A Tinderbox: The Class

2008's Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, Entre Les Murs (literally translated as "Between the Walls", but for it's American release retitled "The Class") is probably the best film I've seen to somehow encapsulate the racial tinderbox that is Paris and its suburbs. The film follows the teacher of a French language and grammar class throughout the year as he challenges and is challenged by his unruly students. The screenplay itself is based on the writings of the sharp and talented François Bégaudeau, who also plays himself as the teacher, and directed skillfully by Laurent Cantet.


One of the things I found most brilliant about The Class was it's unwillingness to convolute its characters. The film is shot in an almost documentary-style with constant activity and reactions and provocations all around the classroom (it is shot in an Altmanesque fashion, where we get many subtle asides through, I imagine, carefully placed hidden microphones). The students are from a variety of racial, class and ethnic backgrounds. Unlike other films which have dealt with hard knocks kids from tough neighborhoods in public school programs, The Class doesn't ever try to narrow and moralize it's story. The teacher, François, doesn't make his students lives any better in the end, he doesn't save anyone. Instead he is caught up in a grim reality of having insulted his students while trying to challenge. Having lost his temper, they are provoked and he is provoked and the walls between him and his students are more apparent than ever. A student who we barely heard from during the entire film comes up near the end and tells him, "I learned nothing."

"The Class" dares to ask some tough questions--Is the French public school program inherently elitist? Does it impose a rubric of learning upon its students that is more imperialistic than considerate of their social and ethnic backgrounds? What is public education, anyway? There is a wonderful sequence where one of the students who was called "peitasse" ("skank") as François lost his temper later declares that what they read in class is stupid and that she learned nothing from school itself this year. She goes on to say, though, that she read "The Republic" by Plato. François, astonished, asks her what it was about. "Love, war, death, society..." She says. So many times in this film, as power shifts back and forth between teacher and students, we wonder who is teaching who. It would seem too easy to discredit the experiences and frustrations of the students. In fact, the brilliance of The Class lies in this clash of cultures, backgrounds and social affiliations. Instead of teaching French grammar, François has to face how they can all deal with each other.

Spazzing: Lars von Trier's THE IDIOTS

I love The Idiots (1998) because it believes in absurdity as a necessary mode of living. Danish filmmkaer Lars von Trier understands the reality of the joke.
I think when he does all his films he can't help but understand that we're captive to sincerity. Honesty, at least in his films since in the mid-90s he found out his father wasn’t his real father—honesty has become the most important aspect of his cinema. What moves you can ultimately be the joke on you. Everyone in his films seem to see themselves as some sort of victim. They all seem to be working with that fact in different ways. Usually, as in this second film of the Golden Heart trilogy (Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, Dancer In the Dark), von Trier creates characters who are naive, even at their own expense. I like this aspect of his films. His main characters cling to a naivete that’s almost childlike. The “adult world”, the social sphere, is filled with hypocrites and people who want to control and cheat you.

Unlike the two films that bookend this trilogy, von Trier creates a safespace for the characters in The Idiots. They're at a sort of commune, pretending to be retarded and having spells known in the film as "spazzing".Von Trier should get the innovative filmmaker award of the 90s for coming up with the concept of "spazzing". It involves personally breaking the line between sanity and insanity. It incorporates personally humiliating oneself in the social sphere. The film starts out with one of the character's spazzing in a fancy restaurant. He gets to leave without paying for his meal. Genius. All films should prescribe usable techniques like this.

The Idiots aims to provoke. That's part of Lars von Trier's cinema. But I never feel he provokes in a way that demeans his characters or the honesty of his story. His whole thing is that there's a story his characters are set up against, which is comprehensible and safe and casts them as victims. His lead characters in the Golden Hearts trilogy, but especially in The Idiots, stubbornly refuse to operate according to social codes. You could say the basic premise in The Idiots comes down to: why can't I have a seizure in public? Drool in public? Fuck whomever I want in public?

The last question points to a particularly explicit and controversial segment in the film--where all the characters at the commune engage in an orgy at a birthday party. Watching a bunch of people act like retards, tearing off their clothes and fucking each other hard core, and running naked around the premises, I think, says something about where images and maybe cultural problems were headed in the nineties and even today. I think von Trier's the Idiots is one of the most genius message films out there, as I think are some of his best films. For Dancer In the Dark, it's simply "follow your heart." (As Selma (Bjork) is being hanged, Catherine Deneuve shouts “Follow your heart!”) For the Idiots, it's "be yourself". Part of being yourself is being unrestrained, von Trier seems to say. If you look at von Trier's work in light of these cliché terms that have been so prominent in the self-help era, and in light of his own psychological troubles, you might find a trace of misanthropic genius. If you’re yourself, you do so at the expense of organized society. Von Trier’s commune in The Idiots is a refuge, a place where troubled people cope with their problems by being occasionally mentally retarded, childlike, and taking off their clothes and drooling. It seems better than pills.

A decent primer on von Trier can be found here.

Bought and Sold: Lukas Moodysson's LILYA 4-EVER

What is intriguing for me about Lukas Moodysson's 2002 feature, LILYA 4-EVER is it's pumped-up honesty. This is a film about a bored Russian girl, who is impoverished and lives in the suburban slums. Whose mother deserts her to go off and live with her boyfriend. Who is broke and has to become a prostitute to at least engage in the capitalist dream of buying whatever she likes at the grocery store. And her story is infused with a vicious clubber track, 9-volt jolts of synth-charged excitement that help keep the story moving along. Helping it to offer some quick rush of escape. It's directed by a Swedish director that's only traveled "a little bit" in Russia. LILYA 4-EVER strives to tell one of those "it's only going to get predictably worse" stories that Lars von Trier is so good at. And like von Trier, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's film seems to be about the capitalist dream, the romance you'll see in a Hollywood movie or the satisfying release that shoppers find in commercials. Just hours before Lilya jumps off a Swedish highway bridge into oncoming traffic, she says to herself "I want a doll, a pencil to draw with, and a handbag." Moodysson's films are tuned into this sort of frequency. He fills his narratives with the flustered, obsessive awe of commercialism. All his films seem to be lists of wants.

Take his 2006 experimental film, Container. It starts out: "I don't want to be locked up inside this disgusting body anymore. Everything bleeds and stinks." You could look at Moodysson's films as a confrontation between the commercial dream and the reality. That capitalist comes at a cost. And that the cost isn't broadcast; isn't typically the subject of so many films. But I think Moodysson's work says it ought to be. And he comes to film with this sort of critical social consciousness.

"You remain dead for all eternity, but you're alive for only a brief moment." Lilya's younger friend tells her, in the form of an angel come back from the dead while she's enslaved as a prostitute in Sweden. She's contemplating her suicide. Maybe that will undo her suffering. The whole film is essentially a portrait of Lilya's suffering. Lilya in the commercial landscape. As someone who won't be known. Who is faceless. Who is the girl in the hundreds of thousands of pornos made each year that's forced into it by a relentless industry. Who is persecuted by the police when she's running around in a foreign country without papers or identification.

LILYA 4-EVER is sort of genius in the way that Moodysson tackles such an apt-for-exploitation, could-be-sentimentalized subject. He shoots Lilya as the face of the girl who is like the waste by-product of commercialism. This is commercialism's worst face. When she's pale and undernourished later in the film, and is forced to go out with a client, she goes to the bathroom and chops her hair off, smears lipstick over her face like a clown. It's one of the most effective moments of the film.


Moodysson, like von Trier, chooses the subject of the commercial dream and it's errors. In the end, Lilya ends up in a sort of heaven on a roof in the Russian industrial ghetto, playing basketball with her dead friend, who also killed himself. According to THIS Moodysson interview, Moodyson claims that ""Lilya" is a statement about human dignity, a quality that is constantly being eroded and corrupted in the world today by forces like political systems and a materialistic culture that allows anything and everything to be bought or sold." The film is also a fuck-you to the system.

Incidentally, just a few days ago Moodyson released the trailer for his latest film, Mammoth. It seems to track some of the same themes that appear in all his work: the industrial landscape, desensitization, excess, etc. Check out the trailer below. It looks promising, as all Moodysson trailers do.

Seduction Cinema: DAVID LYNCH

It was a while coming before I'd post here on David Lynch. I think Lynch is just one of those artists who must mean so much to so many that it's hard to say anything new about him, or to articulate exactly what he means if you're really passionate about him. Thankfully, this weekend I came across David Foster Wallace's brilliant Lynch essay in his collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. He basically gets at exactly what I think is brilliant about Lynch. He places him in a context of contemporary cinema, where it's easy to underestimate Lynch's broad influence. And he says some very important things about Lynch’s work and irony.

You can find the essay HERE. I am going to start posting what I think are really hot, non-academic, speculative and personal essays on film here on the blog. You can find those in the Links section, and I’ll usually notify you when I put one up.


A few words about that Foster Wallace essay. The most important part of the essay comes when Foster Wallace says that Lynch is a filmmaker who wants to give the viewer an experience, not deliver a point with his cinema. He calls him a "contemporary Expressionist", going on to say that his movies "brought home to us--via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of--that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn't intellectual but wasn't even fully conscious, that the unconscious's true medium wasn't verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern or Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true." I thought this was very interesting. Lynch's attention to color, speech rhythms, space, patterns and opposites, light, volume and pitch, sound, and contradictions of character create dissheveled, jarring experiences that aren't always pleasant. His movies seem deliberately intuitive. They're not hard to follow, really. Like any dream--you get swept up and go along for the ride. Lynch's ability to manufacture a world is embedded distinctly in the distinction of his personality. He is so distinctly himself, like so many auteurs, that his cinema seems to be an almost direct translation. When describing INLAND EMPIRE to the press, he said it was about “a woman in trouble”. Sometimes I think that filmmakers should just over-simplify everything and just say, plotwise, what their work is about at the most kindergarten level. It’s a brilliant approach.

Because Lynch notoriously doesn't like to describe his work. He prefers that you just experience it. You can see, for example, in this "Mashed In Plastic" youtube trailer (an upcoming release of his soundtracks, genius collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti), that words can speculate or be signs placed on top of Lynch's work, but can't possibly get at the heart of the idea. Lynch's work takes you into a world. Often his worlds are full of trouble. Lynch's worlds aren't moralistic. They really don't judge. He puts spectators into a position of seduction. Evil is a constant presence and we see why it seduces. Getting into trouble is intoxicating. We see that theme over and over again, with Laura Palmer, Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, and Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive. It's not an Aleister Crowley notion--it's not evil is better, or more true. I think with Lynch, in the simplest sense possible, it's that bad things are intoxicating, rapturous, exciting, and seductive. In a sensuous way. Color and sound seduce. Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive—all follow an unexplained, mysterious bad idea. But the confusion of the idea, it’s good and bad components is necessary. I don’t think Lynch wants to confuse. He wants you to see how good and bad co-exist, how they’re both necessary in cinema. How thrilling they can be. Evil is an important aspect of the imagination. It allows us room to dream.

What You Mess with When You Mess With Star Trek

by Guest Contributor Nathan Schneider


The trailer for the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie came out last week. My RSS feed lit up, as they say, like a Christmas tree. No fewer than three Facebook messages arrived to inform me of the fact (from not-trekkie friends who are sympathetic to my plight). "It raped my childhood" was a popular reaction on the blogs. With each day, more trickles out—scene screenings, rumors, interviews, hints. The movie doesn't even open till May. We're given six months to stew in anticipation or dread.

The trailer starts with a young, buck-toothed James Tiberius Kirk on a farm in Iowa. Something's happening. He jumps into a car—yes, a car, as in a 20th century car, when this is supposed to be the future! Rrrg. He tears off in it, chased by a motorcycle cop, and is about to run over a cliff (in Iowa?) when he jumps out and grabs onto the ledge, narrowly escaping doom, etc. Thank goodness at least the cop's motorcycle levitates. After that, a bunch of starship action scenes with young Kirk and young Spock flash before our eyes, and then it's over. Horrible.

Really? What's so wrong about that? Let me try to explain.

More than anything else quite has, Star Trek dictated the way that I see the world. My metaphysics (resplendent science), anthropology (good and frenetically curious at heart), and eschatology (technology will make everything awesome), are all, in the main, Roddenberrian. Gene Roddenberry was the L.A. cop-turned screenwriter who invented the first Star Trek series and midwifed The Next Generation into being just before his passing. That was the one, with Jean-Luc Picard and the helm, that did me in. Specifically, seasons 3 thru 6 1/2.

It hit at a very formative moment, some lucky sweet-spot between 4th and 6th grade, when puberty must have been all in the brain because nothing had happened yet in the body. But as soon as something did happen in the body, I dropped Captain Picard like a dead cat and picked up the more chick-friendly electric guitar. One day, I actually went to Goodwill and gave away every last bit of my hundreds of dollars in merchandise.

Gene "the Great Bird of the Galaxy" Roddenberry died in 1991. By '95, his beatific vision of the future had fallen into total disrepair. At first, I liked that fact that with each passing year there were more space battles and more interspecies wars. But then there started to be money. Picard always said humans were beyond that. The third series, Deep Space Nine wore on, it became clear that they came at the cost of everything good and true, in my book. Two other series, Voyager and Enterprise, stunk. The last full-length picture was the worst movie ever made.

For a time, I was hopeful. A few weeks ago, Abrams was quoted saying, "It was important to me that optimism be cool again." But soon it became clear what that meant. "This is a treatment of Star Trek with action and comedy and romance and adventure, as opposed to a rather talky geekfest." No, thank you. Spoken like a closet Star Wars fan. Confirmed: "[Abrams] was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie 'that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.'"

I had to come to a realization: the brand is a lie. Or the franchise, or the saga, or whatever. Probably they all are.

Let me tell you: I've been to a few Star Trek conventions in my day. Wander through them, and it is plain to see when each person caught the bug. Why? Because they're dressed like a character of whatever period makes them feel warm and fuzzy. '60s Kirk or '80s Kirk? Data or Spock? We're all umbrella-ed under this single Star Trek™ package, but each carrying separate experiences. Now, I want to finally accept that those can never quite come again, whatever the promises of Paramount Pictures or of fan-made episodes.

It's like Spock once said: "If we were to assume these whales as ours to do with as we please, we would be just as guilty as those who caused their extinction." (The whales are our experiences, big as whales, in the aquariums of our lives.)

I can't possess or re-possess what Star Trek has done; it possesses me. I can only let it get worse with equanimity and protect my childhood from the inevitable rapists.

A Sign of the Times: Paul Morrissey’s FLESH

Paul Morrissey’s Flesh starts out with a typical Warholian shot: a prolonged four-minute shot of a beautiful guy sleeping as the radio plays some Wednesday morning surf-agogo tunes. In fact, after the first ten minutes, I had to double-check to see that it wasn’t Warhol who directed it. It’s a movie about a guy, played by the effortlessly talented Joe Dallesandro, who hustles on the streets of Manhattan in order to get by and support him and his wife. This simple scenario, like some Cassavete’s films, allows for Morrissey to shoot a slice-of-life, that’s it. It’s a genius, understated film that, in an unprentious and unassuming way, captures a sense of the times, how people’s attitudes towards modern life were changing in 1968.

On the surface, at first, it almost seems that the film was made by one of Warhol’s factory hipsters, just having fun. It’s choppy, in some places seems unfinished, and has the feel that it was made on-the-spot. Yet Morrissey wasn’t the hipster type. He was one of the only 9-to-5’ers hanging out in Warhol crew during the Factory days. In fact, he was downright conservative. Quoting from Gary Morris’ 1996 featurette on Morrissey in Bright Lights Film Journal:
“Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Morrissey, probably irrelevant to the brilliance of the films, is his political profile. Yes, the maker of Trash, Flesh, and Heat is a right-wing, reactionary, Catholic Republican! Writer Maurice Yacowar has quoted him as follows: "Without institutionalized religion as the basis, a society can't exist. All the sensible values of a solid education and a moral foundation have been flushed down the liberal toilet in order to sell sex, drugs, and rock and roll." Whew! Since it's impossible to reconcile these knuckleheaded views with Morrissey's unique body of work (which could never have been made in the kind of fascist theocracy he seems to desire), I mention it merely for the convenience of completists.”
His devout Catholic religious views might make a film trilogy like Flesh, Trash and Heat almost idiosyncratic. If a film like Flesh doesn’t glamourize a certain on-the-street lifestyle of street hustling and casual and frivolous relationships (it doesn’t), it does seem to be made of someone in the know of that lifestyle—it doesn’t seem to be made by an outsider.

The film is shot in vignettes and spans only a day in hustler Joe’s life. Morrissey shoots it in an amateur style—there’s no carefully set-up shots, it could’ve been shot over the course of a week. The film is edited in a way so that, between shots, there’s a flash. The amateur style of the film almost makes it seem more genuine, more candid. The dialogue is casual, there isn’t much “acting”. It almost seems like Morrissey just wanted to depict a day where a guy goes hustling again for his wife, so she can pay for the abortion of her best friend. In a perfectly original way, the day becomes a web of associations of many people’s attitudes about sex. A scholar, a tranny, a factory girl hipster, a young Ivy league prostitute, a married john—they all have their say.

Films shot in this manner have an edge and a shape that’s truly inspired. Morrissey’s ability to take characters straight out of Warhol’s Factory and let them simply “be” on screen is quite enough. It’s an example of a director standing back and having faith in the selection of his actors. Each person selected for the film would be impossible to be played by anyone else. This is probably because Morrissey set out to shoot something that wasn’t quite fiction and wasn’t quite documentary. Contemporary filmmakers take note: Flesh was a sign of the times.

Cassavetes' FACES

Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) is a raw blow. You watch it, and you see that this is the meaning of indie cinema. Not Miramax nowadays. Not any of the schlock being put out by smaller distribution outlets owned by the Studio Big Five. Cassavetes did it on a dime. His production team was as tight as possible, with no unnecessary baggage. The film has the grit and honesty you find lacking in a lot of American so-called independent works these days. This is a film that’s dealing with people who hurt, and how they deal with their hurt—often impulsively, with sex, booze and emotionally abusing those they love. It is a film where people have trouble saying things. And it demands to be imperfect.

I was impressed by the film’s ruggedness. You don’t care when, in the beginning, during a drunken, seemingly improvised scene between Gena Rowlands and John Marley and a heavily inebriated friend—you don’t care that the dialogue almost seems made up, that the sound is awful, and the location of the recorder keeps changing, that the location of the lights keep changing (important with film). Continuity goes to the crapper. The editing is choppy. Like Dogme filmmakers would explore nearly thirty years later, Cassavetes cuts for the open wound. And laughter. This is, in many ways, a film about the laughing face.


Because a laughing face can conceal it’s pain. Laughter can affirm and laughter can degrade. Laughter, in most cases, with this film, is a mode of forgetting. Cassavetes shoots his characters laughing at parties while they are cheating on their wives, laughing when they are being hurt, laughing when they are almost dead from alcohol poisoning, laughing when they are sick and exhausted and thrown aside by others. It seems like a perfect approach, what any true filmmaker would do. You approach the idea through something as broad as faces laughing, and wrap the brutally simplistic plot around that: man unhappy with his wife goes off to party with his hooker one night, and the wife engages in similar debauchery.

“The hardest thing for a film-maker, or a person like me…is to find people…who really want to do something…They’ve got to work on a project that’s theirs.” Cassavetes once said. His method of production was non-hierarchical, and his stories depended not so much on a narrative with characters that could clearly articulate their emotions, but on the authenticity and complexity of individual emotional expression. Faces rolls with the punches. It gives us people with problems, and it doesn’t strive for any sort of resolution. His interests in human failure, authenticity, and the complexity of love and relationships would in many ways agressively confront the neatly-packaged, well-produced story lines and affairs that still occur in Hollywood films.