CINEMA IS YOUR SYMPTOM

A Tinderbox: The Class

2009-03-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-09T13:15:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-02T11:44:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-26T12:45:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-23T23:10:00.000-08:00

by Guest Contributor Nathan Schneider
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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‚Äîscene 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‚Äîyes, 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

2008-11-18T16:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-13T22:04:00.000-08:00

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.

Cardboard Communism: Bruce La Bruce's Raspberry Reich

2008-10-30T03:37:00.000-07:00

The thing about Bruce LaBruce's Raspberry Reich is that I really like it's melding of gay pornography and late-60s Godard-like communist commentary(La Chinoise, Made in USA), except for the fact that the image, the acting and the sound makes it sometimes seem like a highschool video project.
Provocative as it is (or seems to be), it doesn't really get as daring as early John Waters, or as edgy and imaginative as some of the pieces considered as the Cinema of Transgression ( Nick Zedd, Jon Moritsugu), or care about any of it's characters (or even the glossy performances), like you might see in the aforementioned or in a Paul Morissey film. Though it tells a story that you'd find in any of these cult-camp classics--a rich industrialist's son is kidnapped by a communist terrorist group that believes the only route to the revolution is via a homosexual infitada, a sexual revolution, and the son is going to be "tortured" sexually until the rich industrials gives into their demands (for publicity)--it's difficult to get beyond the blah production values. But then again, maybe that's the point. It's supposed to simulate the overlit, poorly acted aesthetics of gay porn.
Bruce LaBruce, a former porn star and now celebrated provocateur, shoots everything in video, sloppily shot and edited in Final Cut (I recognize the effects). While it is heartening to see a feature-length film shot and edited on affordable equipment, the results are less than cinematic. I was wondering then, afterwards, why I kind of liked the movie?
Everyone is enjoying themseleves, in the way that you and your high school friends might enjoy yourselves if you were trying to have fun, be silly, and make a movie about sex and radical politics (really not much more than a lot of sloganeering). It sort of has a fragment of the spirit of John Water's earlier films--but it's missing some of the panache, the absurdity, and of course a true performer like Divine. Still, I admire the film's commitment to staying inside a cheap, mass-production porno aesthetic, while having a content about a prospective sexual revolution. It's sort of like Fassbinder's Der Dritte Generation mixed in with the flat cardboard-ness of a porn.

Silence in Bresson’s Un Condemné à mort s'est échapé

2008-10-05T15:44:00.000-07:00

Bresson’s A Man Escaped (Un Condemné à mort s'est échapé) seems, on my first viewing over a month ago at NYC’s Film Forum, to be one of those quiet films whose magnitude builds so slowly that you’re hardly aware until you bear the weight of the escape at the end. I’m drawn to the minimalism of this film—visually, performatively, sonically, textually. Without trying to stretch the drama of his main character’s escape, Bresson instead creates a story out of the many obstacles to be steadily and quietly surpassed. I would like to focus on the sound.

One intriguing aspect of Bresson’s film is the role of silence. Bresson was a minimalist. He wanted each sonic aspect of this film to be the absolute minimum necessary, which apparently meant only sounds that would help move the narrative core of the film along. There is one point in the film when the two prisoners (Fontaine and François, played by François Letterier and Charles La Clainche) are escaping and they are on the roof of the inner cell wall—they hear a squeaky sound. Fontaine says that it’s the only sound whose source he can’t figure out. Later, when they reach the roof of the outer cell wall, Fontaine and François encounter the source of the sound: a Nazi on a bike with ungreased chains circling the perimeter.

Sound in A Man Escaped is invasive: it’s a clue to the danger ahead, it threatens to give one away, it misleads, it informs. Sound plays a crucial role in every frame of the film. Consider, for example, the relationships between prison cells. In order for Fontaine to communicate to other cells, he relies on a distinct patterned sequence of knocks. Though he can’t see the expressions of his prison mates, he has to trust them. And in order to trust them, he must trust that they’ll remain silent—that they won’t give him away to prison authorities. Silence is a form of faith—in someone’s concealment of a secret.

A minimalist style might also contain a secret. Why does Bresson pare things down so much? Why are his “model” actors trained to merely say their lines (minimizing inflection or expressive emotional interpretation)? What we get is something like two serene lakes of sound and image. The scenes between Fontaine and François, at the end of the film, when François moves into the cell, seem to portray many interpretive possibilites. There is only the image and what is heard and said. François’ face and the soundtrack conceal full trust. We’re not entirely sure that François won’t rat on Fontaine, even after he’s joined him in his pact.

Not a word of affection is really uttered between the two characters, but the film’s gravity is held—in the end—by their attraction. It is unusual for a character who enters in the last third of a film to have so much weight. François can only be the silent thing that goes wrong or the key.

The voiceover throughout is of Fontaine plotting his escape, at any cost, even killing François. It is remorseless, quiet—you could even say almost “godlike”. But the voiceover (unlike most movies) isn’t just a simple narrational tool—it’s function is to allow us to follow Fontaine’s meticulous thought process. Subdued, logical strategies from the “inside” contend with the problems presented on the “outside”.

Interstingly, When asked about the film's sense of mysticism, Bresson has elaborated: "I do not believe that everything in a film is put there. You include some things without including them. What you call my 'mysticism' must derive from this. In Un Condamné I tried to make the audience feel these extraordinary currents which existed in the German prisons during the Resistance, the presence of something or someone unseen; a hand that directs all."

The Need to Cause Damage: the 2008 GOP Convention

2008-09-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

Riots at the GOP Convention during the first week of September went almost unnoticed. In the news, it was widely reported (or worse, insinuated) that the protesters didn’t even know what they were protesting about. The news coverage had been gradual, like grains of sand slowly falling through an hourglass. Now is the time to reconsider what in fact is the news. What values does the news protect? What interests does it have? And why (in this example) isn’t there more outrage about the unseemly police state tactics used in St. Paul, Minnnesota during the 2008 GOP Convention?

Were the protesters even mentioned amongst the chummy jabs by the crony partneership of Rudy Giuliani, Joseph Lieberman, Sarah Palin and John McCain? What we (as outsiders) truly know is filtered through many sources—sources which seem to exclude reasons for protest, sources which attempt to maintain journalistic “detachment” yet don’t acknowledge their alliances with big media companies and a compliance with a war machine, Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”. It is no surprise that protests were under-reported at the DNC, as well.

Protesters at the Republican convention were oft-reported in the Minnesota media as a troublesome band of youths who were looking to interfere, attack, and pose a threat. The very framing of protest (through laws, restriction on freedom of speech, and , yes, through media) is to neuter the protesters so that they are caught in these screen shots of protesters being dragged away by police, being peppersprayed and teargassed. Somehow in the mainstream media, the police become unquestionable, unassailable, and irreprehensible protectors of the public good. If public opinion is outraged, how opportune for the media—who can twist the original jarring shots of police dragging protesters away, hitting protesters with batons, setting off fake bombs—as an instance of police brutality.

Apparently, news bulletings were posted saying that 300 people had been arrested in St. Paul before arrests occurred. Apparently, the cops were waiting to arrest and teargas the students, activist and leaders as they marched over a St. Paul bridge, their permit expiring at 5pm, allowing police to make a swift onslaught of arrests by 530 pm. The oft-repeated image in the media is a clash between police and protesters, further corroborating the notion amongst Americans of unruly and “anti-American”, liberal youths who were “posing a threat” that the police had to quell.

The Problem With Reporting.
All film is a lie, because we can edit—because we can exclude information. Because stories in the heads of producers influence how they cut, why they cut and who they cut and what they cut to. There is no more simple law of film than that. And yet images and reports sway a public towards particular opinions, towards a particular outrage or oath of political support.

And yet the serious consequences behind news reporting that claims to be “honest” is it’s glaring dishonesty. It is a dishonesty that soon becomes reflected on the public stage to reach a wider audience, a dishonesty reflected again and again in constituents who rely on the news as a legitimate source for information. Why aren’t there people on a news program who counter the information being reported? Who present a different story? Even amongst ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX the story angle is in the same ballpark, despite FOX’s conservative slant of deceptive “fair and balanced reporting”. What is needed now is a praxis implemented into the media to question the notion of media itself—a drastic reconstruction of the role of media on inidvidual programs. As is the case with the thousands of disgruntled protesters at the GOP convention, American public protest and news reporting needs to be allowed to be less neutered, less controlled and more volatile in terms of the rights of free speech than it is today.

Black Face/White Face

2008-08-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

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…

2008-08-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Notes on Cinematic Thrills and the Blockbuster

2008-07-27T22:35:00.000-07:00

One of Godard’s best notions had to do with the nature of form and content on film. “To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated.” Under that notion, it would seem we were living in a hyper-kinetic world of flash, trash, and an attention-deficit, where the reality is glossy, tabloid, and demented. Take some of our box-office megahits: The Dark Knight (2008), Titanic (1997), Lord of the Rings: Twin Towers (2002). Hollywood of the past ten years has cultivated a sort of blockbuster movie that is epic and operatic, as well as glutted with special effects explosions and disasters. Is there a sort of cultural yearning for these spectacles? And how do they interact with our conscious notions of the real world?

The Hollywood blockbuster is no new invention. It has taken many forms throughout cinema history. The first films were spectacles (by DeMille, D.W. Griffith), meant to attract and mesmerize large audiences and make them forget about the reality beyond theater doors. Ironically, newsreels used to also be viewed before the “main show”—newsreel which explicitly and propagandistically shaped the reality beyond theater doors. Stories of war and fanciful escapades (Birth of a Nation, The Mark of Zorro) gave way to historic epics (Lawrence of Arabia), and then to sci-fi epics (Star Wars). By the early nineties, CGI technology allowed for a blockbuster on a larger scale—unimaginable disasters that jolted their audiences with monsters and explosions that looked more and more “real”. Jurassic Park (1993) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), to name a few.

But with the rise in importance of the mega-blockbuster over the past ten years, I am inclined to say that there is a certain type of spectacle that the globalized American public prefers to see again and again. This type of film is operatic and they share the same striking intensities, so that if you took a machine and just measured the tempo of these films, you’d find remarkable similarities between Dark Knight, Twin Towers, Spiderman and any other schlock blockbuster coming out of Hollywood right now. They all feel the same, maybe in the same way that all of Godard’s movies from a certain period of the sixties share a rhythm, or how all of David Lynch’s films share a style, tone and rhythm. The difference of course is that Godard and Lynch are director auteurs, whereas the movie directors who made the aforementioned blockbusters are all virtually interchangeable, with little identifiable or formal interests at all.

Maybe what young cinephiles and serious filmmakers should study is the mass audience desire for the shock and fears and thrills of blockbuster films. To be close to disaster—and not affected by it—to be cathartically moved or thrilled by it—seems to be a collective desire amongst audiences worldwide. Audiences want “shock and awe”, but is it at a lobotomizing expense? Or is the “shock and awe” of blockbuster films an important communal sensation for our society?

And how do these films shape our sense of global disaster (Twin Towers) and mass violence (Dark Knight)? It might be noted that it’s not precisely what happens in these movies or the protagonists and antagonists involved, but the way it happens, the tone. Just like on the news when we see horrific events, but don’t pay attention to the sanctimonious tone of the report, or how the news is presented and framed for us as it shapes a reality.

Film anthropologists, is there a rise in ticket sales for these box-office blockbusters of the post-9/11 era?
Is there a cultural fantasy for epic disaster?
Is there a lingering dream of American communal solidarity? In the way in which the good rally together to defeat the bad in these films? Aren’t Americans just always hoping for that type of unity which began the country?

Maybe we just have a glossy vision of violence and disaster, which is not only cathartic and fun in a demented way, but (paradoxically) not entirely desensitizing or unhealthy. Disaster epics merely confirm the attitudes of the country. Pop culture gives us the thrill of jouissance (pleasure, and any stimulation, which can be too much to bear); of violence and disaster without violence or disaster (as theorist Slavoj Zizek might say, it’s “decaf coffee”). People go to blockbusters to escape, to be thrilled, to “experience” a spectacle together. The blockbuster ritual binds Americans, at the same time it’s the source of their problems. The unified wish presented in American blockbusters is the wish that we will fight evil together.

I tend to think that serious young filmmakers and cineastes should take note of the wild success, popularity and tones of the blockbuster films. We should train ourselves to become anthropologists of the image, and anthropologists of entertainment. The fantasies of American culture are contained in their good/bad Manichean battles (perfectly typified by the recent revival of comic book blockbusters), their Dolby Surround Sound Boeing 707 effects (when will wind and air blasts be part of the cinematic experience?), the hundreds of bodies careening across the screen from apocalyptic mega-explosions. But might it not just be a way to work through the wish for American solidarity? And perhaps the blockbuster is moreover an artificial jouissance, a thrill that never becomes too much to bear, a disaster that is manageable and where “good” will win in the end; a simulation of the reductionist Republican vision of the ongoing Iraq War.