwise) rather than treating his work as if it were sui generis. This approach instigates comparisons both natural and fanciful. With <i>Black Girl</i>, then, Sembene aims to do the same thing as his contemporary Godard. Both critique the banality of bourgeois life in France. The obvious difference between <i>Black Girl </i>and a work like <i>Pierrot le fou</i> or <i>2 or 3 Things I Know About Her</i> is that Sembene makes the critique from without rather than within. His film is more piercing than those others for this reason and because he need not cite Brecht or Marx to prove his point. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">No film I know assays the blandness of middle-class life as such an effective and intelligent cudgel against complacency. Most of the film unfolds in an unadorned, middle-class home in France. Its walls are free of texture or character, the only decoration being a tribal mask the titular Diouana bought for fifty francs. Most shots are aggressively empty, a character posed in the corner against the blankness of the foreground. The lighting is flat and ugly, losing Diouana’s face in an undifferentiated haze of shadows. The contrast with Diouana’s village is a simple one, crude but no less rich—essentially an equation of aesthetic depth with spiritual fulfillment. In Africa the sunlight sculpts her face, revealing nuances literally illegible in France. The two locales, as distant in expressive possibility as in geography, provoke wholly different avenues of interaction: in France, the pattern of a dress or the shape of a pair of high heels constitute a character’s only means of defining herself and judging others while in Africa the rich crevices and curve of the human face are the primary objects of interrogation. The implications are obvious enough, with the nature of interaction and the meaning of community in Senegal and France diverging after this essential difference.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">My account of the film’s visual style suggests a banal schematic that scarcely does justice to <i>Black Girl</i> or Sembene’s achievement therein. This strategy is but one framework of many built atop another. Diouana’s voice-over narration gives a dramatic shape to the material but also calls its premises into question. The scenes we see in France—mundane tasks, daily rituals, hints of play, unprovoked insults—do not immediately suggest the stuff of narrative. They receive their meaning from Diouana’s narration, which drapes the scenes more than it does describe their whereabouts. Sound and image run along seemingly parallel tracks, only to intersect and then drift apart anew. In an environment of oppression, the very act of offering an alternative interpretation constitutes rebellion. The kind of subjectivity on display here recalls, in some ways, Yuwen’s narration in Fei Mu’s <i>Spring in a Small Town </i>(1948), an effective (and distinctly feminine) counterbalance to the fatalistic forces that dot the emotional landscape of the narrative.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">But Sembene attempts a more complex blending of dialogue and monologue, as in the moment towards the end of <i>Black Girl</i> that might be described as a kind of pirouette between competing subjectivities: an incredulous line from Robert Fontaine’s Monsieur dissolves into an interior cry from Diouana, rhyming the former’s <i>mère</i> with the latter’s <i>prisonnier</i>. This moment suggests a mysterious and poetic undercurrent that temporally intertwines opposing subjectivities, in addition to positing the competing narrators as but two possibilities within a constellation of experience. In other words, this is humanistic filmmaking of the highest order, acknowledging each party’s aspiration to agency without ignoring the limitations of each. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The efficacy of Sembene’s critique is no way diminished because he presents the French as caricatures. The husband, especially, is a canny bit of type-cast, often mugging for the camera in the half-pathetic, half-unhinged manner of Elisha Cook, Jr. He may be a competing narrator, but he does not possess substantive moral weight. He goes through the motions of narrative expectations only to confound them—taking something of a pilgrimage to Senegal after Diouana’s suicide that quickly becomes an unabashedly vulgar attempt to buy off the decay of a soul in attrition. Like his wife earlier, he shields his eyes with sunglasses, setting himself defiantly apart, attempting to appear circumspect but actually failing to disguise a thing, not least his unabashed contempt for the people and the place. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Nevertheless, <i>Black Girl </i>is a film of mysteries. Sembene restores the wonder of a suburban sprinkler system or a balloon caught in window-light. Objects litter the film, though many are seen long before they are understood. Towards the end of the film, we see Diouana packing a suitcase. She picks up a photograph of herself and a sleazy recruiter that was taken sometime in Dakar. We have seen the two together in a flashback—they walked along this street, but that moment hardly merited a souvenir. Only later does Sembene double back and show the photographer posing the uncomfortable couple, finally giving weight and specificity to an object rattling through time and space. It is Diouana’s task to find some semblance of the same amidst competing subjectivities and narrative frames.</span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-63817966434125824322007-09-18T08:10:00.008-07:002009-08-29T23:52:58.273-07:00Aboveground: Killer of Sheep (1977)<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">For many years <i>Killer of Sheep </i>persisted more as a legend than as a movie. Charles Burnett’s UCLA thesis film, shot in the alleys and bungalows of <place st="on"></place></place><//place></place><//place></ place=""><//>Watts</place><//place></ place=""><//></ place=""><//></><//> over a year’s worth of weekends with a cast and crew of friends, never entered the commercial distribution channels but nevertheless built a substantial reputation. It was the kind of independent production that the specialists had deemed essential—an early entry on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry even though Burnett’s film never had the chance to reverberate through the national consciousness. It was a piece of American heritage even if most Americans ignored it and the few who sought it out had hard luck finding it. <i>Killer of Sheep </i>became a staple of most discussions of black independent filmmaking, even if it was only a title that triggered nods and genuflection. People who’d never seen a Burnett film nevertheless cited his largely unknown body of work as a rejoinder to media hype and adulation over Spike Lee. There was this film called <i>Killer of Sheep </i>out there somewhere and it sounded like a honey of a cudgel if one was out to dismiss the latest independent up-and-comer, black or white. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">I’d noticed references to <i>Killer of Sheep </i>for a few years before I got a chance to see the film. Like <i>Chimes of Midnight</i>, it was a legendary but unavailable film that belied the all-too-frequent conventional wisdom that DVDs and Netflix had made cinematic connoisseurship available to everyone regardless of geography. The only way one could see <i>Killer of Sheep</i> was by seeking out dens of taste and programming savvy in a local context. I heard that an Introduction to Film section at the <place st="on"></place></place><//place></place><//place></ place=""><//><placetype st="on"></placetype></placetype><//placetype></placetype><//placetype></ placetype=""><//>University</placetype><//placetype></ placetype=""><//></ placetype=""><//></><//> of <placename st="on"></placename></placename><//placename></placename><//placename></ placename=""><//>Chicago</placename><//placename></ placename=""><//></ placename=""><//></><//></place><//place></ place=""><//></ place=""><//></><//> would be screening the film one Sunday afternoon. I knew the instructor, so I slipped into the screening along with a few friends I invited who’d also run across arcane allusions to <i>Killer of Sheep </i>on occasion. The style was quite a bit different from the three Burnett shorts and one feature I’d seen already. It was an unassuming picture, the kind that one often struggles to get one’s head around. Purportedly an American take on the neorealist movies of DeSica, Burnett’s film constantly undercut all the expectations that came with that Italian baggage: the film’s incidents of degradation and listlessness never congealed into a protest or a statement, per se—just an unpredictable set of scenes that seemed to say everything and nothing about being black in <country-region st="on"></country-region></country-region><//country-region></country-region><//country-region></ country-region=""><//><place st="on"></place></place><//place></place><//place></ place=""><//>America</place><//place></ place=""><//></ place=""><//></><//></country-region><//country-region></ country-region=""><//></ country-region=""><//></><//>. <i>Killer of Sheep </i>was such a confounding experience that I wasn’t even sure whether or not I was disappointed upon finally seeing it. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">When I spoke afterwards with the instructor who’d put <i>Killer of Sheep </i>on his syllabus he expressed surprise that Burnett had ever made another movie. It was easier—and, in some ways, keeping with the myth—to believe that <i>Killer of Sheep </i>was totally sui generis. Later, with indistinct memories of <i>Killer of Sheep </i>on my mind, I hastily composed this bit of prose to accompany a Burnett Q&A session: “Burnett’s does something more…: it lingers on a scene until its documentary value has been exhausted and its unanticipated poetry has been revealed.” That’s not entirely wrong but it’s not very insightful either.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">I had the chance to see <i>Killer of Sheep </i>again last week at the Crest, the Sacramento art house that I patronized with some regularity during high school. In those years I’d see whatever had attracted a moderate amount of critical controversy, though I always secretly wished that the Crest would jazz things up a bit and dig up something like <i>Killer of Sheep </i>instead. Now, thanks to the indefatigable tenacity of Milestone’s Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, that flippant, adolescent desire has been realized. Milestone spent six years clearing the music rights to <i>Killer of Sheep</i>—the official reason the film never saw a commercial release over the past thirty years. After breaking house records in <state st="on"></state></state><//state></state><//state></ state=""><//><place st="on"></place></place><//place></place><//place></ place=""><//>New York</place><//place></ place=""><//></ place=""><//></><//></state><//state></ state=""><//></ state=""><//></><//> and winding through the country, <i>Killer of Sheep </i>finally<i> </i>reaches the smaller markets and draws a sparse crowd. Alas, white boy cinephiles must find a new rite of passage now that <i>Killer of Sheep</i> no longer needs tracking down.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Seeing <i>Killer of Sheep</i> with an audience in a commercial movie theater (even an art house) is quite different from seeing it with a dozen college freshmen who stared at this holy grail with indifferent, weary eyes. One lesson: <i>Killer of Sheep </i>is a crowd-pleaser, at least if I measure that from the hearty cackles and cries of ‘Oh shit!’ that met the protagonist Stan’s misadventures throughout the film. Audiences are getting <i>Killer of Sheep</i>, even though this 35mm version is shorn of ‘Unforgettable’ in the final sequence and often projected in the wrong aspect ratio. (Most modern commercial theaters do not have the proper 1.37:1 lenses that would allow them to screen the film without occasionally chopping off a head from the top of the frame. Burnett shot the film on 16mm, a format that’s never subjected to the 1.85:1 masking that constitutes the industry standard for 35mm. And, while UCLA’s restoration efforts and Milestone’s publicity campaign are clearly positive developments, the thirty-years-coming popularity of <i>Killer of Sheep</i> has its drawbacks: the film has been criss-crossing commercial art houses so much this summer that the print screened last night was much more heavily scratched than the 16mm print that used to circulate through a certain underground outfit.) </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The film isn’t necessarily any easier to grasp today than it was upon first viewing. Most literature on the film defines <i>Killer of Sheep</i> by what it’s not: a conventional narrative film or a blaxploitation effort. (Providing an alternative to the images of the latter was one of Burnett’s aims in making <i>Killer of Sheep</i> in the first place.) Still, it is not entirely without precedent. Burnett’s efforts to craft a ghetto-as-slaughterhouse analogy remind this viewer of the heavy-handed juxtapositions in Eisenstein’s <i>Strike </i>and Chaplin’s <i>Modern Times</i>: all three films present the slaughter of livestock as a metaphor for the plight of the proletariat. The closest antecedent as narrative structure goes looks to be Boris Barnett’s <i>Okraina</i>, that vision of the Eastern front from 1933 that moves from one register to another with ease and unpredictability. Both Burnett and Barnett’s films are effectively a string of vignettes and it takes a few moments wading into each before we can determine whether this episode picks up a previous narrative thread or spins something entirely new. We know characters by gestures and tics before we know them by their professions or by their relationships to each other. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><i>Killer of Sheep</i> lacks the classical craftsmanship of Burnett’s masterpiece, <i>To Sleep with Anger</i>, but its own style is a rich and provocative one. Burnett alternates without any discernible pattern between heavy, pore-exposing close-ups and elaborate master shots wherein characters wander and cavort and play tricks on each other. These shots are somewhat akin to the better moments in James Benning’s contemporaneous <i>One Way Boogie Woogie</i>: each shot is like a closed system with each element in the frame appearing to be but one part in a raucous assembly line. The suspense and the poetry of each shot derives from the foreordained knowledge that the whole thing will fall out of balance at any moment when a single part deviates from the design. <i>Killer of Sheep </i>is a film about waiting: waiting for one kid to wallop the other or waiting for a poorly secured motor to fall out of a pick-up cab. Yet even when Burnett keeps these minor promises the shape of the whole remains stubbornly fixed. The kids don’t grow up and the adults don’t move up the social ladder. Burnett avoids imposing a dramatic arc on the material by leaving it incomplete, almost retarded in its natural progression. It takes some time to realize that Burnett isn’t so much prematurely abandoning the material before the big climax as he is sailing past that moment and following his characters through a state of perpetual denouement. They continue quietly unsatisfied but well past the point where they might change anything.</span></span> </div></span><//span></ span=""><//></ span=""><//></><//></ span=""><//></><//></><//></><//><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-11877029710177617722007-09-09T23:10:00.001-07:002009-08-22T14:01:39.788-07:00Recent Screening Notes: Mann, Kwan, Bertolucci<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: small;"><b>Strategic Air Command (1955)</b><br />
Fans of the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns will likely be disappointed with this patriotic follow-up. Purportedly Stewart himself cooked up this Technicolor, Vistavision tribute to SAC and sold Paramount on the idea. The result is leaden White Elephant effort that retains none of the graphic, abrasive ease that came so naturally to Mann in <i>Winchester ’73</i>. Stewart plays ‘Dutch’ Holland, an air force veteran who finds his post-war prosperity playing third base for the St. Louis cardinals. His wife, June Allyson, is alarmed and puzzled when air force brass call up and cajole Stewart back into the service. There’s no war on, she protests. The rest of the picture is a retrograde exercise in demonstrating that wives say the silliest things and often, as they’re so delicate and trusting, don’t understand that absence of combat actually represents a grave threat to national prosperity. Close your mouth and shut your lyin’ eyes.<br />
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Fidelity to Cold War facts circumscribes the dramatic scope of <i>Strategic Air Command</i>. Since Mann and Stewart can’t well bomb Moscow for a rousing climax, they must make invigorating hay out of practice runs and war games and the like. And yet the steadfast patriotic impulse behind the picture ruins these set-pieces: even the wing of an airborne B-36 catching fire can’t faze our stoical Stewart, who calmly suppresses hysteria throughout. Later, upon reuniting with Allyson and glimpsing his newborn daughter for the first time, he proclaims a model of the B-47 to be the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. It’s an expression of priorities that rhymes perfectly with an earlier scene in which Stewart expresses innocent surprise when Allyson reminds him that she can only become pregnant when he’s on the ground. <i>Strategic Air Command</i> subjugates with received innocence any structure (biological or narrative) that threatens its propagandistic aims. As such, the supporting characters do little more than spout civilian objections to peacetime military build-up, only to have them handily mocked or set aside. Ford’s <i>Wings of Eagles</i>, somewhat similar in its ambition to present the domestic price of a military career, remains superior in every respect.<br />
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<b>Rouge (1987)<br />
</b>Stanley Kwan’s breakthrough film <i>Rouge</i> remains a beguiling work some twenty years after its release. <i>Rouge</i>, a star-crossed love story produced by Jackie Chan, is conceivably a crowd-pleaser, though I suspect that it could not succeed as well as it does without that popular framework. The love story at the center comes across as pretty standard stuff—during the 1930s, a glamorous prostitute, Fleur (Anita Mui), falls in love with a client, Chan (Leslie Cheung); they wish to marry but his parents would never approve of such a union; the lovers agree to a suicide pact. Some fifty years later, the ghost of Fleur returns to Hong Kong looking for the ghost of Chan. She meets a yuppie couple who put her up for a few days while she waits. After several failed connections she begins to suspect that Chan reneged on their pact. Fifty years of waiting for a soul mate give way to rueful melancholy.<br />
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The love story at the center of <i>Rouge</i> is a slight thing, a standard-issue forbidden romance. Its obstacles never feel particular to this couple or to their period. Yet the film’s generality accounts for a large part of its effect. This is not because the romantic sketch is universal or because it’s mounted scrupulously enough to breathe new life into the material. Instead, <i>Rouge</i> curiously positions the central romance as a nostalgic product—not a real artifact of the past, but instead a token of our impoverished conception of it. Fleur looks out of place in the present, amidst neon advertisements and other emblems of a perplexing global culture. Kwan poses her glamour against the chintzy surfaces of 1987 Hong Kong but never suggests that a retreat into the past could resolve the alienation of his characters. It’s a long, sincere sigh about how much sexier and mysterious the past can seem to contemporary eyes. Kwan doesn’t belittle that impulse, but he doesn’t let it pass without interrogation either. The yuppie couple of 1987 (the Hong Kong cousins of Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty in <i>Lost in America</i>) share a healthier, flabbier, and ultimately more honest relationship than Fleur and Chan, but such an observation does little to blunt their sense of inadequacy, living in the shadow of a past more imagined than experienced.<br />
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Kwan assayed a more mature exploration of these themes in his 1992 masterpiece <i>Actress</i> but <i>Rouge</i> works in its own right as the logical conclusion to the expectations established by its own brand of popular entertainment. Both films, incidentally, work as interesting companion pieces to Resnais’s attempts to resurrect the emotional immediacy of unfashionable theater pieces.<br />
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<b>The Conformist (1970)</b><br />
Bernardo Bertolucci’s famous art house thriller reminds me somewhat of a lesser Makhmalbaf effort like <i>Once Upon a Time, Cinema</i> in its tendency to emphasize ornate and oppressive prettiness over nearly everything else. Vittorio Storaro’s impressive photography oscillates between <i>nouvelle vague</i> eccentricity and a more classical and rigorous brand of ravishment, but the mode throughout suggests a detached exercise in style. Much like <i>Schindler’s List</i>, actually, in its desire to condemn fascism as a political impulse but redeem it as a source of stylish chic, <i>The Conformist</i> is a film divided against itself, perhaps deliberately so. Homosexuality serves as the locus of political complacency, though there’s something here for bigots and gays alike: Trintignant commits his crimes and it’s left up to us to decide whether latent homosexuality or the societal pressures to repress it made him do it.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-82208445409905314292007-08-26T15:56:00.008-07:002009-08-22T14:02:16.289-07:00On Recent Apocalypse Films<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;">We may only be coming to realize it now, but cinema screens presented an inordinately high number of apocalyptic thrillers in 2006. I count among their number <i>United 93</i>, <i>Snakes on a Plane</i>, <i>The Host</i>, <i>Children of Men</i>, and, of course, <i>Apocalypto</i>. Together these films form a representative sample of the current tendencies—stylistic, ideological, otherwise—in the action-thriller idiom. Each film, to a greater or lesser degree, revolved around some compact unit of personalities fighting for survival under impossible circumstances. These microcosms of human perseverance suggest struggles, if only implicitly, upon which the fate and fitness of the human race turns. In contradistinction to the science fiction films discussed in Susan Sontag’s classic ‘Imagination of Disaster’ piece, these apocalypse films weren’t much concerned with misapplied science or failed utopias. They were not even, like the execrable <i>Independence Day</i> of ten years earlier, about the dangers of liberal consensus and sympathy when faced with interplanetary invasion. </span><o:p></o:p></span></span> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">All of these recent apocalypse thrillers sought to prove that the world and its disasters might be better understood in showbiz terms. If these films sought to edify, it was on the basis that real life and its tragedies, political and corporeal, might be elevated through translation into familiar commodities. Apocalypse films strived to make history itself more legible and authentic—in other words, more <i>real</i>—by assuring their audiences that the unsettling headlines were natural material for the movies. After having seen these pictures, we are meant to come away convinced that the medium made our own lives and history more palpable and real. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The least ambitious, and generally the least, of these films was <i>Snakes on a Plane</i>. As an action picture, <i>Snakes on a Plane</i>, nominally directed by David R. Ellis, would have been shelved twenty years ago because it fails to meet the most basic measures of competency for the genre. There are no sequences in <i>Snakes on a Plane</i>—all of its minor thrills come about independent of any shot-by-shot set-up. There is no impulse to build suspense in this film: each autonomous shock derives its effect from the four-word premise, not from any attempt to establish parallel action, drop clues, or present the illusion of spatial unity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The film itself is slight but the phenomenon is not. The pre-release fervor over <i>Snakes on a Plane</i> could even be called, to borrow a term developed by Miriam Hansen, a modern-day instance of vernacular modernism. With <i>Snakes on a Plane</i> we saw fans creating tributes and parodies well before the film itself entered commercial release. New Line Cinema’s decision to insert a line in the final cut (‘I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!’) that had been dreamed up by bloggers and <i>Snakes</i> groupies ginned up publicity by pandering to fans but pretending that the choice represented some unspoken democratic evolution in the filmmaking process. But <i>Snakes on a Plane</i> yielded lackluster returns and prompted a number of pundits to declare the failure of the internet to cook up a genuine blockbuster. That’s the important part: rather than abetting a sly studio ploy, the <i>Snakes on a Plane</i> fans denatured one—stripping a product of its commodity character and reappropriating it for more esoteric amusements devoid of exchange value. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Surely Samuel L. Jackson, still trading on the badass persona he perfected in <i>Pulp Fiction</i> a dozen years earlier, accounted for part of the appeal. But arguably just as much enthusiasm flowed from the premise itself, among the most direct in recent times: snakes—on a plane. Whether acknowledged explicitly or not, the scenario of ‘snakes on a plane’ suggested a burlesque upon the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, not least a xenophobic euphemism for the terrorists themselves. If fans found the idea of snakes on a plane inherently funny (and most did, seizing upon the phrase as a rueful acknowledgement of life’s exasperating tribulations) then it had at least something to do with the anarchic dimensions of the premise itself. With most Americans familiar with the time-wasting hassle and false sense of safety instilled by stripping away shoes, belts, camcorders, and, later, toothpaste in the name of homeland security, snakes on a plane sounded like a memorable and better-than-average day at the airport. Laughing about the possibility of venomous vipers in the overhead bin stood as a perfectly healthy way of displacing unease about shoe bombers and the like.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">United 93</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">, ostensibly the more serious of the two productions, also had something to do with working through trauma. Director Paul Greengrass and distributor Universal exuded seriousness of purpose throughout the whole campaign, hoping to avoid or marginalize accusations of exploitation. Their unorthodox press kit—which included biographies of the United 93 passengers rather than the actors—was praised in most of the long reviews. Scraping for words, most cited its ‘documentary’ style as evidence of its credibility. This represented a new way of defining the documentary—one simply on the basis of unrecognizable actors and quite ignoring the film’s mannered style. No documentary outside of <i>The Last Waltz</i> lights its ‘subjects’ this carefully and no documentary I know of attempts to make its subject matter fit so snugly in the dynamic babble-and-swagger idiom established by television series like <i>The West Wing</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Indeed, <i>United 93</i> is a very tasteful production if you can overlook all those tense shots that leave the audience wondering whether the stewardess with her back to the camera will have her throat slit in this shot or the next. Otherwise, though, it’s a model of restraint, holding off on the ominous music cues until the end and reducing the potentially jingoistic dialogue on the plane to a troubled whisper. Much like Clint Eastwood’s <i>Letters from Iwo Jima</i>, most of the praise lavished on <i>United 93 </i>simply and uncritically celebrates the fact that the filmmakers took a humanistic approach as opposed to a racist one, which I suppose constitutes some sort of achievement in this day and age. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">But to congratulate Greengrass and Co. for recreating the events of the United 93 hijacking without stooping to virile, patriotic rallying cries elides the larger problems of the film. One must wonder, as did <a href="http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/29725_UNITED_NINETY_THREE">Jonathan Rosenbaum</a> and the millions of habitual filmgoers who avoided this picture, how edifying such a tasteful recreation could ever be. True to Greengrass’s painfully neutral method, there’s no background here, no intimation that the attacks had any substantial basis in political, socioeconomic, or religious terms. Without any explanation or context, the incident is reduced to, or perhaps circumscribed within the boundaries of, irrational horror. It’s a film that asks its spectators to reconfigure an abstract tragedy as an immediate one, perhaps reclaiming a political event as a personal one. But no matter how visceral the violation becomes, is not the end still an essentially vulgar desire to declare, ‘I know how it felt on that plane; I saw the movie’? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">A friend has suggested that <i>United 93</i> can be read as indictment of divided labor and modernity’s malaises. I don’t begrudge him that interpretation, nor would I deny anyone the right to suggest, for example, that one of the film’s radical humanistic gestures—its insistence that the hijackers were, in their own way, just as frightened and confused as the passengers—proffers a subtle but crippling blow to the neoconservative project of making ‘Islamofascism’ sound like the most formidable and resilient threat ever dealt to the Republic. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">But most every interpretation of the film wanders like that, assaying the terrorist attacks, their aftermath, and their representation here as one big, unsettled metaphor awaiting exegesis. Political opinions, well-grounded or inchoate, masquerade as film criticism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Approaching <i>United 93</i> as a curious cultural object rather than as a work of art (with all the intentionality and efficacy of expression that implies) seems more fruitful at present. As I wrote earlier, the film seems like an artifact from a culture still unable to come to terms with something. Instead of educating its audience about 9/11, <i>United 93</i> packages an incomprehensible tragedy in familiar showbiz terms. A mix of slasher movie suspense and procedural teledrama, <i>United 93</i> attempts to demonstrate that even the most complex events can be understood through the discourses concocted by the entertainment industry. So total and surreal was the devastation that for the first few weeks after 9/11 it was almost a cliché to declare that the attacks resembled the improbable images of a blockbuster movie. Now <i>United 93 </i>has brought us full circle by suggesting that the hijackings actually <i>could</i> be translated faithfully to entertainment conventions. Nothing lies outside the domain of the movies.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Hollywood movies also serve as the main reference point for <i>The Host</i>, Bong Joon-ho’s skillful monster movie that became South Korea’s biggest blockbuster to date. <i>The Host</i>, like every Spielberg film, is about rebuilding a family amidst extraordinary and often horrific circumstances. Killing the rampaging monster isn’t just a matter of civil service or even survival instinct—it’s about making the world safe again for daddy-daughter time. The heavy debt to Spielberg is thrown into relief by minor deviation from the blockbuster template, whether it be the soft critique of American imperialism or the entrancing moment when collective mourning becomes the stuff of a raucous comedy routine. And yet to celebrate <i>The Host </i>because it tweaks the political position and emotional range of the standard-issue Spielberg blockbuster demands an impoverished criterion of judgment; like <i>The Wild Bunch </i>or <i>Far from Heaven</i>, <i>The Host</i> only works as art if a mildly revisionist impulse to lampoon genre convention is accepted as the basis for aesthetic profundity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">On its own terms, though, <i>The Host </i>serves well enough as a diverting, riveting two hours of digital entertainment. The insinuations of deliberate environmental degradation, capitulation to American military might, and opportunistic use of disaster as a pretext for political suppression announce <i>The Host</i> a topical variation on an old formula. Like the other recent apocalypse films, there is self-consciousness about the enterprise—a desire to entertain mixed with a fashionable nod to vague political disillusionment. And also like the rest, the apparent need to dress up old-fashioned thrills in topical guise is ultimately more informative than any of the political statements these movies purport to make. Just as <i>United 93</i> assures us that there’s no trauma too messy for the medium to unravel, <i>The Host</i> settles our conscience about consuming destruction-as-spectacle by according both destruction and spectacle a tinge of currency and savvy. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Mel Gibson’s <i>Apocalypto </i>upholds this politicizing impulse even when superficially straying from it. Gibson takes something genuinely exotic—the death throes of a lost civilization, rendered in a dialect unfamiliar to nearly everyone in the audience—and makes it recognizable in a droll, daffy way. Jaguar Paw and his people are presented, from the very first scene, in terms lifted from the Hollywood buddy comedies of the last two decades—a subgenre almost inseparable from Gibson himself. Unlike <i>United 93</i> and <i>The Host</i>, there’s no suggestion of Us vs. Them here—men everywhere, in every culture, crack stupid jokes about small penises. Humiliation humanizes us all. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The second half of the film, an extended chase sequence, is pure grindhouse junk edited more intelligently than usual. The grotesque set pieces—a panther mauling, a man ripped apart by a hunter’s trap—get the down-and-dirty job done, eliciting hoots and cheers from the cheap seats. It’s this section where the film’s pretensions are most incompatible with its skeezy models and their rather primitive means of audience engagement.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Up until that point, Gibson had been spinning some kind of allegory about civilizations in decline. In interviews, the director compared the Mayan human sacrifice rituals graphically realized in <i>Apocalypto </i>to the Iraq War, with the implication that prolonged Mideast conflict will bring denizens of Western Civilization to the level of snarling savages again. The racial politics behind <i>Apocalypto</i> are troubling indeed, not least in the abrupt finale in which the chase comes to an end on a beach where friend and foe observe the arrival of several ominous conquistador vessels. Are the Spanish meant as some divine corrective to indigenous decadence? Or does their arrival instead constitute the most brilliant anti-climax in movie history, a tectonic shift in the moral order that renders the preceding two hours a quaint lark? As a friend put it much more succinctly: conquistadors—<i>deus</i> or <i>deus ex machina</i>? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">How one reads the film’s ideological project depends largely on whether one thinks Disney would be demented enough to spend millions of dollars on a movie that consciously floats a thesis that might be summed up, in classic grindhouse fashion, as ‘They had it comin’ to ‘em!’ As with <i>The Passion of the Christ</i>, the film’s incidents demand to be read allegorically, even for audiences accustomed to more casual viewing practices.<i> </i>Gibson’s violence—so excessive and so abundant as to run contrary to any principle of narrative economy—exhausts thrill, momentum, spectacle, catharsis, and every other showbiz justification for putrid gore so early in the game that the only rationale left is that the Violence Means Something. Make no mistake: that flesh was ripped apart for our sins. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Alfonso Cuarón’s <i>Children of Men</i> brilliantly combines and contradicts all of the impulses and strategies outlined above. Like the others it might be accused of imaging the apocalypse not as a unique, world historical event but as the culmination of slick genre exercises. To regard the film’s relentless and haggard drive towards anti-climax and death as a critique of the action genre’s more heroic and bombastic impulses—in other words, to commend <i>Children of Men </i>for minor deviations from a well-oiled framework—would be just as disingenuous a position as saying that <i>United 93</i> lends gravity to 9/11. There is a moment towards the end of <i>Children of Men </i>in which the sound of an infant crying—so familiar to all and yet alien to everyday human experience for the past eighteen years of an infertile Earth—very nearly halts a scene of urban warfare. We see where this sentimental interlude is going: the fighters recover their humanity at the sound of untarnished innocence and drop their arms, embracing and smothering each other with the kisses of universal brotherhood. Instead, the mortar fire resumes after a few seconds of awed silence. The apocalypse continues unabated. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">What would one really be admiring here: the morose thesis, the upending of a genre expectation so perfectly prepared, or Cuarón’s calculated skill in making the consumption of the same old Hollywood goods look like anything but? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Likewise, the film’s politics are, to put it generously, confused: protest and conformity, opposition and authority form two indistinguishable positions in England, 2027. According to <i>Children of Men</i>, the Government decries dissent as an act of terrorism—which might be a pungent critique of the former if the film weren’t so intent on showing that left-wing political activists do tend to act like terrorists and greedy, sadistic, narrow-minded ones at that. <i> </i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><i>Children of Men </i>vividly portrays a political disaster <i>in medias res</i>, its instigators and its redeemers equally contemptible and equally unfit to fix any of it. With outrageous crimes met with equally preposterous and cynical resistance, the film alternates between being a call-to-arms and a call-to-complacency. The only hope for salvation comes in the form of one woman shepherded by one man to one island in one corner of the world where one baby might reverse the fate of mankind.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">What a smug, shrill, nihilistic idea for a movie this is. The camerawork saves it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Rather than imparting lessons about the present through appropriating familiar styles, <i>Children of Men </i>forges a new one. Of course, the mise en scene is not entirely original; in fact, it might be described as a version of Tarkovsky’s <i>The Sacrifice</i> engineered for the Playstation 2 console. And yet this shot-gun marriage is a harmonious—and, what’s more, expressive—one. The long takes conceived by Cuarón and his cameraman, Emmanuel Lubezki, are unabashedly virtuosic, which should normally be understood as a limitation for art. But these one-shot sequences—notably the attack on the car early on or the siege on the tenement much later—are all about creating a world in such focused, uncompromised detail that its destruction might be more deeply felt. The imagery throughout is concentrated without devolving into symbols. Whether one writes off the conceit of shooting an attack on a car from angles inside and outside that car without a single obtrusive cut as empty showmanship or not, it’s difficult to deny that the image of Clive Owen and Julianne Moore spitting a ball back and forth between each other’s lips is an affecting and novel but perfectly comprehensible vision of love, trust, comfort, and, ultimately, symbiosis. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Many of the film’s images possess the immediate legibility of ideograms—impressions of rage, despair, and fleeting love. Because the images flow so supplely from one to the next, the frame itself takes on the air of a squalid sanctuary. When the delicate, xenophobic police state collapses towards the end of the film, anonymous Homeland Security officials haul Pam Ferris (who plays Miriam, a maternal, good-hearted dyke who helps to guide Owen, Moore, and a very pregnant Claire-Hope Ashitey) off a bus and throw her up against a fence alongside other hooded prisoners. We see it all from Owen and Ashitey’s point-of-view, from the bus window: a rifleman paces back and forth, inspecting the victims. We drift away without seeing a shot fired—we don’t have to. That’s the material logic behind the style: in this world, slipping from the view of the anxious camera is tantamount to death itself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">One more thing about <i>Children of Men</i>: around the edges there are images and ideas drawn from the television news of the last five years. Headlines, slogans, music cues, snapshots, and, in the scene described above, allusions to the infamous images of Abu Ghraib. These political references are, in the context of a film that treats its nihilism and defeatism seriously and rigorously, admittedly problematic. <i>Time </i>once described <i>Stars Wars</i>—that pop amalgam of John Ford and Leni Riefenstahl—as ‘a subliminal history of the movies’; in much the same manner, <i>Children of Men </i>is a subliminal history of Anglo-American politics since 9/11—pilfering an image here and there, stripping it of its political context, and offering it anew for all its emotional and dramaturgical value. In this sense, <i>Children of Men </i>is a powerful, vexing collage of familiar images. Each workaday atrocity flashes on the screen for the moment and shakes us from the genre routine perfected by the other apocalypse thrillers. Instead of trying to construct a history that supplants ours, <i>Children of Men</i> lets the pain of our world suture its own. It resembles being roused from a nightmare and then slipping right back into another one. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-40456088574685680752007-08-19T15:10:00.002-07:002009-08-22T14:04:07.627-07:00Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Prognosticators regarded Leo McCarey’s <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i> as a solid melodrama with moderate feminine appeal upon its original release. ‘Obviously grooved for femme fans,’ reported <i>Variety</i>. The film opened on Mother’s Day, 1937 but flopped, likely on the basis of its grim premise and lack of star power. Indeed, this depiction of love in the midst of impossible circumstances plucked the heartstrings but at the same time wrenched them into a grotesque tangle that left most viewers feeling beat down and miserable. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The story followed an elderly couple (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) cast out of their home by a foreclosure. They seek aid from their grown children (among them Thomas Mitchell and Elisabeth Risdon), who reluctantly put them up. The old folks find the children and their spouses to be petty and irritable, accidentally cruel but intentionally indifferent. Moore and Bondi must be separated if both are to be accommodated within the children’s limited means. Only fifty years of memories and the possibility of a long distance telephone call binds them together—though not without the awareness that the money used for the phone call might be better spent on a winter scarf. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Four years earlier John Ford’s <i>Pilgrimage </i>(a brilliantly modulated series of genre-bridging sketches that still awaits rediscovery) had been a box office success. Like <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i>, <i>Pilgrimage </i>revolved around generational conflict and relied upon the performance of a homely, elderly woman (Henrietta Crosman) for its pathos. Crosman, a theater veteran, played a crotchety and despondent kind of heroine—not in the least the bubbly, romantic lead that audiences had rightly come to expect from the Dream Factory. The anti-glamour gamble paid off in 1933 but failed in 1937. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Admittedly, the two pictures are quite different in other respects. <i>Pilgrimage </i>explicitly pitches carnal desire against conservative mores: Crosman, who’d rather send her son to die in the Great War than see him carouse with a local hussy, begins as a representative of the old values but gradually evolves to a more tolerant and sympathetic position. The story of her pilgrimage to her son’s grave in France follows an uplifting narrative arc that emphasizes personal growth and enlightenment. Maternal love may sometimes take a stubborn form, but it comes around. No such optimism (or, if you like, pandering) marks <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i>. Here the generational divide stems from nothing much—social engagements that lay the trap for minor embarrassments, suspicions towards a doctor who looks too young or a shopkeeper who sounds too eager, routine gossip and well-intentioned promises, unfashionable frugality that supersedes middle-class hierarchy and manners. It is a collection of misdemeanors and misunderstandings, the stuff that makes for undramatic conflicts and speaks more for a common strain of human frailty than it does for a fiery breach of moral values, whether old-fashioned or new-fangled. The drama is also undercut by a lack of rousing catharsis. Because, at their base, the conflicts in the story emerge from trifling squabbles there is little of substance to overcome and few lessons to be learned. The film begins with a famous creed but were all the problems really reducible to the children neglecting to Honor Thy Mother and Thy Father the power of the piece would be much reduced. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Make Way for Tomorrow</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> is a Depression picture that flails here and there at the socioeconomic tribulations of the times but ultimately treats them softly. The progressive film historian Lewis Jacobs, writing in 1939, believed that the film ‘dramatized the necessity for an old-age security system.’ That’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from the film’s effect and its outline but not from its realization. ‘Had this picture been called <i>Why?</i>,’ speculated Jacobs, ‘it would have been denounced as blatant propaganda.’ But the film is not called <i>Why?</i> and its pathos are not a matter of prescription. Safety nets don’t solve the interpersonal void at the heart of this film. This is no fable and no agitprop, but instead a melancholy observation about the emotional violence that springs from the best intentions of fallible human beings.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">To find comparable melancholy one must look to this famous exchange in Ozu’s <i>Tokyo Story</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span></span></div><blockquote style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">NORIKO: But children do drift away from their parents. A woman has her own life, apart from her parents when she becomes Shige’s age. So she meant no harm, I’m sure. They have to look after their own lives. <o:p></o:p><br />
KYOKO: I wonder. I won’t ever be like that. Then what’s the point of being family?<o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
NORIKO: It is… But children become like that gradually.<o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
KYOKO: Then—you, too?<o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
NORIKO: Yes. I may become like that, in spite of myself.<o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
KYOKO: Isn’t life disappointing?<o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
NORIKO: Yes, it is.</span></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Ozu, a fan of American movies whose early works reveal the influence of Sternberg and Vidor, had never seen <i>Make Way for Tomorrow </i>but his writing partner Noda Kogo had. That McCarey’s picture had an influence on Ozu’s classic film accounts for much of the limited recognition <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i> enjoys among cinephiles today. Both films’ melancholy emerges from a vague sense of disenchantment with time’s drift and the inevitability of love’s dissolution into fragments of pain. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">And yet, next to <i>Tokyo Story</i>, <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i> seems crude at first. McCarey lacks Ozu’s unique ability to situate his characters in a rigorously delineated space. The film lacks the texture of <i>Tokyo Story</i>—the sense of a lifestyle reflected in the choice of wallpaper patterns, flower arrangements, umbrella cans, coat racks, and the like. In <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i>, the walls are often barren and white and the compositions less complex on the whole. As storytelling, Ozu’s technique looks more deliberatively and thoughtfully elliptical than McCarey’s approach. Ozu forgoes conventional exposition and instead lets his audience arrive at the characters’ relationships and temperaments through conjecture and observation. In contrast, the abrupt elisions in McCarey’s narrative—such as the details of the scandal of the granddaughter’s late night trysts, precipitated in part by the Bondi’s presence—feel less organic and more like compromises with the Production Code. That is, the style of the film comes from regimented industrial practice more than it does the personal sensibility hypothetically exemplified by Ozu’s pictures. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The goal of the forgoing discussion was to ground <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i> in what it lacks—glamour, uplift, fashionable themes, neat social directives, rigorous staging, personal technique—so as to better understand its considerable and unique assets. To say that the film is moving—and it is, supremely so, moreso than <i>Pilgrimage</i> and a whole host of other very fine melodramas, even perhaps <i>Tokyo Story</i>—explains some of its appeal but by no means all.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The performance style is worth noting. Moore and Bondi, the latter heavily made-up to look a good twenty years older than she was, read their lines at an eccentric clip. At first their pauses suggest bad actors struggling to remember their lines, revealing but not integrating that nervousness in their performances. But as we watch the performances begin to suggest something quite different—an acting style wholly divorced from theatrical <i>bon mots</i> and banter. There is weight behind these tremendous performances—a sense of the struggle to articulate complex feelings finally unrushed by fashion or pride. When Bondi delivers a speech towards the end about how people should expect a fixed amount of happiness, doled out in chunks here and there or thinly but constantly, her rhythm is perfect: it fits a moment when this woman realizes that she’s considering, explaining, defying, doubting, and justifying her unhappiness all in the same breath. Each clutch of words functions as a discrete unit that the speaker knows will amount to some horrific, insurmountable curse when strung together. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">At other points, though, the performances are jubilant. It is the old folks who come off as child-like, winking at each other behind their children’s backs and expressing distasteful reactions through irreverent gestures. And Moore’s shopkeeper friend, played expertly by Maurice Moscovitch, dispenses his grim pronouncements about family life from on high with all the aplomb of an unshakable cynic on the Yiddish vaudeville circuit. This multiplicity of emotional registers here accounts for a large part of the film’s greatness, allowing each transition from play to profundity to feel all the more unaccountable. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">By and large the strategy of <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i> is to profit from the parts left out and consequently build its effects from sudden realizations. We know from the beginning that Moore and Bondi have been married for fifty years but it takes considerable screen time for the weight of this passage of time to emerge. There are no flashbacks in <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i> and few concrete reminiscences about the past. When the couple does try to talk about their honeymoon, they find themselves arguing about the details—and it’s never clear whether the illegibility of the past has to do with the enfeeblement of aging or with personalities prone to gentle stubbornness from the start. <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i> takes considerable advantage of the medium’s present-tense mode: there is no slippery ambiguity, as there would be in literary fiction, between a simple verbal description of a thing past and an absorbing reverie of it. No, here there is talk of the past but it is always just a murmur and a groping towards something, as we are reminded with every frame, not present. In a novel, words conjure up the past until it seems as vivid as the narrative exposition of the present, itself also a jumble of words; in this film we are always reminded that words can remain only that. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Without many topical references, it takes some time before we come to realize, evident as it should be, that the past the couple shares reaches back into the nineteenth century. Only when they begin to stroll through a rear-projection simulation of Central Park do we come to consider exactly what that past looked like and meant: theirs is not the New York of trendy Park Avenue and ritzy Broadway but New York as captured in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Jacob Riis. That world has vanished without a trace and without any allusions to hint at its character. Even when they visit the Vogart, the hotel of their honeymoon, the past and all it implies lie beyond reach: after a kind clerk points to a picture of how the lobby looked fifty years before, we cut to a close-up of that picture and then track out. The conventions of the time lead us to believe that this is the cue for a flashback or a recreation of the world of the photograph, but as the camera tracks back we see Moore and Bondi just as hobbled and aged as before. There is no revelation, only distance defined anew.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The camera style of <i>Make Way for Tomorrow </i>is not quite as negligible as the comparison to Ozu seemed to suggest. It is difficult to recall another film of the period that so abjures the editing syntax of Hollywood filmmaking. Most, though not all, of the conversations captured by McCarey’s camera unfold in messy master shots wherein the characters glance askance and rarely meet each other’s gazes. There is a minimum of cutting back and forth when two people speak, perhaps because that rhythm on its own implies a pattern and a simple exchange of ideas that would be inappropriate in a film about the breakdown of communication and sympathy. In no other film I know do the backs of characters linger so long and so intensely in the compositions. (The much more self-conscious opening of <i>Vivre sa vie</i> is excepted for obvious reasons.) The style of <i>Make Way for Tomorrow</i>, in short, avoids flash but manages to cultivate highly complex effects from the exquisite blankness of the materials. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-43828660656410252952007-08-17T13:53:00.005-07:002009-08-26T22:15:59.162-07:00Book Review: The Story of Film<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Due to forces not yet fully understood, the remainder tables of America’s corporate bookstores have adopted Mark Cousins’s <i>The Story of Film</i> as a central bargain attraction. Cousins’s revisionist take on film history, 1888 to present, doesn’t seem much at home next to the latest Biskind sleaze-fest or another Marilyn Monroe peek-a-boo collection, but why look a gift horse in the mouth? For five dollars, Americans of every stripe can now be exposed to provocative theses about the history of cinema. That a book arguing, in somewhat populist terms, the centrality of Ozu to the development and poetics of world cinema has found its way to the bargain bins should be recorded for cultural posterity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The Ozu bit is one of Cousins’s more provocative polemical choices. He argues, contra academic habit, that the real classical cinema was made not in Hollywood between 1917 and 1960 but in Japan during the thirties and forties. Classicism, the thinking goes, describes a certain kind of unadorned and natural unity between form and content, not simply musty memories of a cherished golden age. Hence, Ozu and Naruse and Mizoguchi become the exemplars of the medium. Cousins leaves aside Shimizu Hiroshi who seems to these eyes, at least on the evidence of <i>Forget Love for Now</i> and <i>Japanese Girls at the Harbor</i>, equally important in articulating a classical style in Japanese cinema, but why quibble with the minor omissions of a book so thoroughly committed to expanding the canon of cinema? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">At this point I should mention that Cousins does succeed in livening up the standard accounts of film history, not least through flashing forward and backward on occasion to draw unorthodox parallels between the stylistic tropes of, say, <i>The Best Years of Our Lives</i> and <i>Sátántangó</i>. What’s more, there are titles and filmmakers here that even the seasoned cinephile will not immediately recognize. Cousins speaks of Indian filmmaker Baburao Painter and Spaniard Florián Rey in the same breath as Stroheim and Flaherty, all filmmakers who ‘in their social awareness or anthropological ambitions, their meticulous commitment to naturalistic detail and their anxiety about capitalism and exclusion … indicate[d] how incomplete was the view of the world reflected in closed romantic realism.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">‘Closed romantic realism’ is a politically-correct label of Cousins’s own invention meant to supplant the problematic ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ one alluded to above. The ‘closed romantic realism’ business is a slightly disparaging way of summarizing the whole tradition of Hollywood moviemaking, acknowledging that it stands as a phony (closed) and naively evasive (romantic) imitation of the real world while still maintaining some plastic and narrative semblance to it (realism). Fair enough, but I fear that Cousins’s sober and catholic approach to film history only erects new critical blindspots. While Cousins helpfully cites some unheralded dissenters from around the globe, he also counts King Vidor as one who ‘rejected close romantic realism’ on the basis of <i>The Crowd</i>. As a partisan of that film, I would argue that <i>The Crowd</i> illustrates the stylistic and political flexibility possible under the not-quite-so-monolithic Hollywood mode of production. Cousins seems to be suggesting the same thing, but can’t come out to say it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">What’s more, he devotes several pages to ‘postmodern innovators’ like Tarantino and the ‘lively independent production sector’ exemplified by Soderbergh and Hartley but ignores entirely true American independents like Charles Burnett and Billy Woodberry whose rejection of traditional narrative modes would seem perfectly in line with Cousins’s objective to cover ‘great, original films which seem not to have had an impact on successive filmmakers, because they were made in Africa, or poorly distributed, or flopped at the box office, or were directed by a woman, or were misunderstood or banned.’ Other questions: if originality and influence serve as equally valid criteria for inclusion, why are Deren and Warhol included while Brakhage, Kubelka, and countless others are left out? How can one write about Hollywood as ‘closed romantic realism’ and neglect to discuss Frank Borzage, the director who, more than any other, defined, exemplified, and justified that sensibility? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Cousins illuminates certain obscure corners of film history and ignores others that would seem to complicate his theses. The explanations and frameworks are often beguiling and curious but frequently not terribly rigorous. Still, there’s a spirit and openness of inquiry here that more than fulfills Cousins’s stated aim of writing ‘an accessible, jargon-free movie history for general readers and those who are beginning to study film.’ Though imperfect, <i>The Story of Film </i>is better than most any other introductory text book on the subject, despite an appalling number of typographical errors the professionalism of the enterprise.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">For more experienced scholars and cinephiles, <i>The Story of Film</i> will appear to be an obvious improvement on the familiar and limited texts that they themselves suffered through on the way to finding the real cinema. Beyond that, Cousins’s text is problematic. Some paragraphs promise exciting discoveries, such as the one devoted to Murata Minoru’s <i>Souls on the Road</i>, a 1921 Japanese production that Cousins brackets with the much more canonical <i>Intolerance</i> and <i>The Phantom Chariot </i>as an example of films juggling multiple epochs through intercutting. I’d never heard of <i>Souls on the Road</i> before picking up Cousins’s book. Does it survive? Do any archives have a print? Cousins doesn’t provide any filmographies that answer these questions. Instead, only this note at the end of the introduction:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><blockquote style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small;">I have rewatched almost every film mentioned in this book. In some cases, however, that has not been possible. In these instances, I’m relying on memories of previous viewings. In addition, there are about forty films mentioned which I have never seen. Either prints of them no longer exist or I have been unable to track them down. They are included because filmmakers or historians have made a case for their importance.</span></blockquote><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;">That’s quite candid for the author of a work of this scope. Near as I can tell, though, nowhere in Cousins’s narrative does he note that any particular title is lost to neglect and nitrate decay. He does not distinguish in his prose between the extant and the vanished, thus substantially reducing the credibility and utility of his prefatory remarks.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-81856675919816215682007-08-09T09:15:00.008-07:002009-08-26T22:22:08.037-07:00On Marginality, Part III<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: arial; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"> <span style="font-style: italic;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">This post constitutes the last of three parts about the genesis and implications of Joseph Cornell's </span>Rose Hobart<span style="font-style: italic;">. <a href="http://motionwithinmotion.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-marginality-part-i.html">[Part One]</a></span> <span style="font-style: italic;"> <a href="http://motionwithinmotion.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-marginality-part-ii.html">[Part Two]</a></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Rose Hobart</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 100%;"> is no more the key to Joseph Cornell than Rosebud is the key to Charles Foster Kane. And yet there is something essential in <i>Rose Hobart</i>, something beyond star worship and beyond a jocular affection for mismatched eyeline takes. Cornell is, by one light, the most avant-garde of avant-garde filmmakers—not just in his total suppression of narrative momentum but in his expression of concerns defined almost wholly by his status as an avant-garde filmmaker. <i>Rose Hobart</i> is about marginality, among other things—marginality implicit in the act of watching lovely shadows on a screen, marginality as defined by the viewer’s distance to the actress, and, I would like to argue, a kind of kinship through marginality where the distance between enchanted viewer and B-movie actress is bridged by their common home on the cinematic outskirts. He, a moviemaker without a camera; she, an actress whose face rarely graces a trade paper ad, whose private life remains unexploited by the gossip mongers. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 100%;">Rather than exploiting Hobart as his private plaything, Cornell illuminates the fragility of her persona: his scissors impugn her autonomy no more and no less than those of the studio editors. Out of <i>East of Borneo</i> he creates something new—but it is a form fully conscious of the newness of <i>East of Borneo</i>, its own cuts just as phantom as his. Cornell, I think, understood that, properly speaking, there may be one <i>East of Borneo</i>—a sordid little eight-reeler running seventy-four minutes—alongside a countless number of alternate versions: heavily scratched 35mm copies; dupey 16mm reduction prints (as was the material source of <i>Rose Hobart</i>); this particular reel or that one; this moment or that one; <i>East of Borneo</i> as a sourcebook of delirious fantasy; <i>East of Borneo</i> as imagined by the child who has heard about it but not seen it yet; <i>East of Borneo </i>as imagined by an adult who read Morduant Hall’s <i>Times</i> review and hesitates to buy a ticket; <i>East of Borneo </i>as remembered after the house lights rise again the theatre, or perhaps inadvertently for the first time after the space of many barren years, now available only as a series of fragments and incomplete gestures. <i>Rose Hobart</i> is a reverie of <i>East of Borneo</i>: the images that come to one’s mind when another speaks its title, accompanied by the sounds of Brazil—not the real sounds of Brazil but the atmosphere of Brazil the arm chair voyager accesses through a Nestor Amaral LP. Its star Rose Hobart is cast adrift in the ether of memory and photography, her image only made meaningful and full again through a sympathetic viewer. As in Warhol’s later silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe, only through extreme artifice—that is, visions blatantly truncated from their original commercial context and presented anew—are the ubiquitous star images allowed a measure of unsuppressed personality. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Though composed five years after the premiere of <i>Rose Hobart</i>, a brief Cornell piece from <i>View</i> magazine on Hedy Lemarr seems still the best guide for understanding the artist’s method and motivation:</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Among the barren wastes of the talking films there occasionally occur passages to remind one again of the profound and suggestive power of the silent film to evoke an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human countenance in its prison of silver light. But aside from evanescent fragments unexpectedly encountered, how often is there created a superb and magnificent imagery such as brought to life the portraits of Falconetti in “Joan of Arc,” Lillian Gish in “Broken Blossoms,” Sibirskaya in “Menilmontant,” and Carola Nehrer in “Driegroschenoper?”<br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><br />
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">And so we are grateful to Hedy Lamarr, the enchanted wanderer, who again speaks the poetic and evocation language of the silent film, if only in whispers at times, besides the empty roar of the soundtrack…. At the end of “Come Live with Me” the picture suddenly becomes luminously beautiful and imaginative with its nocturnal atmosphere and incandescence of fireflies, flashlights, and aura of tone as rich as the silver screen can yield.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 100%;">Even a viewer more sympathetic to the talkie revolution than Cornell is apt to see his point; Hollywood photography between 1931 and 1941—that is, between <i>East of Borneo </i>and <i>Come Live with Me</i>—seems, to my eyes at least, a golden age of studio photography, the decade during which even the shoddiest of Hollywood features possessed—either through accident or through simple competence—a few glimmering moments. To cite two examples from the beginning of the cycle: neither John Francis Dillon’s 1932 sleaze sideshow <i>Call Her Savage</i> or Sidney Franklin’s 1931 adaptation of <i>Private Lives</i> is a masterpiece, but each contain moments of shimmering glamour that accord Clara Bow and Norma Shearer all the luminance of Dietrich in a Sternberg Valentine. The same holds true for Karl Struss’s work on <i>The Story of Temple Drake</i> or Joseph Walker’s on <i>It Happened One Night</i>, a Poverty Row quickie turned Academy darling thanks to unexpected Heartland popularity, with moments of lyricism worthy of comparison to Murnau’s <i>Sunrise</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">What Cornell saw in <i>East of Borneo </i>and <i>Come Live with Me</i>—and what any astute film historian can see given the chance to view most any two random studio programmers from the thirties—is a kind of unconscious grace hidden amid the studio rubble. Note Cornell’s adjective <i>enchanted</i>—the mortal Hedy Lamarr (or Rose Hobart) possessed by the spirit of art without being aware of it. The <i>unconscious</i> part is key: art created accidentally, almost in direct contradiction to one’s orders and plans, a serendipitous moment of beauty that slipped past everyone’s notice. Cornell’s role of curator is a fiercely democratic one—revealing the unconscious depths of poetry within the damaged goods of forgotten product. Cornell may make <i>East of Borneo</i> unintelligible on the level of plot, but he simultaneously makes legible its unintended poetry. No accident that <i>Rose Hobart</i> is framed by an eclipse—everything in between is one long, privileged moment, a journey into the ideal world of beauty that only happens once in a blue (or, in some prints, pink) moon.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"></span></span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-73974413232856510162007-08-07T18:41:00.002-07:002009-08-26T22:12:03.571-07:00Zodiac (2007)<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;">According to a number of internet critics, Fincher’s 160-minute police procedural is some kind of a masterpiece. It’s a gripping piece for much of its length and the editing is so fluid as to suggest a new classicism unfolding before our eyes. I’m thinking especially of the swirl of images and dialogue as Fincher criss-crosses his locations (the <i>Chronicle</i> office, the city police station, the county police station, etc.) as each party learns of a new bit of evidence. It’s the closest any filmmaker has come to adapting the propulsive, multi-camera modern shooting style (inherited from television) into a genuine aesthetic.</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;">It’s masterful but it’s no masterpiece. There’s brilliant, elegantly expressed stuff dancing around the seams of <i>Zodiac</i>—nods to the racist fear-mongering of the era in a panicked police ABP, recurring jokes about how most Californians have no sense of the geography of their own state. But as a period piece, it’s skewed: the yellow walls of the <i>Chronicle</i> newsroom make a stronger impression than any of the brittle milieu that should be palpably surrounding them. This film says next to nothing about San Francisco in the early seventies and only a little more about media complicity in the commission of sensational crimes. What’s here is mainly an obsessive, unsolvable whodunit. At turns, it’s a rather pornographic one, too, with detailed imaginings of the Zodiac killer’s grisly murders; like most teen slasher films, we know what to expect when a young couple pulls off the side of the road. As Joanne Laurier writes in her <a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/snak-m13.shtml">review</a> for the World Socialist Web Site (a more consistently astute source for film criticism than you might expect), <i>Zodiac </i>falls so short of thoughtful critique that it’s virtually indistinguishable from the exploitative firestorm it purports to examine. Its method is more personal and insular but it’s just as evasive.<o:p></o:p><o:p></o:p><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Adept as it frequently is, </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">Zodiac </i><span style="font-family: georgia;">as a whole pales next to the sketch for a supremely creepy thriller buried in its eighth reel. By an extremely convoluted chain of speculation that bears no reprinting here, Jake Gyllenhaal finds himself in the home of another could-be-the-Zodiac, this one the proprietor of a repertory movie theater. He and Gyllenhaal descend to the basement, a dank pit stacked with rusty film canisters. There’s an expert template here for a thriller that draws parallels between the nocturnal musk of cinephilia and unfettered homicidal mania. It’s the seed for a grand metaphor to explore the aura of cinematic fatalism that stretches back to the days of nitrate film and the 1897 Charity Bazaar. It’s also, if only in contemplation, a much more interesting movie than </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">Zodiac </i><span style="font-family: georgia;">itself.</span></span><o:p></o:p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-67789485056547607222007-08-05T21:52:00.003-07:002009-08-26T22:26:40.937-07:00On Bergman and Antonioni<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">And so a chapter closes, or so we’re told. The obituaries that followed the news of two masters’ deaths were, as these things must be, standard-issue profiles drawn up well in advance. It took a few days for the much more interesting pieces to emerge, the ones that yoked together the deaths of the once-chic Italian and the always-dour Swede to make a Statement about the Death of the Art Cinema. The Sunday Arts sections led with these. The titles were suggestive enough: <a href="http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-op-schickel5aug05,0,1494615.story?coll=cl-movies">‘Ode to the ‘art’ film’</a> (Richard Schickel in the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>); <a href="http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2007/08/05/closing_credits/">‘Closing Credits’</a> (Ty Burr in the <i>Boston Globe</i>); <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/movies/05scot.html?ref=movies">‘Before Them, Films Were Just Movies’</a> (A. O. Scott in the <i>New York Times</i>). <o:p></o:p></span></span> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Most of these pieces were baby boomer reflections on spent youth long since passed and presented almost explicitly as such. Some outlets printed deflations, of course. New City syndicates across the country ran J. Hoberman’s <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/saying-goodbye-to-two-giants-of-cinema/16952/">essay</a> that ridiculed Bergman’s “high-middlebrow symbolism, evident metaphysical anguish and absence of challenging formal innovation [that] made his movies safe for college English departments.” And the New York Times Op-Ed page found space for Rosenbaum to post a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/opinion/04jrosenbaum.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin">harsh screed</a> in which he concluded “while Mr. Bergman’s films may have lost much of their pertinence, they will always remain landmarks in the history of taste.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Poor taste though it may be for Rosenbaum to consign Bergman to the category of ‘landmarks in the history of taste’ before the man’s ashes have had a moment to cool, the gushing think pieces essentially say the same thing. The appreciations of Bergman trot out the same hoary catchphrases and watchwords, ‘existential dread’ foremost among them. Few print any new observations or even suggest new ways of watching these films. The most deeply-felt moments in these articles are those in which the authors historicize the passing of Bergman and Antonioni, gliding over the works and focusing on the supposed death of serious cinema or film culture or halcyon days of critical consensus. It is, of course, the height of provincialism to treat foreign artists who made films within a specific cultural and personal context as important chiefly for their contributions to American moviegoing habits. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Schickel is the most up-front about this, even when he pretends he isn’t:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">The deaths on the same day of two masters of world cinema, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, naturally prompt gloomy end-of-an-era reflections </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">[…] But, in truth, what I've been mourning these past few days is not so much the passing of these difficult, masterful old men but of the cinematic era they dominated -- which sputtered out, its passing largely unremarked, well over 30 years ago.</span> <o:p></o:p></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Schickel’s piece is not, one supposes, a ‘gloomy end-of-an-era reflection’ because he knows <span style="font-style: italic;">that </span>happened over three decades ago. But his own account makes one suspicious:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">I'm talking about the international cinema culture that arose in the postwar 1940s and dominated not just the screens of the world but the sensibilities of a newly impassioned audience at least until the early '70s. I'm talking about Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray, the entire French New Wave (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Melville) and, lest we forget, the cheeky Czechs of the Prague Spring.</span> </blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> Much as Schickel would like to historicize art cinema, his own honor roll seems historically misleading. Ozu was scarcely seen outside neighborhood theaters on the West Coast until the very end of the ‘golden age of art house cinema,’ and even then he never attracted the kind of hip audience that flocked to Kurosawa and Fellini. Melville’s masterpiece, <i>Army of Shadows</i>, wasn’t distributed in the U.S. until last year. <i>Le Samourai</i> did play the circuit back then—in an English-dubbed print retitled <i>The Godson </i>to capitalize on a certain popular hit of the period. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">And what about Rossellini? Here’s Arthur Mayer, who distributed the first neorealist films in the U.S.:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><blockquote style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">“Open City” was generally advertised with a misquotation from <i>Life</i> adjusted to read: “Sexier than Hollywood ever dared to be,” together with a still of two young ladies deeply engrossed in a rapt embrace, and another of a man being flogged, designed to tap the sadist trade. The most publicized scene in “Paisan” showed a young lady disrobing herself with an attentive male visitor reclining by her side on what was obviously not a nuptial couch.</span></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">When <i>Open City </i>opened at Chicago’s Imperial Theater, it was an adult-only show advertised as a “<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">savage orgy of lust</span>!” What about the films he made with Ingrid Bergman? They were obviously ignored in their time or forgotten by the time Hollis Alpert wrote this in an infamous 1959 <i>Saturday Evening Review</i> piece:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><blockquote style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"> I hesitate to say that Bergman’s films are for the connoisseur, for that implies that their appeal is snobbish and even esoteric. It’s already possible to determine whether someone is middlebrow or upperbrow, depending on whether the word Bergman suggests Ingmar or Ingrid.</span></blockquote><o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The point that should be apparent from the above is this: rather than a time of national awakening to the possibility of film as art, the art house age represented by Bergman and Antonioni saw a new insistence on the division between art for us and dross for them. It was the age of Masscult and Midcult, to take a phrase from Dwight Macdonald, who, after much hand-wringing, decided that art could not, by definition, be available to the masses. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">That’s what these pieces overlook. They also assume that Bergman and Antonioni instigated auteurism. (Note that the <i>Los Angeles Times </i>also printed a side bar about those new ‘auteurs’: Cameron Crowe and M. Night Shyamalan.) It’s a related assumption, insofar as it elevates the sheen of the era over its historical details. Such terminological clumsiness obscures the schism that made film culture so vibrant in the period discussed—the fact that, for a vocal minority, the real auteurs were Hawks and Minnelli and Bresson. The Antonioni fans of the day would never have denigrated their god as an ‘auteur’: that was the word that Pauline Kael had ridiculed after Sarris suggested that Cukor had a more abstract style than Bergman. That we can today regard both Antonioni and, say, Sirk as great directors is progress from the past, but a position inconceivable without the battles that characterized that very past. Antonioni and Bergman represented one particular kind of cinema art and that was part of the point—an art genre that could be placed alongside, but more often presumed superior to, Manny Farber’s brand of termite art. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The truth is that films and film directors were taken very seriously before the art house era. Intellectuals of an earlier period surely did not need the Ingmar example to recognize that Griffith, Stroheim, Eisenstein, and Murnau were ‘personal’ or ‘distinctive’ artists even if they toiled in the tawdry movie industry. ‘Difficult’ films were indeed made before <i>The Seventh Seal</i>, though it would be irresponsible to suggest that <i>Limite</i>, <i>Vampyr</i>, <i>Borderline</i>, <i>Story of the Last Chrysanthemums</i>, <i>Ménilmontant</i>, <i>The Wind</i>, <i>Enthusiasm</i>, <i>At Land</i>, or <i>Moonrise</i> ever earned a comparable audience. (It should be noted, though, that for New Yorkers of a certain age, <i>The Blood of a Poet </i>and <i>Lot in Sodom</i> were the <i>Seventh Seal</i> of their generation.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">But Bergman and (to a lesser extent) Antonioni still constitute a significant strain in film and cultural history—the film of ‘personal expression’ that does not arise from the kind of national genre traditions or avant-garde responses to the same that could, with some thought, characterize all of the above examples. Bergman, his admirers insisted, always had something to do with Ibsen. True enough, but where is Bergman’s <i>The Doll’s House</i>? As Sarris, a lapsed Bergmaniac, noted in his original review of <i>Persona</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><blockquote style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"> Bergman had no politics to speak of—or to film of—simply because Sweden itself lacked significant political tensions .… Bergman’s metaphysical concerns might not have been as asocial if race riots exploded now and then in Stockholm. Bergman’s American admirers on the art-house circuit were nonetheless ripe for Bergman not only because his concerns were more relevant to the angst of sheer affluence, but because he seemed immune to the corruptions of mass taste. His small crew in Sweden was an eloquent rebuke to the massive apparatus of Hollywood films.</span></blockquote><o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Consider the social commentary in that film: Liv Ullman sees a monk burning himself to death on her television screen. She reacts, as she does to everything else in the movie, with silence. Some pundits have postulated that her silence springs from a sense of alienation from the modern world that can drive a Buddhist to suicide over the Vietnam War. But Bergman doesn’t say much about Vietnam or the Vietnamese here, only about the hysteria inculcated in its observers from afar. It’s the world as a metaphor for interior cacophony.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Bergman’s films are distinctive and unlike those of any one else. They are insular, but not in the same way as, say, Sukorov’s <i>The Second Circle</i>. They come from a comfortable—but not necessarily less valid—position within the Swedish film industry. Though he made dozens of films, Bergman is not just the Swedish Curtiz. He was not striving for continued relevance in a big industry where you were only as good as your last picture. His films reflect a certain degree of privilege, free from the protean striving that even crops up in a great, if glossy, MGM picture like Lubitsch’s <i>The Shop Around the Corner</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Of course, as Kael so gleefully noted, a bad director’s films would be just as distinctive and his oeuvre as perversely whole as those of a good director. So distinctiveness alone cannot be the sole criterion for excellence. In Bergman’s case, though, the distinctive stamp reaches autobiographical heights, as in <i>Fanny and Alexander</i> with its Lutheran minister who finds brittle glee in the anguish of others, setting his playthings up and watching them suffer. That’s the Bergman formula through and through. And yet the intensity of Bergman’s films—their air of confession and private disgrace, of a stillborn catharsis—preempts the charge that his work is slight. If great artists profit from an awareness of their limitations, then Bergman belongs in the first rank. Like Warhol’s films, Bergman’s work operates with the assumption that a small, carefully delimited slice of the world can be harrowing beyond means and therefore truthful beyond measure. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Antonioni’s scope is much more ambitious. His films often amount to desperate tests, the characters wandering through endless social and moral matrices and finding each wanting and not nearly as distinct as had been hoped. He also plays with the limits of the medium, but in a different way than Bergman does, reducing plot to incident and character to a set of gestures and glances. There is, for example, the entrancing moment in <i>L’eclisse</i> wherein Delon and Vitti bend behind the pillars of the stock exchange to glimpse one another in the crowd. Dramatically, there is nothing here, but that’s the point: Antonioni has shifted the very stuff of cinema. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Authorship is never an easy matter when speaking of films, though these two filmmakers foregrounded personal themes and styles as the clearest proof of it. It is, to me at least, a less interesting kind of authorship than Evgenii Bauer updating classic literature for the cinematic idiom or Sternberg using genre conventions and studio resources to realize personal fetishes or, for that matter, Navajo Indians <a href="http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/16367_NAVAJO_FILMS">recording their lives</a> at the instigation of anthropologists Adair and Worth. In the latter set of films, one really has a sense of the artist negotiating with the medium. These are first films in a more profound sense than is usually meant, for they are films unburdened with the history of the medium. The very rules of cinema are being discovered between the frames. Next to that, personal anguish artfully expressed looks cheap. And it goes without saying that selling one’s cinema as delicate episodes of personal expression (which, one should admit, Fellini did much more often than even Bergman) invites an equally subjective response. And where subjectivity is concerned, Bergman is easily too histrionic for those raised on Dreyer. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">For a generation of filmgoers, though, these personal visions exemplified all that was noble and notable in cinema. (Personal visions of the Bergman-Antonioni variety, not the Brakhage-Mekas one.) The introverted values inherent in their work should not be denied but nor should they be dismissed on that account. The danger, though, in waxing nostalgic about a time when American moviegoers were ready for serious, difficult works is that such an account implies, without much evidence, that they’re indifferent to these things now. Schickel cites expensive Hollywood clunkers of the moment and complains that a contemporary filmmaker like Leconte can’t compete. But that kind of equation ignores the fact that <i>Wild Strawberries</i> bloomed, in its own way, alongside <i>Ben-Hur</i> and that <i>Red Desert</i> opened in the shadow of <i>The Sound of Music</i>. “We would rather be teased than troubled,” writes Scott, “and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness…. I don’t believe that the art of filmmaking has necessarily declined since then (I’d quit my job if I did), but it seems clear the cultural climate that made it possible to hail filmmakers as supreme artists has vanished for good.” That sentiment is easy enough so long as Scott doesn’t bother to hail any living filmmakers as supreme artists. Have the last twenty years really been dominated by mindless blockbusters or did it just seem that way because most print critics have been looking for art in all the old places while ignoring new waves in Hong Kong and Taiwan? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Assuming that the youth of America will be bored by the high seriousness and slow pacing of art house pictures, as Burr does in his piece, is a less sophisticated version of the fears that were inaugurated by Sontag’s death of cinema piece over a decade ago. Blaming MTV and Spielberg and home video and a host of other demons only goes so far in explaining why the art house aesthetic died. A better explanation may be that taste-makers conceived art cinema so narrowly that the departure of two of its luminaries seemed tantamount to the death of the medium itself.<br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">UPDATE: </span>Via e-mail, it appears that the pieces discussed above are the cream of a very uneven <a href="http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/08/antonioni-and-bergman-bite-dust.html">crop</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-69113555222386542442007-08-03T10:00:00.005-07:002009-08-26T22:10:34.486-07:00Recent Screening Notes: Del Ruth and Tourneur<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><b><i>Taxi!</i> (1932) </b><br />
Here’s a film that doesn’t live up to its exclamation point. Roy Del Duth directs an early Cagney vehicle in which he plays an independent cab driver resisting mob pressure from Consolidated Cab Co. He eventually marries Loretta Young, the daughter of a veteran cab driver who finds himself in jail after shooting a mob heavy who tried to kick him off his corner in the first reel. The mob intrigue angle is quickly dropped and the film becomes a flaccid melodrama about the domestication of short-fuse Cagney. In this respect, it’s the tragic inversion of Ford’s <i>The Whole Town’s Talking </i>of 1935, in which Edward G. Robinson must convince his co-workers that, despite appearances, he really isn’t ‘Killer’ Manion. Both films are about the impossibility of ethnic character actors playing against type and getting away with it. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Despite the uneven script, <i>Taxi!</i> proves an occasionally lively production. There are some unaccountable documentary shots of New York which look all the more incongruous (and oddly surreal) next to the studio sets. And the second scene offers the unparalleled pleasure of James Cagney doing his shtick in Yiddish. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i style="font-weight: bold;">Lorna Doone </i><span style="font-weight: bold;">(1922)</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;">Maurice Tourneur offers his interpretation of Blackmore’s oft-filmed romance. I haven’t read that once-popular chestnut, but Tourneur’s version feels quite streamlined. He keeps his cutting to a minimum and develops a few choice scenes to the hilt. He focuses mostly on partings and reunions, constants in the courtship of Lorna Doone and John Ridd. The material leaves something to be desired, but the film confirms (as if it needed to) Tourneur’s mastery of staging and composition. Most of the major scenes begin in disarray, as characters dance around the frame until they find their way to their preordained places. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
This is a highly classical piece, with the emotional logic of character relationships conveyed succinctly in visual terms. One particularly unassuming but accomplished early scene finds Lorna and John standing in the foreground of a forest, speaking for the first time in ten years or more. John’s departure is drawn-out: he holds onto Lorna’s hand for as long as he can while slinking away into the midground and finally slipping away and receding into the background. Tourneur makes many important scenes pivot around the gradual revelation of frame depth. Though not a precise or wholly accurate label, Tourneur appears today to have been a singular and fastidious kind of classicist—the kind who stocked his big scenes with undulating shadows in the foreground to complement the action of the background and adhere to some unspoken, vaguely academic notion that each shot should include enough signposts to prove just how many planes the artist could deploy simultaneously.<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-48222438641265644842007-07-30T07:15:00.004-07:002009-08-26T22:33:09.799-07:00On Marginality, Part II<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: arial; text-align: justify;"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">This post constitutes the second of three parts about the genesis and implications of Joseph Cornell's </span><span style="font-size: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 0pt;">Rose Hobart</span></span><span style="font-style: italic;">. <a href="http://motionwithinmotion.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-marginality-part-i.html">[Part One]</a></span> <a href="http://motionwithinmotion.blogspot.com/2007/08/on-marginality-part-iii.html" style="font-style: italic;">[Part Three]</a></span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><i>Incomplete</i> is neither an epithet nor a judgment of <i>Rose Hobart</i> so much as a sad historical fact. The <i>urtext </i>of Cornell’s first film is frustratingly elusive: while all the extant copies of the film adhere to the same montage (a mélange of <i>East of Borneo</i>, along with some unidentified stock shots), the performative aspects of <i>Rose Hobart</i> have been in some state of dispute since 1936. For its premiere at the Julien Levy Gallery, Cornell reportedly screened his 16mm print of <i>Rose Hobart</i> at silent speed, through a blue glass, with musical accompaniment from a Nestor Amaral record <i>Holiday in Brazil</i>. Though ‘silent speed’ can refer to a range of different frame rates, <i>Rose Hobart</i> is usually screened or transferred to video at 18 frames per second—the probable ‘silent’ preset on most portable 16mm projectors—resulting in a uniform length of 19½ minutes. Color and sound are more contentious. When the first digital incarnation of <i>Rose Hobart</i> was presented on the fourth disc of the National Film Preservation Foundation’s <i>Treasures from American Film Archives</i> DVD boxset in 2000 (an expensive niche set, but still easily the widest distribution and exposure ever given to Cornell and his films), the film, taken from an Anthology Film Archives print, was bathed in deep lavender and accompanied by three tracks from the Amaral album—two instrumental and another vocal, called ‘Playtime in Brazil.’ When the film was released on <i>Magical Worlds of Joseph Cornell</i> disc put out by the Voyager Foundation through the Museum of Modern Art four years later, the color was a pale blue-purple and the soundtrack featured only two songs—both instrumental, and only one the same as on the Anthology/Treasures copy. To further complicate the matter, the Walker Museum holds a <i>pink</i> print of <i>Rose Hobart</i>—also the tint of the color plates from the film in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s widely-assigned <i>Film History: An Introduction</i> textbook. One suspects, though, that Cornell—an artist highly enamored of interactive objects, though that point is obscured when his boxes are presented under glass in museum collections—may have liked, or even wanted, it this way. [1] </span></span></span></div><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The <i>Rose Hobart</i> premiere is a storied event in the history of both modern art and avant-garde cinema. The legend is famous enough—an exasperated Salvador Dali interrupts the film, screaming “Salaud!” and (in some versions) kicking over the projector. The timid Cornell, legend has it, wondered aloud ‘Why, why—when he is such a great man and I am nobody at all?’ (Dali’s official reason for mischief: he had once considered making a film exactly like this, but never wrote it down; Cornell had <i>stolen</i> it—<i>from his subconscious</i>). The riot of one was enough to frighten Cornell away from showing his films publicly for three decades. Private screenings at the Cornell colonial on Utopia Parkway in Queens were the only way to see the film. Nevertheless, the absence of <i>Rose Hobart</i> from most accounts of film history until recently is still rather mysterious, especially given that the leading mainstream American film historian of the thirties, Lewis Jacobs, author of the ubiquitous <i>The Rise of the American</i> <i>Film</i>, was also himself an avant-garde filmmaker (<i>Footnote to Fact</i>, <i>Tree Trunk to Head</i>)<i> </i><span style="font-size: 0pt;">of</span> some repute in New York and a chronicler of that New York avant-garde scene in a 1949 survey published in Roger Manvell’s international <i>Experiment in the Film </i>anthology. The film history textbook trade, even when conceding space to Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and loose antecedents like Ralph Steiner, neglected Cornell’s films for many years; one will not find a reference to him in anything by Gerald Mast or Louis Giannetti. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Even most purported histories of the avant-garde or underground cinema sidestep the Cornell problem, either entirely (c.f., James Peterson’s <i>Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order</i>; David Curtis’s <i>Experimental Cinema: A Fifty-Year Evolution</i>; A.L. Rees’s <i>A History of Experimental Film and Video</i>, published in 1999 when Cornell’s films were certainly in circulation; or the <i>History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema</i> catalogue issued by the American Federation of the Arts) or reference Cornell’s later collaborations with Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, and Larry Jordan without discussing <i>Rose Hobart</i> at all (c.f., Sheldon Renan’s <i>An Introduction to the American Underground Film</i>). To their credit, P. Adams Pitney and Dominique Noguez (the latter writing in French) analyze the film and attempt to ascertain its influence in their respective histories, <i>Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978</i><i> </i>and <i>Une Renaissance du cinéma: le cinéma “underground” américain</i>—though both record <i>East of Borneo</i> as a Columbia release. Sitney even helpfully prints a hitherto unpublished Anthology Film Archives interview with Ken Jacob that puts to rest any assumption about the film’s influence on subsequent avant-gardists:</span> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I was seeing Jack [Smith] again and I told him, “Jack, you’ve got to see this movie.” We looked at it again and again, and we were both knocked out. Jack tried to act at first like a little bit removed, like I was overstating it, and then he broke down and said, “No, it’s very good.” We looked at it in every possibly way: on the ceiling, in mirrors, bouncing it all over the room, in corners, in focus, out of focus, with a blue filter that Cornell had given me, without it, backwards. It was just like an eruption of energy and it was another reinforcement of this idea I had for making this shit film [</span><i style="font-family: arial;">Star Spangled to Death</i><span style="font-family: arial;">] that would be broken apart and then again there would be an order.</span></span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-size: 0pt;"></span><o:p></o:p></span></div><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />
The circumstances of the premiere being what they were, one would expect some astute historian to seize upon the December evening as the American cinema’s <i>Rite of Spring</i>. Such a reading would, in the very least, be firmly in line with subsequent Cornell scholarship, which repeatedly revels in an almost gawking conflation of the artist’s life and work. Joseph Cornell: earl of Utopia Parkway, outsider artist toiling in his basement on brilliant Surrealist boxes to entertain his retarded brother to the indifference of his ailing mother. A homebody who never left New York, haunting recital halls and finding his artistic inspiration in antiquarian bookstalls. Never married, perhaps a lifelong virgin, definitely an innocent—a would-be queer aesthete had he known he could be one. In short, a kind of nebbish savant for the art world set. Although Cornell did not screen <i>Rose Hobart</i> publicly for many years, one obviously cannot and should not assume that <i>Rose Hobart</i> remained locked in storage unseen; Cornell screened the film privately and even lent it out on occasion.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Whether it is Sandra Leonard Starr’s reading that appraises his art through the lens of Church of Christ, Scientist founder Mary Baker Eddy and her writings or Michael Moon’s ‘revisionist’ reading that locates Cornell’s style in his fondness for sugar pixie junk food, the overriding tendency is to deify Cornell as an accidental, improbable, and dingy genius. Yet the biographical evaluation of Cornell is oftentimes so intent on mythologizing Cornell (as blissful dreamer, as lunatic seer, as self-styled schlemiel redeemed through homespun surrealism) that it obscures the Cornellial contradictions that account for most of his mystique. Cornell’s domestic difficulties and many accounts of odd pilgrimages to Utopia Parkway (c.f., that of John Ashbery) suggest an outsider artist <i>par excellence</i>, but before establishing Cornell as the patron saint of <i>Art Brut</i>, one should remember that he exhibited in the same gallery as Ernst, Dali, and Duchamp, served as a designer for <i>Dance Index </i>magazine, corresponded with Susan Sontag, hobnobbed over Kool Aid and cafeteria jellyrolls with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol, and lived the life of an amateur scholar much more than most are comfortable in admitting. Cornell’s knowledge of nineteenth-century theater and ballet, accrued from long days at the New York Public Library, was deep enough to make him a world authority on the subject. His pack-ratting was widely known and Cornell was enlisted to lend bits and pieces of his disorganized picture collection to MoMA and the NYPL for, respectively, a 1933 exhibition of film stills and a 1950 fairy tale exhibition. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Even the standard interpretation of Cornell’s filmmaking—whether Jodi Hauptmann’s Mulvey-inflected analysis of Cornell’s exploitative gaze or Noguez’s description of <i>Rose Hobart</i>, ‘un bel album de "fan"<fan><fan><fan> cinephage’—tends to present Cornell’s cinephilia as slightly unhinged fan behavior, at the expense of considering Cornell as a true film historian. In a survey written for a MoMA catalogue on Cornell, Sitney quotes from an unfinished letter Cornell wrote to French film historian Claude Serbanne in 1946:</fan></fan></fan></span><o:p></o:p></span> </span><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Still I think we owe [Ferdinand Zecca] a debt for doing what </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;">melies</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> seldom did,—working en plein air, leaving a record Atget-like of so many of the Parisian fin-de-siecle landmarks (the unpretentious ones like the boutique of a charcutier such as I have in my “The Man with the Calf’s Head” which Dali liked so much and in which he [sic] a quality of Gérard de Nerval. And then again this type of work influenced René Clair in his early work.)<br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">That film history has still, by and large, failed to meaningfully assimilate Zecca into its grand narrative makes Cornell’s remark all the more beguiling. The difficulty lies in reconciling the Cornell mythos—a junk collector buying up random 16mm films by the pound from a seedy Jersey shore scrap yard, which, again, comes from Levy—and the evidence that he acted, on occasion, as a surprisingly sensitive art historian. </span></span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><br />
So Cornell remains a most perplexing enigma: neither urbane nor innocent, neither savvy nor vulgar, a great man who insisted he was a nobody or a nobody who everyone else pretended was a great man</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<div id="ftn1"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">[1] </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">A further error is implicit in Levy’s recollection of the premiere, found in his <i>Memoir of an Art Gallery</i>, probably the only extant account of the first screening of <i>Rose Hobart</i> and certainly the one that all other accounts draw upon. According to Levy, <i>Rose Hobart</i> was preceded by Marcel Duchamp’s <i>Anemic Cinema</i>, Man Ray’s <i>L’Etoile de mer</i>, and an earlier Cornell’s film entitled <i>Goofy Newsreel</i>. While Levy does not write about <i>Goofy Newsreel</i> in much detail (other than to point to its ‘unfortunate title’), he does imply that it is a Cornell film—as opposed to the program <i>of</i> films Cornell occasionally hosted under the Goofy Newsreel banner. P. Adams Sitney’s report on Anthology Film Archives’ Cornell holdings does not mention any extant film called <i>Goofy Newsreel</i> and it is quite likely that Levy confused Cornell’s usual assortment of silent shorts with a carefully edited film proper like <i>Rose Hobart</i>.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><span style="font-size: 100%;"><br />
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-71312637426957828242007-07-27T06:57:00.004-07:002009-08-26T22:38:16.445-07:00The Hart of London (1970)<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: small;">Jack Chamber’s longest film, called “one of the few great films of ALL cinema” by Stan Brakhage and ignored by most everyone else aside from </span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Chambers.html"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;">Fred Camper</span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">, is a beguiling experience. Its first half consists of a series of dense superimpositions of material that seems to be stock newsreel footage of London, Ontario. Significantly, the forms buried here only begin to become legible when shadow crosses shadow—otherwise everything is a blown-out blur. There must be a profusion of contradictory images before any one image makes sense. That’s the theory that informs the flow of the whole film. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: small;">Chambers said that the theme of <i>The Hart of London</i> is ‘generations,’ which is accurate but something of an understatement. What comes through is a real feeling for the history of the city, and the relationship between children and their parents, but also the relationships between the residents and the city fathers, between local events and national attention, between daily life and its translation into news fodder, and finally between humans and the wider animal kingdom. It’s a film that studies particular cases and circumstances under wider notions of hierarchy, ancestry, and history. In a sense, it’s an ecological film. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><o:p style="font-family: georgia;">Chambers utilizes found footage with a sincerity rare among North American avant-garde filmmakers. Unlike, say, Bruce Conner or Kenneth Anger, who take old stock footage or clips from a DeMille spectacle and deconstruct the ideological underpinnings of the footage, Chambers presents scenes of London life that could serve as a chronicle of local history vivid enough to impress the town council. The images of London professionals and politicians spill one into another like an arcane corner of memory yearning for resurrection and annotation. Rather than critiquing these images, Chambers uses them as a point of departure. By the time his chain of associations has led to a startling and unexpected full color scene, we’re clearly in the presence of a major film.</o:p><o:p></o:p> </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-88496111215790506612007-07-25T08:37:00.002-07:002009-08-26T22:34:36.270-07:00Zabriskie Point (1970)<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">For its first two reels or so, Michelangelo Antonioni’s first and only American film, <i>Zabriskie Point</i>, fits squarely with the style of other contemporaneous youth chic ‘vignettes from the revolution’ productions like Godard’s <i>Sympathy for the Devil</i>, Makavejev’s <i>W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism</i>, and, for that matter, the Monkees’ <i>Head</i>. Which means that it starts with a procession of Maoist or black power sketches that flow endlessly and somewhat uncomfortably into one another. Some black revolutionaries question whether white suburbanites would ever really risk his life to kill a pig. One pasty student vows that he will do just do. But he’s lost amidst a sea of protests and billboard jokes. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><i>Zabriskie Point</i> was produced during the anarchic period when the American studio system— realizing that its idea of great youth picture, <i>Doctor Doolittle</i>, had become utterly irrelevant in the marketplace—opened the floodgates to anti-Establishment pictures and begged for its life. So here we have Antonioni under the imprimatur of MGM—a picture divided against itself, the product of an entertainment conglomerate that tells us that zombies in grey flannel suits run your father’s Corporate America. It’s a film by and about a ruling class eager to destroy itself for one last buck.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">This changes when the film slows down and moves out to the desert. Mark, the cop killer from the first scene, has stolen a private plane and, like all horny revolutionaries, uses his propeller to flirt with Daria, an alienated chick driving alone on the desert road. He buzzes over her car, swoons down towards it, nearly collides with it, only to pull back up at the last minute. She eventually flags him down. They talk, wander, and eventually make love. These sections are the film’s most accomplished—a startling union of exact cutting and ‘Scope composition that ascends to a kind of beatific plane. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Critics spat upon </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">Zabriskie Point</i><span style="font-family: georgia;"> upon its first release in 1970, pointing to incoherence, pretentious dialogue, absurd pretexts for desert orgies and the like. But over thirty years later, it’s clearly a great, precise film of its time. The last reel elevates the whole piece to one of the saddest films I know. Daria stands on the side of the road, listening to a radio report about Mark’s death. She stands with her back to the camera, crying. It’s here that the relation between </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">Zabriskie Point</i><span style="font-family: georgia;"> and Antonioni’s earlier output becomes clear. In that moment, when she realizes the bleak fate of her privileged life after one sullied and extinguished spark, she is no different from the bored aristocrats that populate </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">L’Avventura</i><span style="font-family: georgia;">. She has come as close as she ever will to radical excitement, knowing that she could never die for a cause as casually as her boyfriend. Daria, deflowered flower child of privilege, knows that she will never do anything so exciting for the rest of her life.<br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">In short, <i>Zabriskie Point</i> becomes, like <i>Easy Rider</i>, a bleak vision of a generation’s demise. The fatalism is understated and subtle but much more affecting.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1041118333526796822.post-32228509736446763622007-07-21T12:34:00.002-07:002009-08-26T22:37:44.107-07:00Reign of Terror (1949)<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Henry Sheehan once speculated that the current vogue for film noir stems from the fact that the heightened stylishness of the pictures allows viewers without much sensitivity to lighting and camera angles to pretend they know something about film style—Mise en Scene Made EZ. Anyone can look at <i>The Third Man</i> and spout something about unsettling, crooked angles and ‘the influence of German expressionism.’ <i>Film noir </i>suggests a pre-packaged stable of themes, situations, and, above all, postures and attitudes: in today’s terms, it’s shorthand for a caustic, cynical wallop of baroque style that’s notable for its position as an implied opposite to the dangerous melodrama assumed typical of vintage Hollywood product. Old movies are dreary things you see on TV and can’t believe anyone was ever cowed over. Film noir is something that makes you sit up and marvel at the coarseness of the sensibility—and to think, right alongside those silly, sappy things. Instead of laughing at vernacular dialogue that now comes across as camp to the untrained ear, the noir buff prefers to indulge in stylized banter that was pure excess in its day. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 100%;">Needless to say, the predilection for noir often but not always entails some condescending notion about what the movies used to be. Amidst a sea of weepies, here’s something modern and sexy. Noir buffs will pack the house for the most undistinguished, ‘re-discovered’ noir but steer clear of contemporaneous masterworks. Film noir, a term never used by its practitioners but applied liberally by critics and copyright holders, wouldn’t be such a frustrating conceptual framework were it a more productive one. The greatest noirs, it seems to me, are constricted, rather than made more legible, by that label. Sexual humiliation and moral degradation form the thematic heart of the genre, yet to simply pass off the pathetic scent of <i>Scarlet Street</i> as the apogee (or would it be nadir?) of noir pessimism seems to diminish the unique achievement of that picture. And even <i>Kiss Me Deadly</i> doesn’t approach the apocalyptic fatalism of <i>Criss Cross</i>, which ends with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo escaping to the figurative edge of the earth—still unprotected, still ill at ease, still waiting only for death. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Reign of Terror</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">, directed by Anthony Mann and photographed by John Alton, stands as a great noir that forces modern viewers to accept an even more elastic definition of that elusive style-genre. Unlike most noirs, <i>Reign of Terror </i>moves outside the city and outside the cynical present into the tortured anarchy of the past. Set in 1794, it’s a gloss on the French Revolution that turns the fall of Robespierre into the most rollicking string of outlandishness criminal episodes that Feuillade never made. <o:p></o:p></span><o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">It unfolds with the impossible but unassailable dream logic of a séance. Among its special details: an underground bakery that hides plutocrat henchmen; a quest for a single black book hidden somewhere in the rows and rows of empty ones; a bodyguard conquered by a gang of children armed only with pillows; a man strangled to death in one scene and perfectly conscious (and duplicitous) in another; guards who fire into a cage of a condemned prisoners without provocation; two lives spared with the promise of poultry; the same two saved later because a heavy kicks a kitten against a wall. It concludes with this divine joke: the only man whose word might free your lover from death has just been shot in the mouth, never to speak again. To subsume all of these surreal moments under the aegis of film noir expands the aesthetic possibilities of that style but shackles them to a set of expectations that remains stale and unedifying. <o:p></o:p><o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">All of the above hints at why the film is interesting; an account of its singular skill and sophistication should demonstrate why it is good. <i>Reign of Terror</i> surely ranks as one of the most resourceful B picture programmers. Mann does not present the storming of the Bastille or any comparable spectacle. The crowd scenes are accomplished with clumsy rear projection photography. But most of the picture unfolds under endless shadows. The first meeting of Robert Cummings and Arlene Dahl is a fine example of the whole. He stands behind her in his dark hotel chamber, maintaining his grim composure and hoping that his allegiance to oppositional leader Barras will constitute the right answer to her question about loyalty. The wrong one will land him a knife in the abdomen. His face barely emerges from the shadows, yet hers seems submerged in them, a lovely spectre with tentative corporeality. They hold the pose while they exchange their dialogue, They deliver the lines so coldly and nervously that, for perhaps only a moment, they do seem like little more than figures drafted to demonstrate all the gradations of light that an ace cinematographer like Alton can pull out of a set-up like this. The shot exudes such palpable desperation, such eloquent fear that both actors will dissolve into shades. This is more than noir moodiness—this is a moment wherein line and weight and depth alone wholly express the urgency and fright of recognition and obscurity dictated by the plot.<o:p></o:p><o:p></o:p><i><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><i>Reign of Terror</i>, then, is a drama of connection and communication. Its mode occasionally slips into excess, as when Danton and others leer into the camera, eyes cast straight ahead, forehead engulfing the screen, and deliver an exhortation. It is a direct, disarming mode of address that could, in any other context, come across as crude theatrics. But as <i>Reign of Terror </i>takes as its subject the thorny divide between democracy as an ideal and democracy as a back-stabbing, intrigue-heavy mode of political practice, the style is appropriate. These direct appeals to the mad mob in the audience stand as but one kind of rhetorical conflation practiced by Mann in <i>Reign of Terror</i>. Logically enough, a story of popular uprising in one period finds its expression in the popular narrative entertainment of another. A low genre and style designed to shake and startle its spectators to the core with thrills becomes the closest aesthetic and emotional equivalent to the political upheaval of a distant revolution. This is not the kind of historical film that draws a simple parallel between modern anxieties and portentous allegorical modes of the past, such as <i>The Seventh Seal</i>. Instead Mann demonstrates that the modern thriller, with its immediate emotional register and synaesthetic ambitions, approximates and replicates the paranoia of the past.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">These parallels work so well because the film functions expertly as a thriller. Its assaults and conspiracies come across splendidly because Mann and Alton construct each episode with admirable rigor. They try as much as possible to keep all the action in a single shot, resorting to shock cuts only sparingly. Instead of letting a kidnapping or a beating simply interrupt the action (through a cut), they offer terror as an intrusion upon the continuity and harmony of the compositions themselves. Attacks come from within—brute violence that halts a character from crossing the frame or traversing its depths.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Again, though, the thematic unity of the thrills is the remarkable thing about <i>Reign of Terror</i>. The film’s anxiety over identity and loyalty has struck some as veiled commentary about the coming HUAC storm. This interpretation is too simple, both because it obscures the other major cultural message that might reasonably be taken from the film (one about fascism and mob rule and totalitarian dictatorship perpetrated through democratic means, whether in 1794 or 1933) and because its fears are more elemental. <i>Reign of Terror</i> justifies and elevates the Hollywood thriller because it, however improbably, aims to show that the routine tropes familiar to anyone with a knowledge of serial novels, detective pictures, propaganda stories, neighborhood theater productions, comic books, and the like actually drive the forces of history. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1