Wavelength has been a fixture in the canon of avant-garde filmmaking ever since its first appearance in 1967. As much performance art or installation art as filmmaking, it is just one 45-minute cut of an extended time-lapse zoom focused on a spot on the wall between two windows opposite the camera. A number of actions transpire within the rigid frame as it slowly crawls towards this indefinite point opposite the camera, narrative shadows leaving ghost image tracings on the time-lapse film. A few people enter and leave. A bit of music is played. A man enters the frame and appears to die. A woman arrives and seems to report the death over the telephone. Question marks do emerge from the pointedly simple script, but the riddles of this narrative arc seem insignificant compared to the puzzling interactions of time and space that Snow is intent on exploring.


The technological subtleties behind the film are akin to the early visual witchery of directors like Cocteau or Bunuel. Some of these exciting early experiments are characterized by the sense that the material limits of film are being pushed to their extremes, and our viewing expectations are actually evolving through this experience. With all the tools available to him, he decides to concoct an impossibly tedious gaze over a completely bland scene. And as we wait with the camera things like time and space begin to dawn on us like ideas. Certainly it is hypnotic, perhaps even cathartic, as the simplicity of the film reorients us to the basic potential of the medium itself. But from another perspective the film is completely preposterous, a bit scandalous even to the 21st century viewer. In 1967, the film was a flagship of the latest advances in camera technology, humming and crackling with a sense of evolution like one of the obelisks in Kubrick’s 2001. Snow even claimed this was his, “definitive statement of pure film space and time.” As if Wavelength were nothing more than a rehearsal of time by passing through space. If only everything were that simple.


But by the of the 45 minutes, the camera begins to zero in on the point we have been heading towards, and we eventually discover affixed to that wall an image of waves like the shifting seas at the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. It would be easy to draw some analogies between the two sets of imagery, but it seems that Snow is trying to make his point on a much different “wavelength” than Tarkovsky’s rich depiction of consciousness. (What for Tarkovsky is a concluding abstraction of his look at person-hood and memory is for Snow a fitting destination for focal length. As an image, it alone extends the viewer’s sense of film space beyond the conclusion. I am sure there is some interesting commentary somewhere along these lines.) For 45 minutes this point has hung as a destination that lies across a strange space traversable only by the latest technology at Snow’s disposal, and when we get there all we find is a printed picture even simpler, more artificially naturalistic, than the one that Snow has created in this film. If the viewer’s question through the experience has been, “Can anything be quite so simply focused as this?” the answer is yes, and Snow shows us an image to prove it. I am not quite sure that it is possible to elaborate much on Snow’s conclusion, as in all ways, as film should be, it is an utter abstraction.

Is this really just a Detective remake?


"My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water."


R. Bresson


Last year Sokurov’s Russian Ark stalked memorably across many top ten lists with its long and low hallway shots. Proving that the best films are often just great ideas in action, he simply let his specially built camera pan pensively through the vast cultural landscape of the Hermitage in grand arcs and deep focus. Kubrick did the same thing a few times through the hallways of The Shining, arguably every bit as perceptively as Sokurov albeit without all the historiographical fuss. Perhaps now we could add Pat O’Neill’s recent The Decay of Fiction to this small list of films that make good use of corridors.


All comparisons stop here though. The Decay of Fiction does have a history to tell, but one that may take us in the opposite direction of Sokurov’s Russian marvel. O'Neill's history is a recitation of slow decay rather than meaningful disaster. The location of the film, the infamous Ambassador Hotel, closed in 1989 and was slated for demolition several years later. Watering hole for America’s brightest and site of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, this crumbling icon becomes the background for an awkwardly cinematic adventure. Waterlogged and eroded, wallpaper dangles in the breeze through broken windows and cracks in the sidewalks crawl up the steps and into the once opulent foyer. From scene to scene the shadows of vibrant palms slip over the brown lawns from dawn to dusk in a matter of seconds, and the empty pool becomes a blank page for the quick shadows of clouds. O’Neill gives the building a biology of its own, and through the time-lapse shots we watch time beat mercilessly like waves at its eroding husk.


Across this canvas, a poignant architectural narrative in itself and a remarkable metaphor for American cultural decay (like a worn Fitzgerald novel), is painted a befuddling mural. Perhaps it would be better to think of it as a collage. A pastiche of wayward bars from classic noir soundtracks, random bits of intensely melodramatic dialogue stolen from now classic American detective scenarios, and pristine ball room gowns glimmering in black and white beneath the sculpted necks of America’s original beauty queens. The moldily technicolor hotel is occupied by these ghostly black and white figures and their decontextualized dialogue, all familiar to us by nothing other than the texture of memory. So much so that we need no story to lay these bits of dialogue into, they simply unfold with the suspense of good noir. The mood is set, and these snippets are hung on the flaking walls like portraits of an irretrievable era that we have all lived through.


In The Decay of Fiction, O’Neill forges a visual language that is at the same time sensitive and horrific. It is as clear as a bell, with classic American undertones. But at times it bares its teeth with a bite of what the avant-garde is best at: producing unsettling experiences by means of everyday elements. Thus the film often reads like someone speaking out of both corners of their mouth.


Many times O’Neill’s "blink and you miss" time-lapse camerawork lingers on the drapes of various windows, ecstatic and limp all in the blink of an eye. These exquisite panning shots are meditative and alluring. Almost brooding. And this mood dominates the film excepting several numbing intermissions, nonsensical sequences spaced logically throughout the film. Suddenly a man with an unnaturally large head engages in a frenetic semaphore exercise against a deep black background swarming with an inexplicable array of similar objects. Or random objects dance in double and triple exposure against a monochrome hum and the hotel and its occupants fade briefly from our vision. As the film builds on itself and forces one to linger thoughtfully on the narrative fragments and gently haunting imagery chained together, it keeps cascading into these raging nonsensical sequences that could only be described as: Decay. In one final and exhaustive abstract gasp, the film shatters itself before it returns to a final tour of the poorly aging structure.


In his own words, O’Neill makes sense of this all:


"I am interested in exploring the boundaries of believability. The narrative tradition insists that, no matter how fantastic the story, its surface must be seamless. By contrast, I call attention to the artifice, all the staged aspects, and allow the well-worn stories to slip over and through one another. The film's intention could be described as wanting to take stories off the screen and into the imagination. I like to work within the gaps between reality and story, to look at what is going on around the story, its context, and to make that a part of my conversation with the audience."


Experimental cinema isn't usually high on people's must-see lists, probably because it requires such a great deal from the viewer and often offers little return. But permit a brief illustration in its defense: We seldom laugh at people we overhear speaking foreign languages to each other because even though we may be hearing jibberish, we know they are communicating with each other. Avant-garde cinema often operates along the lines of such polite pragmatics.


O’Neill establishes a consistent grammar throughout the film in the re-imagination of these bits of romanticized detective story and intrigue. In time this narration becomes meaningful enough that he is in turn able to fracture it, he is able to break it into pieces until we find a few "gaps between reality and story." Precisely the same principle is at work in Godard's Detective, a late homage to the crime thillers he was so fond of in his youth. Theoretically the only difference between the two is that the hotel in Godard's doesn't fall apart at the end. In these films both Godard and O'Neill riff on a sense of crime, a sense of noirish verve that ends up having no truly scripted basis. And in both, the repetition of these intriguing bits become little more than points of suspicion along the way to a final smirk at narrative closure.


But to bring it back to the Bresson quote, both O'Neill's and Godard's film never actually seem to come back to life again. Like the flowers in Proust's tea, Bresson's film do bloom ("come to life") again in the consciousness of the viewer, an instant memory of sorts. In comparison, O'Neill and Godard in effect produce a stillborn cinema in these films. They want to discover and nurture filmic seams in their work, but once we begin to stumble over the narrative gaps they are intent on exploiting, we aren't given any more ground on which to regain our footing. O'Neill's film is the practice of a sort of decay that Bresson's films studiously avoid. Not that this is a priori a point of criticism, maybe he really is on to something.

In the first scene of Unknown Pleasures, a teenager rides his motorcycle through the streets of Datong, the heart of a Chinese province as affected by its rapid economic development as it is by the Western influences that this commercial growth has enabled it to embrace. He rides through this strange mix of crumbling architecture and sparkling new buildings with a cigarette dangling from his lips like Jean-Paul Belmondo in more than a few scenes of Godard’s Breathless. At times, just like Belmondo’s character, the teenagers in Unknown Pleasures often tip their hands to the influence of mainstream American film on their self-perceptions.


A few times this happens through heavy-handed references to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. As Tarantino’s film itself is such a pastiche of classic cinema references, Unknown Pleasures’ references to it begin to make it seem like we are in a cultural echo chamber. There are nothing but a few points of narrative departure with these odd references resonating through the many broad empty spaces of the film. Just like many others in their town, Bin-Bin and Xiao Ji are two unemployed teenagers, their days split between the local recreation center and typical teenaged lusts. One day they meet Qiao Qiao, the racy dancing advertisement for Mongolian King Liquor, with whom Xiao Ji falls immediately in love. Qiao Qiao’s trademark wig is not her only resemblance to Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, so is her choice of music and a knack for the same sort intimidating naughtiness that only seems to really happen in the movies. Over lunch Xiao Ji tells her about a scene he saw in this movie (Pulp Fiction, believe it or not) in which a couple get up from lunch and go rob a bank on a whim. After a while, this idea starts to sound like a good one to Bin-Bin and Xiao Ji, who find themselves completely out of options for forging any sort of economic future.


Staged during the tense infiltration of Chinese airspace by an American military aircraft, the persecution of the Falun Gong sect, and the terrorist explosion of the local textile mill, the only bleak glimmer of global hope during the film is the nod toward Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. Beyond this, not only do these teenagers have no chance to get into the military, go to school, or get rehired at the jobs they have already lost, but Xiao Ji’s motorcycle keeps breaking down. The listlessness of the film becomes overbearing very soon; the director’s almost excruciating pacing forces us to watch this doomed story unfold with the fateful timing of hopelessness and poverty.


In a rare moment of escape from this wearying storyline, Qiao Qiao introduces us to the title of the film. It comes from the famous poem of a Taoist master about the dreams of a butterfly. If a man dreams of a butterfly, when he wakes how can he know that he himself is not actually the dream of a sleeping butterfly? This idle philosophy is easy to kick around in the comfort of Western economic stability, but it takes on a different tone in light of the uncertainties these teenagers are facing. For them the Unknown Pleasures are the ones you can take advantage of as soon as they arise, because if they pass you will certainly never see them again.


Shot on digital video in scenes that unfold in real time, Unknown Pleasures has a documentary feel that only makes its storyline more vividly hopeless. Its surprising end seems to imply that at least one of them might make it out of the terrible cycles they were destined for. But no matter what happens, one will leave the film with the distinct impression that this is the daily routine of millions of teenagers that survive both on the crumbs of their local economies and the bits of whatever Western culture makes it to their clubs and black markets.

There is one shot in Taxi Driver that earns its reputation as a masterpiece. Well, perhaps there are a few more, but these few frames tucked away in the first half of the film strike me as particularly brilliant. Travis is making a left turn in his cab into the dispatch office. The camera sits facing the street from the sidewalk, so the cab passes us from the right. And as the car passes out of the frame on the left, just beginning to make its turn, the camera spins clockwise to catch the nose of the car parking, now again on the right side of the screen. While the cab is moving around the camera right to left, the camera pivots the other direction to meet it again at a point opposite of where we started. It is not nearly as dizzying as it sounds. It comes off as an effortless gesture, an almost juvenile sweep of the camera.


But in so demolishing the bland scope of 180°, Scorsese manages to tilt us slickly into a perspective far more suited to his character. Taxi Driver didn’t progress like other films of its day, which may be one reason why it has stuck out so conspicuously over the years. It isn’t your typical three acts in which we move neatly through a packaged narrative that deposits us in bit of closure at the end. Indeed, it does end unexpectedly nicely, as Travis Bickle has made his peace with the world and its socially conscious middle-class blondes. But it only gets there after a steady progression of the storyline that doesn’t halt in stages to let us catch up. Instead it is more of a character sketch. And as such, the film begins to emerge as an organic reproduction of Bickle’s ongoing monologue. Rhythmically punctuated by the image of Travis at the helm of his taxicab in a glimmering New York, an oddly appropriate vigilante story then unfolds in spite of itself.


Scorsese just lets him loose until he picks up enough steam to derail with great violence the other end of the screenplay. The image of Bickle standing in front of the mirror practicing his tough guy act has become iconic, but it is a shame that pop culture has frozen our memory of Travis at this point in the film. That image of Travis is premature, he hasn’t yet reached the potential the inevitabilities of his character have in store for him. Rather fans of the film should hang up posters of Travis as he is found at the end by the cops, smirking and miming suicide with a bloody hand. It as well is an effortless, almost juvenile gesture, but this image then leads to the happy ending of the film that belies the terrific violence through which it occurs. We have to skirt the ethical issues justly raised by films like A History of Violence to buy Bickle’s return to society, but Taxi Driver simply wants us to come full circle with Travis without whatever moralizing it may inspire.


This connection is a bit lame, but like the shot described earlier, Scorsese pans us around Travis until we meet him at the other end. He is able to appreciate both viewer and character as round figures capable of feeling their way through the film. Taxi Driver’s classic, timeless status may derive from the way it develops a life of its own in this respect. Halfway through the film, Travis Bickle seems to start writing his own script, and sometimes it is all Scorsese can do just to catch him in a pan of the camera.

The Green Ray (sometimes known as “Summer” due to a quirk in its American distribution) is one of Rohmer’s more personal films, which is saying a lot. His films are typically about well-defined individuals coming to terms with themselves through a moral or emotional crisis. Rohmer’s indirect style lets us follow them during these periods as disconnected observers. This is not to say that we are disinterested, just removed enough that we can often appreciate the gentle comedy of their circumstances.


In this film, Delphine is one of those people that we would probably have a hard time being friends with in real life anyway. She herself is intent on maintaining an awkward distance from those around her. Every August true Parisians vacate the city, and this summer Delphine has plans to go to Greece with a girlfriend. When this friend backs out, Delphine having recently broken up with her boyfriend is forced to make other plans, eventually ending up at the beach with a different friend. There at the beach house though she finds her fifth wheel status unbearable, a constant reminder of her disconsolate loneliness. After returning to Paris she decides to borrow her ex-husband’s Alpine condo, and then instead wanders all the way down to the shore near Biarritz.


Most of the film is involved with cataloging Delphine’s problems. It is odd that American distributors decided to call the film “Summer,” as there is nothing warm and inviting about Delphine and her predicament. Her conversations with others often devolve into persnickety defenses of her personal quirks, she doesn’t seem interested in things like beach volleyball, relaxing at a ski resort, or letting guys make passes at her in the discotheque. It begins to dawn on Delphine that her tearful restlessness may just be symptomatic of a deeper species of gloom, one that has no solution in place or person. Instead, Delphine eventually stumbles across the strange atmospheric condition known as “The Green Ray.” Eavesdropping on an interesting conversation, she hears about how Jules Verne used this strange event as the title to one of his novels. The green ray is the last spectrum of refraction that occurs sometimes when the rays of the setting sun hit the curvature of the earth just right. Immediately before the sun drops beneath the horizon it will flash vibrantly green just for an instant. For Verne, those lucky enough to see this happen will also for that moment be granted supernatural clarity into their own hearts and the hearts of those around them.


Delphine realizes that this sort of clarity is exactly what she has been looking for. She needs just a glimmer of certainty about herself and a companion, just one moment in which she can safely align herself towards something other than loneliness. And eventually it happens. She meets a man in the Biarritz train station, and on an uncharacteristic whim, Delphine joins him on the next train out of town. They stand together facing the sea at sunset. They wait as the sun slowly drops towards the distant water. We wait with them. And then it happens.


Rohmer reportedly waited quite a long time until he could actually catch the green ray on film. If he couldn’t actually find the atmospheric conditions at the right time with his camera rolling, then the film wouldn’t have worked. Or else the film would have ended with Delphine never meeting that magical moment that Rohmer had so studiously prepared for her. But we wait there with Delphine and her companion, and the sun flashes brilliantly green but for a moment before it vanishes below the curvature of the earth. In many ways this is an uncharacteristic film for Rohmer. Not only did he put a lot of stock into an image that practically would be difficult to catch on film, but much of the script was improvised and the entire thing was shot on 16 mm. This is also the only film to which Rohmer added a score, and surprisingly enough, he wrote it. Furthermore, in the scope of Rohmer’s oeuvre, the fact that he commits to resolving the crisis of one of his characters through such a magical, numinous, and overtly literary moment is stunning. To one of his clearest emotional studies he appends an equally provocative, almost transcendental, solution.

Polly Toynbee’s now infamous op-ed diatribe against her straw man “Narnian brand” of Christianity in a recent issue of The Guardian is flawed, but not in the same way as the film that inspired her outrage. Polly misses the point alright, but not nearly as much as director Adamson in his adaptation of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. If anything, Adamson’s own branding of Narnia represents a far more insidious undermining of Lewis’ loose allegory than Toynbee’s distorted invective could ever aspire to be.


J.K. Rowling has spoken much about our propensity for sanitizing children’s literature. We don’t want things to be too scary, too unnerving, or too formative. Lewis would certainly agree with Rowling. In the book, the White Witch is a dreadful figure for children to encounter. She looms over the imagination with her wand of permanent Winter. But even more terrifying is Lewis’ Aslan, who for much of the book remains an imponderable myth to the Pevensie children. Essential to the narrative is the fact that even the White Witch believes in him, and trembles. This is precisely the point at which Toynbee balks. “He is pure, raw, awesome power,” she says.


But Adamson’s Aslan shouldn’t pose this problem to Toynbee. He isn’t nearly scary enough. Adamson undermines Narnia by playing with its delicate balances of power. His Aslan simply isn’t the sort of thing that his White Witch would ever be that scared of. Truth be told, it would take little effort to turn the quickly paced descriptions and dialogue of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe into a screenplay. The film has been lauded for its faithfulness in this respect. But I guess adaptations are more than mere transposition of dialogue, they also involve the evocation of an author’s moral imagination.

"Towards an Appreciation of the Ridiculous Jaguar Shark"


Others have covered this film well enough, so I only offer a passing remark. All the while reveling in a battery of self-references lining the interior of Anderson’s script, The Life Aquatic also seems bent on taking on a life of its own in the hyper-active literary imaginations of its viewers. Around it swirls a constellation of tropes, figures, and visual cues that flirt with comparison to other, more grounded points of reference (such as the allusions to 8 1/2 that open the film).


Jaques Cousteau is at the helm of these references, on a quest with overtones of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea motivated by undertones of Moby Dick. Sure there is more, and at times these intratextual transparencies are as improbable as Portuguese covers of David Bowie tracks. But the film is at is best when this madcap parallelomania rests at its lowest ebb. The final discovery of the Jaguar Shark (ostensibly the point of the whole film), for example, is as unexpectedly touching as it is original. The shark himself is such an artificial, referenceless intrusion into the script that he seemed to have left the special effects studio intentionally overblown, cartoonish, and sublimely ridiculous. Yet the crew sits beneath the sea in their sub gazing at this shark as if it is the realest and most profound thing they have ever seen. Over the course of the film they have battled real pirates, dealt with serious paternity issues, and wrestled with the past. And here they are swooning over a totally fakey shark.


But I think this ironical appreciation of the ridiculous Jaguar Shark is what it is all about. For most of the crew aboard the SS Wes Anderson, a bona fide sea change occurs during the course of the film. We can see it in their gaze at the very end as this shark is sweeping past the portals of the sub. Immersed in the grandeur of the deep, the boundaries of their world are increased by something that doesn’t actually belong in it. It is a sign that by any standards is as profound as a still from The Little Mermaid, but yet is rendered gently poetic by Anderson's direction. This could be read as a moment of clarity for Anderson, or at least for his fans. On the surface it is one of his most disconnected and arbitrary images, but beneath its pixilated skin breathes something beautiful and real. Though it is a moment of obscene artifice, it sure is a holy one.

Cronenberg is as much an aesthetic brand as Lynch or Julie Taymor. Directors such as these often move from genre to genre, but they always leave their particular traces on whatever films they are making. There are always a few dusty corners in which even an amateur film sleuth can detect their fingerprints. A History of Violence though has proven to be quite the headscratcher for critics for many reasons, not least of which because it doesn’t even seem to be a film by David Cronenberg. Initially it doesn’t appear to share in his penchant for the absurd twist of phrase, stratospheric post-modern commentary, and startling or grotesque visual detail. This may be Cronenberg’s boldest move yet, after a career of defying expectations he decides to fly right in under the generic radar.


Cronenberg does start to leak through later in the film, but only in the briefest of glimpses.There really are only three or four traditional Cronenberg moments in the film, in which after quick sequences of choreographed violence he turns his camera down to the broken and bloody faces of the losers or lets us see the split-second first impact of fist or bullet. These are “traditional” Cronenberg moments because they involve violations of an unspoken contract between artist and audience that some things ought not be done to or with the human body. Crash, eXistenZ, Naked Lunch, The Fly and Videodrome, for example, all involve bits of the body being manipulated, added to, or taken away and extended into the films as cancerous metaphors for dislocation, anxiety, and misplaced desire. In A History of Violence these scenes are very brief close ups of traumatized human flesh. They are few and far between, flickering by in the blink of an eye. However, the marked difference in these “Cronenberg” scenes from those in his previous films is that his past violent use of the human body as a visual device occurs through things that happen to the characters and have a equal visceral and symbolic effect on the audience. In other films his characters are being acted upon for the sake of the audience, but in A History of Violence the audience itself is being viscerally acted upon. We are assaulted by these brutal glimpses from highly stylized and provactive angles.


The storyline has been well tread in other reviews, but few details other than hints that Tom is a Christian are really that relevant. Tom Stall kills two would-be armed robbers in his small town Indiana café with a stealth and panache that startles those around him. Soon a big town crime boss with a nasty disfigurement, Carl Fogerty, comes into town looking for Tom claiming he is actually Joey, an ex-mafia strong-arm gone incognito after ripping out his eye with barbed wire. In a wild-west showdown between Tom/Joey and Carl, Tom is spared execution by the quick thinking of his son, who blasts the crime-boss point-blank with a shotgun. This triggers the resentment of has family, who through this showdown discover his real past. The discovery of his history also leads to a confrontation between Tom and his crime boss brother, in which Tom escapes by shooting his brother between the eyes, effectively nailing the lid on coffin of his past forever.


There are a few moments in the film that dip beneath the generic opacity of this plotline. After Tom’s heroics in the café at the beginning of the film, his previously nerdy/pacifist son becomes emboldened enough to batter down two jocks that have bugging him at school. The skill and rapidity of this fight don’t fit our previous conception of Jack, as he takes care of these two punks as if he had been training for it for years. This story arc involving Jack comes to a hilt when he saves his father with a well-placed shotgun blast. After this Tom hugs his son, more a moment of bloody communion than comfort. It is as if the generational mantle has been passed, like father like son, and there is nothing Tom can do to stop it. A History of Violence implies that there is a story being told here that involves the past, present, and future.


There are also two intimate scenes between Tom and his wife. The first revels in the simple innocence of the marital bed, another point of idyll in Tom’s second chance at life. The second is a liaison that occurs between them after Edie lies to the Sheriff on Tom’s behalf to cover up his past. It is much like the scene between Sean Penn and his wife at the end of Mystic River (the infamous “You are the king” scene.) Tom’s wife accepts the violence of this second marital encounter, and it fully appears to be satisfying to her. Whether her combative actions after this encounter with her husband reflect her disgust at him, at herself, or at both, it doesn't really matter. We see her in some way enjoying that sort of quick and brutal activity in the same way that the audience experiences the violent moments in the film. They are fast, flashy, even "orgasmic." Could she be the stand-in for us? As if we have a love-hate relationship with violence cast as righteous revenge that often results in these dirty, yet desirable, little encounters?


A final note of interest is at the very end of the film. Tom returns from the final shootout at his brother’s house to find his family staring at him confusedly from the dinner table over a steaming meatloaf. The tension is cut when his cute little daughter grabs a plate and sets a place for him at the table. This remarkable, and predictable, finale offers a surprising range of readings, most of which are patently incorrect, and this ironical pseudo-multiplicity is Cronenberg’s crowning surrealist touch on the film. One could say: “Oh look, so there is hope after all, this family will heal and now that Tom has killed his last person the cycle of violence has been thwarted.” May it ever be that it was so simple. It is telling that this little girl is the only one that makes this move towards the acceptance of her father; she has been completely sheltered from the events of the storyline. She has no sense of the beastly violence that we have seen tearing this family apart. Her act of forgiveness in this last seen is therefore one of a cheap, almost absurdist, type of grace. It is a remarkable symbol that any forgiveness that could be offered to Tom is artificial, a sham that the family will be willing to accept to get on with their lives. And it is so much easier to accept fake forgiveness when it comes dressed up like a little girl in pigtails. This conclusion is haunting, doomed, and pointed.


I am having a hard time classifying this as ironical or satirical, as a lot of American viewers seem to be. The film is as straightfoward as Mystic River in its attempt to actually show us violence in a generational scope. Comparisons to Unforgiven also seem to be helpful; perhaps we could classify this as Cronenberg's “western.” Tom certainly is the lone “white hat” going back into a world of outlaws, knowing that he has to be like them to defeat them. Eastwood is heavy handed at the end of Unforgiven with the idea that vengeance can send one straight to the living purgatory of unforgivable sins. And though Tom’s actions could be described as self-preservation or the protection of others, the ease with which violence comes to him easily places him within the moral scope of the gunslinger.


This is also Cronenberg's send-up of small town America, one which eerily resembles the disturbing satire of Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Both films tool with our conception of all things suburban by placing intense acts of violence and obscenity within a space we typically reserve for things like peace and white picket fence prosperity. Our dignified notions of security and civility are upended by a confrontation with the "heart of darkness" in our own backyard. But by and large there are a range of genres that Cronenberg is straddling in the film, A History of Violence being a bit of a meta-commentary on all of them just by virtue of the way it shares the same semiotic past as all of them. Cronenberg has given a number of interviews in press on the film that do clear the theoretical air a bit. In one he says: "I think the main thing was the iconic Americana, which is to say it has elements of an American Western, elements of a gangster movie. But I'm not just thinking of movies. This isn't really a movie about movies. It has to do with America's mythology of itself - the small perfect town where everybody's friendly and happy and what that really entails."


Side note: Peter T. Chattaway drew my attention to this review published here at Reveal.


At one point in the review, the reviewer states: "The true message of the film is not the sensual deployment of violence per se, but rather the messy notion that sometimes violence can be used as a vehicle that expedites redemption."


That is couldn’t be farther from the truth. This sort of a statement is a great example of pushing that need for Christian critics to find "redemption" motifs in everything we watch way too far. If anything, this reviewer is falling into the trap Cronenberg has set in the film for unwary viewers. Cronenberg sets us up to see Tom as someone struggling on the way to redemption through some of the Christian language and symbology dropped as red herrings along the way. The doomed conclusion only highlights the irony, the artificiality, of notions like "redemption" in these particular circumstances. A History of Violence is about how we often mistake things for redemption that really just are the ethicizing (or even Christianizing) of actions and behaviors that in clearer contexts would be completely unwarranted. It is a bit odd that many of my fondest childhood memories involve excitedly watching Clint Eastwood gun people down in various westerns with my dad on Saturday afternoons. This is one facet of what Cronenberg is getting at in what he calls A History of Violence.


From the same perspective, this film is a great cultural discussion of John Milbank’s famous discovery of an “ontology of violence” at the root of Enlightenment politics and culture (good essay on this here). Milbank proposes that all things modern are based on transferal of the supposed struggle and competition inherent to nature over to politics, economics, and theology. It is only through the transparency of post-modern critique that this subtle cancerous tendency has been exposed as lurking at the heart of modern theologies and in the interaction between the church and the world (capitalism, the "Protestant work ethic," colonialism, etc...). I bet Cronenberg didn't know he was surfing the cutting edge of Christian thought in this film.

The Weeping Meadow, the first installment in a planned trilogy narrating the fortunes of Greece in the 20th century, is an odd sort of history. More operatic than descriptive, more transcendental poesis than mere reportage, and more steeped in vision than memory, it is legitimately Homeric in scope. Languid flickers of an edit mark solemn passages of time, these gaps effortlessly bridged by the consistently stylized formalism of Angelopoulos’ dreamscape Greece. Though time skips boldly across the surface of the film, Angelopoulos creatively turns its ensuing ripples into a visual rhythm, a cadence harmonized by the persistent themes of a phantom folk band always in the background.


Right from the very start, The Weeping Meadow is both history and incredulous metaphor wrought in long gazes of the lens. It is 1919, and a hieratically rag-tag mob of displaced Greeks strolls resolutely towards the lens, coming to a slow stop before a reflective sheet of water. They stand together as their recent history is reported, a token orphan in the crowd a symbol of the horrors left behind in Odessa. The next time we see this young orphan, Eleni, she is returning home after having spent the necessary months abroad to secretly give birth to illegitimate twins. Another cut and we are watching her flee an arranged marriage to her aging step-father, aided by her beloved Alexi, son of her adopted parents. The film begins to dig more deeply into the 20th century as Eleni and Alexi leave home to make their way in the big city on the edge of a continent about to go to war.


Angelopoulos abandons an overriding intimacy in the film, preferring simply to use his characters as the human element necessary to spark life in his inanimately crafted scenes. We aren’t afforded much emotional access to Eleni and Alexi, inasmuch as they mostly serve to lend us a vested interest in Angelopoulos’ otherwise beautifully sterile backdrops. The film is built more on a stock of memorable images than it is a bank of memorable moments. A fleet of oar-drawn boats flutters starkly across the screen, sheep hang from high in the branches of a leafless tree, a thousand pristine white sheets hang billowing on the beach. In one crowning moment, Alexi grabs a thread end from the crimson wool sweater Eleni has knitted him for his solo journey to America in search of fortune. He holds it as his boat drifts from the dock; it tightens and bends in the breeze as the sweater unravels until it snaps across the screen and the sequence collapses in a forlorn heap. I am sure that some sort of dialogue could have been scripted that told us all about how sad it was for this young family to be broken up, and how they may never see each other again. This could even have been accomplished in the same amount of time as it takes to watch a sweater unravel. But the direct simplicity with which Angelopoulos choreographs the finality of Alexi’s departure is much more potent.


This characteristic distance in Angelopoulos work makes the final act of The Weeping Meadow all the more surprising. Freed from prison, and stripped of her family by war, Eleni collapses in grief. No longer just a complimentary set piece to the rest of the film, she lies weeping with abandon at the edges of scenes. A fitting end to such a magnificently awful film.

Kings and Queen is about is about the sort of people who are self-deluded, and what happens when these treasured delusions are no longer conceivable. Adjacent to this theme is a collection of characters that are not only deluded, but are so caught in their idiosyncracies that others have trouble in communicating this fact to them. Desplechin referred to the film as a "comedy" before it came out, but I had trouble finding many traces of humor in the subtext. Its key moments of revelation are not as awkward as they are sad. A man refuses to believe he has a serious illness. A daughter hears from her deceased father what he really thought about her. A musician is given an unsolicited reality check by his director. After all this rug-pulling is said and done, we realize that Kings and Queen is not just another complicated family epic built on the teetering limbs of a recent tragedy. It has something far less palatable up its sleeve.


The relationships between its major figures become clearer as the film rolls on. Nora has it all together. She manages an art gallery, buys beautiful prints for her highly literate father, and juggles her current relationship, a difficult past, and the long-distance raising of her young son Elias. When she discovers that her father is dying of a malignant cancer, Nora decides to ask Ismael, a former lover, if he will adopt her son so that he will have a guardian in the untimely event of her death. Though he is a bit nuts, Elias and Ismael have a much better relationship than any of the other men she brought into his life, so he is her only natural option. Ismael, though charming, is a bit addled, having been recently committed to a psychiatric hospital against his will while struggling to evade a massive tax bill with the help of a Gonzo accountant.


But in the journals of her father to be published posthumously, Nora finds an unexpected entry. His last words to her are bitter, outrageously vitriolic, and obviously true. Likewise, Ismael is eventually put in his place by a straight-talking quartet director. Apparently Ismael’s own genius complex was more annoying than it was earned. For both Nora and Ismael, things aren’t quite what they seem, and the lengthy structure of the film provides ample space for Desplechin to air out the causes and effects of their delusions.


One of the more honest exchanges in the film, finally uninhibited by some set of flawed self-perceptions, happens when Ismael explains to Elias why he would not make a good father. In this sad microcosm for the rest of the film Desplechin ably convinces us that self-delusions aren’t just personal problems, they wreck futures, ruin families, and deny us the honest companionship of those closest to us. (And they are as easy to build up as they are to point out.) In scenes like this Desplechin's admitted predilection for Woody Allen comes to the surface, as his gently comic dialogue hovers somewhere between meaningful and neurotic.

Tae-suk’s residential philosophy is one especially poignant in an age where status and living space are becoming more closely linked than ever. The comic Steven Wright once said, “I have a hobby. I have the world's largest collection of sea shells. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world.” Tae-suk could say the same thing about where he lives. He simply roams about by day, systematically placing leaflets on all the doorknobs in a neighborhood. Later he returns, and logically figuring that a leaflet still in place signals a currently unoccupied house, he simply takes up residence until the next morning.


While in these other people’s homes he just potters about. He does the laundry and fixes little things that are broken. He is just a generally helpful unwelcome guest. This quiet routine is broken when he discovers that the house he has currently chosen is also occupied by Sun-Hwa, the abused significant other of the home’s affluent owner. She stalks him for a while, a curious spectator to his domestic rituals, before revealing herself and eventually skipping off in tow to the next vacant home. Their paradisiacal nomadic fantasy unfolds, in complete silence they enjoy a conceptual Eden in other people’s places (there isn’t a word of dialogue between them until three little words at the end of the film). In their downtime, Tae-suk practices his golf stroke while Sun Hwa tries to stand in his way, and director Kim Ki Duk has plenty of time to ply his trade in ironic gestures and thoughtful angles. All is fine and dandy until they discover a dead body in a small flat, and the gig is up. At this point the gentle silence cultivated by Kim between Tae-suk and Sun-hwa is broken up by angry policemen, prison guards, and a jealous boyfriend.


The second act of the film then takes an odd turn. Tae-suk spends time perfecting his phantom talents in prison until he is released and returns to find Sun-hwa, taking some particularly comic revenge on her browbeating boyfriend. This all makes for some great camerawork, certainly the strength of the piece, but in the long run turns out to be an odd change of course. The prison sequences in particular seem clunky set next to the seamless ease of the rest of the film. This change in focus from Tae-suk as a provocative pioneer of new living spaces to Tae-suk as sneaky lover undercuts the interesting commentary on the accepted homogeneity of modern living made earlier in the film. Tae-suk was far more interesting as a modern day hunter and gatherer. Kim Ki Duk would have been better off letting us see more of Sun-hwa seeking solace during her seperation from Tae-suk, as the brief glimpses we have of her during this time are memorable. All in all, 3 Iron may be more closely linked to his previous effort Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring than it seems at first glance. Both films expose patterns of living, and even the actual physical form in which this takes place, as linked our convictions about the nature of self and society.

The closing image of 3 Iron is as charming and metonymical as the puzzling final sequence in Lost in Translation. It is as if together, this odd couple amounts to much less than they were by themselves. Tae-suk's desire to be invisible, a weightless scavenger of the absence of others, is only made possible in the presence of this more grounding romance.


Here is a great interview with Kim in which he makes the comment: "My concept of semi-abstract movie making is about doing more then just presenting reality. To the world as we see it, I try to add our thoughts and feelings." I would love to hear him and Claire Denis have a conversation on this point.

J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader is at the vanguard of critics reading Revenge of the Sith as some sort of Dogville for less artsy audiences. He opens his review with the daydream:


"What I wouldn't give to see President Bush's expression when Revenge of the Sith screens at the White House and the freshly annointed Darth Vader, hoping to seduce Obi-Wan Kenobi to the dark side, declares, "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy!"


As if Bush and his foreign policy were the absolutist dark side to the altruistic Jedi moralism of... who? Oh, I see:


"In a way it's like the Force, something he found within himself that's larger and more powerful than he ever could have imagined, with the potential to ennoble or corrupt. The idea that a good man following a right path could unknowingly become an architect of evil times must have cut pretty close to the bone for Lucas."


So the Jedi in this film have no real contemporary political counterpart. That is, other than the still, small voices that, out of no sense of self-interest, continually critique Bush’s current foreign policy (not many of which seem that still or small, or blankly altruistic). What Jones is after is showing that Bush, once a good man, has been lured unknowingly into conducting a great moral horror. His rhetoric of “us vs. them” is a dire indication of the terrific evil that has sway over the Oval Office (who is the Emperor in this analogy?). Bush’s rhetoric has also been compared to the “shoot from the hip” mentality of classic American westerns. The sense of justice behind the current Iraq war is a black and white matinee ethic that doesn’t work well in the gray haze of international law. I am not out to make any political statement on the issue either way, other than to show that making such political commentary in the guise of film criticism can often backfire.


The average reader though should be at least interested how well such analogies fit the texts they are being ascribed to. As there are few, if any, further parallels between Bush and Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith, one wonders how responsible Jones’ criticism on this point really is. I am reminded of the Bob Dylan ballad in which we find out that Betsy Ross was a communist. There are red stripes all over her flag! As Jones points out, but fails to address any further in terms of his analogy, the Jedi themselves have become compromised by their self-righteous skullduggery. Who are the Jedi in this analogy again?


Fortunately Jones does allude to the following alternative reading throughout his review, but let’s read Revenge of the Sith for what it really is without the flimsy polemics. It is an ironical self-criticism of the bland technological hegemony of Lucasfilm itself. Anakin was seduced to the dark side by the promise of powers that could only be had through the sort of training the Jedi cannot offer. Such a broader, more flexible array of tools would be at his disposal if he would only sign over his talents and future to the dark side. Imagine what THX 1138 could have been like if only there were better technology, like CGI, available. (Oh wait, there is a remake.) In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin’s dark side hubris comes to a quick end as his limbs are lopped from his body by Obi-Wan. Here the placid simplicity of the Jedi leaves the flashy glitz of the dark side to scrabble in the dust.


The irony of this plot line is that Anakin was promised the ability to heal if he went over to the dark side. He is duped by the Emperor into thinking that his wife’s life was on the line, but apparently the dark side doesn’t always tell the truth. Perhaps Anakin’s intentions were a bit altruistic, but the power he is granted turns out to be too much to handle. (On cue, the CGI lava field erupts behind him in a grand pathetic fallacy.) When the Emperor finds Anakin’s leaking torso at the edge of the battlefield, we discover what the true power of the dark side is: technology. It turns out that the Emperor really does have the power to bring people virtually back to life. Sure it requires a lot of buttons and wiring, but what is the difference?


This Empire will be built on the assured results of hardwired offensive technology, not the intangible platitudes of the Jedi. Critics famously discovered that the final scene of Star Wars imitates Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Via the technology analogy, this scene is a bitter premonition of the tyranny of the blockbuster over summer film-going for the next few decades inspired by Lucas’ special effects success. In Revenge of the Sith, Yoda and Obi-Wan watched the footage of Anakin slaughtering the innocent Jedi children left behind at the base by their masters. If a film such as Lucas’ masterful American Graffiti had opened the same weekend as Revenge of the Sith, which one would have sold more tickets? It takes little imagination to see these children as so many charmingly low budget feature films axed at the box office by the technological superiority of so many high budget blockbusters. Well, it does take a little imagination, but not nearly as much as it does to read Bush into the narrative arc of Darth Vader.

Factotum is as low key as it gets. Subtitled “Man of Many Jobs,” it chronicles the first stage in the rise to fame of Henry Chinaski, the literary alter-ego of Charles Bukowski. Moving erratically (and humorously) from job to job, Chinaski finances his penchant for booze and gambling by a strategic blend of minimum wage paychecks and the affection of loose women who have their own places. Somehow he also manages to crank out a steady stream of short stories, exchanging them in the mail for an endless stream of rejection letters. Much of the film is taken up with his partner-in-crime relationship to the obsessive Jan, one notable interlude being a surreal tryst with the exotically lower-rung Laura and her culterati sugar daddy. Finally, after enduring the particularly banal horror of polishing a giant marble nose at the office of a newspaper he would prefer to be writing for, he gets a story published. The rest is history.


True to the spirit of Bukowski’s more semi-autobiographical novels, Factotum is a stack of tragi-comic vignettes that turn on bits of poignant obscenity concluded by a few brilliant sentences of unpregnant reflection. The strength of Bukowski’s artistry in Ham on Rye and Factotum is that he manages to be wide-ranging and sporadic, skipping from town to town, job to job, and bar to bar, yet remains laser focused in terms of voice and theme. He is mumbling and aimless, but seldom loses sight of the miles he wants us to walk with him. The film balances out these features as well as we could expect it to, director Bent Hamer’s (of Kitchen Stories fame) Scandinavian deadpan proving a sensible wallpaper to the persistently drab features of the film.


Chinaski and Jan wrestle something fairly gripping out of the script. It is subtle, but there is an emotional realism and chemistry between them that sort of explains why the whole "Bukowski" thing actually works. My suspicion that this really is a well-done film was confirmed by the appearance of Marisa Tomei as Laura, from whom the director captures an appreciable glimpse of sweetness that isn’t nearly as clichéd as we would expect it to be. Do not be mistaken, there is a lot of cliché in the film. Most of the visual gags and narrative punchlines will strike one as such, but keep in mind that Bukoswki is the one that invented this stuff in the first place. Most drunkenly sardonic, welfare fueled, gutter level black comedy can be traced right back to him. In this sense, the film isn’t a comedy at all. It is an historical epic, the first fledgling steps of what is now a worn-out cultural persona. Whether the film is a gloss on the real Bukowski or not, there is a poetic sensibility here that the Hamer seems Bent (get it?) on drawing out. It is a grimy, unshaven, drunken, cigarette smoking, unemployed, vulgar and lazy sensibility, but there is a spark there nonetheless. Both American Splendor and Crumb seem to be on the tip of Hamer’s tounge.


Compared to Barfly, a much less watchable take on the Bukowski of the same period, Factotum is kid friendly. So there are some obvious ethical issues involved with Hamer’s whitewashing of the traditional Bukowski image, but regardless, Hamer’s Bukowski is the one I prefer to read.

Towards an Easter Aesthetic - What does the Garden have to do with the Gallery? (MHP Column, 4.06)


Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages;
let us walk through the door.


Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.


(John Updike, an excerpt from “Seven Stanzas at Easter”)


Athens, Jerusalem, and Christian Art


The question is often asked, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” It is a convenient way of referring to the age-old dilemma posed by intellectual history’s strangest bedfellows: philosophy and theology. Contemporary Christianity is faced with what may become an issue almost as problematic, especially as aesthetics becomes more successfully philosophical and theologians are thinking more and more like aestheticians. Just like the issues of Athens began to encroach on the home-field advantage of Jerusalem, so is Beauty beginning monopolize the sort of attention we used to put on the more clinical issues of Truth.


Which is fine with me, I don’t find it easier to think Christianly as an aesthetician than a theologian or biblical critic. But I do find it more profitable. All the inroads we are making as Christian thinkers into film criticism, literary theory, theatrical performance, and deeper appreciations of classic and contemporary art will lead us to richer conceptions of personhood, faith, doubt, and eternity. (If you are wondering where all these inroads are being made, please contact me, as I would love to introduce you to some before they start becoming clogged with traffic jams.) So on this Easter occasion, I want to ask: “What does the Garden have to do with the Gallery?”


By the “Garden” I refer to the event of Christ’s resurrection and the place in which it occurred, and by the “Gallery” I refer to the practice and exhibition of contemporary art. In essence, the question is: What does the Christian faith have to do with the craft and practice of Fine Art? The church has long held these two in odd tensions, some unconsciously keeping them in opposition, a few overtly fleeing one to do the other, and yet others collapsing the two as if they are one and the same thing. This stalemate will continue to exist unless we develop more provocative models of being artists in the church and more practical models of being a Church to our artists.


Perhaps we can best do this by starting with the right distinctions, and I simply suggest that the Garden and the Gallery really fit the bill. They are the “Jerusalem” and “Athens” of this conundrum. What we have in these two spatial figureheads are a number of important similarities, and at least one key difference, the significance of the latter precariously balancing the greater number of the former.


What the Garden and the Gallery Have in Common:


1. They are absolutely public. The resurrection of Christ was a public vindication of his ministry, and his initial appearance in the garden is the first of many public appearances of the victorious Savior. The Gospels intended to publicize it even further, making it the center of early Christian proclamation. Likewise, the artist places their artwork in the gallery so that it may be seen by others, so that the public can perceive its wisdom and expertise. There is something validating about having artwork excepted in reputable galleries, and we look at things differently on the walls of the MOMA or in the Louvre than we do things on the walls of bathroom stalls or our living room. Once things become part of public discourse, they take on a different significance than events and objects we consider private.


2. They are a public space. The Garden becomes an important place in John’s Gospel that has ever since been associated with the shocked wonder first of Mary Magdalene and then Peter and the Beloved Disciple. It is the place of man’s first encounter with the risen Lord. We go to the Gallery sometimes as Mary Magdalene went early that morning to the Garden, with fear, doubt, and questions. We leave earth-shaken and reality-checked. At other times we come with much different concerns, but either way we are going to an actual place that frames our expectations.


3. They are creative activities. The resurrection is a profoundly creative act, a re-creative act that charted a course for the proclamation of grace. If the Word becoming flesh was a startling wrinkle in the history of creation, then how much more the resurrection? It was an utter reversal in the scheme of things, the first-fruits of a new age. Art can be this same sort of creative activity, not on the same scale of course, but it can represent powerful reversals of the way things seem to be. It can produce images that alter the tenor and course of culture or experiences that critique our deceptive comfort zones.


4. They are unique. It goes without saying that the Garden is host to something unique; the point of the resurrection lies directly in its unexpected nature. Likewise the Gallery can be a place of newness, a place of discovery and innovation. The resurrection required the writers of the New Testament to develop an entirely new vocabulary for their encounters with the risen Lord. In the Gallery we learn to speak different languages about common concerns, and are given new tools to deal with what were considered to be unsolvable riddles.


But as attractive as they may seem, these analogies between the Garden and the Gallery are a bit naïve. All four of these points set the Garden next to an ideal Gallery that exists only as long as one can imagine it. And I think I think I know why. Even though all these functional analogies work so well, the fact remains that the Garden and the Gallery produce far different things. The Gallery is not consistent in its availability as a public space that provides creatively unique opportunities for revelation and change, and some of its more famous residents have worked very effectively to make the Gallery something else.


What the Garden and the Gallery Don’t Have In Common:


1. There is only one difference here, a key difference. This is that the resurrection is precisely about creation, redemption, and hope, and art quite often isn’t. Actually, most of the time it isn’t, and this may be the reason that we have become so sensitive to the difference between Church and Art in our age. Much of the art we encounter has no sense of redemption or hope and this causes problems for the Christian artist seeking to participate in the professional art world. What sort of work does one do when redemptive themes are so readily shelved as clichéd and passé by both the market and the critics?


But there is an even more fundamental problem as the resurrection is a profoundly and artistically creative act in every sense of the terms, and much contemporary art really isn’t creative at all. So much art these days is derivative, referential to a dizzying degree, and we celebrate this artless regurgitation. The sort of art that is inspired by the Garden cuts through the thoughtless delusion that Pop art is art, or that Tarantino’s films are works of art, or that art school isn’t about mastering the basics, or that Beauty is simply a matter of taste.


In his essay “Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?,” Anthony Burgess says: “Art begins with
craft, and there is no art until the craft has been mastered. You can't create unless you're willing to subordinate creative impulse to the construction of form. But the learning of craft takes a long time, and we all think we're entitled to shortcuts.... Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.” It may seem odd to bring words like “craft,” “construction,” and “form” into this discussion, but this is precisely what the Garden inspires. Enduring, thoughtful, expert works of creative intelligence that provoke more than insipid, self-serving reflections. It requires a renewed affection for form, a celebration of material and color, all things that are linked to an esteem of Creation.


“Let Us Walk Through the Door”


The John Updike poem isn’t up there just because I cautiously enjoy it. It struck me while reading it once that everything he says there about the resurrection could also be said about Christian art. Updike beckons us not to water it down, not to try to manage its sharper corners, or to season it so that our neighbors may swallow it more palatably. We need to embrace the entire package and let it leak into our journey in life. This may be the best advice we can offer to both Christian and non-Christian artists: Don’t be “embarrassed by the miracle.” To the former it is a plea to let their artwork be borne out of the struggle of faith and shaped by redemption. To the latter it is a plea to not be interested just with art, but with the miracle and process of creativity itself. To both it is a gesture that perhaps the Garden and the Gallery are not so far apart. Their failure to converse is the fault of the church, but may it not be for lack of trying.

Finally I understand the backstory to Batman and I enjoy the character all the more for it. In Batman Begins, an unequivocal masterpiece of filmmaking, Christopher Nolan takes the teetering Batman franchise back to its roots. Nolan has staked his claim in American filmmaking on the backs of Memento (2000) and Insomnia (2002), films that demonstrated his ability to produce both creatively active cinema and more thoughtfully paced drama. Who knows what these producers were thinking picking someone with so much indie cred to put together yet another comic hero summer blockbuster, but it worked. A more learned critic could certainly discuss at length the possibility that in Batman Begins we have a seamless convergence between high and low culture. Umberto Eco, a cultural critic bent on abolishing this arbitrary distinction between highbrow and lowbrow even once said, “I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegan’s Wake.” Batman was born in DC Comics, but Eco’s quip is convenient nonetheless.


Batman Begins is at times suffocating. Nolan’s Gotham is the downtrodden Chicago of an alternate universe, its famous elevated transit system pushed to garish extremes and its apocalyptic slums piled right up against a glittering skyline. This is like Lang’s costly Metropolis, but after such urban imagery ceased to be just the fancy of science fiction novelists. The film is also at times as crisp and engaging as any Scorcese film, as many scenes of Bruce Wayne in his street clothes are as effective as similar scenes in The Aviator. The Bruce Wayne of Batman Begins is forced to alternate between his public front-page tabloid persona and his private troubled orphan crime-fighter persona. Much like in The Aviator, the audience becomes part of this duplicity through a crisp visual storytelling steeped in the mood of each persona. And then at times the film is distinctly Nolan. Built on large blocks of narrative and visual contrast, often slipping into potent visual abstraction, and dealing deftly with chronology, Nolan makes Batman Begins all his own.


The film opens with the orphaned Bruce Wayne in a foreign prison camp, soon to be sprung by the mysterious Ra’s Al Gul, guru of an organization feared by criminals worldwide for doing the sort of justice cops aren’t allowed. In a secret Himalayan base camp, Bruce Wayne is trained as a ninja into this League of Shadows by his new mentor, Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), who also forces him to adopt his deepest fear (bats) as a supernatural reserve of strength. After refusing to practice the radically absolutist sort of justice taught by Ra’s Al Gul, Wayne escapes back to Gotham City to avenge the death of his parents by waging a shock and awe campaign on corruption and injustice. Painfully building the Batman persona by trial and error, the last half of Batman Begins chronicles Wayne’s discovery of an appropriately outlandish plot to destroy Gotham. Little does he know, but he may have to face his mentor again much sooner than he thinks. If I recall correctly, Ra’s Al Gul in the comic novels was of Arabian descent. The choice of the filmmakers to cast his character as a much more neutral nationality is helpful, as a film about a radically absolutist terrorist from Saudi Arabia attacking Chicago would probably not have gone over very well right now.


The pacing of the film drops only once or twice, and only then to dwell intensely on the emotional and visual reasoning behind the “bat” motif. The amount of story crammed into the script, and an abundance of perfectly cast characters (Gary Oldman as a “good cop,” Tom Wilkinson as a Mafia boss, and Michael Caine as Wayne’s cast-iron butler just to name a few), defy any review to finish at readable word count. As what is slated to be the first of a few Batman films seemingly determined to rescue the franchise from the slapstick excesses of previous attempts, its fierce pacing whets audience appetites for more. Christian Bale’s perfect performance deserves a few sequels as his brooding Batman far outstrips Keaton’s roguish charm, Kilmer’s bland affectations, and Clooney’s inability to nail the part. Bale reminds us of how serious and thought provoking a comic hero can really be.


Nolan and Bale have set the stage for a new perception of Batman. In Batman Begins, the script frequently returns to social justice as a thematic center. This Batman is incensed by the corporate skullduggery that has overtaken Wayne Enterprises in his absence. He is outraged by the ineffectiveness of police to seal convictions on brazen criminals. And he is intent to stand between the lower classes and oppressive political powers they have no control over. Wayne perceives the heart of Gotham’s problems so clearly that he knows exactly what public persona he has to adopt if he is to hide his identity as Batman. The furthest thing he can think of from “social justice” is the moral excess of a millionaire playboy. The celebrity glitz, the cavalier debauchery, the front page of the style section… These things are sure to take him off the short-list for possible Batman candidates. It is tellingly ironic that the screenwriters cast the distinction between his personae this way, as we have hard-won social justice set against the false glamour of celebrity. Hopefully, we will see more of this Batman, who at all points is so relevant to our current cultural climate. Regardless, I am pleased that we have a comic-based film that will undoubtedly make my top-ten list this year. I have been a closet fan of even the schlockiest films of this genre since the first Superman, but in Batman Begins Nolan has made it socially responsible to be an open advocate.

I am a bit late coming to this one. It finally hit the UK this fall and for its entire run I was determined not to see it. There was just something about it that bugged me. It was hard to miss the buzz about it, and it did sound like something that brought together all of my favorite hobby-horses (DV, non professional, expressionist, etc…). But behind all the hype seemed to be a film born out of an unsettling sort of self-focus. To be fair, it smacked of the same sort of bombastic self-focus that has given birth to some great works of art in the past, like This Side of Paradise or Warhol’s self-portraits.


Jonathan Caouette certainly is interesting. Anybody that has managed to capture most of their life on personal home video is interesting even if they haven’t really done anything. The mere tenacity of that sort at least merits a short film. Tarnation is the ordered summary of 160 hours of film Caouette took of himself and his family over the course of his 30 year life. Though often referred to as an “autobiographical documentary”, it seems to be as much about his mother as it is about himself. Perhaps in this sense the film is a storyline of self-discovery rather than just self-description, as if as an adult Caouette could only really understand himself if he could understand her. Submitted to shock therapy for literally no reason when she was very young, the film traces her struggle with mental illness as it maps out the stages in Caouette’s distinct coming-of-age.


His grandparents, shown by the film to be just as loving as misguided, are straight out of a Flannery O’Connor novel and touched by the irony that fiction can seldom achieve. Or maybe out of an early Ian Banks novel, but that is beside the point. Virtually allowed to raise himself in their care, Caouette turns the camera on them and himself as he chronicles his adolescence in the absence of his mother. What emerges from this haunting visual essay is a perfectly poised stream of home videos punctuated by notable moments of personal shock and self-discovery. His mother’s rape, his abuse in a number of foster homes, a drug overdose, his grandmother’s death, his mother’s fateful Lithium overdose, and other such moments are cast in textures of bold expression. At times they are bold to the point of awful. The young Jonathan himself takes us through the discovery of his own talents, the discovery of his own sexuality. And as he grows, so does the film, becoming more aware of itself as a history, but more importantly, as a collection of emotional milestones carved from mountains of imagery.


As a narrative, the film pulses with something usually foreign to strict storytelling. Caouette often comes close to the edge beyond which something ceases to become a film. We usually refer to such things as “experimental” or “avant garde,” often hiding them in art galleries like the creepy uncle of watchable and accessible film. Cauoette doesn’t simply edit together the frames of these odd old videos, he colors them, bends them, slides them, reduplicates panels of them, scratches them, and spills them across the film with a frantic pathos. Somehow he manages to convey the dislocation and rage that defined these stages of his life, eventually closing on the staged third person footage of him peacefully asleep next to his rescued mother, a reverse Pieta. The film is steeped in an emotional vocabulary that renders its presentation necessary. “The medium is the message,” and in the film Jonathan seems to ascribe this dictum to his discovery of an alternative lifestyle in the gay, punk, and gothic scenes of early 90’s Texas.


As a child he enjoyed filming himself, often in close-ups of his face, as he acted out different roles and tried on varying emotional masks. He has taken some of this footage and manipulated it into a charged frenzy; visual studies in rage and dislocation these images would work well as silk-screened paintings. Easy comparison could be made to the self-portraiture of Francis Bacon, both in tenor and motivation. In one notable sequence the 11 year-old Jonathan delivers a monologue posing as a drug-addicted and abused white trash mother. Somehow he nails the part. He was 11. Eventually all of these theatrics begin to raise an interesting question. This acting came so naturally for him that he seems to be slowly creating or adopting a script for himself as his own story. This script riffs off of the one involving his mother and his unusual adolescent struggles, but it is a construct that helped himself distance himself from reality. Even if he would disagree, consider the film itself. He is posing, defining, and eventually describing himself to us as the finished product. Tarnation itself is this product, and the film serves as an equivalent sort of construct, a shorthand to his self-identity.

This is meant to be a very restrained criticism, as we do this every day. We identify with this character in this film or that book and borrow their script for a while. Like Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless standing with a cigarette next to the Humphrey Bogart poster, we pose our way through the day on the back of other people’s storylines. This isn’t always a bad thing; some scripts are great ones to claim as our own. And Caouette seems to be aware of this. It is just that the character he adopts isn’t that interesting until the end, when he rescues his mother from the fate of Adult Protective Services. As a figure that overcomes such adversity he is interesting. But an example of the potential banality inherent to self-focused projects like Tarnation uncovers itself in the last few scenes. These staged, filmed, and emotionalized moments are clumsy, lacking the heartfelt ingenuity of the rest of the film. They are not very interesting even though they are meant to function quite dramatically. Likewise, his love of all things camp, including Dolly Parton, isn’t that interesting. Camp is the new black (everyone knows that). His incredible giftedness isn’t that interesting, there are lots of talented people out there. He, like his mother in her youth, is a strikingly beautiful person, which of course isn’t that interesting. It isn’t even very interesting that the film was made for only $218. The version on DVD was certainly a few hundred thousand dollars more than that after song rights and the like were purchased (his frequent use of Low was a great addition). And while his visual approach is very engaging, technically acrobatic, and even innovative, the film is too narrative for us to take it simply on a formal basis. Visually the film is arresting, but this at times is threatened by the potential banality of his self-characterization. All in all, there are a lot of things not very interesting about the film.

But I think the film is more than the sum of its parts. He becomes interesting at the end, even in the midst of these underwhelmingly staged scenes. He sits next to his mother sleeping on the couch and falls asleep, having provided the home for his mother that she was never able to provide for him. This profoundly ethical act rescues the film from narcissism. It is this act that makes him extremely interesting, and his method of filmmaking enables us to participate in this process with him. In the end what makes the film absolutely worthwhile is that he tells this story to its conclusion.

“Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.”


Last Days is a religious film. A loosely fictional account of the days leading up to the suicide of the lead singer of an internationally famous grunge band, it is an extended meditation on the death of Kurt Cobain. It is a passion play in the truest sense of the term, each scene the stop on a walk through the “stages of the cross” that traces the last days of this musician named Blake. Perhaps we can even sense hints of Veronica in a scene where a young woman helps him lean back up against a wall, the Garden of Gethsemane in a haunting acoustic performance offered like a plaintive prayer, or the paralyzing fear of the disciples after the death of Christ as the only friends around Blake in the film scatter at the end. Whether or not these parallels exist, the film is unashamed hagiography, this character Blake standing in for Kurt Cobain.


It opens on Blake wandering in the woods, a noble savage, with no explanation offered until we are allowed to see the hospital bracelet on his wrist. He eventually makes his way through these woods to a ramshackle mansion that is either owned by him or a group of hipster musician friends currently occupying it. For a while he wanders through this house mumbling discursively to himself, frequently changing outfits, and even setting up another year’s worth of advertisements in the Yellow Pages with a representative that stops by. Eventually we learn that Blake has escaped from a rehab facility in the last few days before the deal for a world tour was supposed to be signed. At some point he takes a conference call from band mates about this contract to which he mumbles a few times and then hangs up. There are two moments in the film where Van Sant portrays Blake as someone being used by those around him, this phone call and a later scene where one of his friends asks for money and then actually reaches into his pocket and grabs some. Blake is far too weak or coherent to care about either. These scenes are fairly blatant criticisms of Blake’s companions and band mates, as if his celebrity and influence extended to those around him and their desire to maintain this connection contributed to his collapse. If so, this is a hefty commentary on Cobain’s following as a whole and a point at which all comparisons to the passion story of Jesus fall apart.


Other than these scenes, Van Sant includes little narrative detail. A private eye has been hired to track him down following his escape from rehab. He does little other than add a story about Billy Robinson, a vaudeville performer who switched his persona to that of a Chinese magician because they were so popular at the time. His signature act was catching a bullet in his teeth, which made him very famous until one killed him. In his report, the coroner actually called this “death by misadventure,” but conspiracy theorists have often wondered whether it was really a suicide. The analogy here is frighteningly obvious. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon makes an appearance in a kindly attempt at tough love. She asks him if he talks to his daughter, and if so, “Do you say I’m sorry that I’m a rock and roll cliché?” He turns down her invitation to take him back to rehab. One can sense both her concern and disgust at this wasted genius. Unlike others in the film, for her it isn’t about “the scene” as much as it is about reality. Towards the end of the film Blake wanders down to town where he meets an admirer played by Harmony Korine at a club. Blake’s non-responsiveness is complete, as if he has already left the world, and he stumbles back up the long hill to the mansion and to his death.


For most of the film we just follow Blake around as he eludes those who are looking for him. Most of what he says we can’t understand, and most of what he does is unpredictable to the point of being parabolic. In this sense Van Sant seems to be channeling another passion film in that Dreyer’s The Passion of the Joan of Arc isn’t as much about history as it is about a person. Overlaid by the bare facts of the circumstances of her death, Dreyer’s close scrutiny of Joan’s face is an emotional exercise. In the same way Van Sant gives birth to the hopelessness and despair of Blake’s demise, the only difference being that we never really get a glimpse of his face. Dreyer affords us uninhibited access to Joan by means of well-placed close-up shots; Van Sant effectively hides Blake from us.


Perhaps it is Van Sant’s odd focus of on a Boyz II Men video that provides another center to the film. In one room of the house Blake turns on the TV while their video “On Bended Knee” is playing. It is not just that this video is so embarrassingly plastic that it contrasts the humanity of Blake’s plight, or that its cheesiness points to the MTV consumerism that also contributed to Blake’s suicide. Later in the film Van Sant plays almost the entirety of Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs,” which eventually contains the same lyric, “on bended knee.” (Severin, severin, speak so slightly/Severin, down on your bended knee/Taste the whip, in love not given lightly/Taste the whip, now plead for me/I am tired, I am weary/I could sleep for a thousand years/A thousand dreams that would awake me/Different colors made of tears). There is a grinding intertextuality at play here, one that highlights both the schlock of the Boyz II Men song and the mock emotionalism of the Lou Reed lyric. The artificiality inherent to both reflects on the nature of Blake’s career and may clue us into a vague sense of his self-perception.


Any thoughts about the film as a passion narrative are inspired by a final scene. Blake’s body is found the next morning by an observant gardener, and while he is peering through the window at his body Blake’s soul steps out of it and begins climb upwards, using the window as a ladder. This scene comes as a surprisingly abstract end to a film that has been so realist in tone up to this point. It also comes as a surprisingly religious conclusion to a loosely fictional film about one of America’s favorite icons of middle-class nihilism. This ascension isn’t an afterthought to Blake’s “last days,” it is the conclusion. Van Sant also doesn’t allow us to accept this startling image as a metaphor for the platitude that “his spirit will live on.” After his body is discovered, the other people staying at the mansion realize they could be charged with complicity in the tragedy. As they flee, one questions whether issues of legacy in this case are even feasible. This image of ascension signifies Blake’s worth as a person over and against his worth as a cultural icon. It is not a theological image as is its passion narrative parallel, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. It is an utterly human image, an iconography of pathos that robs Cobain’s death of its purely cultural overtones and recasts it in the dignity of anonymous suffering.


I honestly can’t decide whether this is a good or bad film. Van Sant does resort to playing with the sequence of time in a few of his edits in an effort to flag interest in the frequently dull moments of the screenplay. And it could easily be read as another attempt at the mythologizing of Cobain’s persona, repackaging it in religious terms. But this may not be the case.

The Sun is the final installment of a three part series of biopics planned by Alexander Sokurov, one of the most consistent and unpredictable directors currently on the scene. Each film covers a key moment in the life of a world leader, the first two films, Moloch and Taurus, featuring Hitler and Lenin. The Sun follows around the surprisingly enigmatic Hirohito in the hours before Japan surrendered to American ground forces. Sokurov treats this turn of world events with characteristic distance and dignity, so much so that if I knew nothing about the film, it would have taken me a few minutes to even catch on to the fact that I was watching Hirohito.


Most of the film takes place in the imperial bunker, the final location of the emperor’s absolute isolation from his people. Sokurov lingers calculatedly on daily routine, gazing for minutes at the eating of a breakfast, the buttoning of a tunic, or the distanced contemplation of an emperor vaguely aware of the devastation of his empire. His collapsed world is a series of artificially regal rooms locked tightly underground behind bombproof vaults. Ogata’s performance as Hirohito compliments Sokurov’s deliberate pacing, his precise and haunting nuances practically justifying the production of this film. The history the film describes is difficult, but Ogata manages to make these unprecedented moments engagingly human. When Sokurov restages the conversations between him and General Douglas McArthur, even a bit of humor transpires. I found myself chuckling in spite of myself. McAruthur's inability to comprehend Hirohito's role as emperor is balanced by Hirohito's presence as something from another world, incomprehensible even to his own people. These are probably some of the profoundest political lessons put on screen since Errol Morris’ Fog of War.


That is not to say that the film doesn’t have its share of horrors. Apparently, Hirohito had a keen interest in ma