Black Face/White Face

This entry is dedicated to starting to approach the touchy subject of black face and white face. I’m going to try and not be pandering, didactic or stupid. But obviously I’m writing this & clearly I’m an American white guy that grew up in the suburbs, “Remington Court” actually…and there’s the chance that someone could (rightly) make the argument against me that, well, what does some privileged white kid have to say about black face? I think the aim is to understand, especially in the frame of this election, that there are a lot of racially-charged masks being bandied about.
At the coffeehouse/bookstore venue Housing Works in NYC, I sit typing this at a packed reading for a young black author, ZZ Packer, about a new anthology of Southern fiction.
I think of a former Brown University professor, who was teaching a Faulkner course, a self-identified Southerner, who said one day to the class that Faulkner was all about the question—Have we made progress since the Restoration? Obviously in term of civil rights—yes. But the question isn’t what has changed, but how have things changed?
And what is it when we make outstanding breakthroughs with civil rights, but enter a new age where acceptance comes along with commercial branding? Where people are assimilated to their marketing and polling potential? Where our most “audacious” political ideas are wrapped-up in silly sloganeering?
The inquiry into the image of black face and white face seems particularly a propos on the night of the historic acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination of a black man. Now there is some interestingly, though embarassingly timid, conversations circulating through the media of Obama’s “blackness”. He seems to be the “Huxtable” version of the black man—a light, agreeable, professional, who is successful and non-confrontational. In Michelle Obama’s speech at the Convention, in Kathleen Sibelius’ speech, in Hillary Clinton’s speech, it is almost not even acknowledged that for the first time ever a black man is securing the pressidential nomination. Barack Obama’s candidacy is decidedly “Oprah-esque”: Barack Obama is not a black man, but an Everyman.
Interestingly, the same does not apply to Hillary Clinton and her candidacy. Hillary Clinton is a woman, a mother. This role is not confrontational, but it has been historically undervalued, repressed and removed from power.
And yet the Obama campaign is sure not to address their historic candidacy too much, or be too particular about it.

I address this on this blog because it is not just a political question, but a question of media personae. Ellen Degeneres, the TV star cum Talk Show host, too, received endless flack for her ostentatious and confrontational identity as a gay woman, after her historic coming-out on her hit show in 1997. A few years in the shade, and she comes out again, as a friendly, affable TV Talk Show Host: an Everyman.
This role of the Everyman is symptomatic of our culture—a politically correct occupation of the tongue; an obsessive need to have our pop and political figures be likeable, normal, non-confrontational, like us. Who is “us”? (allow me the grammatical error) It would seem obvious to anyone that the Everyman, which may be indistinguishable from the White Man, is sales revenue, is high numbers, is good ratings. And is it surprising still that a black man secures the Democratic nomination? Isn’t it inevitable? If he’s not really black, but more of an Everyman?
The image-story of the “All-American” family seems to be the one that restores universailty. It stands for reassurance, stability, normality.
And we still stand, somehow, in some way, under the shadow of that image of the smiling, wide-eyed nuclear family from the 1950s.

Also of interest may be this Alessandra Stanley article publish in the Aug 27th, 2008 New York Times Op-Ed section:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/us/politics/27watch.html?ex=1377576000&en=09ea4cba30254a43&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

The Inscrutable Action: Moi, Pierre Riviére…

How can a film about a murder committed in the 1830s and serving as the basis for a famous case study by Michel Foucault tell us about an irrational crime? Moi, Pierre Riviére, Ayant égorgé ma mére, mon souer, et mon frére shows us a portrait of a young man who kills his mother, brother and sister. But the film seems to be more interested in the townspeople’s faces, their hypocrisies and the banality of life in the township of Normandy circa the 1830s.

For me, the lesser-known (but highly skilled) French director Rene Allio strikes a note between the banal portrait of town and family life, with the spectre of the crime and case study looming over every shot. Moi, Pierre Riviére… is not about motives. If anything, it is about the deception of crime and reason. It is a superbly deceptive film.

Allio brilliantly conveys the banality of town and family life, all the while allowing Pierre’s parricide to loom over the narrative. Never going for the traditional thrills of plotted-out narrative twists, he is often compared to Bresson for his use of historical documents (Pierre Riviére’s actual confession), the steady detachment of his shots, and using non-actors. A bit like Bresson’s Mouchette, we don’t necessarily get a motivated or psychotic deviant, but a quiet, pensive observant one. It is wise to paint a picture of Pierre as observant. In a town with little creative outlets, Pierre’s fantasies lean towards violent manifestations: birds pinned by nails to trees, making a horse leap off a dangerously steep drop and fall, a strange Da Vinci-esque weapon made of sickles and farm tools that Pierre later buries, and eventually the actual murder.

The story easily translates to contemporary catastrophes like Columbine and the Virginia Tech shooting. In these banal environments where town and family life become opressively sterile, dull, and hypocritical, a character like Pierre has no outlet but his violent fantasy, whose assault is realized against the audience of the town itself. Somehow, his violent tinderbox fantasy fits in to the town’s bucolic pulse. A contemporary mirror to this film could be the first half of Gus van Sant’s Elephant (before he screws up the film by focusing it on the killers and their preparations). One reason why Moi, Pierre Riviére… doesn’t become clouded by Pierre’s crime is precisely because of the insrutability of what appears to be a tortured, repetitious fantasy that is thrust into reality, almost spontaneously—like breaking a wall.


Allio portrays the mother’s histrionics and excesses as hyprocritically excused by the town. Instead, Pierre’s quiet and patient father is largely victim to the mother’s whims, which Pierre becomes increasingly unable to tolerate. Pierre’s mother, Madame Riviére (brilliantly played by Jacqueline Millere), seems outrageous in her coying manipulation of her children’s judgments about the world and their father. In one scene, after running up a high debt buying high-priced gowns in town, necessitating the foreclosure of their home, Mme Riviére refuses to leave and is pulled out by the father, kicking and screaming and crying abuse. Seeming to live under the fickle life of the moment, she is unable to seea bigger picture of consequence and action. When Pierre later says his murder was “an act of God”, he is allowing himself to be the decisive judge.

Moi, Pierre Riviére is a film about a cruel crime, a film about a famous case study about the crime, and a film that let’s the recreation exist, in a distanced, detached sort of way. It would seem that the townspeople, in their testimonies, all knew Pierre was crazy and there’s a large array of answers given for his crime, including Satanic alliances, insanity and a cruel and evil nature.

The question of insanity, as in the Columbine and Virginia Tech cases, looms largely over the trial proceedings at the end of Moi, Pierre Riviére…, but is eventually dismissed by the film. What Allio portrays is a stifling environment without creative release or books to expand the mind (it is mentioned that Pierre attained one encyclopedia, which he drew from to justify mysoginist interpretations). Instead, we see someone stuck in the frame of their own stifling family narrative. The film and it’s (non) actors remains distant and remote in order to put us inside the vacuum of that claustrophobic state of life.
The opaqueness of the performers gives a certain alienation to the film. Allio stands back and allows images to remain images, painted by one decisive eruption—the murder—and causing us to ask for reasons why until we’re okay with not knowing anymore.

Beyond Disgust: Pasolini’s Saló

One of the first things you notice in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló: or, The 120 Days of Sodom (Italy, 1976) is how easily the crime is carried out. The fascist libertines just sign a treaty early on, select their victims, and go to the Palazzo. No one protests when the victims are taken off by a group of elder statesmen (The President, the Magistrate, the Bishop, the Duke) under the guise of some state-ordanined purpose. The purpose behind imprisoning the youth is irrational and absurd, twisted. Saló isn’t about the motives behind the crime. Saló is about the complex crime of civilization; what is repressed behind the façade of power and security. The libertines of the film make their youth victims perform a black mass, undergo inspection in the nude, consume shit, and participate in a hysterium of medieval tortures. Pasolini shoots most of this in elegant palatial surroundings, in a quiet, almost deliberately detached manner. The film, you could say, sometimes feels like a reorganization of the senses, of the victims attitudes towards the irrational and the digusting.

Pasolini’s mid-career and late-career works were less interested in comprehensible notions of individual pathology. Collective psychology plays a more important role in his films: ritual, communal solidarity, notions of society and civilization. We never receive motives (outside of the obvious political motives) to justify the agreement the totalitarian men have in Saló. What does Pasolini show us? Nostalgic renderings by elderly women of earlier perverse and sexual experiences, men dressing up as women (and not as drag queens), a black mass wedding dinner where each character is forced to agreeably ingest a steaming hot bowlful of shit, a crooked and obtuse smile on a totalitarian elder’s pink and blotchy face. Pasolini refuses material of comprehensible psychological motivation in favor of the impenetrable and obscure will of the libertines.

Saló portrays a European identity where the horrors of the Second World War were inevitable. After the catastrophe of the First World War, what ingredients must have already been in place to allow for such a monstrous and sprawling degree of human error? How could entire countries and their people condone or cast a blind eye to the genocide and distorted, murderous logic?

A small group of old white men run the show in Saló. Early on, we see them sign an agreement which effectively are the rules of the game. In Pasolini’s view, it is clear that the playing field is often decided and re-established, redefined by those who have power, by those who are “creating” the notion of civilization. In his brilliant film version of Medea (1969, starring Maria Callas), Pasolini frames the argument between Medea and Jason as an argument between competing notions of civilization, one based on law and civil order, the other based on mysticism and the interventions of the gods. The brilliance of Salo comes from Pasolini’s framing of civilization as the organizing principles behind one’s attitude towards disgust.


In Saló, God is in the background, almost as haunting décor. In a room where the teenage hostages are all bound in a tub of shit, and where other lascivious and intimidating sexual acts take place, two praying angel statues observe the action, at the edge of the shot. Pasolini’s point: yes, God and the holy world is watching, but there is no intervention. God in Saló not only watches atrocities (echoing Holocaust survivors like Eli Weisel, who in interviews asserted that—considering the atrocities of the Holocaust—there most likely can’t be a God, or that he abandoned humans, or that if there is a God, it is the wrong one…), but God is part of the atrocity. The whole of Saló is about this notion of watching and not acting; participating by watching. Pasolini pushes this notion of the Gods-eye view within us, as we watch the tortures unfold. The ceremonies of religion merely allow for roles to be inverted, for the digusting to emerge in opposition of the holy. Pasolini seems to be painting a picture that it is the disgusting that is allowed to occur because of the notion of the holy, of the sacred, of the pure.

In the film’s beginning, the totalitarian group of Fascist men, scour the houses of the Italian village for the most supple and beautiful specimens of youth (a play on the Nazi ideal aesthetic of blonde hair and blue eyes). Their selection is cruel. When one of the teenage female victims is selected and ordered to strip in the cigar room for the old libertines, her neck tilts back as she bursts into tears, her jaw drops and quivers, her eyes fall shut, with all her facial muscles tightening and releasing in a sort of ecstatic spiritual pain. The image, later repeated in the famous shit-eating scene by the same blonde actress, is undeniably religious. As tears stream down her face and she stands with her chest bare (Pasolini must want her to resemble something akin to a bawling Mary Magdalene Renaissance statue), the old men stare in fascination: She’s our girl.


The very process of selecting the most beautiful teenagers for the most horrific of crimes is another arena in which Pasolini extends his argument on civilization. Interestingly, the older libertines all have something grotesque about them, in the way they gaze, in their costumery, in the way they speak. And not only are the victims selected because they are beautiful, but the elders (particularly the women) cling bizarrely to this notion of a youthful beauty, which them an element of the grotesque. The worship of the beautiful is recast as the die of pleasure is recast. Saló presents a fascist rhetoric of renewal for it’s young—a mode where daily disgust is met with quiet obedience, where the young, beautiful and innocent go through a rite of passage to induct them in “civilized” fascist society.

There is something about the Catholic image of suffering, the small Italian palace in the countryside where the tortures take place, the focus on costume and make-up (particularly in the grotesque costumery of the older women—lace, frills), the fine silverware and white lace dresses, and finally the parlor salon with a piano where the sordid stories are told. The inventions of the height of European sophistication, elegance and decorum are revealed in context with the shady underside of the tortures and disgusting aspects that allowed European civilization to rise. All that is normally repressed in European society is brought out by the Fascist elders as a series of rituals and games to press on the young in the film. The young are pushed through circles (‘Circle of Blood’, ‘Circle of Shit’, etc) as if pushed through a society’s rites of passage.

In Saló’s final moments, we see the young grouped together in a bathing tub of shit, then caught up in a variety show of tortures and brutal exercises, including the chopping off of one boy’s tongue, the scooping out of eyeballs, the burning of nipples and genitals.

The older men at one point stand, arms across each other’s shoulders, doing a chorus kickline. They all take turns sitting in the palace and watching the tortures occur in the courtyard, with the help of binoculars and two obedient soldier boys holding machine guns. Through the binoculars we see the void of torture—through the point of view of the perpetrators. But Pasolini also seats us inside the room where the libertine is watching the torture unfold. A symphony is playing in the background. One boy is told to obediently help the old libertine out, by jerking him off while he watches the tortures occur. Notably, the piano accompanist who played during the perverse tales earlier on, stares blankly out a window, then gasps—as if suddenly realizing her role—and jumps to her death.

Is the role played in a fascist society essentially a sleepwalking one? Or is this Pasolini’s notion of people living in capitalist society?

Saló’s final shot: two boys holding the machine guns are dancing together—they talk about their girlfriends. They seem oblivious to any subtext between them. They simply are going through the dance steps.