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Criticism and Context; Jia Zhangke

2012-01-24T09:50:00.004-05:00

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Movie Mutations project is that it brought together a number of film critics of a certain generation who were geographically dispersed across multiple continents and yet shared a lot of common ground in terms of taste. The films and filmmakers they treasured and championed were often equally (if not more) dispersed in terms of nationality and culture, and yet there was often significant agreement among these critics about their worth. When I first read Movie Mutations, I remember thinking: Does lack of knowledge of context — social, historical, cultural, economic, political, artistic — pose no barriers to the appreciation of a filmmaker’s work as it travels around the world?

My own position on this is simple: Contextual knowledge is not a prerequisite for appreciating cinema, but it definitely can, whenever available, contribute to a deeper and wider understanding of both the film at hand and its place within multiple larger structures — social, historical, political, etc. In other words, I’m rarely nervous about expressing praise for a film I like, no matter its global source, simply because I lack the contextual knowledge to appreciate it fully. The fact that it appealed to me for certain reasons is enough for the moment. But there’s a part of me that continues to be curious — for new knowledge and insight, both contextual and critical, that might revise, rethink, or even just elaborate, in ways large and small, my appreciation.

Case in point: I’ve enthusiastically followed the films of Jia Zhangke for almost a dozen years now but a fascinating piece in a recent issue of New Left Review — “Poetics of Vanishing: The Films of Jia Zhangke” by Zhang Xudong — deepens my view of his films by situating them in certain revealing particularities of background. (The piece is available online for a fee.)

Zhang describes how ‘Fifth Generation’ filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige were responsible for breaking Chinese cinema into the global culture market. They rejected the studio-bound socialist-realist tradition that preceded them, and instead chose to evoke a mythologized past with a visual reliance on “sweeping, dehistoricized landscapes”:

The elevated style of these films, reifying what they depicted into something ‘timeless’, seemed distant from the concrete experience of their own times, and failed to represent or recount the ongoing, epic social transformation of the country itself in the era of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms […]

Where the Fifth Generation sutured together a mythological whole—embodied by vast, empty shots of a pristine, ahistorical landscape, from Shaanxi’s loess plateau in Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) and Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) to the icy mountain ranges of Tibet—the Sixth was eager to portray the shabby, formless texture of everyday life in county-level towns, where socialist underdevelopment meets the onslaught of marketization.

Specifically, Jia’s films, Zhang tells us, portray a very particular kind of place: they are set in xiancheng, or county-level cities. There are over 2400 such cities in China, but they are extremely under-represented in film and literature. Zhang writes:

To focus on xiancheng is, whether consciously or not, to zoom in on the underbelly of China’s socialist modernity and its Reform Era. Nominally part of ‘urban China’, xiancheng stands apart from the fantasy of a pristine and authentic, custom-bound rural world […] On the other hand, xiancheng is decidedly not a metropolitan area: if anything, it offers the opposite of urban sophistication, white-collar jobs and access to national cultural and political power […]

In terms of material or symbolic capital, then, xiancheng is proletarian China par excellence. In terms of urban forms and their visual representation, xiancheng is usually found to be shapeless and unattractive. […]

In other words, this is the in-between, generic area where the daily reality of contemporary China is laid bare. With no clear-cut boundaries or sharp distinctions between rural and urban, between industrial and agricultural, between high and low cultures, xiancheng becomes a meeting place for all kinds of forces and currents, whether contemporary or anachronistic.

Jia’s “hometown trilogy” (Xiaowu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures) marked the ‘discovery’ of xiancheng in Chinese cinema, Jia even referring to himself as a “cinematic migrant labourer”. After being so closely identified with this milieu, he tried to move beyond it in the setting of The World. Zhang comments:

But this setting [of The World] is in fact a xiancheng within the nation’s capital, at once a migrant labourer’s village and a xiancheng imagining of a globalized world. Indeed the ultimate irony of the film is aimed not at the Disney-style theme park, but at Beijing or even China itself: a giant xiancheng, whose concrete, contradictory realities co-exist with a virtual, mirage-like unity.

Finally, he makes this ironic observation about the reception of Jia’s work:

The idea that Jia’s films are representations of working-class life that only high-cultural audiences can understand, or that they constitute laments about urban demolition funded by the demolishers—24 City, for example, was funded by the very developers behind the project featured in the film—are ironies not lost even on Jia’s supporters.

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Jonathan Rosenbaum has long advocated for the crucial place that information occupies in film-critical writing. His book on Kiarostami, co-written with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, is a good example — as is so much of his other work — of this element of critical practice. Iranian politics, history, poetry, and cultural tradition are all summoned to the task of helping to explicate Kiarostami’s work.

Another example that comes to mind is Andrew Horton’s book on the films of Theo Angelopoulos, which attempts to draw upon centuries of Greek history and culture, Byzantine iconography and ceremony, Greek music hall traditions, and shadow puppet theatre to help sketch a broad context for the director’s art.

I’m wondering: Are there other examples of books, essays or even documentaries that perform this film-critical work of helping to provide any kind of context to better appreciate certain films or filmmakers? I’d love to hear any recommendations.

* * *

Some recent reading:

-- A lovely joint piece by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, "Secret and Impossible," available in both Spanish and English, at Cine Transit.

-- The new issue of the journal Experimental Conversations contains a terrific essay by Fergus Daly called "Sidney Lumet: Experimental Filmmaker?". David Hudson handily rounds up the issue for us. David also collects links to pieces on David Cronenberg on the occasion of his NYC retrospective. Also: Jim Emerson's 12-minute video essay, "Written in the Flesh: A Crash Course in David Cronenberg".

-- A fantasy double features piece at MUBI penned by several writers.

-- Matt Zoller Seitz's "Vertigoed: A Press Play Mashup Contest" has almost 100 participants including Catherine Grant, Jason Mittell and Kevin Lee. The contest required them to take the same Bernard Herrmann cue -- "Scene D'Amour," used in a memorable moment from Vertigo -- and match it with a clip from any film.

-- The Village Voice lays off J. Hoberman: David Hudson has a post that collects links. Hoberman's "year in film"; and in the NYT, he talks about the Village Voice and film culture.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Bresson's Affaires Publiques. Also: Ignatiy on Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

-- Kent Jones and Jonathan Rosenbaum discuss Bresson and Godard. Also: Kent has an essay on Jean-Pierre Gorin's films on the occasion of the new Criterion/Eclipse box set.

-- With this post on Diary of a Hitman (1991), Zach Campbell launches a new series of pieces at MUBI.

-- David Bordwell on the expressive use of hands and hand gestures and why they are comparatively rare in cinema today. Also: his post "Tinker Tailor: A Guide for the Perplexed".

-- This Onion story is pretty funny: "Miranda July Called Before Congress To Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is".

-- The Academy sounds an alarm about the fragility of digital production media.

-- The Senses of Cinema 2011 World Poll.

-- A brilliant video montage set to Lionel Richie's "Hello". For a "key" to where the clips are drawn from, see this post.

-- At Moving Image Source: Patrick Keiller on "landscape cinema and the problem of dwelling"; and a group of essays by several critics on films in the "First Look" program at the Museum of the Moving Image.

-- Several links via Adrian: Claude Chabrol on adapting La Ceremonie; A great interview with Bob Dylan by John Elderfield; "What If": movies imagined for another time and place"; The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest; Anne Bilson in the Guardian: "Why restyle Great Women of History as cockamamie feminist role models?". Related: Laura Flanders on The Iron Lady at Truthout.

-- Ben Sachs in the Chicago Reader on Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which can be viewed online.

-- An epic essay and music mix by Trevor Link, "Pop Utopianism: A Manifesto"/"We Need to Talk About K-Pop: A Mix"; and, via Trevor, a discovery of Cinefiles, a large and valuable database.

-- Olivier Père will be curating a complete Otto Preminger retrospective at the Locarno film festival this summer.

-- At The Guardian: a piece on the birth of UK film criticism, 100 years ago.

-- At the MUBI Notebook: "The Lost Pasolini Interview"; "The Posters of Robert Bresson"; and Dan Sallitt's defense of Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty.

-- Rowena Santos Aquino on filmmaker Kim Ki-duk.

-- Via the Film Doctor's blog: At Filmmaker magazine, "6 Filmmakers Talk About Documentary Films in the Digital Age"; a story on the "found-footage horror movie" at The Atlantic; an interview with Frederick Wiseman at Filmmaker; and at Observatory, "Reassessing the Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock Collaboration".

-- At Little White Lies: Yusef Sayed on F.J. Ossang; Hong Sang-soo; and Philippe Grandrieux.

-- The current issue of the Director's Guild of America Quarterly includes pieces on Michael Mann and Leo McCarey.

-- Time magazine proclaims Godard's Histore(s) du Cinéma "the DVD of the year".

-- An interview with Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard at the Film Comment blog.

-- Completely unrelated to cinema (or is it?): I finally know the difference between dork, geek, dweeb and nerd.

pic: Jia's Still Life (2006).

Film: The Critics' Choice

2012-01-03T09:10:00.003-05:00

It’s rare to find a coffee-table book about cinema that is truly of value to both the casual reader and the serious cinema-lover. One of them is French New Wave (1999), edited by Jean Douchet. I’ve just discovered another: Film: The Critics’ Choice (2001), edited by Geoff Andrew, with a foreword by Bernardo Bertolucci (Billboard Books, 2001). It’s out of print, but used copies are going for under a dollar at Amazon.

The book has a simple, clean structure that invites browsing. There are ten sections, each written by a different critic. Each critic takes on about 15 films. Every film gets 2 pages, one of which is devoted to a mini-essay and the other to a large still photograph.

The sections include “The Silent Era” (David Bordwell); “America: The Studio Years” (David Thomson); “America: Years of Change” (Philip French); “America: The Modern Era” (Amy Taubin and Kent Jones); “Europe: The Golden Age” (Gilbert Adair); “Europe: The New Waves” (Jonathan Rosenbaum); “British Cinema” (Peter Wollen); “Europe: A New Fin de siècle”; “International Cinema” (Tony Rayns); and a final section on animation (Paul Wells).

The essays are unusually insightful, especially given that they are working within the constraints of the coffee-table book format, and some of the film choices are pleasantly startling in their unlikeliness. There’s lots to savor here, but let me limit the scope of this post by reproducing, as a tribute, some passages by the recently deceased Gilbert Adair.

Adair on Fritz Lang’s M (1931):

Here is a curiosity: The sinister prominence with which the letter “M,” one tailor-made for the branding iron, figures in Fritz Lang’s filmography. His best known, although far from finest, film was Metropolis (1927), whose heroine’s name was Maria. His most celebrated creation, the protagonist of two silents and one late sound feature, was the verminously arachnoid mastermind Dr. Mabuse. Three of his most memorable Hollywood productions were Man Hunt (1941), Ministry of Fear (1944), and, long the favorite of cultishly minded Langians, Moonfleet (1955). (A whimsical case can even be made that the title of another work from the American period, The Woman in the Window, 1944, contained two inverted Ms.) Lang himself made a moving valedictory appearance in 1963 in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris.

On Julia Solntseva and her 1970 film The Enchanted Desna:

Solntseva was the widow of Alexander Dovzhenko, a great filmmaker and a matchless celebrant of the Soviet Eden, whose loyal helpmate she had been throughout his life. When he died in 1956, she proceeded to film, one after the other, his handful of unrealized scripts almost as if they had been bequeathed to her, as if she were executing his deathbed request; and when there were no more left to film, she simply downed tools and retired.

If ever a film were a poem, it is The Enchanted Desna. A pantheistically phosphorescent hymn to nature as equally to the gleaming tractors and plows which were destined to transform it (and a personal favorite, intriguingly, of Jean-Luc Godard), it must be, at just 81 minutes, the briefest of cinematic works to ever have been shot in the 70mm wide-screen process [...] The visual motifs that we have to come to associate with Dovzhenko's cinema--the skies so low-hung we feel the characters will have to hunker down on all fours to crawl beneath them, the cornfields waving goodbye in unison (Dovzhenko himself once said that his was "a cinema of farewells")--are just as present in The Enchanted Desna.

On Manoel de Oliveira's first feature, Aniki-Bobó (1942):

...whose mystifying title is a Portuguese variant on "eeny-meeny-meiny-mo," it is a film about, and to some degree for, children. Set in Oporto, the director's native city, its slight plot centres upon the rivalry--for the affection of the local stunner--of a pair of matching mop-haired tots, one of whom, a blond cherub who might have stepped down from a Tiepolo altarpiece, is unjustly accused of having shoved the other onto a railroad track. [...]

What makes Aniki-Bobó unique, though, is its blatant theatricality, a word scarcely ever used to describe children's films. As witness the endearingly actorish performances which Oliveira coaxes from his diminutive performers, his film is unequivocally a melodrama. And even if its loose and deceptively artless shooting style (it was filmed wholly on location) seems to anticipate the revolutionary strategies of neorealism, the result is less reminiscent of De Sica's work, say, than of Pagnol's Marseillais trilogy, Marius, Fanny and Cesar (1931, 1932, 1936), by virtue of both the dockside setting and the tiny if nevertheless eternal triangle so solemnly, so touchingly played out before it. Like Pagnol's own films, what Aniki-Bobó offers is a persuasive illustration and defense of cinema as open-air theater.

* * *

Any suggestions of good coffee-table books on cinema--books that might contain something of interest for both the casual film buff and the more serious film-lover or film critic? I'd love to hear them.

I know that publishers such as Taschen and Phaidon have produced a number of cinema books in this format, although I know only a few of them. I recently picked up a couple of volumes in Phaidon's recently released budget series--on Hitchcock and Kubrick (both by Bill Krohn) and Lynch (by Theirry Jousse)--and they look interesting and insightful.

* * *

Some links:

-- Sight & Sound has made available a great little trove of Gilbert Adair's writings online. David Hudson's post at MUBI collects a number of pieces on Adair.

-- Adrian has a tribute to Adair at Filmkrant. And here's a wonderful text that is a critical 'duet': Adrian and Cristina Álvarez López's two-part, dual-language essay on Philippe Garrel at Cine Transit.

-- At Moving Image Source, critics, writers and artists share their highlights of 2011: part one; and part two.

-- As usual, plenty of recently posted, wonderfully engaging reading at Jonathan Rosenbaum's place on subjects as diverse as middlebrow cinema, Errol Morris, Iranian politics, black cinema, and Samuel Fuller.

-- Polls for best films of the year: Indiewire's round-up; and Film Comment's best released films and best unreleased films of the year. Also: Cahiers du Cinéma's top ten of the year; Andréa Picard's choices for best experimental films of the year; and Reverse Shot's best films of the year. Finally: Michael Z. Newman's "Faves, 2011."

-- The new issue of Cineaste has several web-exclusive pieces but is particularly worth picking up for a fascinating symposium (not online) on "the prospects of political cinema today" featuring such figures as John Gianvito, Travis Wilkerson, Sally Potter, Kelly Reichardt, John Sayles, Pere Portabella and John Hughes.

-- A new DVD release that seems to have slipped under the radar: Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, available for the first time with English subtitles. The translation is by Deleuze scholar Charles Stivale. (via Jason LaRiviere)

-- A wonderful close analysis of the prologue to Melancholia by Manohla Dargis.

-- The new issue of Senses of Cinema includes articles by Jacques Rivette and Murray Pomerance, and a roundup of the Toronto film festival by Darren Hughes. Also: the new issue of La Furia Umana is just out; it includes this Luc Moullet piece on Eric Rohmer in conjunction with MUBI.

-- Film Studies for Free's "Favorite Online Film Studies Resources in 2011".

-- The new issue of Film-Philosophy includes essays by Steven Shaviro and Rowena Santos Aquino, and a review of a recent collection of writings by Alain Badiou on cinema.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky puts up a post collecting 22 capsule reviews he wrote this year for the Chicago film weekly Cine-File.

-- Ben Sachs, at Chicago Reader, on his best films of the year.

-- At Moving Image Source: Chris Fujiwara on "The contradictions of Cuba in the work of Nicolás Guillén Landrián"; Bilge Ebiri on the use of language in Malick's The New World; and an excerpt from Jordan's Mintzer's recent book on James Gray in which Gray is interviewed about The Yards.

-- Charlie Kaufman's next project is ... a musical about online film criticism??

-- At Artforum: Tony Pipolo on Robert Bresson; and on Jean-Marie Straub.

-- Links to several recent articles by film scholar David Rodowick (srcoll down). Also via his page: the archives for Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image.

-- "Passionate Utterances: Learning from Stanley Cavell," at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- A restoration and revival of the films of French comedian Pierre Étaix.

-- Zach Campbell on some "recent commercial cinema." Also: Zach is now on Twitter.

-- Kent Jones on the documentaries of Vittorio de Seta.

-- Gilberto Perez on Alexander Dovzhenko in Film Quarterly.

-- The Anthology Film Archives just concluded the fascinating retrospective "Anarchism on Film" curated by Cineaste editor Richard Porton.

-- B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo's complete "Vertigo Variations".

-- Jonathan Romney on the recent DVD releases of films by Miklos Jansco.

-- In The Guardian: "Friedrich Kittler and the rise of the machine."

-- Via Adrian: Writings on Indian cinema at Projectorhead magazine and Silhouette.

-- The new issue of the journal World Picture.

-- At eFilmCritic: "2011 Whores of the Year."

-- At The Nation: "The Making of the 99%" by Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich.

Links to Recent Reading

2011-11-29T11:45:00.001-05:00

-- RIP, Ken Russell. Any personal favorites by this filmmaker? I've seen just a small fraction of his work.

-- Joan's Digest, a new feminist film quarterly edited by Miriam Bale. Also: Bale interviews Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method at Moving Image Source.

-- At MUBI, translated by Ted Fendt: "Jacques Rancière, Philippe Lafosse and the public in conversation about Straub-Huillet."

-- At Cine-Tourist, a collection of framegrabs of about 20 hand-drawn maps from films.

-- Image-posts: "The Striped Shirt in Cinema" (Cynthia Lugo) and "The Scarves of Grey Gardens" (Srikanth Srinivasan).

-- At Occupied Territories, Trevor Link's Tumblr page: "Depression, Melancholia and Me: Lars von Trier's Politics of Displeasure"; and a conversation about Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea.

-- How I wish I could catch this Edward Yang retrospective currently playing in NYC: David Hudson gathers links to pieces on Yang's films.

-- (via Andrew Klevan) Yakuza Graveyard is an interesting image-filled Tumblr page featuring posts such as this collection of images of teapots in Ozu's films.

-- The Film Quarterly site is featuring several web-exclusive pieces.

-- via Catherine Grant, a video: "The Cinema According to Luc" [Moullet]. Also: Catherine posts links to sample chapters from over 50 new Palgrave Macmillan/BFI film books.

-- At Serge Daney in English: some postcards Daney sent to actor Melvil Popuad.

-- At Press Play: "Pictures of Loss," a personal series of pieces by Peter Tonguette on grief and mourning in film.

-- An article on gender inequality in Hollywood, both in front of and behind the camera.

-- This new book by Jordan Mintzer, Conversations with James Gray, looks wonderful.

-- Amy Taubin and J. Hoberman discuss Melancholia and J. Edgar.

-- An interesting re-take on Francois Truffaut by Richard Combs in the new Film Comment.

-- David Phelps on "The silent cinema of [UC Davis] Chancellor Katehi's slow walk of shame".

-- Olive Films is releasing a number of classic Hollywood titles on DVD in 2012.

-- "The End of an Era Arrives as Digital Technology Displaces 35mm Film in Cinema Projection"

-- Great news: BFI is putting out a 4-DVD box of Ozu's silent "student comedies".

-- I notice that Straub-Huillet's Moses and Aaron is being released on DVD by New Yorker Video in a couple of weeks. Is New Yorker back in business? If so, great news.

Cinephile Business: Streaming, Lists

2011-11-02T10:35:00.004-04:00

Thanks to Jaime Christley — who has just fired up a new blog called thefilmsaurus — I recently discovered Hulu Plus. It’s been common knowledge for a while that Hulu features hundreds of Criterion titles that you can stream to your TV. But I’ve also learned that:

(1) Several terrific films not yet put out by Criterion on DVD are available for streaming there, for example: Bitter Rice, Remorques, a half-dozen Naruse films, Welles’ The Immortal Story, etc.

(2) Even better: a large number of titles are streaming in HD.

A quick scan reveals that Japanese cinema is particularly abundant. There are a dozen films by Mizoguchi (most on HD) including The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, The Life of Oharu, Utamaro and his Five Women, and The 47 Ronin; 17 by Ozu (more than half on HD); 9 by Oshima (nearly all on HD); and over a dozen by Naruse. Suzuki, Imamura, Shimizu and Teshigahara are also represented. And Kurosawa is the most generously available of all, with around 25 titles.

All of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” are on HD, as are three great Bressons (Au Hasard Balthazar, Mouchette, A Man Escaped), ditto Buñuel (Simon of the Desert, The Exterminating Angel, Viridiana) and Ophuls (Le Plaisir, La Ronde, Lola Montes).

* * *

Of late, I’ve been confining new DVD purchases to non-region-1 titles. Recent acquisitions in that department include: A Man Vanishes (Imamura, 1967), Before the Revolution (Bertolucci, 1964), Sparrow (Johnnie To, 2008), Our Beloved Month of August (Gomes, 2008), Deep End (Skolimowski, 1970), The Hunter (Pitts, 2010), On Tour (Amalric, 2010), The Banishment (Zviagintsev, 2007), Red Psalm (Jansco, 1972), I for India (Suri, 2005), Up the Junction (Collinson, 1968), De bruit et de fureur (Brisseau, 1988), and vol. 1 of the new Humphrey Jennings collection.

I won't be traveling to and from India this winter, so I'm hoping to have time on my hands to make my way through most of these over the holidays.

* * *

In Tim Palmer’s recent and interesting book Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema, there is an appendix devoted to a list, prepared by the great French film critic Alain Bergala, of “The 156 Films You Must Have Seen.” It was created as a guide for entering students of the French film school La Fémis. Each filmmaker (with just a couple of exceptions) is represented by only one work.

Bergala writes that these are neither “best” films nor his favorite films; instead he believes them to be the most productive for a contemporary beginner. As with all lists, he reminds us that it is highly contingent and unstable, a starting point for debate and multiplication.

I’m linking to the list at Google Books; the last page of the list is missing, so I’m recording below the films on that absent page:

André Téchiné Wild Reeds (1994)
Jacques Tourneur Cat People (1942)
François Truffaut Stolen Kisses (Baisers Volés, 1968)
Tsui Hark Once upon a Time in China (1991)
Johan van der Keuken De Platte Jungle (1978)
Agnès Varda Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1984)
Paul Vecchiali Drugstore Romance (Corps à coeur, 1979)
Dziga Vertov Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
King Vidor Duel in the Sun (1946)
Jean Vigo L'Atalante (1934)
Luchino Visconti The Leopard (1963)
Raoul Walsh High Sierra (1941)
Orson Welles The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Wim Wenders Kings of the Road (1976)
Billy Wilder Kiss Me Stupid (1964)
William Wyler The Children's Hour (1962)
Valerio Zurlini Family Portrait (1962)

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Your thoughts on streaming films or on Alain Bergala's list above? I'd love to hear them.

* * *

A few links:

-- There's one film and filmmaker on Bergala's list that I'd never heard of: Paul Vecchiali's Drugstore Romance (Corps à coeur, 1979). I notice a Vecchiali box set on sale at Amazon France but alas, without subtitles.

-- Two interviews with Chantal Akerman on her new film Almayer's Folly: by Darren Hughes at MUBI; and Michael Guillen at Fandor.

-- At Catherine Grant's place: A recently updated list of open access film e-books.

-- Caboose has a new project called "Planetary Projection" in which film projectionists around the world are invited to describe their work.

-- (via Cinetrix) Sergey Levchin's account at Senses of Cinema, "I Was a Captive Audience at the 57th Flaherty Seminar."

-- At his blog Journey by Frame, Trevor Link has been running a series of posts on Joe Swanberg's movies.

-- Cynthia Lugo on color and Derek Jarman's book Chroma.

-- James Benning's Landscape Suicide and American Dreams (lost and found) are now on DVD thanks to the Edition Filmmuseum.

-- I just learned that J. Hoberman and Yvette Biro have their own websites.

pic: Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)

A few impressions from Toronto

2011-10-06T21:35:00.008-04:00

Here are notes on a handful of films from Toronto. If you have any thoughts on these films or filmmakers, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

THAT SUMMER (Un été brûlant) (Philippe Garrel, France). Ten minutes in, and I find this film, like other Garrel, deeply, unaccountably moving. It’s not the characters, their desires and dilemmas — it’s too early to know what they are just yet. It’s what always gets me about Garrel: his “regard,” his own special deep and intent way of looking. His look is concentrated, still, un-ironic, Romantic, full-hearted. The ordinary, everyday reality of human beings — their faces, movements, gestures, or even just each person’s special immobility — is not just captured but inexplicably and miraculously heightened by this special, Garrelian look. He monumentalizes with his look the most obvious things we take for granted in real life — but he does so without hyperbolizing them. In this film, he focuses on a small number of characters who are lovers and friends, but each time he introduces a new character or when a new person enters the frame, my heartbeat instinctively quickens as if an entirely new and fascinating ‘landscape’ had just come into view. This is how acutely he is able to sharpen the viewer’s attentions — surely some kind of perceptual feat.

THE KID WITH A BIKE (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium). The Greek verb “kineo,” to set in motion, is often claimed to be the root of the word “cinema.” I responded to this film with a primal force because it’s about ceaseless movement. Running, pedaling, chasing, being chased, climbing, falling, ducking, darting, hurrying: the film is a virtual catalogue of these (and other) dramatically urgent forms of movement. There’s a great moment when the kid shows off his prowess on his bike by stopping it and balancing himself to a point of complete stillness for an instant. It’s a quietly humorous moment — an apotheosis — because it tells us that movement is the natural state; it is stillness that must be achieved with the special application of skill.

CRAZY HORSE (Frederick Wiseman, USA). Wiseman’s documentary on the famous Paris strip-tease club left me ambivalent. I loved all the behind-the-scenes stuff: long meetings about creative decisions and club management; bits of rehearsals; auditions; interviews with employees; and the minute-to-minute technical problem-solving in preparation for the shows. Some of the most telling moments expose the “branding anxiety” of the nightclub: it no longer wants to be seen as catering to “Japanese tourists” and wants respect, admiration, and prestige for its “refined art”. It’s great to witness this middlebrow quandary hover over the conversations and decision-making. What disappointed me were the long, repetitive, and relatively unreflective presentations of the dance numbers themselves. There’s a devastating moment in a backstage meeting when the director of the show proposes a restructuring of the stage management staff in order to specialize them, to highlight and take advantage of the special uniqueness of each employee. In the same breath he points out how different the stagehands (almost all men) are from the girls in the show, “les filles,” who are all interchangeable. The critique couldn’t be clearer — but by lavishing long and fascinated attention on the numbers, the film doesn’t further this critique in any way, and in fact only ends up endorsing and failing to question this gendered division of labor. It strikes me as a confused film: clear-eyed and critical in its backstage documentation; and wide-eyed about the abstract, formalist qualities of the strip-tease performances themselves.

HOUSE OF TOLERANCE (L'Apollonide) (Bertrand Bonello, France). This drama about the last days of a French brothel at the turn of the 20th century provides a corrective to some of my issues with the Wiseman film. The prostitutes are imaginatively individuated but — and here’s the film’s true radicality — this individuation is not performed through character development or psychology. In fact, despite spending a full two hours with them, we hardly get any sense of their “inner lives,” their psychological motivations, or their backstories. Instead, these women register as pure presence, as bodies and faces shot frequently in close-up, without the illusionistic need to outfit them with “rich” characterological detail. Some of my favorite scenes in the film are anthropological in nature: the group ritual of the trip to the gynecologist’s office to be examined for disease; and the initiation of a newcomer into the daily regimen — what time the women retire, when they awake, what duties they perform, what protocol must be honored with their clients, and so on.

AZHAGARSAMY’S HORSE (Sureendran, India). Here’s an interesting phenomenon: a festival film is almost always a film of some ambition, a film that in some way seeks a certain regard from the audience. Even the horror or exploitation works that show at TIFF aspire to some level of “art” — or at least to some level of special-ness or cult-ness. In the midst of such films, the Tamil rural comedy Azhagarsamy’s Horse is a “termite” surprise: it’s rude, crude, sentimental, vulgar, broad, joyous — and, I believe, completely unaspirational. Now, I’m not claiming this is a great film — but it’s qualitatively different from most of the films that surround it at the festival, and thus a blast of fresh air. The film also contained the most memorable and shocking image of the festival: the closeup of the rear end of a horse as it squeezes out a large, cylindrical “pooh stick,” which is then immediately caught mid-air by a village charlatan, stirred up with water, and sprinkled on the faithful believers in the village square as an all-promising healing elixir from the gods. Wow! A savagely satirical moment that is played not preciously or with any self-congratulation but casually, unfussily, in passing.

* * *

A few links:

-- A wonderful collection of tributes to Raul Ruiz at The Notebook, by Luc Moullet, James Quandt, Catherine Grant, Joe McElhaney, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Gonzalo Maza, and others.

-- Miguel Marías on 120 essential films of the 1920s. At Miradas de Cine.

-- David Cairns at Shadowplay on Mark Cousins' The Story of Film, a new 15-episode TV series.

-- Thom Andersen in the new Cinema Scope: "Random Notes on a Projection of The Clock by Christian Marclay".

-- Dave Kehr and Dennis Lim on the latest DVD box set from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938.

-- The indefatigable Catherine Grant helpfully collects links to Maya Deren studies; and to work on sound in Hitchcock's cinema.

-- The latest issue of La Furia Umana includes a round-table on the "post-cinematic" with Steven Shaviro, Therese Grisham, Nicholas Rombes and Julie Leyda; an essay by Joe McElhaney on Terrence Malick; and much more.

-- Adam Nayman's terrific piece in Reverse Shot enriches my appreciation and makes me realize that I may have underrated Asghar Farhadi's A Separation.

pic: Azhagarsamy's Horse.

TIFF 2011: The Round-Up

2011-09-23T10:00:00.003-04:00

Best-of-Fest:

This is not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi, Iran)

Three Big Personal Favorites:

The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
Dreileben ("Three Lives" -- three feature films, by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler; Germany)
That Summer (Philippe Garrel, France)

Strong Films:

Elena (Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia)
House of Tolerance ("L'Apollonide") (Bertrand Bonello, France)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, USA)
The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr, Hungary)
Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont, France)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, USA)

Solid, Fascinating:

Life without Principle (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland)
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, Iran)
Back to Stay (Milagros Mumenthaler, Argentina)
Good Bye (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran)
Invasion (Hugo Santiago, Argentina, 1969)

Good But With Reservations:

Crazy Horse (Frederick Wiseman, USA)
ALPS (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)

Most Fun:

Azhagarsamy's Horse (Suseendran, India)

Not Good At All:

Elles (Malgoska Szumowska, Poland/France)

I Regret Not Being Able To Schedule:

Low Life (Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval, France)
Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, USA)
Edwin Parker (Tacita Dean, UK)
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, UK)
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Love, France)

* * *

I would hazard a guess that most cinephiles who are not students or scholars of film generally tend to be either suspicious of "film theory" or indifferent to it. But to be a serious film-lover, I would contend, is also to be interested, consciously or unconsciously, in however "non-academic" or intuitive a manner, in certain basic questions of film theory.

Nearly all of the writing thus far on This is not a Film has concentrated on its political context and production circumstances — already legend — and the courageous gesture the film represents. This is entirely appropriate, but the film also holds enormous potential for future analysis by film critics as a work of meta-cinema that asks fundamental questions like: What is the difference between a screenplay and a film? (Once upon a time, in the nouvelle vague era, an answer to this question was simply: “mise en scène.”) Is the “director” of a film always a single, unified, human person? In a film, can the role of the director “move around,” in non-human form, attaching at one moment to the unexpected gesture or movement of a nonprofessional actor, at another moment to a striking setting or piece of decor that takes over a shot or scene and “rules” it?

Panahi and the film take up such questions, sometimes explicitly, other times implicitly. In a wonderful pedagogical move, he plays excerpts from DVDs of three previous films (The Mirror, Crimson Gold, and The Circle) to show us supporting evidence for his arguments. This is not a Film also stands as part of the wonderful tradition in Iranian cinema that is relentlessly curious about the relationship between fiction and documentary. The film ostensibly unfolds on a single day but was apparently shot over four days. Look carefully for the time stamp on the bottom right corner of Panahi’s television screen: it offers clues to the discontinuity of shooting and the degree of constructedness of this film.

Lest I might have unintentionally given the impression that it is a dry and ‘academic’ treatise, let me quickly add that this is a very funny, surprising, and deeply moving film — but no less philosophical because of these virtues.

* * *

Dreileben is a collection of three feature films made for German TV, and was shown at the festival in one continuous screening with a brief ten-minute break. It’s a fascinating experiment born of an epistolary exchange between three filmmakers — Christian Petzold, Christoph Hochhäusler, and Dominik Graf, the former two being affiliated with the “Berlin School” — that lasted two years and was published in the German film magazine Revolver. The topics of conversation included film aesthetics, film genre, and issues of national identity. The correspondence is downloadable on pdf as part of the “press book” for the film here.

The three films share a single plot event: a murderer in custody is brought to a hospital to visit his dying foster mother, and uses the opportunity to escape. They weave separate stories around this event, often at its peripheries, occasionally moving to its center.

The Petzold film, Beats Being Dead, employs a mise en scène that is so absurdly clean that it strikes me as humorous. The film has a detached and sardonic tone, and it’s impossible not to read its protagonist — a privileged white kid who dates an emotionally volatile Bosnian working-class girl — in a critical fashion. The film’s surprise ending was decried by some as “cheap” — but it makes eminent sense by the time the final film of the collection (One Minute of Darkness by Hochhäusler) winds its way to the (same) ending. The climactic event registers first as generic move, then as social inevitability. The endings of the two films together ask the questions: Are murderers born, or are they made? Does violence always already exist in society? To what extent is it a consequence of processes set in motion by society and the State?

The Hochhäusler film (to my mind the strongest of the three) finds an equivalence between a cop losing his hearing and a hypersensitive, mentally disturbed murderer. This is a film about heightened, concentrated sense perceptions that puts the characters — and us — in a strange and uncanny awareness of the surrounding natural world. The crack of a twig, the chaotic swarm of an anthill, the crawl of a colored bug on a leaf, the smear of an animal’s blood on a man’s face — all of these register with uncomfortable vividness, their impact enhanced by the electronic soundtrack of hums, whirs and whines that is forever reminding us of the hearing loss of the protagonist. A strongly sensuous film.

The third feature of the collection — Dominik Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around — is the odd one out that fits loosely into this triptych, which is why I have little to say about it. Perhaps its virtues will become more apparent when I revisit the films: I notice they’re already on DVD in Germany.

* * *

Coming soon: capsule impressions of the other TIFF films.

Thoughts or questions or ideas on any of the festival films? Please feel free to share them here.

* * *

A few links:

-- Adrian Martin on The Tree of Life at the FIPRESCI site. Also: Adrian is the organizer of the "World Cinema Now" conference in Melbourne; it kicks off next week.

-- Catherine Grant posts some wonderful videos of V.F. Perkins speaking.

-- The dauntingly prolific Michael Sicinski's coverage of TIFF at: Cargo; his site The Academic Hack; and at MUBI. (He was also part of the exhaustive and invaluable Cinema Scope dispatches from the festival.)

-- David Hudson has an 80th birthday post for Jean-Claude Carrière. Also: David has launched a new feature at The Notebook called Daily Briefing.

-- Michael Z. Newman has a post about the process of collaborating with Elana Levine to write their new book Legitimating Television.

-- Mark Fisher on "The Privatisation of Stress" at New Left Project.

-- Arena Supplement on the films of Jean Rollin.

TIFF 2011

2011-08-31T17:05:00.008-04:00

The TIFF lottery gods were uncommonly kind to me this year: I got nearly all my picks for the film festival. Here's what I'm seeing:

Dreileben ("Three Lives" -- three feature films, by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler; Germany)
Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France)
The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr, Hungary)
The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
This is not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi, Iran)
Crazy Horse (Frederick Wiseman, USA)
Elena (Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia)
That Summer (Philippe Garrel, France)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki, Finland)
The Cardboard Village (Ermanno Olmi, Italy)
Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont, France)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, USA)
Life without Principle (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)
House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello, France)
ALPS (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, USA)
Elles (Malgoska Szumowska, Poland/France)
Good Bye (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran)
Azhagarasamy's Horse (Suseendran, India)
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, Iran)
The Student (Santiago Mitre, Argentina)
Back to Stay (Milagros Mumenthaler, Argentina)
Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh, Australia)

Films I wanted to see but was unable to schedule: The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, UK); Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, USA); Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, USA); We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, UK); Invasion (Hugo Santiago, Argentina, 1969); Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz, Philppines); Once upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey); Faust (Alexander Sokurov, Russia); Low Life (Nicolas Klotz/Elizaeth Perceval); and Mushrooms (Vimukta Jayasundara, Sri Lanka). And my Wavelengths (avant-garde) schedule is still uncertain.

Here is a link to all the programmes at the festival. Any suggestions or recommendations? I'd love to hear them.

* * *

A few links:

-- For the next couple of weeks, during TIFF, Cinema Scope Online will be putting up new pieces each day.

-- Catherine Grant's post at Filmanalytical presents, with explanatory text, her latest video essay: on "the haptic" in film.

-- Good news: Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again has just been picked up for distribution by Oscilloscope Laboratories. Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted his essay on the film. Also at Jonathan's: an essay on Raymond Durgnat on the occasion of the launch of a new website devoted to Durgnat's writings. Right now there are links to a small number of pieces, and I hope the site will accumulate many more as time goes by. Finally: an interview with Jonathan by Michael Guillen titled "Positioning Cinephilia" in the journal Film International (not, alas, available to read online).

-- Jim Emerson helpfully (as always) gathers together the various strands of the recent "chaos cinema" debate.

-- Interested in browsing an eclectic set of links-filled posts? Visit Cinetrix.

-- Ignatiy V. on Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai's Don't Go Breaking My Heart.

-- Steven Shaviro: "What is the Post-Cinematic?"

-- (via Chris Fujiwara) A brief interview with Frederick Wiseman, "Finding a sharper focus on reality through literary criticism."

-- German cinema: I finally caught up with Maren Ade's Everyone Else, surely among cinema's great microscopic examinations of a relationship. The three-feature Dreileben is the film I'm most looking forward to at Toronto; here is a 2007 interview with one of its directors, Christoph Hochhäusler, who also helps run the film blog Revolver. Michael Sicinski's appetizing review of The City Below is here; I hope the film gets distributed in the US. I can't wait to see it.

pic: Dreileben - One Minute of Darkness.

"A Ghost at Noon" by Adrian Martin

2011-08-21T09:55:00.004-04:00

Raúl Ruiz died this week. Adrian Martin has written a personal, moving and illuminating tribute to him -- a 2,500-word piece that I'm posting below. Please also see Catherine Grant's large post of links on Ruiz's work at Film Studies for Free. Your thoughts on Ruiz's films -- and your favorites among his work? Please feel free to share them in the comments. -- Girish.

* * *

A GHOST AT NOON

"I try to remember that disparity exists. And that is a good way to remember death. Then death becomes something completely other than accommodating or resigning oneself to dying, something other than melancholia. On the contrary, it becomes a ‘working tool’."
- Raúl Ruiz, 1987

In the magisterial Mysteries of Lisbon (2011) – which is not, in fact, Raúl Ruiz’s final film (he subsequently shot La noche de enfrente in Chile), even if it is, happily, one of his most internationally successful – there is a scene in which the mysterious priest of the saga (superbly played by Adriano Luz) enters a private room in which we see, neatly arranged, the traces of all his other, previous identities. They are more than just disguises or costumes; they are his other selves. Ruiz’s camera makes a slow, elegant pan around this small, confined space of intrigue, coming to rest on the diminutive Father Dinis, simply reflecting, absorbing all these signs of the labyrinthine fiction of suffering and woe to which he has been a party, both player and puppet. It’s the kind of moment that – as in every great film – you don’t necessarily really see or take in on a first viewing, or even fifth viewing; but it’s there, waiting for you to catch up with it at last.

Another of the best Ruiz films, in my devoted opinion, is Three Lives and Only One Death (1996). It is among the many he made that reflect (in so many allegorical and metaphorical ways) on mortality. The movie seems to mark a somber limit: after living so many parallel lives, so many second chances, so many imaginary identities – each one spinning out its own world or universe – the main character (Marcello Mastroianni) discovers, as we discover, that the proliferating game comes to halt with the full stop of the mortal sentence: there is only one death and, beyond that, nothing (I believe Ruiz remained an atheist his entire life). But, in the immediate wake of the announcement of the director’s own passing at the age of 70, someone on Facebook turned this title around in a pleasing, triumphant way: one death, but so many lives.

And Ruiz did indeed lead so many lives, progressively as well as simultaneously. An astonishingly prolific artist who was unafraid to grab any production opportunity, no matter how small (“Give me ten thousand dollars or ten million dollars”, he once joked, “nothing in-between”), his career went through many phases. Although some commentators (including passionate supporters) tended to reduce every one of his works to the same ‘Ruizian’ wash of zany angles, coloured filters and narrative illogicalities – how he must have grown weary of that appellation, as Welles grew tired of Wellesian or Antonioni of Antonioniesque! – there are important differences, in scale, medium, strategy and level of achievement, between his very diverse productions. (He also disliked, by the way, the inevitable Frenchification of his Chilean first name into ‘Raoul’ – something I wish the New York Times and many French commentators had gotten up to speed with by now.)

I won’t attempt a synoptic sweep of his full career here – that will require a hefty book or three. Some highpoints that come immediately to mind, however: the first films made in Chile, 1960-1973, full of treasures unknown to many of us, such as No One Said Anything (1971) and Socialist Realism (1973) – what a blast, three years ago, to see in Valdivia the discovered and restored (by Ruiz himself, with a mouth-music sound accompaniment) inaugural short, La Maleta (The Suitcase, 1963). The wayward-lurching Los Tres Tristes Tigres (1968), a hyper-realist bourgeois drama already way out the other side of Cassavetes, Dogme and Mumblecore combined – arch-surrealist Ado Kyrou knew the spark of genius straight away when he saw that one, just as Serge Daney would, four or five years later, when Raúl and his wife, director-editor Valeria Sarmiento, had hastily relocated in France in exile from the dire political situation in Chile.

This begins the period via which most of us encountered Ruiz in the English-speaking world, usually belatedly: from Suspended Vocation (1977) and Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) through to The Roof of the Whale (1981) and City of Pirates (1983) – an extraordinary run of dazzling, neo-baroque explosions, many emanating from the B movie-type conditions of television commission. Ruiz took his working-method inspiration on these projects from Edgar Ulmer or Buñuel in Mexico; the speed and improvisational gifts he evolved there meant, many years later, that he could sustain the elaborate mise en scène of Mysteries of Lisbon over an entire six episodes – something the HBO/Canal+ crowd cannot quite do.

Some of Ruiz’s champions tend to stall around here, fixating on these works and the apotheosis of their wild techniques in Treasure Island (1985) or Life is a Dream (1986). But Ruiz, far from exhausted, had a long way to go yet. The Blind Owl (1987), an adaptation of a classic Iranian modernist novel by Sadegh Hedayat, is among the summits of his career, as is the too-little-seen series Manoel on the Island of Marvels (1985), which crept out, unannounced but subtitled, at midnights on Australian television in the ‘90s. Dark at Noon (1992) looked like a turn into the ‘genre mainstream’ (horror-mystery), but when that didn’t pan out, Ruiz – as always – continued on with his low- or no-budget works, and essayistic videos like Mirror of Tunisia (1993) in collaboration with Abdelwahab Meddeb.

The long-nurtured partnership with Portuguese producer/entrepreneur Paulo Branco led to another kind of upswing in the mid ‘90s, with glamorous stars inside the labyrinthine plots of Genealogies of a Crime (1997) and, later, That Day (2003). The film that really made the difference for Ruiz, film-industry wise, in the 21st Century was Time Regained (1999) – and whoever first had the crazy idea to get him to helm this classic of French literature must be eternally thanked. This gave Ruiz the ability to keep lavish, high-profile projects (the ten million dollar ones), like the underrated Klimt (2006), going.

The works kept flowing forth, on all levels – the English language productions (genre turf, again) of Shattered Image (1998) and A Closed Book (2010), as well as the advanced hermetics of free experiments such as Love Torn in Dream (2000) with its multiple, arithmetically arranged, interconnecting plots across different historical times and spaces, or the heady Lost Domain (2005), or La maison Nucingen (2008). He worked in gallery installation and in theatre, a real multimedia guy, giving rise to pure experiments with actors and language like Agathopedia (2008) – every kind of actor loved Ruiz – and the tribute-in-process Responso: Homage to Huub Bals (2004), which had a special poignancy for its Rotterdam audience.

Ruiz was so often ahead of the curve: we hear a lot about mind-games and puzzle-films these days, as if Christopher Nolan is doing something new and innovative, but the real mind-games were laid out by Ruiz in Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982), The Comedy of Innocence (2001) and Three Lives and Only One Death. And then – once more obscured in the West – the return to Chile as both its Prodigal Son and Revered Master (national pride over him is more than palpable there): starting with the TV Dante (1992) and going right through Días de campo (2004) and two elaborate TV series (La recta provincia [2007] and Litoral [2008]), ending with the yet-unseen La noche de enfrente – and, in between, the groundbreaking long-form ‘digital essay’, between documentary and fiction, of the Chilean Rhapsody (2002-3), a marvel of exploration and inquisition.

Like every filmmaker, Ruiz always had many projects. He seemed to work on the principle once well described by Joseph Losey: have five films on the go, and you’ll get to make the sixth. And, because Ruiz wrote assiduously most days of his young-adult and adult life, deft writing without much need for redrafting, these were not mere sketches; he had a well-developed script in his drawer for most of them. But he almost never expressed regret for this or that unmade baby; as he once proclaimed, “it’s stupid to make only one at a time: you have to create a dozen or twenty in one” – so traces of phantom projects managed to find their way into every crevice, every opportunity.

Ruiz was a gifted teacher of filmmaking; several of his features, including The Golden Boat (1990) and Vertigo of the Blank Page (2003) emerged from ultra-low-budget classroom exercises. He always believed, pedagogically, in the rigorous union of doing and reflecting, in serene, morning/afternoon alternation; theory and practice were never split apart for him, although he would always add that, in his own work, he was able to carry out only a fraction of the experiments he conceived. Experimentation was, indeed, his watchword: in the last years of his life at University of Aberdeen in Scotland, he speculated about the possibility of marrying cinema theory with neuroscience via experiments on the brain and its strange force-field ‘aura’; this followed on from his interests in all things mathematical and scientific. He was a mind-bogglingly well-read person (while scoffing at the academic pedantry of precise bibliographic citation – he once tossed me a rare manuscript by someone who had crossed his path, saying: “If I need to refer to it, well, I know you’ve got it”) – and only Valeria could have the faintest clue, now, of all the rare and obscure texts he acquired (he was an avid antique book collector) and pored over in his lifetime.

The importance of Ruiz as a theorist of film has, I believe, been criminally underrated and overlooked. In many essays throughout his life (such as those given to Positif), in the brilliant Poetics of Cinema book series for Dis Voir (alas, now unfinished), and especially in his manifesto-like “The Six Functions of the Shot”, Ruiz probed, with infinite care and patience, the mysteries and possibilities of every linkage and liaison in cinema: cuts, camera movements, sounds, gestures, shadows, narrative and non-narrative events … And no less important, on this level, were his more obviously creative pieces (film, play and radio scripts, novels, the ‘notes for actors’ that he provided on all his later projects, and the literally hundreds of in-depth interviews he gave in many languages): Ruiz never ceased elaborating, teasing out, refining and extending his often extraordinary (and only seemingly whimsical) ideas. His life was one continuous ‘thought experiment’, as the logicians say.

I feel honoured and privileged to have known Raúl a little, between his visit to Australia in 1993 and his death. He was a marvellous, generous, endlessly hospitable guy (as all who ever visited his home in Belleville will testify), and his lifelong relationship with Valeria was something wondrous to behold. His mischievous sense of fun and laughter, once you had his trust, was truly infectious. Hanging out with him was always a delight, and brought unexpected revelations at every turn in the road, or in the conversation: from his sudden confession to me that “the great secret to good filmmaking is this: you must always cook for your cast and crew!”, to the reluctant admission that the reason he doesn’t figure much in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books (and he absolutely should) is that he and the philosopher once got into a raging fistfight after a hot intellectual disagreement.

A rarity among filmmakers, Raúl actually liked critics, and encouraged their creative drive (as with Benoît Peeters and Pascal Bonitzer) – although he was also sensitive to their capacity for fickleness, and easily hurt when he felt he had been unceremoniously ‘dumped’ by them (“dumped for Kiarostami!”, he once privately opined). Partly because of this, he developed, at least from the ‘80s on, a droll sense of cultural fashion: “Every five years, I am embraced for being a player of games”, he drily told me, “and then, for the next five years, I am castigated as being unserious and irrelevant. Then we start over again”. Ruiz knew how to bide his time, ride the waves, and stick to what mattered to him: serious playfulness, playful seriousness. Nobody in cinema worked that dialectic better than him.

But if I had to pick one anecdote (among so many) that best characterised the warmth and genuinely democratic, open spirit of Raúl, it would be from his International Rotterdam Film Festival retrospective of 2004, when I was standing next to him in a crowded foyer. Suddenly, he spotted and waved to a distant guy; they approached each other, warmly embraced, briefly chatted and parted ways in the throng. Who was he (I asked), an actor, a producer from one of his films? No: “He projected my films here in Rotterdam twenty years ago”. For Raúl, a good projectionist was just as important, just as valuable as anyone who contributed to his work, no less than a Malkovich or a Deneuve, a Jorge Arriagada (composer) or a Sacha Vierney (cinematographer). What a memory he had – and what a profoundly ethical sense, right where it most matters, in everyday life, and in the lived history of that everyday.

I first met Raúl when he was 52 years old – which is the age I am about to reach now. (I am instantly reminded of the beautiful sentence in Poetics of Cinema to the effect that his “astonishment” at Hollywood’s bizarre rules of storytelling “is as young today as I was then” when he first encountered them in a scriptwriting manual of the 1950s.) At that time, he was starting to feel an anxiety that I can only fully relate to at this point: a sense that his life’s work had been scattered, much of it lost, and out of his control or reach. He was looking for someone who could be both an archivist and a booking agent for his work in all media. There was a desperation in his voice and his eyes when he spoke about this – and that was an uncharacteristic symptom coming from this always elegant, controlled, outwardly modest man (“chaste”, he would say with a smile).

Mercifully, the coming history of technology turned to his assistance: on DVD – which I believe Raúl came to regard as his archive – so many works, unseen for decades, have come back: The Territory (1981), Point de fuite (1984), key shorts … and with a brisk trade in less legal restorations downloadable on-line. There remains so much more to cover and explore in Ruiz’s œuvre; most accounts barely scrape the tip of the iceberg.

In the whole time I knew him, and also frequently in his writings, Raúl would return to a peculiarly Chilean experience that fascinated him, the phenomenon of the ‘noonday ghost’. He would retell this typical, iterative tale with the utmost conviction and sincerity: walking in a Chilean street, he would see an old friend from 40 years ago. They would speak of banalities: the traffic light not working, the rising price of milk, the hole in the nearby bridge. Then they would saunter apart – with Raúl realising, some minutes later, that his friend had been dead for some long time already. This is the noonday ghost, Raúl explained: nothing like the Gothic ghost of shadows who avenges wrongs, returns the repressed or haunts the living with a malign force. The noonday ghost looks just like you or me, in the bright daylight, and is just as boring. This ghost is a figure for the other key dialectic in Ruiz’s cinema: the interplay of mystery and ministry, as he described it – sublime things that inevitably become dead ordinary, and ordinary things that become suddenly, strangely sublime.

I hope to bump into Raúl Ruiz, ghost at noon, someday in the street, or in a crowded cinema foyer. He will once again be walking calmly, hands clasped behind his back. And he will be saying, as he so often did, and will again: “Dying is no big thing”.

© Adrian Martin, 20 August 2011

LOLA

2011-08-17T06:15:00.001-04:00

Adrian Martin and I are excited to announce the launch of our new Internet film journal LOLA.

We've worked steadily on the journal for the last several months. We owe enormous thanks to our webmaster, the filmmaker Bill Mousoulis, for his invaluable help; and to all the authors who were so wonderfully generous and patient during the entire process.

Here is the table of contents for the debut issue; the theme of the issue is "Histories."

Let me provide links below to the fifteen pieces in the issue, along with a brief excerpt from each:

-- Joe McElhaney, "Contemporary Cinema?": "I was born in 1957, the year Charles Chaplin made A King in New York. Chaplin was 68, allowing A King in New York to be seen as the film of not only ‘a free man’ (as Roberto Rossellini famously put it) but an old one […] [M]y relationship to contemporary cinema can be dominated by a passion for aging filmmakers, the older the better: Rohmer (deceased, but just barely), Resnais, Rivette. And who older (and perhaps better) than Oliveira?"

-- William D. Routt, "Innuendo 1.5": "Lubitsch’s offensive characters - named Moritz or Sally or Meyer - were not unlike the characters performed by some rappers today. They were composed of all the stereotypical traits that made Germans, even German Jews, uneasy. Sally Pinkus and his kind were in-your-face Jews, a combination of shmendrik and schlemihl [...]: lecherous, stupid, greedy, vulgar, sneaky, cunning, ill-mannered, klutzy, flamboyant. In Lubitsch’s films these awful characters triumphed: they got the girls and the money - just what anti-Semites, then and now, are afraid of. That was the joke."

-- Andrew Klevan, "Expressing the In-Between": [On the character played by Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby] "Susan’s fluidity and flexibility of movement shows a capacity for indefinite behaviour, an elegant erasing of boundaries (erected by stiffer bodies and stuffy institutions). The mythical forest is ideal, but she turns everywhere into an in-between place, where a lack of conventional determinations and destinations arouse indeterminacy. Maybe this is because, as she repeatedly tells us, she was born, not on the top, nor at the foot, but on the ‘side of a hill’."

-- Luc Moullet, "Ah Yes! Griffith was a Marxist!": "The film is also the first masterpiece of militant cinema. Eisenstein dreamed of adapting Capital, but Griffith had already done it twenty years before with this film. While we often think of the Southern conservative of The Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith is here, paradoxically, very close to Karl Marx."

-- Richard Porton, "WR: Mysteries of the Organism: Anarchist Realism and Critical Quandaries": "Makavejev’s playful, allusive film, an apt case study for testing the capabilities of a robustly contextualist criticism, cries out for what, following Clifford Geertz, social scientists (as well as a recent generation of literary critics) refer to as ‘thick description’. For resourceful critics, WR is also the perfect vehicle for flights of essayistic fancy. Raymond Durgnat, a famously digressive critic himself, compared Makavejev’s magnum opus to an ‘adventure playground’."

-- Shigehiko Hasumi, "Fiction and the 'Unrepresentable': All Movies are but Variants on the Silent Film": "Stated briefly, my hypothesis is that the medium of film has not yet truly incorporated sound as an essential component of its composition. This statement applies generally to all types of film, whether produced for entertainment or for artistic ends, irrespective of the form in which they have been consumed throughout the history of the medium stretching back over one hundred years. Another way of expressing this hypothesis is to say that the so-called talkie is in fact no more than a variant of the silent film."

-- Sylvia Lawson, "Out of the Mid-Century: History, Memory and Cinema": "Watching cinema, we’re always watching history. It could be the history of the present, or else history as it was unfolding in the time of the film’s production. If it’s a period-piece, the history isn’t so much in what’s illustrated as in the way of looking at the story. Those genteel costume dramas produced by the renascent Australian industry in the ‘70s had nothing to do with (for example) girls’ boarding schools in 1900. The history they tell us is the history of ideas about what a national cinema should be doing. There was an aspiration in there, a straining toward European art-cinema, and a lot of cultural anxiety."

-- Stephen Goddard, "'So, Did You See Me?': Testimony, Memory and Re-Making Film History": "In 1997, my mother engaged in a process of remembering, narrating and reconsidering her histories when her video testimony was recorded by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. […] Some families are able to gather around a family photo album, to hear the stories that surround the images of parents and relatives in earlier times. My parents did not have any photographs from their days before war. My mother’s prisoner number clothing tag is the earliest remaining image representing her identity. As an antidote to the lost images of her formative days, and as a way of representing the events that were never recorded, the stories and anecdotes from her Shoah testimonial have now become the soundtrack to a lost ‘home movie’."

-- Darren Tofts, "In My Time of Dying: The Premature Death of a Film Classic": "What do we conclude from the jaundiced history of The Song Remains the Same? It is clear that, rather than some hideous chimera that should never have been made, the film and the story of its making is, in fact, archetypal filmmaking. The history of cinema is the history of overcoming circumstance. From a cybernetic point of view, the final film that is eventually screened is not a successful culmination of shooting, editing and post-production schedule. It is a measure of the degree to which entropy or error has been avoided or at the very least minimised during the entire production process."

-- Adrian Martin, "Dinosaurs, Babies and the Sound of Music": "It is important to remember this in the discussion of cinema: we must follow the music. Because, of all the arts, music – no matter how deeply rooted it is in the history and tradition of its country of origin – is the most stateless, the most nomadic and migratory. Wherever it lands, it takes root: becoming an intimate part of one’s experience, one’s history. Music’s destiny is always to be appropriated, but not in the sophisticated, knowing, tortuous way the visual arts, at least since the ‘60s, have violently appropriated images, wrenching them from their context and brazenly advertising the thematics of that displacement. Music simply carries..."

-- Justine Grace, "The Streets: Breaking out of the Black Box/White Cube in Rotterdam": "For Carels, a guiding principle in compiling the XL programme was the relationship between a work of art, or film, and its site; the idea that locations outside the traditional exhibition space of the white cube/black box could provide an illuminating exhibition framework that enhanced the meaning of the work and the experience of the viewer."

-- Nicole Brenez, "F.J. Ossang: The Grand Insurrectionary Style": "Instead of showing the chase or the race, Ossang films the world that produces such velocity, plunging into the substance of colours and the experience of sensations. Whatever the story may be, it springs from a love of words: not so much the dialogue but the formulation, the insert, the slogan, the point – giving rise to the monumental handwriting that so characterises his work. But, most of all, Ossang’s cinema involves bringing back epic gestures to popular visual culture, tearing things apart until they become inconceivably beautiful."

-- James Guida, "Stuck in the Mud: The Visions of Lucrecia Martel": "Martel’s characters flit in and out of harm’s shadow as a matter of course. The interest is not in danger as shock value, but in its regular promise and proximity, in the sights and sounds that surround its unfolding."

-- David Phelps, "Think But This ... 36 vues du Pic St-Loup": "Rivette, like Louis Feuillade, frames spaces as stages, even outside: the movie exists only within the world its characters have created. Characters enter the frame as they would enter a doorway on-stage to join a scene; if they are not in frame, they are ghosts, with no relevance to the scene at all except as ghosts, and when the audience is not seen in the rehearsal/performances, it may as well not exist."

-- Elena Gorfinkel, "At the End of Cinema, This Thing Called Film": "Light cannot contain film, but spills out, through film and beyond it. If film spilling entails loss – the nightmare of film preservationists’ Sisyphean struggle against the ravages of time on an unfathomable body of unknown films – light spilling invokes an expanded arena of diffusion and admixture..."

I should also mention that Adrian's been very busy: he also guest-edited the new issue of Screening The Past.

* * *

I'm curious to know from readers (if they wish): Are there certain topic areas within cinema that you think might be in particular need of critical/scholarly exploration for future essays or issues? In other words, I'm wondering: Are there specific topics on which you might particularly be interested to read critical/scholarly writing about cinema? Thank you!

Notes on Musicals

2011-08-05T13:50:00.006-04:00

The wonderfully strange Depression-era musical Hallelujah, I’m A Bum (Lewis Milestone, 1933) reminds me that there was a time in mainstream Hollywood cinema when you could have a character who was a self-proclaimed socialist and revolutionary, one treated with affection and sympathy by the film. (He’s played here by silent film comedian Harry Langdon.) A further anti-Americanism: the film centers on a community of “hobos” who live in Central Park, and vigorously extol in song the values of not working. Al Jolson is their leader, a pal of the Mayor of New York played by Frank Morgan who utters here the line “There’s no place like home” — a full six years before The Wizard of Oz! Much of the film’s dialogue is in rhyming couplets, which, along with the songs, were written by Rodgers and Hart. (Both have cameos in the film.)

* * *

Richard Dyer, in his classic and influential essay on musicals, “Entertainment and Utopia,” divides musicals into three broad tendencies: (1) A clear separation of narrative and songs (e.g. a backstage musical like 42nd Street in which the songs occur in rehearsal or performance within the story); (2) Transitions from story to numbers, often cued, when characters 'unrealistically' break into song or dance (e.g. Funny Face); and (3) An attempt to dissolve the very distinction between narrative and numbers by means of something that strongly unites and binds them both together. He gives the example of On The Town, in which a transforming energy runs through every scene, every shot, linking up the story with the songs, the musical and the non-musical moments alike. This energy transforms the city — New York City — into a utopia.

In most musicals, we find two distinct worlds: a ‘real’ world of the ‘here and now’ and a ‘utopia’ into which to escape through song and dance. But films in the above third category don’t permit such easy differentiation. They give us the real world (the weary dock-worker’s refrain at the beginning of On The Town: “I feel like I’m not out of bed yet!”) and simultaneously an emotional utopia that pervades the entire film (the sailors’ limitless “energy of leisure” as they plunge into the city to explore it).

Jonathan Rosenbaum has also remarked on this quality of certain musicals. In explaining the co-existence of “strangeness and intensity” in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, he identifies two Rodgers and Hart films, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum and Love Me Tonight, as displaying a related impulse — “to perceive the musical form as a continuous state of delirious being rather than a traditional story with musical eruptions.”

The blurring or outright erasure of the distinction between the tone, mood and atmosphere of the ‘story’ world and that of the ‘song and dance’ world can result in a complex and ambiguous impact on the viewer. Rosenbaum’s response to Rochefort is one of “powerful, deeply felt emotions — an exuberance combined with a sublime sense of absurdity, shot through with an almost constant sense of loss, yearning and even tragedy.”

If it’s the idea of energy that suffuses On the Town and determines the tone of the film, it is community that does this for Hallelujah, I’m A Bum. Bumper (Al Jolson) and his hobo pals live together in a common space (Central Park), share equally their discoveries (like the $1000 bill Bumper finds), interrogate each other’s decisions and moral positions, and, in every way, make each other’s business their own. Individualism is suspect; the individual is accountable at every turn to the community.

Lewis Milestone’s style finds witty, startling devices to convey this theme. An example: Twice in the film, an army of hobos sets out with great urgency to see Bumper, their leader. But instead of chaotically swarming en masse across the park to get to him, they approach him in geometric formations in four groups — one each from south, north, east and west! — in musical fashion, their steps in time, the editing participating equally in the musical performance. It’s one of many moments in this film when the reality of the homeless during the Depression becomes inextricably linked with their representation — stylized, musically joyous, and utopian in feeling. It’s a poignant, bittersweet touch in a film full of them.

Your thoughts on musicals? Any particular favorites in the genre, and why you like them so? I’d love to hear them.

* * *

A few links:

-- "Obscure Objects of Desire: A Jam Session on Non-narrative," with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Raymond Durgnat and David Ehrenstein (originally published in Film Comment in 1978).

-- A lengthy profile of Raúl Ruiz by A.O. Scott in the NYT.

-- Catherine Grant has a video essay that uses Gilda to offer a primer on gender, sexuality and movement. Also: Catherine rounds up for us the new issue of Jump Cut.

-- Adrian Martin and Conall Cash interview Eve Heller and Peter Tscherkassky at the Melbourne Film Festival.

-- Here are some interesting posts at Jon Jost's blog on avant-garde filmmakers: Leighton Pierce; James Benning; Nathaniel Dorsky; Letters from Dorsky to Jost (part 1, part 2).

-- An interview with Shelly Kraicer about Chinese independent cinema.

-- The BFI's "Most Wanted" list of missing British films.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Mysteries of Lisbon at MUBI.

-- At Moving Image Source: Richard Porton defends the "talking-head" documentary.

-- Male Archetypes in the Movies," by A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis in the NYT.

DVD Booklets

2011-07-21T19:00:00.001-04:00

Booklets that accompany DVDs are one of the less visible and accessible outlets of film writing. I’ve spent the last week with a stack of DVDs and booklets borrowed from my college library. Let me share a couple of interesting excerpts from them here. Any favorite DVD booklets to recommend? Perhaps we could collect all your suggestions in the comments section.

(1) Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Criterion).

Sergio Leone was sixteen, in high school, and happened to be present when the film was being shot. He describes the experience:

All of a sudden [De Sica] said: “Well, here I would like to see a group of ten, fifteen red priests, those who do the Catholic propaganda.” […] The next day we shot the scene—beautiful also from a choreographic perspective—in which these red priests, caught in the thunderstorm, take shelter under the eaves of a building. Two of them are speaking in German to each other, so that the child, fascinated by the strange language, gets distracted and lingers on, listening to them. I was one of the two red priests involved in the conversation, which in reality consisted of saying some numbers, because we didn’t speak German. The rest of the group was formed by my classmates, whom I had recruited after De Sica said he had no idea how he could come up with fifteen teenagers.

(2) Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance-nue (Masters of Cinema).

Kent Jones writes:

Pialat, much more than Michael Bay or Tsui Hark, was an action director. Which is to say that his films give us the actions of his characters within their environments, without any discernible master idea governing their every move. In each Pialat film, and L’Enfance-nue is no exception, continuity as we know it is deliberately and continually thwarted if not smashed, in order to expunge just such master-planning. One never knows when a scene will end, or indeed what will constitute a scene, and our tracking of time as some kind of guide (an unconscious procedure in any movie) is thrown out the window — as in a Terrence Malick film, any given scene could be taking place minutes, hours, days or months after the preceding scene, and crucial moments occur off-camera. There is no time for the film to build up any sort of thematic repository to which the viewer can return for psychic re-orientation, beyond the specifics of these people, as they are seen in this place at this time of year under these skies, and in this light […] we become genuinely attuned to the film as a series of precious moments, passing before our eyes at 24 frames per second. Many filmmakers before and after Pialat tried to reach this absolute level of proximity between fiction and documentary, actor and character, setting and place. For most, it happened only fitfully. Only Pialat, with his mixture of sublime sensitivity, brute force and a furious resentment that kept his creative machinery perpetually stoked, was able to sustain such a balance throughout an entire film.

(3) Hiroshi Teshigahara films (Criterion).

James Quandt on The Face of Another (the entire essay can be found here):

The confluence of artistic forces — West with East, Europe with Japan, traditional with experimental — is readily apparent in the sinister, glittering waltz Takemitsu composed as the signature music for the credit sequence of The Face of Another. More unsettling than the composer’s nerve-scraping electronic music, which is more conventionally ominous, the strangely “inappropriate” waltz not only emphasizes Takemitsu’s and Teshigahara’s respective debts to Western culture but also introduces an important, largely unremarked incongruity in the film’s visual strategies. By employing a traditional, even antique, form — the triple-time Viennese ballroom dance, popular for more than two centuries — for modernist ends, Takemitsu inadvertently evokes a formal tension in the film between its strangely outmoded aspect ratio (the squarish Academy ratio) and its arsenal of visual innovation: freeze-frames, defamiliarizing close-ups, wild zooms, wash-away wipes, X-rayed imagery, stuttered editing, surrealist tropes, swish pans, jump cuts, rear projection, montaged stills, edge framing, and canted, fragmented, and otherwise stylized compositions. Since the late fifties, most Japanese films (though not Ozu’s) had been made in widescreen, and a mania for the Scope format was widespread, so Teshigahara’s adherence to the old-fashioned ratio, emphasized by the black-and-white cinematography, is especially striking.

(4) Georges Franju’s Judex/Nuits rouges (Masters of Cinema).

Franju speaking about Nuits rouges to Tom Milne in 1975:

I have always been attracted by emanations of strangeness; in other words, by the insolite. I suppose this is why my films so often belong to the genre formally but somewhat loosely categorized by the term ‘cinéma fantastique’. Within this rather nebulous area, I distinguish three zones: le cinéma fantastique, properly speaking; le cinéma de l’insolite; and le cinéma de l’angoisse. The fantastique lies in the form; the insolite, in the atmosphere; the anguish, in the uncertainty, the unknown. The fantastique must be created; the insolite should emerge; and the anguish, be felt […] Then how does the insolite manifest itself in the film? It springs, surely, from elements calculated to clash with each other — action and oneirism, divertissement and drama […] The cinematic image is gifted with twin powers: the power of psychological insight and the power of attraction or fascination. As a spectacle, Nuits rouges exercises the latter, and should therefore be approached rather like those carnival sideshows which require you to rediscover your innocence.

* * *

A few links:

-- David Hudson has a tumblr page called Transatlantic.

-- (via Zach Campbell) Geoffrey O'Brien on Malick's The Tree of Life; and a terrific post and discussion ("Cases Closed / Problems Opened") inspired by the film at Zach's place.

-- (via Walter Biggins) At Cracked.com: "5 Annoying Trends That Make Every Movie Look The Same".

-- Catherine Grant collects links to "Terrence Malick Studies" in a post.

-- The welcome return of Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Global Discoveries" DVD column in the new issue of Cinema Scope magazine. An excerpt, on a new Edgar Ulmer 6-DVD box set: "It seems weirdly appropriate (yet also uniquely frustrating) that the box itself should be hard to open, the individual discs hard to pry loose from the container and almost equally hard to put back securely..."

-- Film Comment has a handy collection of Cannes Top 10 lists from various critics on a single page.

-- Recent website discoveries: The Film Doctor blog; Trevor L.'s tumblr page, Occupied Territories, and his blog Journey by Frame.

-- Michael Sicinski at Moving Image Source: "Cinephile fashions and the hybrid films of Nicolás Pereda".

-- (via the Cinetrix): Two pieces by Mark Rappaport at the journal Requited, "The Gong Show," and "Black Bra, White Bra".

-- At Sight & Sound: an interview with filmmaker Pere Portabella.

pic: Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance-nue (1968).

--

On Lists

2011-07-05T09:20:00.003-04:00

In the last couple of years, the Criterion label Eclipse has released several multi-DVD sets of world cinema. I hereby offer a wish list — born of an idle fantasy — of ten DVD collections I would most love to see released by the label:

-- Jacques Rivette: L’Amour Fou (1968), Duelle (1976), Noroît (1976), Haut Bas Fragile (1995).
-- Ritwik Ghatak: Ajantrik (1958), Komal Gandhar (1961), Subarnarekha (1962), Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974).
-- Anne-Marie Miéville: 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema (1995), We’re Still Here (1997), After the Reconciliation (2000).
-- Hou Hsiao-hsien: Daughter of the Nile (1987), City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993).
-- Marguerite Duras: Destroy She Said (1969), India Song (1976), Le Camion (1978).
-- Edward Yang: Taipei Story (1985), A Brighter Summer Day (1991), Mahjong (1996).
-- Mark Rappaport: Local Color (1977), The Scenic Route (1978), Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992), The Journals of Jean Seberg (1995).
-- Jonas Mekas: Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1969), Reminiscences of Journey Through Lithuania (1972); Lost, Lost, Lost (1976).
-- Kumar Shahani: Maya Darpan (1972), Tarang (1984), Kasba (1990).
-- Abbas Kiarostami: Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), Homework (1989), Life and Nothing More… (1992), Through The Olive Trees (1994).

Any candidates of your own for Eclipse sets?

* * *

A few weeks ago, using the appendix of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Essential Cinema as a guide, I made a list of about a hundred films to see this summer. On it were both classic titles that had slipped through the cracks of my viewing and lesser-known films I’d never seen. For example:

Greed (Erich von Stroheim); Nathalie Granger (Marguerite Duras); Bird (Clint Eastwood); Venom and Eternity (Isidore Isou); Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey); The Gold Diggers (Sally Potter); Senso (Luchino Visconti); The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson/Val Lewton); The Mouth Agape (Maurice Pialat); The Unknown Chaplin (Kevin Brownlow); Occasional Work of a Female Slave (Alexander Kluge); Citizen’s Band (Jonathan Demme); Mister Freedom (William Klein); Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee); David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride); The Shooting (Monte Hellman); Limlelight (Charlie Chaplin); Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan); Spring in a Small City (Fei Mu); Our Daily Bread (King Vidor); Avanti! (Billy Wilder); Day of the Dead (George Romero); Walker (Alex Cox); The Window (Ted Tatzlaff); and Executive Suite (Robert Wise).

Any particular titles from the Rosenbaum 1000 (either available or unavailable on DVD) that you most want to see?

* * *

Just as writing about cinema has exploded on the Internet in the last decade, so has the activity of list-making. We are acutely reminded of this at the end of each year, when it becomes obligatory for film blogs, websites, and magazines (and even journals housed in academe such as Film Quarterly) to publish lists that pronounce and rank the best cinema of the year. But even apart from this end-of-year exercise, the making of lists is an activity that seems to exert a powerful attraction on the cinephile — note, for example, the popularity of sites such as They Shoot Pictures.

What purpose do lists serve? More importantly: What can lists accomplish? We can think about this in two ways: let’s call them the macro and the micro levels.

At the macro level, lists can help elevate certain films and filmmakers to broader consciousness, and render them worthy of attention, importance, and study. This usually occurs because of the efforts of a group or community: think of the Hitchcocko-Hawksians at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s. Sometimes, in rare cases, a single individual can have the same effect — as Andrew Sarris did with his list-filled book The American Cinema in the 1970s. In the tribute essay collection Citizen Sarris: American Film Critic (edited by Emanuel Levy), a number of film critics and scholars testify to the impact of the book. One of them is Dave Kehr, who was part of Doc Films at the University of Chicago, the oldest student-run film society in the US:

Every Doc Filmser carried a paperback copy of The American Cinema, usually wrapped with rubber bands to compensate for the Dutton edition’s notoriously flimsy binding, with titles one had seen underlined in each biographical entry. This dedication to a sacred text made us resemble, a bit too closely for comfort, some of the other cultists then proliferating on the proudly radical campus — namely, the junior Maoists with their Little Red Books.

For Jonathan Rosenbaum, it was a different collection of lists — the results of the 1962 Sight and Sound world cinema poll — that proved consequential. He writes in the introductory essay to Essential Cinema:

I vowed to see as many films on the list as I could, and for the next several years proceeded like a butterfly collector, dutifully underlining each title in that issue of Sight and Sound as soon as I’d seen the film. It was a better way of surveying the lay of the land, I quickly discovered, than the indexes of [Arthur] Knight or of [Paul] Rotha and [Richard] Griffith, because it guided me toward objects of critical veneration more than historical markers — objects that would eventually be joined by those found in Andrew Sarris’ The American Cinema and Noël Burch’s Theory of Film Practice, among other essential guidebooks — and because, as I used the list to make my own discoveries, it involved me more directly in the process of forming my own values and tastes. Some critical favorites on the list proved to be disappointments, others were greater than I had even hoped for, but in both cases these responses represented not so much end points as the beginnings of evaluations and reevaluations that would continue over decades and that are still taking place.

By influencing tastes and helping to form unofficial canons, such lists have a macro-level political impact on film culture. We can see an example of this political activity in the dissemination of lists and counter-lists — like Zach Campbell’s "Counter-Canon" in response to Paul Schrader’s “Canon Fodder” essay in Film Comment [pdf] from a few years ago.

I’m equally interested in the micro-level potential of lists — specifically the way in which, for a moment, they help dislodge the agency of the viewer. Cinephiles are deeply and notoriously attached to their personal taste; they often defend it militantly. The lesser critics might simply assert their taste; the better ones might provide well-argued reasons why the frontiers of their taste mark and enclose the only “good” cinema. Evaluation is (rightly) a key aspect of film criticism, but we must guard against our personal taste freezing into something static. Sometimes we must resist the bonds — the straitjacket — of our own taste.

When we design some of our viewing around a list, we hand over our agency to it. If the list contains filmmakers or performers we don’t much care for, we set our prejudices aside for the moment in favor of the project of seeing every title on the list. We open ourselves up to surprise, to the continuous “evaluations and reevaluations” that Jonathan invokes. The result is more valuable than we usually acknowledge: it keeps us learning, growing, moving — forever “becoming” — in our role as cinephiles and critics.

Your ideas on lists and the purposes they can serve? Any significant list-making projects — either by individuals or groups — that particularly stand out in the history of film culture? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

* * *

Some links:

-- Press Play, a new blog started by Matt Zoller Seitz, that will focus on video essays.

-- The new issue of La Furia Umana features a Max Ophuls dossier and many well-known critics.

-- There's a new issue of Film Comment.

-- Matthew Flanagan at Landscape Suicide on Godard and Greece.

-- At Andy Rector's place: A piece by Luc Moullet and an interview with Straub/Huillet (scroll down a bit).

-- At Cinema Scope: a round table on Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.

-- At MUBI, Ben Sachs and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky interview Jerzy Skolimowski.

-- Srikanth Srinivasan at The Seventh Art on the films of Mani Kaul.

-- The captivatingly designed new Italian journal FilmIdee.

-- Leah Churner at Moving Image Source on "What happened to the Hollywood musical?"

-- A large post on Jacques Rivette by David Ehrenstein at Dennis Cooper's blog.

-- In Sight and Sound: "Lena Bergman remembers the viewing habits of her father Ingmar Bergman in his unique private cinema, a converted barn on Fårö, the Baltic island where he lived until his death in 2007."

pic: Marguerite Duras

The Language and Style of Film Criticism

2011-06-17T14:20:00.009-04:00

A quick personal note. Especially in the last year or two, when Internet film-cultural activity has been dispersing more and more over a variety of spaces (notably Facebook and Twitter), I’ve found myself putting up new blog posts less frequently than I once did. I’d like to correct this. As an experiment — and to try and provide a modicum of predictability and consistency to readers — I’ll aim to post every two weeks, specifically around the 1st and the 15th of each month. This will also give me a personal deadline, a target to shoot for. I'll be curious to see how it works out.

Some exciting news: Adrian Martin and I are launching a new Internet film journal together. It will be called LOLA, and we envision its form and sensibility to be similar to that of Rouge. The first issue of LOLA should be out this summer.

* * *

I’m reading a terrific new essay collection called “The Language and Style of Film Criticism,” edited by Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton, who teach in the UK at Oxford and Bristol respectively. As it happens, a passage in one of Adrian’s old and classic essays, “Mise en scène is Dead,” which appeared in the journal Continuum in 1992, provides a cue and an impetus to the project of this collection.

As cinephiles and film critics, we are accustomed to watching and re-watching films — and subjecting scenes, shots, compositions, gestures, and so on, to close analysis. What we almost never do is transplant this slow, careful, close-analytical approach to good film criticism itself. In a broad, eclectic and personal fashion, all the authors in this collection do precisely that.

The brilliant piece by Klevan and Clayton that opens the collection is no pro forma introductory essay. It is lengthy, detailed, and broad in scope, building its arguments by paying close attention to several key examples of critics and criticism. Let me provide a couple of excerpts:

We find the best criticism deepens our interest in individual films, reveals new meanings and perspectives, expands our sense of the medium, confronts our assumptions about value, and sharpens our capacity to discriminate. Moreover, it strives to find expression for what is seen and heard, bringing a realm of sound, images, actions and objects to meet a realm of words and concepts. Engaging with film through criticism therefore means involving ourselves not simply with a series of points and arguments but with language and style.

In a thorough and eloquent essay exploring the history of film criticism and analysis, Adrian Martin has asked why, in accounts of criticism, ‘the materiality of the writing of [Manny] Farber — or [Jonathan] Rosenbaum or David Thomson or Meaghan Morris — [is] so often rendered immaterial, a wasteful luxury, mere surplus value … écriture is again divorced from content, to be damned or indulged accordingly’. Pointing out that ‘writing is always more than simply “badly done” (dense, circumlocutory, baroque) or a “good read” (witty, racy, stylish, etc.)’, Martin calls for a better sense ‘of the action of critical writing, what it can conjure, perform, circulate, transform’. ‘In writing as much as film,’ he adds, borrowing a phrase from Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘we must come to terms with what is “at once mysterious and materialistic” in matters of style.’ This volume of essays aims to answer Martin’s call. [...]

Film criticism, Klevan and Clayton point out, has not found a firm place for itself in the academy the way literary criticism has. Rather, it's been sidelined in favor of approaches that pursue historical or social or political or cultural study of film:

Rather than objects of criticism, most commonly, particular films are objects to be analyzed, specimens used to investigate cultural, historical or theoretical positions, contexts and tendencies. This is true even of aesthetically orientated work. Most academic writing aims for a prose that is neutral, objective or informational. It is generally suspicious of personal involvement with films and apprehensive of value judgements, except for ideological critique (for instance, where a film is implied to be ‘transgressive’ in some way, or its representation of a social group ‘positive’). It is felt, perhaps, that serious academic analysis should differentiate itself from the evaluative reactions of the ordinary film viewer […] For the most part, films are used illustratively (valued primarily for their usefulness) rather than engaged with critically (valued for their achievements). Despite this, much film writing, of whatever hue, in its choice of films and examples, and in its assumptions, either contains remnants of film criticism, or is haunted by its absence. One ambition of the volume is to help film criticism emerge from this illicit and ghostly presence.

* * *

A few words about the various essays in this collection. Adrian himself has a piece here, in which he analyzes passages by three critics, John Flaus (“the mimic”), Shigehiko Hasumi (“the pointer”), and Frieda Grafe (“the seer”), and how these critics perform description of films in different ways, to different ends. Klevan’s essay takes three close readings of film sequences by James Harvey, Charles Affron and V.F. Perkins, and in turn provides illuminating close analyses of their writings. In his piece, Christian Keathley suggests how a “poetic criticism” might work in the video essay form. Alex Clayton looks closely at samples of film criticism from Bordwell/Thompson’s widely known book, Film Art: An Introduction, critiquing them for not sufficiently ‘coming to terms’ with the film (in this case, His Girl Friday). In Richard Combs’ essay, he takes four critics — Manny Farber, David Thomson, Raymond Durgnat, and Pauline Kael — and groups them together as ‘four against the house’ (the title of his piece), in which the “house” refers to whatever these writers are opposing (e.g. the viewer, academia, etc). Other contributors to the collection include Lesley Stern, George Toles, William Rothman, Charles Warren, and Robert Sinnerbrink.

* * *

Some links:

-- Catching up with an old-but-good image post from Mubarak Ali on the "chaos/choreography of things hidden and revealed" in Frank Tashlin's Bachelor Flat.

-- Catherine Grants presents Christian Keathley's new video essay, "50 Years On." She writes of the essay: "It beautifully posits and explores the idea of two different viewing strategies in the cinema: what Keathley calls a "literate" mode in which "a single-minded gaze is directed toward the obvious [cinematic] figure on offer" on the screen; and a "non-literate" mode, less narrowly focused, roaming instead "over the frame, sensitive to its textures and surfaces"."

-- Many, many new pieces at the Project: New Cinephilia site.

-- (via Chris Mason Wells) Leos Carax is making a film with Denis Lavant called Holly Motors. Also via Chris: interesting news of Anthology Film Archives programs of 1980s musicals and films presented by William Lustig.

-- Robert Polito has a piece on Patricia Patterson in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- Several podcasts are available for listening from the recent Northwestern Univesity conference on film criticism. Participants included Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Farran Smith Nehme, Gabe Klinger, Nick Davis, and others.

-- As he often does so usefully, Jim Emerson gathers together the various threads and voices in the recent "boring films" debate, and weighs in thoughtfully with his own position.

-- At Moving Image Source: Film Socialisme Annotated" by David Phelps.

-- (via Adrian) An ambitious essay on Terrence Malick's The New World by art history scholar Richard Neer.

-- -- At IEEE Spectrum: "5 Technologies That Will Shape The Web."

Pic: Installation by Patricia Patterson

Micro-criticism

2011-06-02T11:20:00.005-04:00

The Edinburgh International Film Festival is hosting a symposium called Project: New Cinephilia. The event — a conversation about cinephilia, film criticism, and film culture — is taking place both at the festival and at its website, recently launched in collaboration with MUBI.

Chris Fujiwara, Adrian Martin and I are among the contributors. Chris’ essay is titled “Criticism and Film Studies: A Response to David Bordwell”. (The Bordwell piece he’s responding to is in the new issue of Film Comment.) Adrian’s article is titled “Creative Criticism” and is appearing in English for the first time; it was originally written for Cahiers du cinema. España. My essay is called “Taken Up by Waves: The Experience of Internet Cinephilia,” and is a reworking of two previous pieces that appeared in Filmkrant magazine and on this blog. Also: the first online roundtable on cinephilia recently concluded at the site. Finally, Damon Smith and Kate Taylor, curators of the project, have posted an editorial that explains its aims and sketches out its context.

* * *

There is a useful but not very respected mode of criticism — let’s call it “micro-criticism” — that is made possible by the Internet. Most of the criticism generated in this mode is probably not of great use. But when it is practiced well, it can be valuable, insightful, and forward-looking, while working in small, daily, and humble ways.

I think it’s a rarely acknowledged practical truth that the cinephile or critic will see many, many more films than she will write about. Even the most disciplined blogger, with free and unlimited space in which to write, and an army of films available to summon up and watch on Netflix “instant” streaming, will not be able to engage with each film in any sustained way that might be termed “criticism.” But the Internet does provide this cinephile with the next best thing: a useful means — frequently, Facebook or Twitter — to record short, sharp impressions of each film, offering perhaps a fresh and particular “angle” into the work, a fruitful and unexpected lens through which to view it and attempt to open it up. This record is often brief and telegraphic; even if it is almost never a lengthy or carefully considered reflection, it just might contain the seeds of one. I'd argue that even such all-too-brief insights can function like tiny building blocks in our ongoing construction of a structure — a structure that constitutes our personal understanding of a film or filmmaker, and indeed of cinema itself. Further: perhaps, someday in the future, the cinephile or one of her readers might be struck by a piece of micro-criticism enough to find it insightful and worthy of development or incorporation into a larger reflection or piece. In this sense, micro-criticism is a sort of “termite criticism” (as Andrew Horbal once called it in evocation of Manny Farber) that works in short moves or bursts or flashes but is nevertheless (or can be, in the best hands) a generator, or at the very least a glimmer of vanguard critical ideas and possibilities.

Examples of this kind of micro-criticism can be found on the Twitter pages of Michael Sicinski, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Steve Shaviro, and Mike D’Angelo, to name just a couple of its gifted practitioners. Such micro-criticism also finds a particularly healthy home on Facebook. (I’m not linking to pages of cinephiles and critics on Facebook here since most are not publicly accessible from the Internet at large.) The advantage of Facebook, in my experience, is that it allows conversations around micro-critical statements to germinate and grow. (I know there are folks who have mastered the art of conducting conversations on Twitter, but I’m defeated by this challenge. I find Twitter most useful for catching links and finding micro-critical nuggets of the sort I’ve been describing above. At most, I’ve managed to conduct brief “exchanges” on Twitter — never full-blown conversations. Nevertheless, I find Twitter invaluable.)

The idea of micro-criticism reminds me of a wonderful essay on the British-Swiss film critic Raymond Durgnat by Jonathan Rosenbaum. The essay first appeared in Film Comment in 1973 and is available in his most recent book, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia. In it, Rosenbaum characterizes Durgnat as a “wandering troubadour” of film criticism:

An essential aspect of his wanderlust is that he rarely stays with one subject for long, at least not in the rigorous, methodical way that characterizes André Bazin, [Robert] Warshow, or [Robin] Wood. Even when he devotes a book to a single figure, like Luis Buñuel or Georges Franju, his characteristic approach is multilayered and varied, a continual shift of strategies, rather than the systematic pursuit of a single argument.

Durgnat himself responds to Rosenbaum’s characterization with an illuminating comment about the nature and function of criticism:

The business of criticism seems to me “matters arising,” and naturally varies from film to film. I’d rather be wrong but open up a perspective than be right, i.e., dismiss opportunities for the full, intellectual, sensual, emotional experience of reflective hesitation [emphases mine--G.]…

I think there’s a lesson here for Internet micro-criticism. The short, succinct form of tweets or Facebook status updates furnishes a useful freedom — to record observations, try out ideas, hazard lines of analysis, risk hypotheses, identify contradictions, think laterally rather than linearly, all in a spirit of “reflective hesitation.”

I’m curious about your take here: Do you think Facebook and Twitter have the potential to generate useful film criticism and conversation? When — under what conditions or circumstances — do you find these social media to be particularly substantive or valuable? Do Facebook and Twitter offer a useful alternative, or supplement, to traditional modes of film criticism? Finally: in your view, what are some interesting ways in which social media are enriching film culture? I’d love to hear your thoughts on any or all of these. Thank you!

* * *

A few links:

-- The second issue of the recently resurrected Movie journal includes a tribute to Robin Wood and seven of his essays published by Movie between 1960 and 1983. (Also: a link to my earlier post on the "rebirth of Movie.")

-- Christian Keathley has a beautiful 7-minute video essay on a moment in Anatomy of a Murder at Catherine Grant's website Audiovisualcy. Also: at Film Studies for Free, Catherine collects links to writings on Otto Preminger's films.

-- Several typically thought-provoking pieces by Ignatiy, including one on Allan Sekula and Noel Burch's new film The Forgotten Space; and the posts in his new column at MUBI, In The Margin.

-- The Bioscope points to its current favorite website, the Cine-Tourist. Created by Roland-François Lack of University College, London, as a home for his studies into cinema and place, it is interested in "how films record and depend upon place, both literally and metaphorically."

-- Good news: Film International has been unveiling old pieces on a regular basis at its website. A recent example: Jonathan Rosenkrantz's "Colourful Claims: towards a theory of animated documentary". Also: the site features a "Picks of the Week" section in which editors of the journal recommend their favorite online articles on cinema.

-- Let me share a blog discovery: Cinemiasma, written by "EG".

-- A charming Mother's Day post by Michael Guillen at MUBI: "Mothers and Movies".

-- An interesting news story on how theaters are sometimes using 3-D lenses to show 2-D films, which severely compromises the projections.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum's place continues to be, for me, the essential film blog. It gives me reading pleasure every single day. A recent post among many: "Theory and Practice: The Criticism of Jean-Luc Godard". Also, a link to a podcast: Jonathan, Gerald Peary and David Sterritt discuss and conduct an audience Q&A on the subject of film criticism at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

-- A wonderfully helpful post by Kristin Thompson on the "graphic match."

-- Owen Hatherley in the Guardian: "Marx at the Movies."

-- At Fandor: Kevin Lee catches the latest films by Jose-Luis Guerin, Claire Denis and Jean-Marie Straub at the Jeonju film festival.

-- An interesting piece in the NYT: "'The Hangover' and the Age of the Jokeless Comedy."

-- A resource to visit soon after you've watched the just-released silent Naruse set from Eclipse: a wonderful round-table discussion between Danny Kasman, David Phelps and Dan Sallitt.

-- Simon Reynolds in the Guardian: "Why retromania is all the rage."

Costume and Cinema

2011-05-02T13:15:00.003-04:00

Of the many elements that comprise mise-en-scene — including actors, setting, decor, objects and props, lighting, color, and so on — costume is surely one of the most neglected in film criticism. Cinema scholar Pamela Church Gibson has identified three possible reasons for this neglect of costume and fashion: it’s often considered to be a ‘feminine’ and ‘frivolous’ object of study; it is an overt and materialistic expression of capitalist-consumerist culture (and thus of questionable worthiness); and, finally, fashion is used by society to encourage women to present themselves as ‘objects’ for male visual consumption (feminism in particular wants to be conscious of this). Yet, studies like Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing reveal that for women audiences, costume is one of the most frequently mentioned aspects of a film.

Costume can also be a vital component of film and mise-en-scene analysis. Take King Vidor’s classic “maternal melodrama” Stella Dallas (1937). In it, Stella (played by Barbara Stanwyck), born and raised in a working-class household, has aspirations of class mobility. She marries an upper-class man but their relationship falters; their class differences are too much, and can’t be surmounted. After they are estranged, Stella works to raise their teenage daughter in a highly strategic and deliberate way, one that prepares her for assuming a place among the upper class. She accomplishes this mainly by assembling for her an identity based on the ‘correct’ wardrobe.

One of the strengths of this film is the wonderful, detailed way in which it presents a system of codes — the codes of class — based on dress. Stella herself is sartorially extravagant: she favors loud patterns, bold stripes, generous frills, large bows, fake jewelry, spangles, vulgar furs with heads, and mountainous hats. But for her daughter, Stella sews and makes home copies of ‘tastefully’ restrained high-fashion clothes favored by the upper classes. (Diana Vreeland of Vogue magazine associated this pared-down, anti-excessive style with “the elegance of refusal”).

In a fascinating essay, literary scholar Edie Thornton has written about the role of women’s magazines in the ‘20s and ‘30s that provided step-by-step instructions for working- and middle-class housewives to construct flawless, undetectable copies of high-fashion garments. Thornton points out that upper-class clothes in Stella Dallas are quiet, minimal, undemonstrative, generally ‘effacing’ the labor of the domestic activities involved in keeping house. (There is an interesting analogy here with Hollywood cinema of the same period — studio-bound, well-crafted, with tasteful production values — that often worked to efface its own labor through devices such as continuity editing.)

In this intelligent and prescient film, personal style, no matter how simple or invisible, is something that is ‘constructed,’ never natural. Stella fashions two parallel and radically divergent identities: one for her daughter (a style based on subtlety and ‘refusal’) and one for herself (excessive and flamboyant). One could watch this film with an eye for costume alone, and find it richly rewarding and meaningful.

I’m curious: What are some other films that make expressive or meaningful use of costume, films in which costume is a key component of mise-en-scene? Also: Any of your favorite writings (reviews or essays or books) that pay attention to film costume? I’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions.

NOTES: I'd like to thank Tanya Loughead and George Boger for the conversation that spurred this post. Pamela Church Gibson’s essay on costume and film is available in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (1998). Edie Thornton’s essay appeared in American Literary History in 1999.

pic: Upper-class 'restraint' and lower-class 'vulgarity' side by side in Stellas Dallas.

Dave Kehr's Book

2011-04-10T20:45:00.003-04:00

Dave Kehr’s first book has just appeared. Published by University of Chicago Press, it’s titled “When Movies Mattered,” and collects his criticism from a ten-year period spanning the mid-‘70s to the mid-‘80s, when he worked at the Chicago Reader. It’s a wonderful read.

I admire Kehr for many reasons. He’s a marvelous writer with a clear and elegant prose style and a bone-dry wit. He also has the all-too-rare talent of gathering the insights of cinema scholarship (especially in film history and film style) and bringing them in a lucid and stimulating fashion to a large non-specialist readership. Without announcing it as such, he performs an invaluable pedagogical activity in the New York Times DVD column each week — and in the pages of this collection.

To give you a flavor for the pieces in the book, let me excerpt a few favorite passages. The first is from a review of Cassavetes’ Love Streams:

The history of film is in some ways also a history of the repression of emotion. The actors in silent films used the whole of the body as an expression of feeling: gestures were large, movements broad and rhythmic, the eyes and mouth were exaggerated by makeup and by the orthochromatic photography into emotional signs of a startling directness. Sound films diminished the importance of the body, focusing expressiveness on the voice. And when, after the war, the first modernist films appeared—those of Bresson, Tati and Antonioni—the voice lost its primacy, too: emotion eluded words; it became concentrated in the actor’s regard, in the silent exchange of looks. The refinement and repressiveness of modernism continues to define the dominant film styles—it’s our generation’s index of realism, just as extravagance was “real” for the filmgoers of the teens and early 20s. Pop melodramas like Kramer vs. Kramer fake the placid surfaces of L’Avventura; comedies—notably Ghostbusters—are built on a hip detachment carried to an absurd degree.

John Cassavetes stands outside this history. His actors are full-bodied, demonstrative, and his camera doesn’t back off from them: there is an emotional intensity in his films, a readiness always to go too far, that can be embarrassing, intimidating, for some audiences. And because Cassavetes couches his emotional extravagance within the traditional signs of realism—location shooting, long takes, a grainy documentary quality to the image—many audiences feel betrayed by his films: they present themselves as “real,” but this isn’t the reality of other movies. Cassavetes is compelled to expose, expand, to apotheosize emotion; it is no wonder then that he is consistently drawn to themes of breakdown and madness—the only way the contemporary cinema can assimilate emotions of Cassavetes’ size is to characterize them as insanity.

On the way in which Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria “answers” his earlier film 10 in terms of theme and style:

The difference between the two films is registered in Edwards’ choice of lenses. 10 was a long-lens movie, using a telescopic compression of space to express the essence of romantic fantasy: in Dudley Moore’s subjective gaze, equated with the long lens, Bo Derek was always brought closer to him, made larger than life and isolated against a shallow, fuzzy background. The long lens emphasizes the authority of objects and individuals over the environment; it picks things out from a context, giving them an artificial size and an artificial independence. But the long lens is limited by its inability to grasp anything other than surfaces—it has no depth, no penetrating power, but only a worshipful abjection before the glittering face of things. It imposes a closeness that isn’t there, closing gaps mechanically. But it can only bring surface close to surface; it can’t describe the deeper attractions between characters, can’t sound their harmonies.

Victor/Victoria is a short-lens movie; it uses the wide-angle viewpoint to place the characters in a physical setting, describing their precise spatial relations to the people and décor around them. The short lens makes connections where connections exist, photographing the ways people position themselves and react to each other. And where there aren’t any connections, only the short lens can show the emptiness between characters, the psychological spaces that separate them. With a sensitive director, the composition in depth made possible by short lenses is a way of seeing in depth; spatial arrangements become emotional, moral, philosophical constellations.

The opening paragraph from his review of Oliveira’s Francisca:

I no longer try to reconcile my love for Hollywood with my taste for the structuralist-minimalist-materialist avant-garde, though for a long time it struck me as schizophrenic that I could be deeply moved by the high Hollywood illusionism of a Frank Borzage melodrama one evening and transported just as far the next night by Jean-Marie Straub’s endless pans in Too Early, Too Late. There is a lot of aesthetic ground between Borzage’s glowing, soft-focus close-ups of Margaret Sullavan and Straub’s decision to mount a camera on the dashboard of a Citroën and drive around the Place de la Bastille for 20 minutes without a cut. Yet as time passes these contradictions don’t seem quite as contradictory. In the politicized atmosphere of film criticism in the 70s, it was too often a question of making a choice: you could be a modernist or a classicist, an innovator or a preservationist, a materialist or an idealist, but never both. In the exhausted 80s, however, the points of contact seem more visible, the battle much less heated. Straub, for example is a great admirer of John Ford’s Donovan’s Reef, a film that stands stylistically, thematically, and ideologically at the other end of the spectrum from Too Early, Too Late. What we have been missing is a classically trained director who can admit his points of contact with the modern cinema. With the emergence of the 75-year-old Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira we have one at last.

On Raúl Ruiz's City of Pirates:

I read in the papers that we’re living in a great period of fantasy films, made possible by the tremendous breakthroughs in special effects technology and the soaring imaginations of a new generation of American filmmakers. But scratch a Star Wars or a Close Encounters and what you find is the same old realism: a linear, cause-and-effect story line, characters defined by perfectly conventional psychologies, a visual style still based on the Renaissance norms of “natural” perspective. In their story-telling techniques, these films couldn’t be more naturalistic; the fantastic intrudes only at the level of content, in the more or less standardized form of slobbering monsters, super-powered heroes, and sleek spaceships. If this is fantasy, it looks awfully familiar.

The only real maker of fantasy films I know is the Chilean-born director Raul Ruiz, who now lives in France as a political exile and makes his movies in a bewildering number of countries and languages. He makes them quickly, too—an average of two or three features a year, plus half a dozen short films and documentaries. Though Ruiz’s films are full of ghosts and mysterious happenings (all executed, charmingly and effectively, through essentially the same range of camera tricks that Georges Méliès invented at the turn of the century), what makes them fantastic isn’t their content, but their style. His fantasies take off from the narrative conventions that most filmmakers (and audiences) accept instinctively. Where a Spielberg will ask, “What would happen if a spaceman came to earth?” Ruiz’s “what ifs” are predicated on forms; they are at once more bold, more fundamental to the medium, and more elusive. There is a moment in City of Pirates […] when a character complains of a toothache. As he points out the afflicted area, the camera moves to a position inside his mouth, shooting out from between his open jaws. The shot is a joke on the Hollywood convention of impossible camera angles, the archetypal example being the camera that peers out at a pair of lovers from within the depths of a fireplace. This kind of shot is disturbing, even in its cliché form, because of the attention it draws to the bulk—the physical fact—of the camera. In a conventional realist style, the fact of the camera is always hidden; we are not supposed to feel it there, but to identify its point of view with a sort of free-floating omnipotence—a mysterious, unseen, almost godlike presence. The fireplace shot violates a taboo: it points to the profane physicality of the sacred object that is the camera by denying it too ostentatiously. Obviously, the camera could not be where it is if this were a real fireplace and the actors were real people. The shot comes dangerously close to overturning the naturalistic code of narration that the Hollywood cinema is built on, but for some reason we accept it—perhaps because the space the camera is violating is only a physical space. Ruiz’s shot is shocking—and shockingly funny—because it violates a spiritual, psychological space: the space of the human head, where the mind and the soul are supposed to reside. The Exorcist notwithstanding, Ruiz’s shot is the most vivid image of possession I’ve ever encountered. A foreign presence is, very literally, occupying a human body, and in the act of penetrating the flesh, the camera is transformed from benign, invisible sprite to rampaging demon. The shot is a throwaway, over in a second. But as the story unfolds, we encounter other possessed characters: two policemen who can swap spirits (and voices) by kissing each other on the cheek, a man living alone on a rocky island who is occupied by the half dozen personalities of his mysteriously missing family.

A whole series of transformations is involved here, and the way in which it progresses is a vivid illustration of the workings of Ruiz’s imagination. A narrative event (the toothache) produces a formal event (the shot). The shot is then analyzed for the story elements it might contain, producing the idea of possession. Finally, the theme of possession is incorporated into the overall narrative, producing a plot—a plot of which the toothache is a part. This interpenetration of form and content—this endless circulation, really, of form into story into form into story—is the basis of Ruiz’s cinema. As nonlinear as his narratives are, they unfold smoothly and continuously—and, in a sense, coherently—because they are bound together by this underlying network of transformations and associations.

* * *

A few links to recent reading:

-- Dave has an essay on Raoul Walsh in the book; it is now available at Moving Image Source. At MUBI, David Phelps and Danny Kasman sit down with him for a podcast conversation. Also: Dave talks at some length about Walsh in this recent interview with Miriam Bale.

-- Several pieces by Robin Wood at Film International including "Against and For Irreversible" and "Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression": part one; and part two, which I linked to a few weeks ago in the post on "Difficult Cinema."

-- Along with several others, Farran Smith Nehme will be taking part in Northwestern University's Film Criticism conference this month.

-- At Andy Rector's: a 1978 interview with Serge Daney.

-- The brand-new NYC-based film website Alt Screen, founded by Paul Brunick. Among the contributing editors are Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Jim Emerson, and Nathan Lee.

-- Zach Campbell: "The Lights".

-- Michael Guillen interviews Todd Haynes about Mildred Pierce (2011).

-- At MUBI: David Phelps on films by Claude Lanzmann, Thomas Harlan and Robert Kramer.

-- Links to several recent pieces at Chris Fujiwara's website--on Takamine Hideo, Nina Menkes, and the Viennale.

-- At the website for the Visible Evidence conference, to be held at NYU in August, Brian Winston has a memorial post to Richard Leacock.

pic: Raúl Ruiz's City of Pirates (1983)

Netflix Streaming

2011-03-27T13:45:00.001-04:00

I recently traveled to New Orleans to attend the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) for the first time. It was a great thrill to meet and have conversations with numerous scholars and critics I've only known through books and essays. In addition, I attended about 30 paper presentations, most of them fascinating. The conference was massive (up to 25 panels taking place simultaneously); I gravitated to the panels which focused on cinephilia, film style, sound and music, genres, and philosophy. The complete conference program is available at this page. The venue for next year's conference is Boston; I'm looking forward to returning.

* * *

Dave Kehr has a very interesting piece in the New York Times on the rise of streaming and the decline of the DVD. He refers to a post by Eric A. Taub at the Times' Gadgetwise blog, which reports on the less-than-desirable quality of Netflix streaming. My own experience often corroborates this: I've found Netflix streaming to be of variable, and frequently sub-DVD quality. Occasionally I'll encounter a title of superb quality (a recent example: Mad Max), but just as frequently the films seem to suffer from compression-related quality loss. For the record, I almost never have "buffering" issues, and no other devices are using bandwidth in my home when I'm streaming a film on the TV.

I'd love to know what others think of Netflix streaming: Do you find it to be of good quality? Would you say that your Netflix streaming experience is comparable to DVD? I'm curious to know if streaming quality issues are widespread or if they only affect a certain section of the Netflix population. I've also been keeping an eye on the Hacking Netflix blog to see if these issues get taken up there.

* * *

A few links to recent reading:

-- Great news: the first issue of Lumen, a new journal founded by Edwin Mak and Matthew Flanagan.

-- A terrific interview by Michael Guillen: "The Politics and Poetics of Obsolescence: Brunch With Thomas Elsaesser."

-- (via Cinetrix) Each post on the blog Movies in Frames contains 4 frames from a film.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum: On Jean Renoir; and Mark Rappaport.

-- At The Guardian: "Asha Bhosle: The Voice of Bollywood".

-- At Sight & Sound, three women film critics share their inspirations; and Hannah Gill wonders about why film criticism is a male-dominated profession.

-- David Hudson rounds up the new issues of Cinema Scope, Cineaste, Film Comment, and Offscreen.

-- Michael Sicinski's essay on Kiarostami's Certified Copy.

-- Scott Foundas on Serge Bozon and other contemporary filmmakers who started out as critics on La Lettre du cinéma.

-- Amy Taubin interviews Todd Haynes on Mildred Pierce.

-- At Cinema Scope Online: Max Goldberg interviews Nathaniel Dorsky.

-- At 99%: An interview with the Brothers Dardenne.

-- The 2011 World Picture conference will be held in Toronto.

pic: Film critic Dilys Powell

Difficult Cinema

2011-02-23T16:00:00.006-05:00

Congratulations to Marilyn Ferdinand (Ferdy on Films) and Farran Smith Nehme (Self-Styled Siren) for the just-concluded Film Preservation Blogathon. The event's aim was to raise money to preserve blacklisted filmmaker Cy Endfield's noir The Sound of Fury (1950). There is still time to donate to this cause: Please see the Facebook page of For the Love of Film. Marilyn and Farran, thank you!

* * *

I've been wondering: What does it mean for a film to be difficult? Are there multiple ways in which films can be difficult? To put the question to myself in a more personal and subjective way: What are some films or filmmakers that I find difficult? And why?

I recently watched Andrei Rublev (1966), a remarkable and quintessential work of cinematic modernism. It can be called difficult for many reasons: it's three and a half hours long; the narrative is episodic and discontinuous; the film is structured in the form of chapters but often there is little idea of how much time has elapsed between them; there are dozens of characters, and the relationships between them are not always clear; to complicate matters, the same actors turn up in multiple roles through the film; Tarkovsky frequently drops narrative and character in order to focus on the elements (earth, air, water, fire) in an immersive, tactile way. In and beyond matters of plot, action, character and psychology, Tarkovsky poses challenges to interpretation, especially given the central theme of the spiritual -- the non-material, the intangible -- that runs through the film.

Robin Wood has a wonderful passage on the subject of difficult cinema in a 2004 essay on Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep. It appears in a section he titles "Confessions of an Incompetent Film Critic." Let me quote it at some length:

For people of my generation, who grew up in the 1940s/50s on an exclusive diet of classical Hollywood cinema (with the occasional British movie), the European ‘arthouse’ cinema always presented problems which linger on even today, a simple basic one being that of following the plot. This is not because the plot is necessarily complex or obscure, but, frequently, because of the way in which the characters are introduced and the action presented. When I grew up there was remarkably little serious criticism available (not much beyond the weekly reviews), and film studies courses in schools or universities were not even thought of. I was seventeen when I saw my first foreign language film (Torment/Frenzy [Hets, 1944], by Alf Sjöberg, from an early but already characteristic screenplay by Ingmar Bergman). I knew from the reviews that it would carry me far beyond anything I had seen previously, both in style and subject-matter, and my hand was trembling when I bought my ticket. I believe I had great difficulty following it (my first subtitles, not to mention extreme psychological disturbance). Fifty-five years later I still have the same problem when confronted with the films of Claire Denis (or Michael Haneke, or Hou Hsiao-Hsien…). The habits acquired during one’s formative years are never quite cast off; when I showed I Can’t Sleep to a graduate film group last year, my students corrected me over a number of details and pointed out many things I hadn’t noticed, although this was their first viewing of the film and I had already watched it three times. A classical Hollywood film – however intelligent and complex – is dependent on its surface level upon ‘popular’ appeal and its action must be fully comprehensible to a general audience at one viewing, covering all levels of educatedness from the illiterate to the university professor. (The same was of course true of the Elizabethan theatre – see, for example, the conventions of the soliloquy and the aside, wherein a character explains his/her motivation, reactions or thoughts to the audience). One of the cardinal rules was that every plot point must be doubly articulated, in both the action and the dialogue; another was the use of the cut to close-up that tells us ‘This character is important’; yet another, the presence of instantly recognizable stars or character actors. All of these Denis systematically denies us. It is a part of her great distinction that her films (and especially I Can’t Sleep, arguably her masterpiece to date) demand intense and continuous mental activity from the spectator: we are not to miss a single detail or to pass over a gesture or facial expression, even if it is shown in long shot within an ensemble, with no ‘helpful’ underlining and no 'spelling out' in dialogue.

It is the particular distinction of Denis’ cinema that sets it apart from – almost, indeed, in opposition to – the work of many of our most celebrated ‘arthouse’ directors: Bergman, for example, or Fellini or Antonioni. Their films are rooted in autobiography – not necessarily in any literal sense, but in terms of personal introspection – whereas Denis left autobiography behind with Chocolat, and even that film is notable for its poise and critical distance, its objectivity. Where Bergman or Fellini seems to be saying to us ‘Come with me and I’ll tell you my secrets, share my experiences – how I feel about things, my thoughts about existence’, Denis issues a very different invitation to the spectator: ‘Come with me and we’ll play a game, albeit a serious one. Let’s see how much you can notice in what I decide to show you, how you interpret what you see and hear, what connections you can make, how much can be explained and how much remains mysterious and uncertain, as so much in our lives remains unclear. I’ll allow you a certain leeway of interpretation, because I don’t always understand everything myself, not even my own creations, though I’ll be as precise as possible…’

* * *

On the one hand, I agree with Wood that filmmakers such as Denis and Hou are difficult. In comparison to (say) popular cinema, the demands they place on us are sometimes of a different order. And yet, when I experience each new work by these filmmakers, the difficulty I feel in making sense of them is counterweighed by the feeling of deep pleasure I take in the very ambiguities, uncertainties and mysteries that make the work difficult. In the end, the overriding impression that lingers is not one of the work's difficulty but of its rewards, and the pleasures it brings.

But there is another, more personal and subjective sense in which cinema can be difficult -- when certain films or filmmakers pose problems especially for us as individual viewers, problems that don't seem universally shared by other film-lovers. For example, even though they strike me as very interesting, I find that I have to work hard to grapple with and 'tune into' the few films I've seen by Jacques Rivette. (Confession: I haven't seen Celine and Julie yet.) Many of the cinephiles and critics I admire are devotees of his films, and this leads me to believe that I've not yet found the secret 'key' to, the 'way into' his work. The films hold me at arm's length; I've not discovered how to 'align' with -- and resonate with them yet.

I recently read Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay on Rivette's films, "Work and Play in the House of Fiction." It helpfully begins with this epigraph from Whitney Balliett:

[Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz] causes earache the first time through, especially for those new to Coleman's music. The second time, its cacophony lessens and its complex balances and counter-balances begin to take effect. The third time, layer upon layer of pleasing configurations -- rhythmic, melodic, contrapuntal, tonal -- becomes visible. The fourth or fifth listening, one swims readily along, about ten feet down, breathing the music like air.

Jonathan adds:

Apart from the brief ensemble passages written by Coleman, there is no composer behind Free Jazz, hence no composition; the primary role of Coleman as leader is to assemble players and establish a point of departure for their improvising.

Rivette's role in Spectre is similar, with the crucial difference that he edits and rearranges the material afterward, assembling shots as well as players. And the assembly is one that works against the notion of continuity: sustained meaning, the province of an auteur, is deliberately withheld -- from the audience as well as the actors. [...] We watch actors playing at identity and meaning the way that children do, with many of the games leading to dead ends or stalemates, some exhausting themselves before they arrive anywhere, and still others creating solid roles and actions that dance briefly in the theater of the mind before dissolving into something else. Nothing remains fixed, and everything becomes ominous.

Although I haven't seen Spectre or Out 1, there are many interesting observations and insights here. I think I may have gathered some clues to help me with my next Rivette encounter.

I'm curious to hear from you: What do you think are some ways in which films can be "difficult"? And, subjectively speaking, are there certain films or filmmakers that you find difficult? And why? I'd love to hear your thoughts on anything related to this large subject.

* * *

A few links:

-- Zach Campbell recalls an Andy Rector post on Joseph Losey's The Lawless (1950) and uses it to comment on the film. Also: Dave Kehr has an interesting review of the newly released Losey noir The Prowler (1951).

-- Jeffrey Sconce brings Christian Metz's film theory to Ida Lupino's Not Wanted (1949) in his post on the "quasi-diegetic insert".

-- From Ignatiy: the new episode of Ebert Presents; and his post "Cabinetry," on the Liam Neeson Euro-thriller genre.

-- Two Jonathan Rosenbaum-related items: a podcast of an interview he did with Colin Marshall; and a newly written introduction to his book on Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.

pic: Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep (1994)

Rediscoveries on Blu-ray

2011-02-01T20:25:00.004-05:00

Exciting news: Hearty congratulations to Ignatiy Vishnevetsky for being selected to co-host the new TV show, "Ebert Presents: At The Movies." The show is on PBS but my local affiliate in Buffalo doesn't carry it. Fortunately, the show has a nicely designed, regularly updated website where I was able to catch up with the episodes so far. My best wishes to Ignatiy with the show: here's to hoping he becomes a household name before too long!

* * *

I have a piece called "The 21-st Century Cinephile" in the latest issue of the Dutch film magazine Filmkrant. It's part of their "Slow Criticism" dossier, with pieces by Adrian Martin, Gabe Klinger, Dana Linssen, Neil Young, and others. In my piece, I discuss the need for a dialectical engagement with cinema discourse in this age of social media. The fragmented mode of cinema conversation on Facebook and Twitter is both invaluable (because of its dizzying stream of ideas, insights and stimulation) and challenging (because of its addictive allure). I find that these days I have to work hard to carve out time for engagement with long-form criticism in books or essays. Both modes of engaging with cinema discourse are important; it's a daily balancing act to be able to spend one time's wisely and well. I have a question for cinephiles: Do social media like Facebook and Twitter enhance and fuel your cinephilia? Do you find these social media valuable in your life, specifically your cinephilic life? I'm curious to know what you think.

* * *

I've seen Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) in nearly every format: the first time on the big screen when I was a teenager, and then, years later, on both VHS and DVD. I watched it on Blu-ray recently, and it suddenly struck me, with great vividness and force, as one of the great works of cinema.

Reading Vlada Petric's review in Film Quarterly, published when the film came out, I was surprised by its negative critical reception:

Everybody is fascinated by its visual (as well as auditory) qualities, yet many find its characters "unconvincing both as people and as symbols" (Joy Gould Boyum), "its drama deficient, and its psychology obscure" (Andrew Sarris); others claim that "most of its events take place abruptly, lacking adequate preparation or a dramatic payoff" (Arthur Knight); while some discard it completely as an "overwrought artifact" (Pauline Kael), or "a test case of pretension" (David Thomson), and "one of the most perversely undramatic, uninvolving and senseless movies ever made" (David Denby).

I can't fathom these criticisms. The drama in Days of Heaven issues only partially from the tragic love triangle at the film's center. For me, the main drama playing out in this film has to do with the way it stages confrontations between polar opposite ideas of what cinema is, what cinema can do. First, Days of Heaven's avant-garde impulses are as strong as those that drive its narrative. The film tells a compelling tragic-epic story, but at least as striking is its formal beauty, the way in which one stand-alone image after another stops you in your tracks. Malick often gives things -- both living and non-living -- their own shot, often unmotivated by the act of any particular characters looking at them. The conflagration, the locusts, the farm at the "magic hour," the broken wine glass at the bottom of the lake, the flying circus, the rooftop wind generator, the lone mansion: these images are indelible, their beauty and force far exceeding their merely functional requirement in the narrative.

The film embodies another primal opposition of cinema -- between the modes of documentary and fiction. Not only does the film capture and document nature better than most films, the credit sequence signals, with subtlety and imagination, the tension between the two modes. A montage of twenty-four sepia-toned archival photographs, the sequence introduces us to the time period in which the film is set. (In his book on Malick, Lloyd Michaels makes a case that every single photograph in this sequence bears a sly, glancing allusion to the narrative of the film itself.) Following these twenty-four historical photographs, the twenty-fifth, in the style of the preceding pictures, shows Linda Manz, playing the character of a poor urban kid. In one quiet, fleeting moment, the film has moved from its documentary opening into its fictional world. It is during such moments -- and they are many in Days of Heaven -- that I find this film profoundly "dramatic."

I'm wondering: Have you had the good fortune of rediscovering any older films -- and renewing or expanding your appreciation of them -- on Blu-ray? I'd love to hear about your experiences.

* * *

A few links:

-- A Blake Edwards special issue (plus other bonus pieces) in the new issue of Undercurrent.

-- The Senses of Cinema 2010 World Poll.

-- Cinema Scope now has a brand new online section with essays and a top 10 list.

-- Ignatiy has started a Tumblr site called Direct Transmission.

-- Videos at Catherine Grant's: "Fifteen Film Studies Guest Lectures at the University of Chicago."

-- Doug Dibbern at MUBI: "Cinephilia, the Science of Hope, and the Sacred Ground Beneath the Grapeland Heights Police Substation in Miami, Florida."

-- On the occasion of the new edition of his book Planet Hong Kong, David Bordwell gives us "25 Classics: A Cheat Sheet."

-- "Moments of 2010" by various writers at Moving Image Source.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Blog

2010-12-26T01:45:00.002-05:00

Jonathan Rosenbaum's blog has become the cinema website I visit most religiously. In just over two years, what a great model of a critic's archive this site is turning out to be! Especially given that Rosenbaum is arguably the most highly respected English-language film critic in global film culture, this is a great boon to film lovers.

The site is updated many times weekly with essays and reviews from a prolific, globetrotting lifetime of reading, thinking and writing about films -- but not only about films. Rosenbaum once said in an interview: "Film is an integral part of life and the world, not an alternative to life and the world." This statement -- which signals his twin commitments to aesthetics and politics -- conveys crucially the sensibility that animates his writing.

One of this week's posts is a 1998 essay that provocatively and productively pairs Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan with Joe Dante's Small Soldiers. The essay begins with Rosenbaum's capsule reviews of the two films, which make the arguments of the essay in condensed form. Here is an excerpt from each capsule:

Small Soldiers. Director Joe Dante (Gremlins, Innerspace, Explorers, Matinee) is a national treasure, and his lack of recognition by the general public may actually make it easier for him to function subversively. His unpretentious fantasy romps have more to say about the American psyche, pop culture, and the ideology of violence than anything dreamed up by Steven Spielberg or George Lucas [...] His films are about not just culture and violence but also everyday cultural violence, something we all have to cope with.

Saving Private Ryan. Steven Spielberg’s 1998 exercise in Oscar-mongering is a compilation of effects and impressions from all the war movies he’s ever seen, decked out with precise instructions about what to think in Robert Rodat’s script and how to feel in John Williams’s hokey music. There’s something here for everybody — war is hell (Sam Fuller), war is father figures (Oliver Stone), war is absurd (David Lean, Stanley Kubrick), war is necessary (John Ford), war is surreal (Francis Coppola), war is exciting (Robert Aldrich), war is upsetting (all of the preceding and Lewis Milestone), war is uplifting (ditto) — and nothing that suggests an independent vision ...

* * *

There is one design singularity that I should point out: The website consists of not one but two main pages that are updated regularly. In addition to the home page I linked to at the start of this post (this home page is called "Featured Texts" and contains mostly essay-length reviews), there is another page called "Notes" that houses lectures, essays and notes. Both pages are essential reading.

Let me link to some additional Rosenbaum-related reading material:

-- His collected writings at Chicago Reader; at Moving Image Source; and at DVD Beaver.

-- A recent Cineaste piece called "DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia."

-- His "Essential Cinema" list of 1000 films.

-- A collection of his annual top 10 lists from 1974-2006.

-- His latest book, "Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia" (from University of Chicago Press), which is one of the best cinema reads of the year.

* * *

Let me also share a few recent links:

-- David Hudson collects reports and reflections on the terrible news from Teheran: Jafar Panahi has been jailed for 6 years and banned from making films for 20. Also: Rafi Pitts' open letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

-- At Caboose, great news of the upcoming "Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television," a transcript of fourteen one-hour talks delivered by Jean-Luc Godard at Concordia University in Montreal in 1978 and translated into English for the first time. Also available at this page are two sample PDFs from the talks, on Alphaville and À bout de souffle.

-- In the new issue of Cineaste, Richard Porton has a large piece on the Toronto International Film Festival that refers to the post and discussion we had here at the blog a few months back.

-- Two year-end polls of best films: Village Voice poll; and Sight & Sound.

-- Many interesting posts at Zach Campbell's place, on subjects ranging from "snobbery" and comic acting to Minnelli's Some Came Running and Godard's Film Socialisme.

-- Recent blog discoveries: Sudhir Mahadevan's Ambrotypes and Ferrotypes; Drew McIntosh's The Blue Vial; and Jaime Christley's Unexamined Essentials.

-- At Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's: lots of capsule reviews originally written for Cine-File, plus a nice defense of Tony Scott.

-- Insightful commentary by Jean-Pierre Gorin on his ten favorite Criterion films.

-- Catherine Grant announces the new issue of Screening the Past.

-- David Hudson collects obituaries and tributes to Blake Edwards and Jean Rollin.

-- J. Hoberman on Norman Rockwell in Artforum.

Hindi Popular Cinema

2010-11-29T22:30:00.013-05:00

I'm going to hazard a guess that many of the super-cinephiles and critics I respect most -- like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Adrian Martin, James Quandt, Dave Kehr, Joe McElhaney, or Chris Fujiwara, to name just a few -- share one thing in common: They've seen a vastly greater number of Hollywood films than they have films from that other large popular cinema in the world, that of India.

There might be at least two reasons for this. First, for several decades after Independence, India officially endorsed and held up for global view only its "art films," while being openly embarrassed of its popular films. This meant that Western access to Indian cinema, through film festivals and retrospectives, was more or less limited to art cinema (Satyajit Ray being its prime example). Second, even after availability of Indian popular cinema became a significantly lesser issue in the US with Netflix (which carries literally hundreds of terrific examples spanning the 1950s to the present), the sheer collective volume of output of this industry proves still to be impossibly daunting, a deterrent to even the most ambitious, adventurous cinephile.

A key reason why Indian popular cinema is worthy of sustained cinephilic and critical interest is the multitude of ways in which it is so unlike Hollywood cinema in its aesthetics. The two great Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, have had a powerful influence on Indian culture -- including its narrative and non-narrative arts -- through the ages. Their mark is also seen in popular films. Standing in contrast to the linear narratives of classical Hollywood, these two epics are compulsively digressive, creating large, dense, and bustling networks of stories and characters; their signature movement is sideways rather than forward.

The influence of classical Indian theatre -- or Sanskrit theatre -- has also been widely acknowledged. This theatre valued spectacle and stylization over narrative, the narratives themselves being highly episodic. Music and dance drove the spectacle, and were vital ingredients of this theatre. Finally, the Parsi theatre of the 19th century, with its heterogeneous mix of wildly varied elements both Indian and Western, was also a key antecedent. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake write:

Stylistically the plays displayed a curious mixture of realism and fantasy, music and dialogue, narrative and spectacle and stage ingenuity, all combined within the framework of melodrama. The Parsi theatre, with its lilting songs, bawdy humour, bon mots, sensationalism and dazzling stagecraft were designed to appeal to the broad mass of people, and they did. Elitist critics used epithets such as 'hybrid,' 'coarse,' 'vulgar,' 'melodramatic,' 'sensational' to describe these plays.

All of these constitutive influences -- the age-old epics, classical Sanskrit theatre, Parsi drama -- bequeath to Indian popular films a super-abundantly rich mix of high and low cultures, a vitality and fertility and creativity that hums through them. At its best, I've always felt, this is a cinema of constant surprise.

For cinephiles and critics interested in exploring Hindi popular cinema, I can recommend no better resource than Philip Lutgendorf's website, which also features writings by Corey Creekmur. Lutgendorf and Creekmur are both professors at the University of Iowa with a deeply erudite and passionate interest in Indian culture. A beginner should first zero in on their lists of top 10 recommended Hindi films. Nearly everything on these two lists is available for rental at Netflix or can be purchased at websites such as Nehaflix.

The film reviews at Lutgendorf's site are remarkable for the way in which they knowledgeably situate the details of the films within a context of Indian culture, language, history, mythology, etc. Let me illustrate -- and simultaneously try to whet your appetites for this cinema -- by sharing a few example excerpts.

-- On Jai Santoshi Maa (1975):

"A classic example of the “mythological” genre—the original narrative genre of Indian-made films—and one of the most popular such films ever made, it gave a new (and characteristically Indian inflection) to the American pop-critical term “cult film,” for viewers often turned cinemas into temporary temples, leaving their footwear at the door, pelting the screen with flowers and coins, and bowing reverently whenever the goddess herself appeared (which she frequently did, always accompanied by a clash of cymbals). Despite tacky sets and the crudest of special effects, the film features a well-crafted script, with witty dialogs that abound in cultural references, and its devotional songs are extremely catchy (for years they could be heard blaring from temple loudspeakers all over India). Overall, the film has a charmingly playful quality, especially in its (often comically unflattering) portrayal of divine personalities, which is characteristic of folk Hinduism."

-- On Pakeezah (1971):

"“I’ve seen your feet; they’re very lovely. Don’t set them down on the earth—they’ll get soiled.” This metaphorical warning-note, penned by a romantic stranger and left between the toes of a sleeping woman in a railway compartment, forms a much-underscored motif in this classic courtesan film...The central theme of the film is the struggle for respectability of a tawai’if, an Indo-Islamic courtesan trained in poetry, music, and dance—a glamorous “public woman” whose career was to be an elegant companion (and potential lover) to affluent men, but for whom a “respectable” marriage and home was out of the question. Her beautiful feet—apart from being an erotic fetish—represent her mastery of the art of North Indian classical dance or Kathak, which tawai’if’s preserved and nurtured for several centuries. The “earth” that such feet must perforce touch, however, is ruled by patriarchal society with its crippling double-standards, which decreed that respectable women (who lived in parda or seclusion) could seldom be interesting to men, and that interesting women were seldom respectable. All courtesan fiction struggles with this divide..."

-- On Lagaan (2001):

"“Cricket,” wrote cultural theorist Ashis Nandy, “is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English.” In his only-partly-whimsical 1989 book, The Tao of Cricket, Nandy develops this insightful if contra-historical sutra into a lengthy analysis of what he sees as the three great public-arena obsessions of contemporary India: cricket, politics, and the Bombay cinema—further arguing that all three adhere, in significant ways, to the same basic grammar of performance. Whether or not he ever read Nandy, director Ashutosh Gowariker had the genius to combine all three in one allegorical package, and to sell the idea to Aamir Khan, who then produced and starred in the resulting screenplay. The rest is cinematic history, and also one of the most successful Indian efforts at historical cinema: an epic-length (nearly four hour, yet surprisingly well-paced and gripping) parable in which the indigenization of cricket becomes a metaphor for the entire Indian Independence struggle, as well as for the larger and still-ongoing project of (to quote another book by Nandy) the “loss and recovery of self under colonialism.”"

-- On Don (1978):

"Although there are no lack of contenders for the title, this might just qualify as the Compleat Amitabh Bachchan vehicle. It has: international smugglers, subplots aplenty, jokes about Bombay, Banaras, and other films, uproarious action sequences (the credits include “Car Chase Driving: Haji”—who I believe was once my cabbie in Bombay), classic-villain Pran as a crippled safecracker who can walk tightropes, Zeenat Aman at her foxiest, several unforgettable songs, and a totally tongue-in-cheek (or paan-in-cheek) attitude about itself. Practically everything good in the film—and there is a surfeit—comes in doubles: exploding suitcases, Interpol agents, escapes from tall buildings via ropes that are severed, cute kids, lots of entendres, and Bachchan himself, who puts in stellar performances as both the Really Evil Goan crime boss “Don,” who sports killer shades and razor-sharp bell-bottomed suits, and Vijay, his happy-go-lucky desi doppelganger from the banks of the Ganga, who chews paan incessantly, puts surma (collyrium) around his eyes, wears a lungi, and dances on the pavements of Bombay with bells on his ankles to earn coins to support the street urchins he’s adopted. Okay, you see the possibilities here…but you don’t really, unless you’ve seen the film."

-- On Pardes (1997):

"East has been meeting West for a long time in Hindi films, often through the stereotype of a seductive yet menacing foreign Otherworld, wherein Indians lose their culture and fall into debauched Western ways (as in the 1970 film Purab Aur Paschim, “East and West,” which featured miniskirted, dyed-blonde Saira Banu as the locus of erotic interest and cultural anxiety). Such portrayals, reflecting a love-hate relationship with the West and with Indians who have settled there, underwent substantial modification by the 1990s, as Indians came to perceive their own culture as increasingly globalized, and their overseas kin—known in India, irrespective of citizenship or self-identification, as “NRIs,” (“Non-Resident Indians”)—as ongoing participants in it. Indeed, critics have observed that some of the spectacular hits associated with Bollywood’s “romantic revival” in the ‘90s seemed aimed as much at NRIs as at the domestic middle-class audience..."

-- Creekmur on the influences that mark Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (1957):

"Although the film constructs a distinct vision that would characterize Dutt's remaining films -- especially the explicitly autobiographical Kaagaz ke Phool (1959), about a failed film director -- it's interesting to speculate on Dutt's possible influences when making Pyaasa: at least one song sequence ("Hum aapke aankhon men"), set in a cloud-covered dreamworld and hinting at Guru Dutt's origins as a dancer, appears to pay a modest homage to the famous dream sequence of Raj Kapoor's Awara (1951). More often the film -- especially its final rally for a constructed hero that escalates into a riot -- suggests Frank Capra's similarly bleak Meet John Doe (1941), and a late scene between the unscrupulous publisher Mr. Ghosh and Meena at their breakfast table surely alludes to Citizen Kane (1941). (In Welles' film, the famous "breakfast montage" ends as the first Mrs. Kane silently reads a copy of her husband's rival newspaper; in Pyaasa, Meena holds up an issue of Life magazine with a crucified Christ on the cover.) The film's consistently rich black and white photography suggests not so much American film noir of the 1950s, but its gloomy precedents in French poetic realist works like Carne's Le Jour Se Leve (1939) or Quai des Brumes (1938), which paved the way not only for dark American crime films, but for the existential artist-outsiders who would be Vijay's European soulmates following World War II."

* * *

To build upon Lutgendorf and Creekmur's lists of recommended films, I'd like to invite you all to suggest Hindi popular films you've enjoyed. (Perhaps one of my favorite fellow Indian bloggers, Srikanth Srinivasan of The Seventh Art, will recommend some of his favorites too.) Let me kick things off with a trio of my favorites that are not on Lutgendorf's site: Raj Kapoor's Bobby (1973), Ramesh Sippy's Shakti (1982), and B. Subhash's Disco Dancer (1983). In order to contain the scope of this post and make it more manageable, I have restricted it to Hindi popular cinema rather than including all of Indian popular cinema. But if you have non-Hindi cinema suggestions in mind (e.g. Tamil or Bengali or Telugu popular films), please feel welcome to share those as well.

If I might end on a personal note: I left India in 1986, and have followed Hindi popular cinema only sporadically since then. So, any recommendations of films made in the last 25 years will be especially welcome. Thank you.

Recent Reading

2010-11-06T14:55:00.006-04:00

I am traveling to the Radical Philosophy Association conference in Oregon this week to present a paper on the films of Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak. I've never presented at a philosophy conference before; I'm both excited and nervous. When I return, I'll post some ideas on the topic I've been working on for the paper, building upon notions of radical vs. conventional form and content.

Meanwhile, here are some links to recent reads on the web:

-- Dave Kehr has a piece on the new Elia Kazan box set in the NYT. In his new blog post, Dave writes:

"There was a little spasm of Ingmar Bergman bashing over at Glenn Kenny’s place last week that made me think how much Bergman and Kazan have in common: both were celebrated theater directors who made their movie debuts around the same time, building their style around a distinctive, stylized direction of actors that somehow passed for psychological realism in the postwar context; both liked to traffic in big themes (social and political for Kazan, philosophical and religious for Bergman) but found their most sure connection with audiences in their intimate treatment of the thrills and traumas of adolescent sexuality.

Both panted after grand cinematic effects — the weirdly canted angles in “East of Eden,” the avant-garde interjections in “Persona” — without showing much facility in filmmaking on the practical level of composition and cutting. Both made Red Scare movies that were their absolute worst (Bergman’s “This Can’t Happen Here,” Kazan’s “Man on a Tightrope”). And both eventually drifted away from big ideas into family history and autobiographical confession, Kazan with “America America” and “The Arrangement” and Bergman with “Fanny and Alexander” and “Scenes from a Marriage.” As superb as some of their individual films may be, both in the end seemed to be accidental filmmakers, for whom movies were a secondary form of expression while the true heart of their work lied elsewhere — not in the orchestration of sounds and images but in the theatrical alliance of language and gesture."

-- Recent posts at Jonathan Rosenbaum's place: On Rob Tregenza's Talking to Strangers, Nobuhiro Suwa's 2/Duo, Andrew Niccol's Lord of War, the Winter Soldier documentary, Alan Rudolph's Trixie and Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August. On his notes page: "Notes Toward the Devaluation of Woody Allen."

-- On the tenth anniversary of Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, Nick Rombes organizes an event in which critics respond to one frame assigned to them from each of the film's 102 minutes.

-- Zach Campbell: "Citizen Kane is so ubiquitously celebrated that it's almost a latent, potentially underappreciated film again ... not in general, but amongst the cognoscenti. (It served as a whipping boy, for instance, for Joel David's wonderful Sight & Sound list.) The temptation to attack, disrupt, subvert, or ignore "the canon" is sometimes so powerful that it gives greater structuring power to the canon than it might realize. Kane stands in for all that is "yes, but..." about filmic greatness - "yes, it's great, but..."

-- Another Zach post, this time responding to a comment on television made by Tom Gunning in a recent interview.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: "Bruce Willis winces, Jason Statham mouths off, Arnold Schwarzenegger quips and gets irritated, Jackie Chan mugs earnestly, Steven Seagal swings his ego like a big distended gut—but only Jean-Claude Van Damme gets frustrated, looks scared, cries, stares off into the distance, shrugs, sighs, yelps in pain [...Van Damme's] screen persona is based on hesitation—on the moments when he turns away from the camera (Legionnaire), gets knocked down and recomposes (Bloodsport), slowly breaks apart and then puts himself back together in a new shape (In Hell, which is more "dimestore Dostoevsky" than Jim Thompson ever was) or pauses."

-- At Brooklyn Rail: "In Conversation with Jonas Mekas". (via David Hudson)

-- The most comprehensive Claire Denis retrospective ever to be mounted in New York, at the IFC Center, includes her documentary on Rivette (The Nightwatchman) and her assistant-directing assignments for Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders.

-- Joseph McBride at Sight & Sound: "Capra before he became 'Capraesque'".

-- Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot on Julián Hernández’s Raging Sun, Raging Sky.

pic: Jonas Mekas portrait, pencil on paper, by Phong Bui.

The Berlin School

2010-10-17T14:30:00.002-04:00

I recently watched four films by the German filmmaker Christian Petzold: The State I'm In (2000); Ghosts (2005); Yella (2007); and Jerichow (2008). The first three are fascinating, but less than completely satisfying. The fourth makes a quantum leap beyond them. I had seen Jerichow before, when it made a powerful impression; today, it registers as a wonderful, perfect little film. All four are well worth seeing.

I've had a peculiar experience with Petzold. On the one hand, I'm riveted by the precision and rigor of his style: the intelligence of his compositions, the confidence with which he handles shot duration, the sharp surprises in his cuts, and the masterful, exhilarating control of his mise-en-scène. Watching these films do their work is to be immediately reminded of the stylistic flabbiness of most films. But the content of the first three films -- their narratives, characters and themes -- while promising and interesting, struggles in vain to equal the marvels of their style. Jerichow succeeds by molding and developing that content with the same scrupulous discipline and care that Petzold devotes to film form. In its multidimensional political critique, Jerichow achieves a great, stirring resonance that travels well beyond the film's specific narrative and characters.

Despite my reservations, Petzold's films have made me extremely curious to see and learn more about the films of the "Berlin School." The three filmmakers most closely associated with this "school" are Petzold, Angela Schanelec and Thomas Arslan. Michael Sicinski writes in Cinema Scope:

Without any intention whatsoever, Petzold has become a kind of figurehead for the Berlin School much in the way Andrew Bujalski has been reluctantly appointed the global ambassador for “mumblecore.” What Petzold, Arslan, and Schanelec do have in common is the fact that they studied filmmaking at Berlin’s dffb, an intellectually rigorous film school guided at the time by [Harun] Farocki and fellow film-essayist Hartmut Bitomsky. Aside from these two Berliner forefathers, and the three dffb graduates, the “movement” fans out all over Germany, also encompassing directors associated with Revolver magazine, such as Christoph Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, and Ulrich Köhler, and other non-dffb filmmakers such as Maren Ade, Aysum Bademsoy, and Maria Speth, all rendering the “Berlin School” tag quite misleading. Nevertheless, Petzold has achieved a level of international exposure and acclaim which thus far exceeds that of any other director working under this umbrella, and so, within certain circles of international film discourse, Petzold’s work ends up being at least partially understood as an ongoing referendum on the ultimate value of this broad swath of German counter-cinema. Does it or will it have the staying power of the New German Cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s? Is it an appropriate antidote to big-budget junk like Downfall (2004) and withering mediocrities like The Lives of Others (2006)? Are Petzold and the “Berlin School” the future of German cinema, or is Fatih Akin?

The "Berlin School" film that has most recently fired my curiosity is Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below, thanks to Sicinski's review of it. Alas, it doesn't appear to have acquired US distribution yet. (Hochhäusler keeps a German-language blog called "Parallel Film.")

Here are a few more useful links to writings on the "Berlin School":

-- Ekkehard Knörer's invaluable overview piece in Vertigo magazine;

-- Marco Abel's equally indispensable essay in Cineaste, and his interview with the articulate Petzold (wonderfully titled "The Cinema of Identification Gets on My Nerves"), also in Cineaste;

-- Dennis Lim's New York Times article;

-- A "Berlin School" retrospective at Cinematheque Ontario, and Andrew Tracy's essay at MUBI on the occasion of the series;

-- The text "The Berlin School -- A Collage" at Senses of Cinema;

-- Steve Erickson's review of Yella at Baltimore City Paper; and a blog post at Kamera.

I'd love to know from you: Any "Berlin School" filmmakers or films you especially like or would like to recommend? And any thoughts on this "movement"?

* * *

Speaking of German-language cinema-related artifacts, Victor Perkins wrote me a note recently to share news of a Max Ophuls discovery he made "on a visit, or pilgrimage, to Saarbruecken":

In a bookshop opposite the plaqued house in which Ophuls grew up I enquired in case there were new German books on MO that I should know about. Instead of a book the owner sold me a cd which turns out to be major treasure. It offers a recording of the 1954 broadcast from Sudwestfunk, Baden-Baden, scripted and directed by MO based on Goethe's Novelle. It has Oskar Werner as narrator and a distinguished cast including Kaethe Gold. The music is adapted from works by Haydn. Even those whose German is non-existent, or yet more primitive than mine, would be taken by the intricacy of the relations between narration, performance, effects and music. It was clearly a labour of love for Ophuls, and a supplement to the broadcast gives us Ophuls himself commenting on his dedication to Goethe and his aims in the broadcast.

pic: Christian Petzold's Jerichow (2008)

TIFF 2010: The Round-Up

2010-10-05T16:05:00.003-04:00

Best-Of-Fest:

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

Big Favorites:

The Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica, Romania)
Promises Written in Water (Vincent Gallo, USA)

40-year-old Film That Threatens to Blow Everything Else Away:

A Married Couple (Allan King, Canada, 1969)

Must-See -- Can't Say More Upon First Viewing:

Film Socialism (Jean-Luc Godard, France)

Excellent:

The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat, France)
The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz, Portugal/France)

Strong, Fascinating:

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea)
You Are Here (Daniel Cockburn, Canada)
Boxing Gym (Frederick Wiseman, USA)
Guest (José Luis Guerin, Spain)
The Ditch (Wang Bing, China)

Still Pondering:

I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhang-ke, China)

I Regret Not Being Able To Schedule:

Silent Souls (Aleksei Fedorchenko, Russia)
Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
ATTENBERG (Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece)

* * *

A few weeks back, we had a lively and fascinating conversation about the institution of film festivals. Now let me turn my attention to the intersection of film festivals with the personal.

As I was attending TIFF this year, scurrying from one screening to the next, a question often occurred to me: For me -- for a cinephile -- what is the relationship between the experience of watching films at a festival a week or two out of the year, and watching them at home the other 50 weeks of the year? What are the ways in which a festival experience can productively inform -- indeed, transform -- one's 'normal' mode of watching films?

I ask because I find that attending a high-quality, intense, immersive film festival often seems to put my mind and body, without my immediately realizing it, in a special zone. I find a heightened perceptual awareness setting in -- a sharpened sensitivity to all audiovisual detail in each film I see (assuming I've had enough sleep!). I'm sure this is aided in no small measure by the great projections and the respectfully quiet audiences. The social, film-cultural context also plays a great role: I see films in the company of cinephile/critic friends and acquaintances who have traveled from near and far. Their not-negligible financial investment in the project of 'doing the festival' is more than matched by a strong intellectual and emotional investment in this experience. If we can call a cinephile a film-lover who is especially distinguished by possessing an active engagement with cinema, festivals can be a crucible experience, a distilled form of this engagement.

There are other factors contributing to the film-cultural richness of the festival experience. Filmmakers are frequently present for Q&A's, shedding light on (or sometimes confounding) our takes on their films. In recent years, I've stayed in close touch with many other critics and cinephiles, meeting up with them to discuss, intensively and often in great detail, the films we see from one day to the next. The Internet has also been an invaluable tool in this process: I check blogs, Twitter, and Facebook daily in order to tweak my schedule, dropping some films, adding ones that suddenly appear promising. (Michael Sicinski's TIFF reports at Cargo and MUBI, for instance, were a precious resource for me this year.)

Now here's something curious: Not only does the festival experience make for a special, super-active engagement with cinema, I find that it also exercises a healthy hangover, an extended influence upon viewing habits once I've returned home. I become a little more disciplined about recording my thoughts upon seeing each film, I make it a point to google up criticism on each film afterward, I make a better effort to discuss the films I see with others, and the amount of cinema-related reading I do also sees a spike. Unconsciously, I suspect, I'm trying to replicate, or at least approach, the intense level of involvement I experience at the festival. The challenge, of course, is to sustain these practices, from day to day, for the rest of the year!

So, I'm wondering: Personally, as a cinephile, what are the things big and small that you value about the film festival experience? And I'm curious if this experience in any way alters or influences the way you watch, talk or write about films in the days and weeks upon your return? Finally, are there any lessons that the crucible of the film festival experience can teach us -- lessons that we can apply to our 'normal' film-watching lives? I'm eager to hear your thoughts and accounts.

Festivalling

2010-09-08T15:30:00.001-04:00

I leave for Toronto tomorrow. Thanks to the vagaries of the festival lottery for advance ordering, I was shut out of a handful of films that were high on my list: Apichatpong's Uncle Boonmee, Godard's Film Socialism, Michelangelo Frammartino's The Four Times, the Russian film My Joy. But I'll be trying to add those films to my schedule once I get to Toronto. Here are the screenings I have tickets for:

A Married Couple (Allan King, Canada, 1969)
Guest (José Luis Guerin, Spain)
Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea)
Ruhr (James Benning, Germany)
Inside America (Barbara Eder, Austria)
Women Art Revolution - A Secret History (Lynn Hershman, USA)
Boxing Gym (Frederick Wiseman, USA)
ANPO (Linda Hoaglund, Japan/USA)
Curling (Denis Côté, Canada)
The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat, France)
I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhang-ke, China)
The Ditch (Wang Bing, China)
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica, Romania)
Promises Written in Water (Vincent Gallo, USA)
Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz, Portugal/France)
You Are Here (Daniel Cockburn, Canada)
Sandcastle (Boo Junfeng, Singapore)
Mavericks: Apichatpong Weerasethakul (A presentation/conversation)
The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
Erotic Man (Jorgen Leth, Denmark)
Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Genpin (Naomi Kawase, Japan)
Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

Here is a link to the festival film list.

* * *

Recent reading:

-- I've been eating up Jonathan Rosenbaum's wonderful collection "Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia".

-- I recently revisited Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life; it looks stupendous on Blu-ray. Here is a great piece by B. Kite on the film and Nick Ray.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: "If Fritz Lang's is a "cinema of the hand," then Rohmer's is a "cinema of the elbow.""

-- Michael Guillen interviews Chris Fujiwara at The Evening Class. Also, at Undercurrent: Fujiwara on the Richard Porton-edited collection Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals.

-- More Fujiwara, at La Furia Umana: A conversation with Pedro Costa about Jacques Tourneur. Also at the site: Tag Gallagher on Jacques Tourneur.

-- Kristin Thompson provides a handy annotated list of several blog entries at Observations On Film Art.

-- Part 2 of Paul Brunick's piece in Film Comment on Internet film criticism.

-- Adrian Martin at Filmkrant:

"On the contents page of issue 68 of Bright Lights magazine, the summary of an article by Joseph Jon Lanthier catches me: 'Shutter Island might be the only psychological thriller abetted by a lack of interest in the psyche'. A similarly gripping assertion was made on Facebook by US scholar Corey Creekmur concerning the most recent current talk-fest film, Inception: its cagey view of dreams, Creekmur thought, showed little interest in or knowledge of Freudian dream-interpretation.

This is not only a cinematic phenomenon or trend. In Melbourne recently, the famous Lacanian expert Renata Saleci spoke about the movement in social fields such as criminology and pharmacology towards a certain, often quite banal form of neuroscience: the kind that pores over images of parts of the brain lighting up in different colours, as if in proof that 'psychological deviations' (like juvenile delinquency) can be seen, charted and quantified this way. Saleci summed up the problem by throwing her hands up in despair: "No psychoanalysis! They see no difference between the brain and the mind!"

And the mind, lest we forget, has an unconscious. And the unconscious is not so easily retrieved or narrativised as we are seeing in these recent, ambitious 'mind game' movies (as Thomas Elsaesser and others have called them). More than ever, people like to take the soft option and replace Freud's term with 'subconscious' - implying that there is something (a thought or feeling) just out of reach, just below the surface, something ultimately easy to fish out into full and mastered consciousness.

But the unconscious is the negation of the consciousness, its true shadow realm, not some adjacent room one can simply enter and ransack. The unconscious is what cannot be ever entirely mastered, the zone that eludes us - at the same moment that it drives us. The unconscious is the space of denial, of fantasy, of distortion, the elaborate revision and transformation of all that is easily viewable or knowable."

Any other recent reading you'd like to share? Please feel free to do so in the comments.

pic: Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon.

Film Festivals

2010-08-29T22:10:00.007-04:00

Recently I've been wondering: How have film festivals slowly changed in the last decade or two? And what are things that a good film festival ought to be doing?

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) kicks off in a couple of weeks. I've attended it continuously for the last twelve years. The festival has changed markedly over this time. The number of commercially high-profile "galas" and "special presentations" has shot up. The size of the "Masters" program -- where the festival puts its best, most highly regarded narrative art films -- has shrunk dramatically. Even more distressingly, programs devoted to retrospectives of single filmmakers or particular national cinemas have been more or less eliminated. In fact, the festival now shows almost only new films: anything that isn't contemporary, anything that lacks the sheen of novelty, has disappeared from the festival's horizon. The only exception to this gradually escalating corporatization of TIFF has been the avant-garde program Wavelengths, helmed by Andréa Picard, who has guided it from strength to strength in recent years.

I hasten to add: the festival still shows a healthy number of good films. It's the one week of the year that I look forward to the most. Nevertheless, there's no denying that the changes at TIFF have, over the years, weakened the festival in certain crucial ways.

The book Dekalog 3, edited by Richard Porton, is a valuable recent collection that takes film festivals as its subject. One of the pieces is a terrific conversation between James Quandt and veteran film curator and festival director Simon Field, who observes:

...Toronto, whether it likes it or not, has got caught up in marketing procedures, particularly of Hollywood but also of the independent American cinema machine. Some of the auteurist emphases of the older festival have begun to get lost [...] In the time I've been coming, it has become a much bigger machine, emphasizing more and more its premieres. It's become much more self-conscious about being one of the most important festivals in the world; it's more preoccupied with its own rhetoric, celebrating its rhetoric. [...]

In the Netherlands, there's what they call the 'sandwich process', how you use bigger films to get audiences to support your festival and its smaller -- but equally important -- films. [...] In Toronto it has begun to affect the tone of the festival and one of its roles, a role of which much is made here, to educate and inform, and the problem is how to maintain that balance when, for instance, all films are described as fabulous, and when some parts of the festival disappear beneath an overcrowded program. The noise of the 'upper' part of the festival [the more commercial part] drowns out other areas. When you get the feeling that rhetoric, and the marketers have taken over, you begin to be concerned that the marginal films aren't at the centre of anyone's interest.

Toronto's moving away from showing non-contemporary cinema and its reluctance to invest in bodies of work -- instead featuring strings of individual films -- are blatantly market-oriented moves. They bank on novelty, but also, they look to diversify financial risk, distributing it among a slate of disparate single films rather than showing groups of films, like an entire Kiyoshi Kurosawa retrospective or a Turkish cinema sidebar, both programs I enjoyed there several years ago, when the festival operated under a somewhat different economic model.

For me personally, a good film festival -- let alone one with a great, global reputation like Toronto -- should do much more than simply show a bunch of new films. A good film festival should also be an event that enriches film culture in substantive and imaginative ways, and provides educational opportunities for the public to deepen their appreciation of this prodigiously diverse and rich medium. In his remarks to Quandt, Simon Field adds:

Should festivals have a stronger educational role? If you have a Resnais, a Michael Mann, a Costa or Diaz, and you're showing a plurality of cinema, how are you backing that up with ways to help people understand it? When I did the Ernie Gehr focus at Rotterdam, he started off doing the standard American-style Q&A -- waiting for questions, and then he realized that a lot of people in the audience didn't have a clue about how to approach his films. I don't know what the answer to that is. There's a danger with a very plural festival that you'll never help people engage with that kind of cinema because you're too busy showing films [...] you also need to help people understand the films. That's becoming more difficult because there's just this mass of stuff.

So, if you were to design your dream film festival, what might it look like? Mine would include films old and new, packaged into stimulating, often counter-intuitive programs; panels, lectures and workshops featuring critics, scholars and filmmakers; and a keen curiosity about film and film culture from all eras and countries. True, that sounds utopian, but I also believe that it's not essential that all film festivals in the world follow the same economic model and be driven by the same objectives.

I'm curious to hear from you: How do you think film festivals are changing? Are there good models for film festivals out there, models that don't simply and unimaginatively enslave themselves to capitalist imperatives? Are there festivals with significant critical influence (like, for a period, the Buenos Aires festival under Quintin's leadership) that care not just about showing individual films but also about film culture, film discourse and education? Any other thoughts on the film festivals of yesterday and today? I'd love to hear them.

Watching Films, Keeping Notes

2010-08-19T16:45:00.004-04:00

Ignatiy and I were chatting recently on my Facebook page about "writing process"; I thought I'd open up this conversation to all, and ask for your take on this topic.

As a "cinema person," I wear two hats. First, I'm a cinephile. I watch films -- usually several each week -- and these films range widely in period, country, genre, etc. The vast majority of these films are non-contemporary and most of my viewing is done on DVD. I keep a small "Moleskine" book, and try to spend at least 10 minutes taking a couple of pages of notes after each film. (I rationalize this discipline by telling myself: "If you can spend 2 hours watching a film, you can spend a tenth of the time scribbling some notes about it.") Rather than summarize plot or character, my notes, which are in bullet-point form, tend to record moments and details (like the "small striking moments" we talked about here a few weeks ago) and any ideas that they may spark. When I revisit these cryptic notes a few weeks, months or years later, I'm always startled by how much of importance and interest I forget about a film. More than anything, these notes serve to refresh my memory of the film and the ideas generated by my encounter with it.

And then there's the public, "critic" side of me that works on various writing projects -- blog posts, essays for magazines, journals or books, conference presentations, etc. For these, I create collage-like notes, some of them extensive, and then mine them during the writing process. After a piece is done, I trash the sheaf of notes (although perhaps I should be filing them away somewhere).

Finally, I keep another little notebook, a sort of "reading/writing journal," in which I record, each day, in fragmentary form, ideas, quotations, personal reminders to investigate certain films, books, etc., and all manner of bric-a-brac that I may want to use or develop, or avenues that I may want to chase down someday. I also have a section in it devoted to possible seeds for future pieces.

Ignatiy, in his blog post "68 Sentences," illustrates an alternative approach. The post is a montage of sentences, all originally hand-written in his notebooks. Rather than creating two distinct sets of writings (one comprised of private notes, the other crafted explicitly for public view), his writing process seems to bridge the gap between the two. He said on my Facebook page:

I'm not really an essay or even a paragraph writer -- I think I work in a weird sort of film production mode, where a topic is an excuse to produce dozens of sentences that I then assemble in a sort of editing [...] A lot of things I'll finish will include sentences or maybe whole paragraphs that were cut from previous things (and followers of the blog who also read my stuff for Mubi will notice posts, re-worked, appearing months later in completely different contexts). Further: there are many essays that were never finished that I have been cannibalizing for ideas / sentences for a long time...

I'd like to ask cinephiles and critics: Do you take notes upon seeing each film? If so, what form do they take? And what function/purpose might they serve for you? I think it might be illuminating and fun to compare our individual -- and sometimes unusual -- approaches to this ordinary, everyday (but nevertheless valuable) task.

* * *

Recent reading:

-- James Quandt's tribute to Eric Rohmer at Artforum.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay-post "Listomania."

-- Chris Fujiwara on the notion of "contemporary cinema" at n+1.

-- Matt Zoller Seitz on "3-D's radical, revolutionary potential" at Salon.

-- Mark Rappaport on the "Sirk-Hudson connection" at the Criterion website.

The Rebirth of MOVIE

2010-08-07T15:30:00.004-04:00

Great news for film criticism: The legendary British magazine Movie has been reborn -- online. The first issue of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism is now available in its entirety at the University of Warwick website. The issue kicks off with a wonderful tribute by V.F. Perkins to one of the prime movers behind the original Movie, Ian Cameron, who died a few months ago.

The origins of Movie, Perkins writes, can be traced back to Oxford in the late 1950s, to film society program notes penned by Cameron. This led to his writing and editing film criticism in the student magazine Oxford Opinion. Cameron recruited others to write for the film section, and they developed a collective agenda that was

strongly polemical, taking one of its cues from the delightfully disdainful way in which month by month Cahiers received the output of the British film industry. (The respect accorded in Britain to The Bridge on the River Kwai was almost as galling to us the rejection of Vertigo.) Our wrath found a main target in the British Film Institute and its publications, Sight and Sound and Monthly Film Bulletin.

Using their cultural visibility as an Oxbridge publication, they attacked British film writing because it was

predictable in its judgments and predictable in putting judgments ahead of appreciation. It offered next to nothing that counted as analysis, where a verdict and an interpretation come with support from argument. The absence of an evidenced criticism was a particular affront to Ian's scientific sensibility.

It is this ethos of patient close analysis, this carefully considered appreciation of films grounded in descriptive detail that is the signal contribution of the Movie legacy to film criticism. The new Movie's continuity with its former self is readily seen in the way this ethos marks every piece in the new issue. For example, with the help of detailed attention to moments and texture, James MacDowell's essay develops the notion of a "quirky sensibility" found in many recent American movies. Kate Leadbetter's article contrasts the lead female characters of three Fassbinder films (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, Lola) in terms of physicality (movement and gesture) of the performances -- again with an intent focus on the moment-to-moment execution of those performances, aided by framegrabs. Lucy Fife Donaldson picks up the thread of a Movie round-table discussion from a 30-year-old issue, and weaves it into an argument about the way form and style function in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The rest of the issue features similarly substantive and satisfying film criticism. I eagerly await the issues to come.

* * *

I'd like to take this opportunity to consider a larger topic: the history and impact of British film criticism. Narratives of film criticism have all too often privileged the French (the storied Cahiers du Cinema) or the Americans (the Sarris-Kael debates; the rediscovery and celebration of Manny Farber) but no such attention, adulation or myth-making has been visited upon the British. (I wonder why.) If, in the '60s, Sight & Sound and Movie represented two separate and distinct strands of British film criticism, it is the latter, I think, that has stood the test of time, remained the fresher, the more useful and substantive. This is particularly unusual given that a sizable portion of Movie criticism of the '60s focused on films from an earlier (studio) era of Hollywood. I suspect it's because Movie's critical principles, irrespective of writer or film, always dictated a detailed critical attention, an attempt to take hold of and fully account for form and style, connecting them to interpretation. The need for these principles is felt every bit as urgently in film criticism today as it was 50 years ago. (The key recent book-length work which demonstrates these principles at work, and features many Movie and Movie-influenced writers, is "Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film" (2005) edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye. It is a model work of close-analysis film criticism and interpretation.)

The influence and impact of Movie's early polemics can be seen even as recently as this week -- in Sight & Sound editor Nick James' online-only piece. He points to the end of the Miramax era, the drying up of support and funding for prestige, middlebrow, "quality" films (by "quality" he means the visibility of money and "good taste" on the screen). Films like Shakespeare in Love and The English Patient, which marked the apex of the Miramax era, were nothing more than recent equivalents of prestige fare like The Bridge on the River Kwai, championed by Sight & Sound in the 50s. In James' editorial, he positions the magazine against such a quality, middlebrow cinema and for a more personal and "poorer" cinema less worried about respectability. His call echoes that of V.F. Perkins in the early '60s in his essay on British cinema. (Please see this earlier post on Movie and British cinema.)

There is another aspect of the new Movie that interests me: the passage of time since its founding, and the institutionalization of film studies in the interim. In the early days of Movie, film studies didn't exist as a discipline, but in the '70s, many of its writers, like Robin Wood and V.F. Perkins, had begun working, part-time or full-time, in academe. However, in that post-'68 heyday of "Screen Theory," their work found itself in the margins of the discipline. And so, I wonder: To what extent has the new Movie been influenced by developments in the film studies discipline since? And in what ways is it providing an alternative, a corrective, to the predominant streams and methods of scholarship in film/media studies today?

Your thoughts on Movie old and new, British film criticism, and any related subjects? I'd love to hear them.

pic: Ian Cameron, 1937-2010, a founder of Movie. The Guardian obituary is by Charles Barr.

Mediators: The Experience of Internet Cinephilia

2010-07-12T06:30:00.006-04:00

Gilles Deleuze's "Mediators," published in 1985, is one of my favorite essays. I feel a deep personal affinity for it because I think it captures the way Internet cinephilia works, even though the piece itself makes no reference to cinema, cinephilia or the Internet. Perhaps I could share some of my thoughts on the piece here with you, and invite you to reflect and respond.

In his essay, Deleuze talks about movement in sports. Traditionally, our conception of movement and motion has been one in which we, as individuals, are the source, the origin of movement. Examples might be running, shot put, javelin, etc. Thus, the individual is the starting point, the source of energy and effort, and creates the leverage and momentum on her/his own.

But more and more, Deleuze notes, we see the popularity of certain recent sports -- like surfing, hang-gliding or wind-surfing -- which make us think of movement in a new and different way. These sports take the form of individuals entering into an existing wave. Thus, we as individuals are no longer the sole source, the origin of all movement. In fact, there’s no longer even a particular starting point that’s of importance. Instead, what we have happening in these sports is a sort of putting into orbit.

The key action now is to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to get into something, join something larger, more powerful than ourselves. These big waves that Deleuze is urging us to join, to ride, to be taken up by, he calls mediators.

Deleuze is saying: It is up to us to enter these waves around us, to place ourselves in the path of these mediators, these waves of thought and creation and reflection that are swirling all around us every day. For him, the more we think, work and live in isolation, the more difficult it is for us to move forward simply of our own accord. But with the help of mediators, we can get caught up in forces much bigger, more powerful than ourselves, and they can help us do and think things we could never have done or thought on our own.

This, to me, is a great model for the way the Internet functions at its best. As a cinephile, the Internet is where I find my big waves -- my mediators -- every single day: on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, magazines, journals, and other sites. Several times a day they carry me from one idea to another, one film to another, one spark of curiosity to another.

It's been my experience that often, Internet cinephilic mediators (a) appear in small, brief encounters and (b) act as stimulants. A discussion on Facebook or a stray tweet on Twitter might spur me to add a film to my DVD queue; a reference in a blog post might impel me to request an article via interlibrary loan; a passing allusion in an email conversation might have me cracking open a book I've long owned to read an essay I didn't know was there; and an observation in a movie review might find me jotting down a fresh and interesting way of looking at a familiar filmmaker.

On any given day, I might experience a dozen or more such encounters that act as little stimulants, opening doors to films or writings or ideas new to me; they keep me learning and growing in tiny ways as a cinephile and critic. The Internet has suddenly made possible a new and large community for mutual teaching and learning, a community that includes both people we might know well (e.g on Facebook) and those we don't know at all (e.g on Youtube). In pre-Internet film culture, there were relatively few critics writing for large numbers of cinephile readers. But the number of readers and writers (fellow teachers and fellow learners) has exploded on the Web. Combine this with the dizzying, accelerated frequency of our encounters with these mediators -- every day, all day -- and we find rich possibilities whose only drawback is their super-plenitude.

I've been speaking in the abstract so far, so let me provide an example by recording here a handful of such "mediator encounters" I've had just in the last 48 hours. Every single one has awoken my curiosity, or brought me an insight, or expanded my consciousness in some way, however small:

(1) Jonathan Rosenbaum's fascinating account of the ups and downs in his interactions with François Truffaut, and their consequent impact on Welles criticism.

(2) Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's piece on Tony Stone's Severed Ways (2007), a filmmaker and film I'd never heard of ("[a] cross between Los Muertos, the last reel of Last of the Mohicans, Rossellinian film-teaching, Denisian sensation and Straub's "nature has ten million times the imagination of the most imaginative artists" maxim).

(3) Chris Fujiwara's review of a Nicholas Ray retrospective that recalls Godard's comparison of Bitter Victory to a trick drawing ("One is no longer interested in objects, but in what lies between the objects and becomes an object in its turn"), to which Fujiwara adds: "Each Ray film forms patterns that are hidden in plain sight."

(4) Zach Campbell's coinages of "reversible films" (The Matrix, 300 or V for Vendetta, that all too cleverly accommodate contradictory ideologies in a streamlined fashion) and "diffuse films" (that are political but messily and knowingly so, like Splice or District 9).

(5) Dave Kehr's DVD review of Samuel Fuller's Verboten ("In Fuller’s hands, what can at first seem an error of taste often turns out to be a vision of the world.")

(6) Mubarak Ali's remarkable collage-post on Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani's films, with text by the filmmakers, Jacques Rancière, Laleen Jayamanne, and Geeta Kapur -- and audio clips, besides!

(7) A Sight & Sound review welcoming Glauber Rocha's Antonio Das Mortes to DVD: "For Rocha the mysticism of Brazilian popular religion, a syncretistic fusion of Catholicism and the motifs of African religion transplanted with the slave trade [...] provided him with a model for the syncretism of his own film language, where the exuberant rush of images, the mix of mysticism and legend, cult and ritual, was married to a form of symbolism both political and surrealistic to achieve a visionary force."

(8) A collage of texts on the Berlin School in the new issue of Senses of Cinema: "One could perhaps reconstruct the affinity between the Berlin School directors of the 1990s and the ‘second’ Nouvelle Vague generation (Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel, Jacques Doillon, Maurice Pialat, Benoît Jacquot) through an implicitly shared post-utopian concept of the political which can conceive of social change only as a retreat into the private realm and the cell formations which take place there."

(9) Finally: the two most valuable pages in the film-blogosphere, David Hudson's Daily MUBI Twitter site; and Catherine Grant's blog Film Studies For Free. And two more regular check-ins: new DVD release news at DVD Beaver and Criterion.

What makes Internet cinephilia distinct and different from pre-Internet cinephilia is not the presence of mediators per se. (Deleuze's own mediators existed in an age before the Internet.) Instead, their exploding number and the large volume of daily encounters we are able to have with them suddenly presents us with new challenges. Perhaps we can talk about this and other issues below.

So, I'm wondering: What do you especially value about Internet cinephilia? How is the experience of being an Internet cinephile distinctly different -- both better and worse -- than being a cinephile in the pre-Internet era? What sorts of "mediator encounters" excite and stimulate your cinephilic enthusiasm from day to day on the Internet? Your thoughts and suggestions are most welcome.

pic: Bruce Brown's classic surf film, The Endless Summer (1964)

Film Commentaries by Critics/Scholars

2010-06-06T20:05:00.003-04:00

The vast majority of audio commentaries available on DVDs feature those involved in the making of films: directors, actors, writers, producers, and so on. Over the years we've had several discussions here about such commentaries. In this post, however, I'd like to help gather examples of your favorite DVD commentaries by film critics and/or scholars.

One of our frequent guests here, Adrian Martin, might just hold the championship record for this category. His commentaries include (deep breath): Vivre sa vie, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, The Exterminating Angel, Masculin Féminin, La Promesse, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, The Blue Angel, Alice in the Cities, Journey in Italy, Gertrud, The Tarnished Angels, Martha, There’s Always Tomorrow, Beware of a Holy Whore, Les Cousins, Ministry of Fear, Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, F For Fake, Le Plaisir, Madame de …, Good Morning, A Married Woman, Le gai savoir, and La Luna (at last count). All of these (as far as I know) were recorded for the Australian label Madman, and thus are not as well known in the US. The first two of these commentaries have just been re-issued on the Criterion DVDs of the films here. I've had the opportunity of hearing a handful of these, and they are unfailingly strong and enjoyable.

Two other favorite examples of critic/scholar audio commentaries spring to mind. On the Criterion DVD of the 'Corinth version' of Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore have an informative and insightful conversation that makes you wish more DVDs would use this format. (I look forward to the upcoming Criterion DVD of Close-Up that announces a joint audio commentary by Jonathan and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa.) James Quandt's commentary on Bresson's Pickpocket is the very opposite of an improvised conversation; it's very evidently scripted, a long-form essay read aloud, a wonderfully dense but riveting piece of work. I had to pause the DVD every so often to savor the words just spoken, to let the weight of the analysis sink in. These are just a couple of favorites, of several, that I mention here as examples.

Recently, the video essay has emerged as another valuable form of film commentary. If Adrian is the champ of the audio commentary, the shortlist of contenders for the video essay would have to include Matt Zoller Seitz, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Kevin Lee, Jim Emerson and Tag Gallagher. Catherine Grant has helpfully posted a collection of links as an homage to MZS's and Kevin Lee's video essays; and one to Jim Emerson's essays. Gorin's commentaries on Criterion DVDs, including his classic video essay on Pierrot le Fou, are consistently valuable. An inventory of Gallagher's DVD-analyses can be found at his website (scroll down all the way).

Could I ask you to recommend, if you like, your favorite examples of audio commentaries and/or video essays, either among those mentioned above or otherwise? Perhaps we can assemble a collection of recommendations as a resource for future googlers here.

* * *

Some links:

-- The new issue of Cineaste includes Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay "DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia."

-- There's a new special issue of Undercurrent on film festivals, with pieces by Chris Fujiwara, Jon Jost, Yvette Bíró, David Sterritt, and others. Also: I've discovered that Jon Jost runs two blogs, here, and here.

-- One of the liveliest debates in the film-blogosphere in the last few weeks has been about "slow films." See: Steven Shaviro; Harry Tuttle; Glenn Kenny; Frieze Magazine's blog; Vadim Rizov; and the Guardian. The original Matthew Flanagan essay "Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema" (2008) is available at 16:9.

-- At Sight & Sound, 51 film critics list their favorite film books (scroll down for full ballots). Here's the aggregate top five.

-- At Catherine Grant's place: a valuable collection of links to "Bazinian, Neo-Bazinian, and Post-Bazinian Film Studies".

Nicole Brenez's video essay on Boris Barnet's By The Bluest of Seas, courtesy Kevin Lee.

A Visit to Hendrix College

2010-05-01T18:00:00.001-04:00

Just in case you'd like to adjust your bookmarks: this will be the new location of the blog.

Even though I've lived in the US for over 20 years, last week marked my first real visit to the American South. Hendrix College, a small, progressive liberal-arts institution in Conway, Arkansas, invited me to spend three days with their faculty and students. As part of the series "Word and Image," I gave a public lecture titled "Film Blogging, Cinephilia and Internet Film Culture." A highlight of my trip was spending time with the faculty who teach film at Hendrix, Kristi McKim and Dorian Stuber. I also screened and conducted a discussion on Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), and taught a class on "essay films" in Kristi's "Nonfiction Film" course. Finally, it was a special treat to meet and share meals and conversation with many young and cinema-passionate students. In all: a wonderful, energizing experience.

As part of my lecture presentation, I introduced the audience to the film-blogosphere and took them to over 20 websites, explaining briefly each one's unique strengths and value. The sites and writers included (in no particular order): David Hudson's Auteurs Daily; Jonathan Rosenbaum; Catherine Grant; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson; Dave Kehr; Steven Shaviro; Michael Sicinski; Long Pauses; Kevin Lee; Jeffrey Sconce; Zach Campbell; Ignatiy Vishnevetsky; Dan Sallitt; Richard Brody; Jim Emerson; Self-Styled Siren; Mubarak Ali; Kinoslang; Matthew Flanagan; Ry Knight; Chris Cagle; and several others. I'm recording them here in hyperlinked form especially for those who might've been in the lecture audience and might like to make note of and explore these sites further.

This reminds me that it's been a long while since I put up a post here asking for your favorite recent blog/website discoveries (please interpret "recent" loosely to cover the last couple of years!). Any websites or blogs or Twitter pages that you find valuable that are not so widely known or are absent from the blogroll to the left? Perhaps we can share our discoveries and recommendations here and turn the comments section into a repertory of online reading tips on film (or otherwise). Thanks!

pic: Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star.

This blog has moved

2010-04-27T14:49:00.001-04:00

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Small, Striking Moments

2010-04-02T21:05:00.008-04:00

A quick note: Blogger is forcing me to migrate to a new setup. It will likely happen within the next week or two. If the website experiences any convulsions or seizures, you'll know why! I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that it all goes well.

* * *

Teaching a film class for the first time has meant that I've been watching the assigned films with an extra-fine toothcomb. Before the semester started, I thought I knew these films intimately. But I've been constantly surprised by new and previously unsuspected wrinkles and folds in, for example, Marnie, Safe, or The Gleaners and I.

I've resurrected the practice of maintaining a film journal, and have been keeping notes on all the films I see, not just the ones for class. Particularly, I've been recording "small, striking moments" -- those that arrest you (without always signaling their full import right away) but fly out of your head in a few weeks if you don't consciously capture them in writing. I'm defining these moments broadly: they may have to do with performance, or gesture, or movement, or camerawork, or editing, or any number of things. These moments have also proved valuable in class, providing new and unexpected 'angles of entry' in order to talk or write about a film.

For a past issue of World Picture, Christian Keathley wrote an essay [pdf] on Otto Preminger that excerpts a valuable exchange between film scholar Andrew Klevan and philosopher Stanley Cavell. Their conversation takes up this idea of "small, striking moments":

AK: I find that after I’ve watched a film I normally have a few
moments or maybe just one moment that really strikes me.

SC: Start there…

AK: Yes, I’ll start there. […] It feels intuitive. Anyway, I’ll have
only a dim sense of what it is about that moment. I’ll just go ‘hmmmm.’

SC: A moment you care about, however apparently trivial, can be
productive. Why did the hand do that? Why did the camera just turn
then?

AK: And why is this niggling me? Our direction of thought here
reminds me that you have discussed Emerson’s feeling that primary
wisdom is intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. The
occurrence to us of an intuition places a demand for us on tuition. You
call this wording, the willingness to subject one self to words, to make
oneself intelligible. This tuition so conceived is what you understand
criticism to be, to follow out in each case the complete tuition for a given
intuition. There’s a moment that really struck me in Frank Capra’s Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936, US). I read your piece on the film
after re-watching it, and was pleased to see you mention this moment. It
is when Mr. Deeds (Gary Cooper) is lying on his back on his bed talking
to Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur) on the phone. He has his right calf and
ankle resting on the knee of the other leg, and he’s playing with his foot
while he’s talking to her. The camera is behind his head so that most of
his face is obscured (this shot is repeated a number of times). Then when
the phone call is over you see him playing his trusty tuba and his face is
even more hidden than in the previous version of the shot. Why did they
think to execute it like that…like that?

SC: Like that…

AK: And why was I drawn to these shots? […] I didn’t only
think the shots were unusual, or striking, I thought they were gently
mysterious, and that they were significant. They asked questions of me.
As the film continued, the memory of the shots kept returning. My
intuition was that because the shots were like that they might give me a
key to the whole film, and open it up in new and rewarding ways.

* * *

I'm curious to know: Do you keep notes on the films you see? What sorts of things might you record there? Do you find them helpful in the long run? Also: any recent encounters with such "small, striking moments"? Please feel free to share.

The Genius of the System

2010-03-06T14:25:00.005-05:00

The rich discussion on auteurs and auteurism in the previous post thread has me humming with questions. Let me take up one particular line of inquiry in this post.

I think it would be uncontroversial to assert that our present moment is not the Golden Age of American Cinema -- especially so in comparison with Hollywood's aesthetic zenith at the height of the studio era from the 1920s to the 1950s.

For example, here is a small subset of Andrew Sarris' list for best films of 1956: Ford's The Searchers; Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man; Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life and Hot Blood; Budd Boetticher's Seven Men from Now and The Killer is Loose; Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, There's Always Tomorrow, and Battle Hymn; Fritz Lang's While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt; Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life and Tea and Sympathy; Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It; George Cukor's Bhowani Junction; Stanley Kubrick's The Killing; Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers; George Stevens' Giant; Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments; and many more.

What was in place -- what combination of factors existed -- during that moment in Hollywood, and in America, that allowed a thousand good movies to bloom? One early answer came from André Bazin, who cautioned the 'young Turks' of Cahiers, like Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette, against creating a "personality cult of the auteur". Instead, he defended the fertile context composed of industry, genre, and tradition he called "the genius of the system":

What makes Hollywood so much better than anything else in the world is not only the quality of certain directors, but also the vitality and, in a certain sense, the excellence of a tradition...The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements.

David Bordwell adds:

Bazin's point struck the Cahiers writers most forcefully only after his death, partly because the decline of the studio system faced them with mediocre works by such venerated filmmakers as Mann, Ray, and Cukor. 'We said,' remarked Truffaut bitterly, 'that the American cinema pleases us, and its filmmakers are slaves; what if they were freed? And from the moment that they were freed, they made shitty films.' Pierre Kast agreed: 'Better a good cinéma de salarie than a bad cinéma d'auteur.'

I think that the fine arts during the Renaissance and theatre during Elizabethan times might provide two parallels to Studio-era Hollywood. In all three periods, we had large numbers of artists who produced work of great collective volume for a single, sizable audience. The scale of the system could support and nourish a large number of artists and craftsmen, permitting them to work towards a technical mastery of skills. Further, genres flourished as conventions were created, elaborated, modified, transformed and regenerated in a continual and vital process of exchange with a mass audience.

Two more analogues of such "systems" spring to mind, both of which, like Studio-era Hollywood, thrived in the first half of the twentieth century. First, the era of the "Great American Songbook," with its brilliant roster of songwriter/composers including Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Shwartz & Dietz, Hoagy Carmichael, and dozens of others. The institutions that made this great flowering possible included Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood itself.

Second: Comics -- both comic books and newspaper comics. The Comics Journal, the leading US publication that focuses on comics as an art-form, conducted a large poll in 1999 of the "100 best comics of the century" (scroll down about half-way). Their results are revealing: while a good number of contemporary "art-comics" make the list, the uppermost reaches are occupied by works of popular art from earlier in the century like George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Charles Schulz's Peanuts, Walt Kelly's Pogo, Winsor MacCay's Little Nemo and Carl Barks' Donald Duck (all in the top 10).

So, to draw the circle back to where we started. We all know that American movies are still Big Business. Viewership is high. The industry has seen rapid technological development, with a concomitant expansion of palette for artists and technicians. What, then, accounts for today's American films not being in the same league as those made during the '20s to the '50s? How are the two eras -- then and now -- crucially different? And what role might "the genius of the system" play in all of this?

I realize that I've advanced more questions than answers in this post, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on any of these issues. Thank you!

* * *

Some recent reading:

-- I've respected and learned from Cineaste associate editor Thomas Doherty's writings over the years, but his new piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The Death of Film Criticism," is disappointingly glib, lazy, and inaccurate (as others have pointed out). See Chuck Tryon's and Jim Emerson's responses to the piece, and Jonathan Rosenbaum's comments on the Chronicle post thread.

-- The new issue of Cineaste has about a dozen pieces available to read online, including a few "web exclusives."

-- Adrian Martin at Filmkrant: "For my part, I often return to a key article of 2004 by the young Brazilian critic Filipe Furtado which...begins with a fine gesture: it juxtaposes Kiarostami's Ten (2002) and McG's Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003) while sharply lamenting, 'the fact that it seems impossible to talk about them together struck me as a shame.'

-- Zach Campbell at The Auteurs on the extras and supplements for Criterion's DVDs of "Rossellini's War Trilogy."

-- Kevin Lee puts up Jia Zhang-ke's 1998 essay "The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return."

-- David Hudson looks ahead to several new films including Secret of the Kells; and a tad late but no less interesting for its delay: Doug Cummings at Film Journey has put up his list of favorite films of 2009.

-- Several new posts at prolific Jeffrey Sconce's blog, Ludic Despair.

-- Craig Keller posts notes on several new Masters of Cinema DVD releases.

-- The Self-Styled Siren mounts a defense of Sam Wood; and Glenn Kenny takes up auteurism in his "Topics/Questions/Exercises of the Week" column at The Auteurs.

-- Is there a harder-working film-blogger than Michael Guillen of The Evening Class? Recently: he interviewed James Benning.

-- A nice overview of the career of Sergei Parajanov by Ian Christie in the new Sight & Sound.

Journey of a Word

2010-02-08T11:10:00.002-05:00

A New York Times article last week anointed Steve Jobs as an "auteur":

Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” observes John Kao, a consultant to corporations and governments on innovation. In the auteur model, he said, there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created. Movies created by powerful directors, he says, are clear examples, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

At Apple, there is a similar link between the ultimate design-team leader, Mr. Jobs, and the products. From computers to smartphones, Apple products are known for being stylish, powerful and pleasing to use. [Apple's "design restraint"] is evident in Mr. Jobs’s personal taste. His black turtleneck, beltless blue jeans and running shoes are a signature look.

How far we've traveled in 50 years. When Truffaut, Godard and other Cahiers du Cinema critics originally formulated their "politique des auteurs," they meant for it to particularly apply to Hollywood filmmakers like Hitchcock, Hawks or Nicholas Ray who managed to imprint their films with a personal vision and stylistic signature while working within an industrial system of production. Crucial to this "politique" was a politics of resistance that was manifested in at least 3 ways:

(1) A select few Hollywood filmmakers resisting (through aesthetic tactics grouped under a sign called "mise-en-scene") the powerful standardizing forces of the Hollywood system.

(2) A corresponding gesture of resistance on the part of the French critics themselves: one aimed at the dominant and respectable homegrown "Tradition of Quality" cinema.

(3) These French critics also combating the notion that Hollywood cinema, because it was a mass-culture product, was not worth taking seriously as art.

In the 1960s, Peter Wollen resituated the notion of the auteur with the help of structuralism. (See the essay "The Auteur Theory" in his book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema.) This move could also be seen as a gesture of resistance -- in this case, against an overly romanticized notion of the auteur with near-mystical powers of individual genius. The auteur, for Wollen, became a site, an "unconscious catalyst," a collection of themes, oppositions and traits that could be read, then inventoried and grouped under a name within quotation marks: "Hitchcock," "Hawks," "Fuller," and so on.

The term went into decline, at least in the formal study of film, in the 1970s and 1980s, but it has seen a resurgence -- in a reconstructed form -- since the 1990s. It was around this time that "independent cinema," as an industry category, began to show sizable commercial promise. In the last 15 years or so, we've seen the industry (first independent, then the mainstream) seize the term and deploy it -- not with any kind of resistance in mind but, plain and simple, as a strategy for product differentiation. Directors -- independent or mainstream, at the multiplex or the film festival, talented or mediocre -- are indiscriminately dubbed "auteurs" in a move that automatically attempts to bestow upon them quality and distinction, a brand identity. Especially when wielded by the industry and the media, the word has been diluted to the point of insubstantiality. It represents little more than the commodification of a set of product attributes in search of a market niche. The original animating values of resistance and critical polemics have slowly disappeared from the word since its appropriation. What does remain vitally useful today (especially for cinephiles) is the reading strategy we call "auteurism."

Your thoughts about the evolution of the word "auteur" over the last few decades, and its usefulness today? I'd love to hear them.

* * *

What was "independent cinema" before it became a commercially lucrative market segment about 15-20 years ago? We can find some answers in the fascinating 100-page catalogue [pdf] that accompanied a month-long, 150-film retrospective Independent America: New Film 1978-1988 at the Museum of the Moving Image in 1988. Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay for the catalogue, "Myths of the new narrative (and a few counter-suggestions)," can be found at his blog. Chief curator David Schwartz writes:

Before the commercial success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Pulp Fiction (and before the rise of home video), independent filmmakers made and showed their films in a world truly apart from Hollywood. To get their work seen, they would travel for months, with their 16mm film prints in tow, to colleges and media arts centers across the country. The commercial success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape marked the beginning of the end of this era. Last year’s big “independent” hit, Juno, was distributed by Fox Searchlight, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and it made more money than any other Best Picture contender. Juno’s virtues were not in its artistic independence; but precisely the opposite — it was a well-written, well-directed, well-performed, and utterly conventional movie.

Rosenbaum’s essay, and the entire Independent America film series, capture a time when the label “independent” was truly up for grabs, indicating a genuine alternative to mainstream commercial cinema.

New Year, New Venture

2010-01-23T17:00:00.000-05:00

I'm teaching a film class for the first time. It's an undergraduate course titled "Philosophy and Film," and I'm doing it in partnership with my colleague Tanya Loughead, who is a Continental philosopher. Rather than being a course that uses films--or slivers of films--simply to illustrate philosophy, we've designed the course to accord equal time and importance to both areas. On the philosophy side, we'll read Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Foucault, Butler, and Derrida. For film, we've picked about 10 well-known, canonical titles including Ray's Pather Panchali, Bresson's A Man Escaped, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, Denis' Chocolat, Haynes' Safe, and Varda's The Gleaners and I. This being our maiden voyage into teaching cinema, we've chosen (conservatively) films with established reputations, films that have been amply discussed and written about. In addition to exams and papers, we've designed the course to include an in-class, small-group discussion component. My own primary role in the course will be to work to provide students with a basic grounding in film form, style and aesthetics. It promises to be an exciting--and unpredictable--venture.

We'd appreciate greatly any suggestions or advice from film teachers who happen to be reading. We are particularly curious about the experiences of others in using small-group discussions. But, really: any words of wisdom will be most welcome. Thanks!

* * *

The recent film I most want to see is Miguel Gomes' Our Beloved Month of August. An excerpt from Adrian Martin's essay on it in the new issue of Indian Auteur:

Is every important, progressive film of today a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943)? Almost every Pedro Costa film, for instance, seems to return to it; and ghosts or zombies of every material sort seem to stalk or sleepwalk through the work of Albert Serra, Lisandro Alonso, Tsai Ming-liang, Béla Tarr … But Our Beloved Month of August takes us back to a very particular moment of Tourneur’s masterpiece: the scene in which the previously subservient, glad-handing, guitar-strumming, nightclub entertainer with the wonderful name of Sir Lancelot breaks his subaltern role and strides forward to gleefully accuse the drunken, guilty white man with his deceptively lilting ditty: “Woe is me / Shame and scandal in the family …” [...]

The great Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser once mused on the difference between a screen wall and a solid wall – for him, the convenient key (like so many mundane, everyday phenomena, of the kind that Gomes also alights upon) to understanding our civilisation and its discontents. The solid wall marks, for Flusser, a neurotic society – a society of houses and thus ‘dark secrets’, of properties and possessions. And of folly, too, because the wall will always be razed, in the final instance, by the typhoon or the flood or the earthquake. But whereas the solid wall gathers and locks people in, the screen wall – incarnated in history variously by the tent, the kite or the boating sail – is “a place where people assemble and disperse, a calming of the wind”. It is the site for the “assembly of experience”; it is woven, and thus a network.

It is only a small step for Flusser to move from the physical, material kind of screen to the immaterial kind: the screen that receives projected images, or (increasingly) holds computerised, digital images. From the Persian carpet to the Renaissance oil painting, from cinema to new media art: images (and thus memories) are stored within the surface of this woven wall. A wall that reflects movement, but itself increasingly moves within the everyday world: when I was a little child and once dreamed of taking a cinema screen (complete with a movie still playing loudly and brightly upon it), folding it up and putting in my pocket so I could go for a stroll, I had no idea it was a predictive vision of the future, the mundane laptop computer or mobile phone.

* * *

A couple of links:

-- At the Guardian: "Haiti's only film school was destroyed in the earthquake, but the mini-movies that its students have made since are a living chronicle of the still-unfolding crisis and will serve as enduring testaments to the power of cinema to inform and move."

-- At Sight & Sound, several critics and curators pick (and display) their favorite online videos of 2009.

-- Senses of Cinema World Poll 2009.

The Film Criticism of Tim Hunter

2010-01-13T19:30:00.001-05:00

(Thank you to sleuthing super-cinephile Adrian Martin!)

Tim Hunter is probably best known to film-lovers as the director of the classic teen drama River's Edge (1986). In addition to two other good youth-centered films (Tex, 1982; Sylvester, 1985) he notably co-wrote Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge (1979), a film that looks stronger with each passing year.

Hunter's father, the British screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter, fronted for Dalton Trumbo on the original story for Roman Holiday, and was later himself blacklisted. The family went into exile in Mexico, and then to New York. Hunter grew up mostly around blacklistee kids. He then attended Harvard from 1964 to 1968. He ran a film society there, quickly developing into a precocious cinephile and budding filmmaker. American auteurism, spearheaded by Andrew Sarris, was in the air, and it was an exciting time to be a movie enthusiast. On the strength of several student films, Hunter was admitted to the AFI Center for Advanced Film Studies in the early '70s, where he studied alongside Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader and David Lynch.

At Harvard, Hunter was film critic and arts editor for the student publication, the Crimson. It turns out that 42 pieces he wrote for the publication (mostly in the mid-to-late '60s when he was an undergraduate student) are now available on the Internet. What a surprise: especially given his tender age, it's a collection of sharp, thoughtful and knowledgeable film criticism that also gives us a good sense of the film culture of the period. The most remarkable quality of these pieces, in my view, is their keen awareness of cinematic craftsmanship and style--the choices that filmmakers make (or the opportunities they miss), and how those formal choices work to make meaning in a film. Let me share a few excerpts.

Here Hunter expresses dissatisfaction with The Graduate:

Cinematically, the chief influence on Nichols remains the photographer of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Haskell Wexler, also cameraman on In The Heat of The Night. When the sun shines, Nichols points his camera at it; if a car approaches the camera, Nichols bounces the headlights off the lens; should a character jump into the water, Nichols makes the camera jump into the water; and as mood becomes essential, well, Nichols can always shoot it with a shaky hand-held camera.

The problem goes deeper than Nichols' consistent substitution of trickiness for style. A great director, Rosselini or Hitchcock, plans his film as a totality, understanding instinctively how each shot relates to the film as a whole; a competent director of narrative films like Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) plans shots with relation to the entire scene. Nichols, however, cannot plan past a given shot, and although a frame may contain an effective gimmick, camera angle, or background detail, the scenes themselves are purposeless and disconnected, largely due to awkward and self-conscious editing.

On why the first half of Torn Curtain is much better than the second:

The importance of the first half, however, cannot be overestimated, as it shows Hitchcock at a point of maximum control of his medium. Breaking new ground in color photography, he has filmed Torn Curtain without direct lighting. Instead, he has used reflected light, bounced off a white screen on the set. This reduces the color contrasts, putting much of the film into lush soft-focus, and almost eliminating unnecessary shadows.

He continues in Torn Curtain to experiment with visual romanticism: Julie Andrews is chastized by Newman on an airplane and as she lowers her head sadly, the camera while dissolving to the next scene begins to blur, as if tears were clouding the lens. Suddenly Hitchcock cuts sharply to the airplane door loudly opening, revealing the East Berlin airport. It is an unnerving return to reality, a visual refusal to give his heroine any means of escape.

He's bowled over by Chabrol's The Champagne Murders:

The implications of the finale are fathomable on a script level, then obscured by the zoom pull-backs that serve as the final shots. Chabrol makes no judgments at the ending and leaves the three in limbo, either to destroy one another or to form a new menage substituting Audran for Christine. The optics of a fast zoom shot are wondrous in that the audience is left with a feeling of simultaneous movement toward action and away from it. At the same time that we move to a higher vantage point with a wider angle of vision, we are jerked away from the luxury of watching action in sharp focus detail. The effect is one of ultimate suspension, in every sense of the word, and the greatness of the ending is a consequence of the perfect optical realization of attitude and theme.

On why Huston's The African Queen doesn't work:

The odyssey of cockney mechanic Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) down uncharted African waters suggests tense comedy-melodrama: they must, after all, evade rifle fire, skirt rapids, fix boilers, swat flies, brave swamps, remove leeches, blow up German cruisers, and fall in love. Regardless, Huston injects the action with mechanical uncaring: Allnut and Rose talk genially in medium close shot, one of them looks off-screen, says "Look!", and Huston cuts to what they see; he resorts to this lethargic montage in introducing enemy troops, the fort, all rapids, and the boat Louisa. The repetition of dramatic technique promotes an episodic quality that defeats a build-up of suspense or tension; there is no attempt to vary action and the middle third of The African Queen concentrates solely on rapids: a small rapid, a big rapid, and--out of the blue--a great big surprise rapid, spaced neatly at five minute intervals.

Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain makes a surprise appearance on his list of ten best films of 1967:

In a period marked increasingly by acceptance of lack of craft (witness the reception of Mike Nichols' mediocre The Graduate), Billion Dollar Brain stands out as a low-level case-book of cinematic efficiency. Russell's camerawork is frequently tantamount to cutting: he will start on a medium shot of Michael Caine, swing up to a sign on a building, down to people leaving the building, and back to Michael Caine--all so quickly we might have seen four separate shots...

And so does Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown:

Bernard Shaw postulated that great playwrights by definition write great plays, and this is certainly the easiest way to defend Preminger's' Hurry Sundown, a difficult and dramatically unrewarding film. Like most of the great European directors who work in Hollywood, Preminger, takes little of America for granted, and his films are marked by a distinctly individual way of seeing the world. [...] In Preminger's films, there are no point-of-view shots; Preminger never cuts to what a character sees, instead putting both the watcher and the watched in the same shot. Though Preminger tends to ignore the dramatic world of his films, his camera defines the personality and function of a character by the amount of space placed around him, and by the way he is moved with relation to the frame. The more space Preminger has to work with, the more complex his films become, and predictably, Preminger is a master of wide-screen cinematic technique. At best, Preminger creates a network of conflicting spatial relationships from the many people in his best-seller-based sagas, and his films work on a level far transcending the dramatic material. From this specialized, perhaps perverse, point-of-view, Hurry Sundown is close to Preminger's best film.

In the last 20 years, Hunter has worked mostly in television, directing episodes of shows like Twin Peaks, Homicide, Law & Order, Mad Men, Dexter and Nip/Tuck.

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David Hudson at The Auteurs is maintaining an updated post of Eric Rohmer tribute links.

Framework on Cinephilia, etc.

2009-12-31T10:20:00.003-05:00

-- The new issue of the journal Framework has a cinephilia dossier edited by Jonathan Buschbaum and Elena Gorfinkel. I joined several others, including Jonathan Rosenbaum, Adrian Martin, Nicole Brenez, James Quandt, Zach Campbell, Chris Fujiwara and Laura Mulvey, in contributing a piece to it. For those with institutional access, the contents of the issue are available via Project Muse, Proquest, etc.

-- I haven't seen the film yet but Jim Emerson and Martin Anderson write about Avatar 3D causing eyestrain and headaches if the viewer looks away from the areas of the frame where the filmmaker wants you to look. André Bazin famously believed in the value of the spectator assuming an active role by scanning the film frame and choosing what to pay attention to. Avatar seems to be mandating the very opposite--by punishing viewer choice and agency with physical pain to the eye and the head!

-- The new season of the Cinematheque in Toronto features one of the films I've most wanted to see: Joris Ivens's A Tale of the Wind (1988). But alas, it's scheduled on a night when I teach. The European Foundation has assembled a 5-DVD Joris Ivens set which is rumored, at some point, to get a US release.

-- There's a new issue of Screening the Past, in two sections--of essays and reviews. Also: Senses of Cinema has a new issue.

-- A refreshingly candid interview with Manohla Dargis on women and Hollywood. Also: a reflection by her in the NYT on moving-image entertainments of the digital age.

-- At The Auteurs: Inspired by Manny Farber, B. Kite puts up a "Petite Mannyfesto"; and Zach on the book Manny Farber proposed in the 1970s but never wrote.

-- Sukhdev Sandhu has a brief piece in The Telegraph on "the decline of American cinema" during the decade. (via Jonathan Rosenbaum.)

-- At Jonathan's place, book reviews from the archives: Noel Burch's Theory of Film Practice; Citizen Sarris: American Film Critic; Rudy Wurlitzer's Slow Fade; and Susan Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn.

-- Two reviews of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Gamer make me want to see it: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and Steven Shaviro.

-- Michael Sicinski's latest reviews include the new films by Soderbergh, Herzog, Reitman and Tom Ford.

-- David Bordwell on why Akira Kurosawa was a "problematic auteur."

-- José Neves has a list of films old and new (many unfamiliar and interesting) seen at the Lisbon Cinemateca during the year. (via Matthew Flanagan, who covers the London Film Festival in the new Senses issue.)

-- Several good posts at the prolific Jeffrey Sconce's blog, Ludic Despair.

Robin Wood, 1931-2009

2009-12-19T15:55:00.007-05:00

Film criticism has lost one of its giants: Robin Wood has died. He was 78. Catherine Grant has assembled a wonderful collection of links as a tribute to him. Armen Svadjian summarizes Wood's career and interviews him in a piece from 2006. David Hudson collects links to reactions around the film blogosphere.

Wood was a prolific and impassioned critic with a broad range and deep convictions. He was an inspirational writer and yet he was sure to provoke occasional disagreement and exasperation in even his most loyal followers. Most notably, he declined to keep his criticism at a remove from his personal life. (A well-known instance is his piece "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic" [pdf].) When Hitchcock's Films Revisited was released in a revised edition in 2002, he included a 33-page preface that was pure autobiography. Joe McElhaney's review of the book is a wonderful example of the deeply felt, searching, and sometimes ambivalent response that Wood was often capable of provoking.

My one memorable encounter with Wood occurred about 10 years ago at a limited Hitchcock retrospective in Toronto. He wrote the essay accompanying the series, and appeared in person to lecture on Marnie immediately following the screening. I suspect most of the audience had not read him and didn't know who he was, but nearly everyone stayed--electrified--for an hour while he held forth on the film. At the end, someone asked him about the T-shirt he was wearing. He swelled his chest out and pointed to it so everyone could see. It had a picture of a crystal ball with a photograph of Barbara Harris on it. It was, he explained, a protest shirt: he was wearing it in defense of Family Plot, which had been left out of the retrospective.

In addition to the Hitchcock book, my own favorites among his work include his writings on Howard Hawks (the book he wrote in 1968, the more recent BFI Film Classics monograph on Rio Bravo), and his collection Personal Views. But really, the moment I put that down, I realize how unfair and inadequate my selections are. It's impossible to winnow down his enormous contributions to just a couple of titles.

So, your reflections on Wood and his work? Any favorites among his writings? Please feel free to share them.

Best of the Decade

2009-11-25T18:20:00.006-05:00

Just as they did ten years ago, James Quandt and TIFF Cinematheque (née Cinematheque Ontario) have conducted a worldwide poll of film curators, archivists, historians and programmers for best ("most important") films of the decade (scroll down for the compiled list). It's a heady and wonderful list that militates unashamedly and polemically for film as art. There are 54 films on the list, and four of the top 5 are Asian. Here's the top 10:

1. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
2. Platform (Jia Zhang-ke, China)
3. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke, China)
4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, France)
5. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, China)
6. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
7. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania); and Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary).
8. Éloge de l'amour (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
9. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
10. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)

One of the purposes of such a list is to stimulate conversation and debate. So, let me make a few comments about it; I invite you to do the same.

-- Just 5 of the 54 are women-made films: Beau Travail and L'Intrus (Claire Denis); The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda); The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel); and Longing (Valeska Grisebach). Missing women filmmakers include Chantal Akerman, Catherine Breillat, and Jennifer Reeves (among many others).

-- The list privileges narrative, feature-length films. Avant-garde/experimental cinema is almost wholly absent (save Ken Jacobs, and Apichatpong, whose work straddles narrative and avant-garde modes). Thus, for instance: no James Benning, Peter Tscherkassky, Nathaniel Dorsky, Michael Robinson, or (again) Jennifer Reeves. Also: no short films except Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World.

-- The decade was marked by an explosion of the documentary form, which had a profound influence on fiction filmmaking and even made great incursions into the mainstream. But documentaries (except the Varda) go missing on the list.

-- By explicitly advancing the cause of art cinema, a poll such as this automatically marginalizes the aesthetic merits of commercial cinema. So, from Hollwyood to Bollywood, popular cinema barely registers here.

-- A personal aside: My own cinephilia peaked during this time. I attended TIFF throughout the decade, and caught most of the films on the list at the festival. There's exactly one film here that I didn't care for at the time: Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor (2000). Time to give it a second look.

-- I wonder: are all filmmakers represented here by their most worthy work of this decade? There are two Tsai Ming-Liang films on this list but not What Time is it There? (2001), which, to my mind, is a key film in his oeuvre, a kind of summation of his themes and a compendium of his style. I have no quarrel whatsoever with Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth or In Vanda's Room (astounding films, both!) but I miss the inclusion of his Straub/Huillet documentary, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? Finally, I wonder: is Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman her best film--better than The Holy Girl or La Cienaga?

Let me conclude by adding a handful of personal choices that are not on the list: La Captive (Chantal Akerman, France), RR (James Benning, USA), Remembrance of Things to Come (Chris Marker, France), Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki, Finland), and Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria).

I'd love to hear your reactions to the Cinematheque list--and your ideas for "best films of the decade" that don't appear on it.

A Handful of Reads

2009-11-15T17:45:00.002-05:00

-- Cinematheque Ontario is doing a series, curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin, on essay films. Also: Andrew Tracy on essay films at Moving Image Source.

-- Glenn Kenny on Cinemascope at the Auteurs Notebook; David Bordwell is among those who weigh in after the post.

-- Bordwell: on the sexual use of bedposts in movies; on Shaw Brothers widescreen cinema; and on four little-known but interesting Hollywood films from 1933.

-- Dave Kehr in the NYT: two horror film articles (one and two); on new Sirk and Buñuel DVDs; and on Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. (Also: Dan North on the Zemeckis.)

-- From the Viennale, Gabe Klinger reflects on film festivals. Also: Gabe on the AFI Fest.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum: on "recycled cinema" (Rivette's Divertimento and Stone's Natural Born Killers); a dialogue between Jonathan and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa on Kiarostami's Shirin; on Resnais and Marker's Statues Don't Die; and on his favorite Ford film, The Sun Shines Bright (1953), which I've never seen but just found online in a used VHS copy.

-- An autodidact's joy: "250 Free Courses from Top Universities," all online.

-- Catherine Grant: links to some introductions to film studies; a collection of studies of the close-up; and writings in phenomenological film and media studies.

-- Chris Cagle evaluates several currently used film history textbooks.

-- Michael Guillen assembles a large post of Robert Beavers' comments to audiences during the filmmaker's recent 2-week residency in San Francisco.

-- Ben Sachs relates Michael Mann to 19th century painting at The Auteurs Notebook.

-- Michael Anderson at Tativille offers an essay on the "taxonomy of the 360-degree panorama."

-- Michael Byrne at The Nation on the films of Dusan Makavejev.

-- Pedro Costa discusses his Jeanne Balibar documentary, Ne Change Rien, with Scott Foundas: “When the Lumière brothers did a shot, the movement inside the shot is almost impossible to re-create today [...] I am always very afraid when I see a little dog crossing the street in a Lumière brothers film, afraid it’s going to be crushed by a Model T. It’s something very concrete, this menace. Then Chaplin did the same thing consciously, and Stroheim took it further. We could see so many things in those films that, today, you only see in some Filipino or Chinese films, or sometimes on TV, in some documentaries. Everything beautiful and everything dangerous and everything that has to do with society disappeared a little bit from films. I’m becoming very reactionary, but Straub would say you have to go back to the past to push things forward.”

-- Newly discovered blog: Matthew Holtmeier's Cinema Without Organs.

pic: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), in Jean-Pierre Gorin and Cinematheque Ontario's essay film series.

Lines of Inspiration: Popular Cinema to Art Cinema

2009-11-01T10:50:00.001-05:00

One of the best and most fascinating things about cinema is the tension between its status as art and its status as industry. There is nothing new about this idea. But the way we construct the categories of 'popular cinema' and 'art cinema'--in starkly opposing fashion--holds them further apart than they really are or should be. It's good to be reminded of this on a regular basis.

So, my ears always perk up when I hear art filmmakers claim popular filmmakers as inspirations and influences. Let me relate a recent instance. Last month, of the 25 or so films I caught at the Toronto International Film Festival, the most memorable was To Die Like A Man, by Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues.

To Die Like A Man is a rich but challenging film about an aging drag queen/cabaret singer on the brink of a sex change operation. She has volatile and difficult relationships with both her junkie lover and her young, psychologically unstable son. The film is challenging because it never settles into a single comfortable narrative mode; it's forever shape-shifting. At various points, it becomes: melodrama, "queer realism," a musical with songs (but frequently without musical accompaniment!), a Wizard-of-Ozian fantasy, a breathtaking ode to silent cinema, and (in one brilliant moment) a medical documentary in which a doctor demonstrates a sex change operation using origami.

But here's the important thing: These shifts don't resemble the collage and pastiche practices that we sometimes associate with a certain kind of popular "postmodern cinema". To Die Like A Man presents itself to us, with no confusion, as an art film.

In the Q&A after the screening, someone asked Rodrigues about the film's unusual opening, resembling a war movie, in which a squad of soldiers moves through a forest in the darkness. It was inspired, he answered to everyone's surprise, by Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma! He added that he screened Douglas Sirk films for the cast during production. I would not have dreamed, without being told, that this film held classic Hollywood as an important forebear.

This isn't an isolated, freak example. In 1995 the journal Projections, in collaboration with Positif, devoted an issue ("Film-makers on Film-making") to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of cinema. In this issue, each filmmaker contributes an essay, big or small, devoted to her or his signal inspirations in cinema. The number of art filmmakers choosing to speak about popular films or filmmakers is eye-opening.

Chris Marker turns in an impassioned 8-page essay on his all-time favorite film, Vertigo. Catherine Breillat performs an insightful analysis of Elia Kazan's Baby Doll, which affected her powerfully and spurred her to write 36 Fillette. And arch-modernist Greek director Theo Angelopoulos writes of growing older and refashioning his personal history of cinema in the form of fragments: a few faces, gestures, shots, and words. Turns out they all belong to popular cinema:

The cry 'I don't want to die!' in Michael Curtiz's Angels With Dirty Faces; Orson Welles' damaged face in Touch of Evil; the young Irish girl dancing with Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine; Ingrid Bergman's face full of love in Notorious; Peter Lorre's monotonous whistling in M; these short moments, shots cut out of the films they belong to, make up the one film which marked me, the film which still does.

One the best accounts comes from Raul Rúiz. He tells the story of seeing Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat for the first time, and experiencing an utter revelation: here was a film that was an unconscious inspiration, a proto-Rúizian narrative unbeknownst to him.

Several times I had been linked with Edgar G. Ulmer and I usually disagreed [...] People as different as Jérôme Prieur, John Zorn and J. Rosenbaum had compared me to him. Now at last recognition came to me, and as in an old melodrama, I exclaimed: "Father!' and he replied 'My son!'

For at least twenty of my films find their source in The Black Cat. Each scene in the film is transformed, and completed, into one of mine.

A couple more examples. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about Straub's admiration for Chaplin:

Over a decade ago, Jean-Marie Straub made this startling observation: “A lot of people think that Eisenstein is the greatest editor, because he has some theories about it, but this is not true. Chaplin was greater, I think, in editing, only it is not so obvious. Chaplin was more precise than Eisenstein, and the man after Chaplin who is the most precise is surely Rivette.”

What Straub had in mind, I think, is Chaplin’s and Rivette’s ability to edit in relation to content: emotional content, narrative content, performance content. For both directors, editing is a precise answer to the question of what a particular shot’s meaning is–where this meaning begins and where it ends.

Finally, Pedro Costa's love for Jacques Tourneur is well-known, and is also evident in his first feature, O Sangue.

So, I wonder: can we collect some examples here of art filmmakers who have held up popular cinema as an important inspiration or influence?

pic: Boris Karloff in Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934). Also: here are two valuable interviews with João Pedro Rodrigues, by Michael Guillen and Dennis Lim.

Catching up on Interweb Reading

2009-10-03T14:40:00.003-04:00

I spent a week at the Toronto film festival--more on that in a post coming up next week--and then came down with 'festival exhaustion'. Now I've now been catching up on all the Internet movie reading I missed in the last few weeks. Let me collect some of it here:

-- At Slow TV, a terrific debate on the new Tarantino film featuring Adrian Martin and three other critics/scholars.

-- Zach Campbell: "Mad Men is good, but it's not even close to Tashlin's critiques. It remains exquisitely tasteful, on the surface, and ultimately middlebrow. Therein lie a few of the problems." Also: Zach on Inglourious Basterds: "Quentin Tarantino has an incredibly unphilosophical mind, and this is both his strength and his problem. Not even in his most mature work (Jackie Brown) does he really question anything. The root of his cinema is pleasure, a deeply tactile, visceral, and memory-based pleasure for which, presumably, there are no limits worth abiding (in quantity or quality)."

-- Several pieces at Jonathan Rosenbaum's: Sally Potter's The Gold Diggers (that appeared in Camera Obscura); Fatal Attraction ("Fear of Feminism"); Paris Journal for Film Comment (1971) on Demy, Pollet, Franju, Tati and Rivette; two Alan Rudolph films, Remember My Name and Mortal Thoughts.

-- New issues of: Cinema Scope; Senses of Cinema; Film Quarterly.

-- From the Toronto International Film Festival: Darren Hughes at Long Pauses; Richard Porton at Cineaste; B. Ruby Rich at SF360; Also: David Hudson collects a master index of TIFF reviews at The Auteurs.

-- Recent Dave Kehr writing in the NYT DVD column: "Tradition of Quality" films; Jacques Demy's Model Shop, Nikkatsu Noir; The Wizard of Oz.

-- A wealth of links from the valuable, indefatigable Catherine Grant, including this post on classical cinema.

-- Igantiy Vishnevetsky is among the most thoughtful of today's film bloggers. Here, at his site, Sounds, Images, are links to his recent writings and posts.

-- At Moving Image Source: Kevin Lee's two-part essay on Chinese cinema of the Cultural Revolution; Joshua Land on "The female Christ figures of Lars von Trier's films"; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Manny Farber.

-- Jeffrey Sconce on the Rotten Tomatoes' "worst of the worst" films of the decade.

-- Frieze runs a series in which artists and filmmakers talk about films that are important to them. Latest in the series is Tacita Dean; other entries can be found in the sidebar.

-- Matthew Flanagan's Landscape Suicide is one of the most original and stimulating places in the film blogosphere. See this recent post on forests.

-- David Bordwell on summer movies: one, and two.

-- Sally Potter's Rage is the first film made for cell-phone release. Here's an interview with Potter.

-- Marc Raymond on melodrama in Korean cinema.

-- Danny Kasman's review makes me eager to see the new Rivette film.

-- At Dennis Cooper's: David Ehrenstein presents "Rainer Werner Fassbinder Day."

-- Newly discovered blogs: the Indian site The Edit Room (at the Wide Screen Journal); Putney Debater, run by filmmaker/scholar Michael Chanan; Iranian cinephile Ehsan Khoshbakht's Notes on Cinematograph.

Any other recent, good reading you'd like to recommend? Please leave a link in the comments.

For Nika, For Alexis

2009-09-06T10:30:00.006-04:00

It was a tragic week: two valuable, inspiring figures of film culture, cinephilia and film criticism are with us no longer. Below, Adrian Martin pens a moving tribute to them. -- Girish.

* * *

For Nika, For Alexis

Adrian Martin

There are some people you like straight away. Nika Bohinc, editor of the Slovenian magazine Ekran for several years, was one of these people. I first met her in July 2007, at a film event in Zagreb inspired by Movie Mutations, the book I co-edited with Jonathan Rosenbaum. She had made the trip from Ljubljana with several of her comrades – just one sign of the enormous dedication of Slovenia’s current generation of intellectual cinephiles. Nika liked the way I introduced films (by Ruiz and Garrel), and so – impulsively, empathetically, definitely, the way she seemed to decide so many things in her life and work – I quickly became part of her plan for a Summer School on Independent Cinema, held as part of the Ljubljana International Film Festival three months later.

I shall never forget the moment I arrived at the Festival centre. I looked up from the registration desk and saw Nika’s face – with that warm, grateful, complicit, cheeky smile I came to know well. Her instant embrace told me that mere comradeship was over; friendship had begun. Indeed, the entire Summer School turned out to be organised around Nika’s friends: Christoph Huber, Neil Young, Gabe Klinger, an unlikely coalition of critics from Austria, UK, Australia and USA. Plus one other key speaker whose relationship to Nika had moved past friendship: Alexis Tioseco, raised in Canada, resident of the Philippines. Nika told me, in a private moment outside a club, about her excitement, mixed with nervousness, about leaving Slovenia to live with Alexis in the Philippines.

Nika, almost 30, and Alexis, 28, are dead – victims of a gruesome murder in Manila on September 1. Shot in the doorway of their house by thieves, their death resonates eerily with the recent short film, Butterflies Have No Memories, by Lav Diaz – one of the Philippine filmmakers tirelessly championed and promoted by Alexis. Where Nika felt only intermittent closeness to her national cinema – she once boasted to me how she had managed to feature a certain new Slovenian release in Ekran without betraying her low editorial opinion of it – Alexis had taken up the New Philippine Cinema, indeed Southeast Asian cinema as whole, as his cause. The recognition that Philippine cinema has gained over the past few years belongs to filmmakers such as Diaz, Raya Martin, Khavn De La Cruz and Sherad Anthony Sanchez – but it also belongs to Alexis, who was the fervent critical spokesman for that movement. I can look up from my computer right now and, like many cinephiles around the world, see all the DVD copies of key Philippine films, new or old (but all independent) that Alexis sent to me.

I had first heard from Alexis, via email, in 2004. I spotted him in the audience a year later, in Singapore, at a conference on Hou Hsiao-hsien: like Nika, he was a committed follower of film culture, wherever it took him. Alexis was harder to get to know than Nika: he had a quiet, reserved, excessively polite side. But he was also a joker, with a fine antenna for gossip, and a matter-of-fact willingness to tell you if you had got something wrong. I chided him when, in 2005, he launched his invaluable website Criticine by citing Olaf Möller’s hysterical attack on Movie Mutations (in a pre-Nika issue of Ekran!). But Alexis, in fact, made Olaf’s point made more eloquently and rightly: “It is necessary that the written word of writers native to a country’s cinema reach the world at large, for their insights – that can only be gleaned from one that lives and breathes the history, culture, and air of the work’s origin – is important. Cinema must be dialogue.”

In a public letter that has been widely distributed on the Internet since that tragic day, Alexis declared to Nika: “The first impulse of any good film critic, and to this I think you would agree, must be of love. To be moved enough to want to share their affection for a particular work or to relate their experience so that others may be curious. This is why criticism, teaching, and curating or programming, in an ideal sense, must all go hand in hand.” Both of them lived by that creed.

Both of them too, spent the short span of their adult lives fighting against the film bureaucracies of their respective countries – overbearing in the Slovenian instance, indifferent in the Philippine case. They experienced disillusionment with their myopic, local, national film cultures (as do we all), but found solace in a wider world, a fragile community of like-minds and soul-siblings discovered through Film Festivals, publishing and the Internet. Ekran, under Nika’s guidance, pursued this fine ‘line of flight’ – her final issue (February-March 2009), for instance, heralded Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month of August, a Portuguese film she (like me) dearly loved, on its front cover. In 2007, Nika and I brainstormed a project, somewhere between a magazine and a website: we would ask people from all over the world to write about, precisely, the indescribably beautiful bit of their local cinema which had never been imported onto the Festival or art-event circuit, the precious part that resisted such easy ‘translation’ or commodification. The closest Nika came to this dream was the blog page Ekran Untranslated; a glance at the people, stories and cultural experiences represented in these ‘postcards’ from critics and filmmakers, printed in their original languages, will give you a sense of the internationalist dream she lived. And her unforgettably poignant union with Alexis was another part of the same dream, extended into the most intimate realm of love.

Alexis, I am proud to say, picked up on a quotation I fondly recycled in Ljubljana: Godard’s remark that cinema is “the goodwill for a meeting” – to which JLG added, “it is the love of ourselves on earth”. Cinema must be dialogue, and it must be love. I learnt this, more deeply than I realised, from Nika and Alexis.

© Adrian Martin September 2009

* * *

I never met Nika or Alexis face to face but knew them through correspondence, the blogosphere, and Facebook. Their warmth and generosity, and the way in which they incarnated for us the powerful spirit of global cinephilia, were ever palpable in my exchanges with them. Their inspiration will live a long life inside of us.

Let me collect here a few of the tributes and reflections that have appeared in the last few days: Gabe Klinger at the Auteurs; Jonathan Rosenbaum; Noel Vera at Critic After Dark; Glenn Kenny at The Auteurs; Jason Sanders at Filmmaker; Raymond Phathanavirangoon at TIFF; Kim Voynar at Movie City News.

Please feel welcome to share any reminiscences or thoughts of Nika and Alexis here. Also, please feel free to post links to any tributes if you like. Perhaps we can build Nika and Alexis a small 'virtual memorial' here.

Photo: Jason Sanders at Filmmaker

TIFF 2009 Films

2009-08-20T13:45:00.002-04:00

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has posted its entire film list. Here it is, at Darren's TIFF blog, 1st Thursday. As in previous years, I expect to spend a week at the festival, driving back in between to teach my classes.

The avant-garde program, Wavelengths, looks very strong, with new films by Ben Russell, Michael Snow, Jean-Luc Godard, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jean-Marie Straub, Ernie Gehr, Lisandro Alonso, Harun Farocki, Heinz Emigholz, Jim Jennings, and others.

In addition, I'm targeting the following films:

White Material (Claire Denis), Les Herbes Folles (Alain Resnais), Face (Tsai Ming-liang), Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu), Independencia (Raya Martin), Irene (Alain Cavalier), La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris (Frederick Wiseman), Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat), The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke), Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont), Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo), Lourdes (Jessica Hausner), The Time that Remains (Elia Suleiman), Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara), A Prophet (Jacques Audiard), Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda), Antichrist (Lars von Trier), Bright Star (Jane Campion), The Window (Buddhadeb Dasgupta), Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar), Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé), Mother (Bong Joon-ho), Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova), Le Père de mes Enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve), La Donation (Bernard Émond), Hotel Atlântico (Suzana Amaral), Vincere (Marco Bellocchio), L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea), Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore), The Hole (Joe Dante), Vengeance (Johnnie To), Nymph (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang), To Die Like a Man (Joao Pedro Rodrigues), and A History of Israeli Cinema (Raphael Nadjari).

Any thoughts, suggestions or recommendations of films or filmmakers on the TIFF film-list? I'd be most eager to hear them. Thank you!

A Few Links

2009-08-11T22:25:00.002-04:00

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum's "A la recherche de Luc Moullet: 25 Propositions" is a 1977 piece that will appear in his upcoming book Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, out from University of Chicago Press next year. Also: there are several interesting entries in his Notes section.

-- Two recent blog discoveries: Jeffrey Sconce's Ludic Despair; and Damon Smith's The Hands of Bresson.

-- Dennis Cozzalio has a lengthy interview with Joe Dante.

-- The New York Film Festival has announced its lineup; it includes new films by Resnais, Denis, Rivette, Breillat, Costa, Almodovar, von Trier, Oliveira, Haneke, etc.

-- Lots of new reading at The Auteurs, including Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on D.W. Griffith (who is "always modern"); David Cairns on Nicholas Ray's You Can't Go Home Again; and a roundtable on Alejandro Adams' Canary with Ignatiy, Michael Sicinski, Craig Keller and Dave Macdougall.

-- Dave Kehr on the 1986 film Combat Shock ("one uncompromising picture, a movie so eccentric and so relentless that no mere profit motive could possibly explain it.")

-- Doug Cummings provides illuminating excerpts from Hayao Miyazaki's Starting Point: 1979-1996, a compendium of Miyazaki’s writings and conversations.

-- Dana Polan at Moving Image Source on "The generous pedagogy of Julia Child and The French Chef."

-- I've been reading, with great pleasure, the new collection Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, edited by Joe McElhaney.

Any other web reading you'd like to recommend? Please feel free to suggest in the comments.

pic: Alain Resnais' latest, Les Herbes Folles, is playing at the New York and Toronto film festivals, and just got picked up by Sony for US distribution.

A Cinephilia Collection

2009-07-30T14:15:00.004-04:00

Zach Campbell and I have co-edited and participated in a series of letters on blogging, cinephilia and the Internet. The letters appear in a new collection out from Wallflower Press (distributed in the US by Columbia University Press) called Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, edited by Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb. Also taking part in our letter relay were bloggers Dan Sallitt, Brian Darr and Andy Horbal.

* * *

A few links:

-- Great news: David Hudson returns!

-- I've just discovered two terrific film blogs: Matthew Flanagan's Landscape Suicide; and the self-effacingly named "Log" run by two cinephiles, RW and Clint.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on a recent manifesto by Jean Douchet translated for us by Craig Keller. Ignatiy writes: "[Douchet] calls for a more partisan criticism, one less interested in appearing respectable than in defending its positions, whatever they might be [...] This is both a call to arms and an example: cinephilia that isn't afraid to be polemical, youthful and "unfair.""

-- The Venice Film Festival has announced its lineup; and Darren has been tracking the Toronto film festival announcements.

-- At Nitesh Rohit's blog Winds from the East you can view, in its entirety, Shyam Benegal's 1982 documentary Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker.

-- Adrian ("The Machine") Martin: on Abbas Kiarostami and Victor Erice at Artlink; "A Reflection on Animation Studies"; a podcast at the Monash University site, "Playing Vampire Cool: The Strange Postmodern Romances of Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (1994) and Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995)".

-- Cinematheque Ontario now has a blog.

-- Chris Fujiwara on Jerzy Skolimowski at Moving Image Source.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum has an essay on Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

-- Doug Cummings has a blog entry on Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible.

-- Catherine Grant makes has two invaluable discoveries for us: a collection of V.F. Perkins' writings online, and a post about the site "The Art of the Title Sequence."

-- At his blog Caméra-Stylo, Will Scheibel calls for papers on a panel on "Popular Film Criticism in Media Culture" for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Los Angeles next spring.

-- Cause for celebration: the first book-length study of Hou Hsiao-hsien in English.

-- The latest online issue of Vertigo magazine.

-- Thank you to all who contributed to the vigorous discussion and debate in the comments thread to the last post on "building a large conversation"!

Building A Large Conversation

2009-07-13T16:25:00.003-04:00

In his book-length essay What Happened to Art Criticism? (2003), James Elkins surveys the last 50 years of the field. Contemporary art criticism, he writes, is in a state of crisis. While the field itself is larger than ever before--more writers, outlets, volume of writing produced--it has steadily receded in both importance and ambition. The vast majority of today's art criticism, which is generally written for art magazines, catalog essays, gallery publications, newspapers, etc., leans towards description and neutrality--and shies away from making strong judgments. Elkins calls for a new and alternative kind of art criticism that is both (1) deeply aware of art history and thought about art; and (2) is unafraid to evaluate, pass judgment, and be polemical. He writes:

Art criticism is best, I think, when it is openly ambitious, meaning that the critic is interested in comparing the work at hand with past work, and weighing her judgments against those made by previous writers. I like art critics who periodically try to bear the burden of history by writing in the imaginary presence of generations of artworks, art critics and art historians.

Elkins makes an important and troubling observation: the two fields of art criticism and art history hardly ever cite each other. Art historians writing in journals like Art Bulletin, October or Art History almost never refer to art critics who write in contemporary art magazines or newspapers. And similarly, art critics, while focusing on individual artworks and often rendering close, detailed descriptions of them, are either unwilling or unable to invoke the work of art history scholars both contemporary and past, even though it would undoubtedly help deepen their reflections if they did.

I see some parallels of Elkins' critique in the fields of film criticism and film scholarship. Except for a small number of invaluable critic-scholars who work to bridge the gap, the two groups similarly shy away from citing each other. Why is this so? For critics, it would require the significant effort of familiarizing themselves with scholarly literature past and present, an effort made more difficult by the presence of a specialized scholarly vocabulary. For scholars, whose jobs already require them to do vast amounts of reading, this would mean widening their field of vision to include writing in film magazines, the Internet (including blogs), and newspapers. Added to this are the demands in both professions of watching scores of films on a steady basis.

But nevertheless I think it's an important and worthwhile effort. In a roundtable at Artforum, Annette Michelson makes a penetrating comparison of two similar-but-different film writers, Umberto Eco and Pauline Kael. Both concentrate on narrative, seldom dwelling on matters of film form like camerawork or lighting. They have keen powers of observation and are witty writers, they possess an affection for a wide range of films both highbrow and lowbrow, and they have significant experience in journalistic writing targeted at general readers. But while Eco is deeply knowledgeable about intellectual history and scholarship--even being a notable contributor to the field--Kael is relatively uninterested in and even hostile to scholarly work. This, Michelson writes, inhibits Kael's

ability to account for film's impact in terms other than those of taste and distaste, [her resistance] expressed with increasing vehemence. To have continued to write into the '90s with no account taken of the advances made in our ways of thinking about spectatorship, perception, and reception meant that she ceased to renew her intellectual capital, to acknowledge and profit by the achievements of a huge collective effort. And so her writing, unrefreshed, grew thinner, coarser, stale. It is this that was ultimately responsible for Renata Adler's punishing assessment of her work, published in the New York Review of Books in August 1980.

One of the invaluable aspects of scholarly work is this "huge collective effort" that builds upon the work of others--both of centuries past and contemporary. The edifices that scholars construct have the likelihood of being tall and capacious by virtue of the largeness of this effort. There is a lesson here that film critics can learn from scholars: the practice of reading widely to become familiar with traditions of thought in film, art, philosophy, and other disciplines that can guide them and their readers towards a deeper understanding of cinema. This would mean a practice of criticism conducted in an exemplary fashion: as Elkins says, in the imaginary presence of generations of artworks, critics and scholars.

What can film scholars learn from practicing film critics? At least two things. First, critics are invaluable because they have their fingers on the pulse of cinema at any moment. They are on the front-lines, watching new films, directions and innovations break. They help determine which films will acquire critical reputations, thus boosting the films' chances of being taken up for future study. Second, journalist-critics have the talent to write engagingly and skillfully for a large audience of educated non-scholars. In addition to their customary mode of writing--with their peers in mind--scholars could learn much from critics about cultivating this alternative and useful mode of writing that can bridge the gap between academia and the general reader.

Let me close with one practical tip for critics and scholars. Critics looking to get acquainted with some of the best scholarship of the last 10 years might consult this large 2007 poll at Screening the Past. And scholars seeking pointers to the best online criticism (blogs and otherwise) tracked on a daily basis should bookmark the indispensable David Hudson, formerly of Greencine Daily and IFC Daily, soon to return at an as-yet-undisclosed site.

Any thoughts on the opportunities and challenges for critics and scholars in building this large conversation? Please feel free to share them here. Thank you!

pic: A still from Noël Burch's Noviciat (1964), which features Annette Michelson in its cast. Might someone know: is this Michelson in the photo?

Links

2009-07-03T16:30:00.004-04:00

-- The French critic Jean-André Fieschi has died. He is best-known to English-language readers through his brilliant essays, in Richard Roud's 2-volume Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, on Hitchcock, Buñuel, Murnau, Tati, Rivette, Vertov, and others.

-- There's a new issue of Cinema Scope.

-- Let me collect here links to the writings of the thought-provoking blogger Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: his site, Sounds, Images; at The Auteurs, including his column "What is the 21st Century?"; and at Tisch Film Review.

-- Also at Tisch Film Review: interviews with J. Hoberman; Ivone Marguiles; and A.S. Hamrah.

-- At the Monash University site: an Adrian Martin podcast titled "Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and Some Others". Via Catherine Grant, here are links to a collection of podcasts by several other scholars including Lesley Stern, Andrew Benjamin and Graeme Gilloch.

-- A link to all five of Ryland Walker Knight's posts which collect an eclectic array of quotations.

-- Dave Kehr on Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad: "For Mr. Resnais, a fan of comic books and genre fiction, the hotel in “Marienbad” belongs to a long line of Dark Old Houses, the archetypical setting for a certain kind of comic thriller that dates back at least to silent films like Roland West’s 1926 “Bat” and Paul Leni’s 1927 “Cat and the Canary” (and to the Broadway plays that inspired them)."

-- The Claude Chabrol Blogathon at Flickhead.

-- Dan Sallitt on Stephen Frears.

-- Kevin Lee interviews scholar Chris Berry on Chinese cinema.

-- Steven Shaviro has a post on Michael Jackson: "Greil Marcus, as the quintessential white hipster, can only see cultural innovation and subversion when it it is performed by white people. Marcus celebrates the ways in which “the pop explosions of Elvis, the Beatles and the Sex Pistols had assaulted or subverted social values,” but denounces Michael Jackson’s pop explosion as “a version of the official social reality, generated from Washington D.C. as ideology, and from Madison Avenue as language … a glamorization of the new American fact that if you weren’t on top, you didn’t exist.” For Marcus, black people are evidently at best primitive, unconscious creators whose inventions can only take on meaning and become subversive when white people endow them with the critical self-consciousness that Marcus seems to think black people altogether lack. And at worst, black artists and performers are, for Marcus, puppets of the Pentagon and Madison Avenue, reinforcers of the very status quo that countercultural whites were struggling so hard to overthrow."

-- The online magazine Cinefils features English-subtitled interviews with international filmmakers.

-- Ted Gioia on how the jazz world has viewed Michael Jackson over the years.

-- Joe Hughes reviews Paola Marratti's Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy.

pic: Chabrol in his jammies, courtesy Kevin Lee.

Adieu Philippine: Mise-en-scène de la jeunesse

2009-06-18T23:45:00.004-04:00

"Men are dangerous at forty: at that age they get sentimental." -- One teen to another in "Adieu Philippine".

Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto has kicked off its summer season. The highlights: French New Wave, Otto Preminger, Surrealism and the cinema, Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Melville, and leading ladies of Italian cinema.

Playing in the New Wave series is Jacques Rozier's rare Adieu Philippine (1962). What a smart, lyrical and witty film this is! A young TV camera operator meets, befriends and tries to seduce two young women who are aspiring actresses. Upon the film's release, both Rivette and Rohmer named it a masterpiece and Truffaut found a genius "in the balance between the insignificance of the events filmed and the density of reality."

The film is also a great inventory of the 'signs' of a nouvelle vague film: slender plot with episodic unfolding; documentary-like hand-held camerawork; location shooting; a looseness of framing and composition; the 'un-authoritarian' camera often following the actors around rather than choreographing them; naturalistic dialogue; sexual candor, and so on.

But what makes this film distinctive is a through-line of theme not uncommon to New Wave films but elevated here to a masterful organizing principle: the gulf between young and old.

New Wave histories by Richard Neupert and Michel Marie tell us that France of the 1950s was deeply interested in the manners and mores of the postwar generation. The journalist Françoise Giroud coined the term "New Wave" in a series of articles she wrote in the magazine L'Express (the equivalent of Time or Newsweek). They summarized the results of a mammoth sociological survey of youth; 8 million people between the ages of 18 and 30 were surveyed. This was the generation, she wrote, that soon "will have taken France in hand, their elders taking leave, the younger ones helping them move out." The survey, by training a microscope on the lives of the young, also exhaustively set that generation apart from the older one.

It is precisely this distance--even alienness--with which youths viewed adults that is enacted ingeniously in the very mise-en-scène of Adieu Philippine. Adults in this film generally fall into two groups: (1) they are seen but not heard, only the young being privileged with speaking parts; or, (2) when they do speak, they come off as foolish, sentimental, gauche or out of touch. (An exception is a great family dinner-table scene with Maurice Garrel.)

In one scene in an auto-repair shop, four teens kick the tires and size up a used car ("The tires are as bald as Yul Brynner", "We'll never pick up any girls in this jalopy"). As their raucous repartee flies back and forth, there's a cut to an older mechanic who is looking on at them silent and google-eyed as if he plainly doesn't comprehend what language they're speaking. In another scene shot guerrilla-style at an airplane landing strip, a boy and two girls flirt and wisecrack with each other while adults (bystanders who happened upon the film's shooting, no doubt) hover and stare at the youths, as if gaping at specimens of some strange species at the zoo. In one of the film's virtuosic passages, two girl-friends are followed on a busy Paris street by a non-stop lateral tracking camera. Passing them is a stream of older people, but we hear only the girls, loud and clear, and none of the adults (the film has silenced them).

Of course, the keen awareness of one generation succeeding another is also an important aspect of the story of French New Wave cinema itself. The "young Turks" who led the New Wave revolt against "le cinéma de papa" were trying to make their voices heard loud and clear first through their criticism and then through their films. In 1958, after the L'Express survey, Pierre Billard, the editor of Cinéma, put together an issue of "Forty Under Forty," in which he identified 40 young filmmakers to watch. The New Wave was being born.

Some other interesting or off-the-beaten-path films showing this season:

-- In the surrealism program: She Done Him Wrong, Monkey Business (Marx, not Hawks), Pour Vos Beaux Yeux (Henri Storck), and Hans Richter's narrative feature Dreams That Money Can Buy (I'd never heard of this but it sounds fascinating).

-- A Preminger series that includes The 13th Letter, Margin for Error and Such Good Friends, although Skidoo is absent because the estate refused permission.

-- Chabrol's ultra-rare Les Godelureaux (1961), which I've hunted in vain for years.

-- An eclectic "leading lady" Italian series.

Any thoughts/comments on the season's films? Please feel free to share.

This just in: there's a large, brand-new issue of Jump Cut now online.

pic: Adults in the foreground, youths in the background. We see the adults' lips move but we hear no sound. Instead, the soundtrack is given over to the four young men.