Posted some news on the Jesco White biopic over at Twitch. The documentary Dancing Outlaw was awful to watch in a Capturing the Friedmans sort of way, so I can't quite imagine the effect of his story in an even more immediately cinematic way. It's strange in them thar hills.
Where is the Cinema? Some Cities and Films in 2008 (Curator)
I am happy to see my first piece up at Curator Magazine. I have long been an advocate of the International Arts Movement, and am happy to be at least a small part of what goes on there. At this point, I have monthly contributions scheduled, which will help with the overflow of upcoming screenings and DVD screeners.
A little snippet:
In all of these films there is a looming presence of places: real streets, cafés, and bits of geographical lore that persist beyond the imagination of these storied tours. They are films intent on celebrating their chosen landscapes rather than using them to concoct the kind of infectious screenscapes Baudrillard discovered all over Hollywood. And though only one of these films actually takes place in an American city, they inform us nonetheless. We step out of theaters after films like this into St. Louis, Boston, Austin, or any other hazardously American city armed with ways to look at our neighborhoods and daily routines in similarly thoughtful ways.
"Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio."
(Transmission - Joy Division)
The title Heartbeat Detector is an awkward anglicizing of Klotz’ La question humaine that draws attention away from his abstract universalizing of the tendency towards dehumanization that lay at the root of all Third Reich scheming. The English title refers to technology used by the Nazis during the Final Solution (like a much scarier version of Anton Chigurh's homing device). It is the sort of image that Klotz wedges often into the film, those which lodge in our memory because of the way their traumatic subtexts appeal to all of our senses. But Klotz' original title is even more provocative in the way that it links this present day corporate thriller to a brand of evil that transcends the Holocaust and lurks, as the film suggests, at the heart of capitalism in its increasingly globalized forms. It is an evil that has hit the film long before its sequence of events have actually begun, all its characters and consequences, even the unexpected cameo of Holocaust related cultural flotsam like a Joy Division track, are ripples that have since ranged far from the center.
Simon is assigned to psychologically evaluate the oddly behaving CEO (Mathias Jüst) of the French branch of a German petrochemical firm called SC Farb. A psychiatric version of a hitman, Simon has a knack for pruning dead weight from SC Farb’s payroll. He gains access to his CEO’s fading mental health by feigning interest in an orchestra that used to play for the workers in the factory. But through letters, interviews, and odd encounters, Simon begins to uncover the origin of Jüst’s despair in the WW II collaboration between SC Farb and the Nazis. Klotz’s direction is quiet and still, slowly engaging the psychology of its inevitable revelations. Yet his storytelling cuts and leaps through Simon’s investigation, each interview and discovery like a bullet point on a board-meeting docket.
And then the film periodically explodes in barely intelligible orgiastic club scenes followed by their off-kilter aftermath. Its characters become unhinged, freed from the oppressive confines of Klotz' direction, and wake up on sidewalks after lengthy binges. The centerpiece of the film is a long take lit only by strobe light during which Simon gives himself over to the moral confusion set in motion by his discoveries, partying like a soldier on R&R from the front. I think we come to grips in this scene with the “la question humaine” as one that undermines the battle lines between commerce and conscience, as if it is just as barbaric to be corporate post-Holocaust as it is to write poetry. Corporate-speak is genetically related to the death of language in propoganda. Dilbert is actually a lexicon of cruelty. These more abstract scenes briefly envision Simon in that same space occupied by Godard’s marionette radicals in La Chinoise, Roland in Weekend, or the Native American avatars in Notre Musique - that irritating place where unmanageable political ideas take narrative form, the visual equivalent of Kafkian inside jokes.
The final moments of Heartbeat Detector are a flawless blip of pure cinema emerging from the politically descriptive power of the film. I couldn't help but think of them in terms of Wittgenstein's few uses of darkness as a metaphor for the limits of language. What is left in the wake of the Final Solution (both its execution and failure) is a devaluation of meaning that makes it difficult for language and its nationalist associations to cohere. The momentum of narrative revelations in the film create an emotional and linguistic landslide that Klotz represents through the film's more abstract scenes, but even more directly here in the Shoah-like tangle of sounds and images at the end. It resembles the pithy call and response of Hiroshima, mon amour, but can only script Simon's solitary, confused, anguished voice. He has arrived at the end of the landslide, immobilized. His recitation of “stucke, stucke” in these final moments of darkness calls to mind the use of the word to refer to the corpses of Nazi victims in train cars and camps. I have often been surprised by how liturgical Resnais’ voiceovers are in their form and effect, likewise the end of Heartbeat Detector is a haunting liturgical call with no expected response.
Just posted some info on Jerusalema at Twitch. Even though it strikes me as yet another City of God crime spree, I am looking forward to digging into the biblical references evoked by its title and points of dialogue throughout. The title itself comes from a hymn its director overheard while putting the film together which is all about Jerusalem as the promised land. The application of Jerusalem imagery to "New South Africa" is well known, but the film seems to take these allusions to their logical extreme.
Just posted some info on Refn's Bronson at Twitch. I am not as much of a fan of the Pusher series as others have been, though they appeal whatever it is in me that has to watch any Van Damme or Segal movie that is on TV just because. But something about the way its initial plotlessness has been described grabs my attention. Seems like Chopper in that Scandinavian mode that makes everything plot detail feel so universal.
Well I hope that someday buddy
We have peace in our lives
Together or apart
Alone or with our wives
And we can stop our whoring
And pull the smiles inside
And light it up forever
And never go to sleep
My best unbeaten brother
This isn't all I see
Oh no, I see a darkness
(“I See a Darkness” – Will Oldham)
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
(Groucho)
I am happy that I caught Wendy and Lucy right after rereading Jeffrey Staley’s near perfect essay “What is Critical about Autobiographical (Biblical) Criticism?” for the umpteenth time. It is an essay that after reading many times I have come to hate as much as I love, because it draws me out, it points at an elusive “me” that so often cowers behind sonorous technical proclamations or dense historical reconstructions. His footnotes, flecked with David Foster Wallace-like twists of narrative and poetry, draw the reader back into the text rather than into away into a forest of scholarship. And then a few points in he writes this:
“But the more personal and revelatory our writing becomes, the more we are forced to deal with questions of telling and naming. For example, when I write in the public arena of scholarly discourse about myself—my wife, my brothers, or my children; or my schoolmates from my childhood years on the Navajo Reservation; or my career as a scholar-teacher, I wrestle with questions of how the people I have named might react to my stories if they read them tomorrow—or five, ten, or twenty years from now. Should I change names and places to protect the innocent? But
who are the innocent and what or who makes them so?
It seems to me that part of the political and ethical power of autobiographical biblical criticism lies precisely in its willingness to give flesh and blood names to the disease of our scholarship and to our situatedness in the world. But I worry when I write. Am I really standing with the characters in my narratives, allowing them to speak “their” truth, or am I using them gratuitously as exotic embellishments to enliven a less than convincing argument? …Serious ethical issues are raised when there is the real possibility that our writing might “re-victimize” the voiceless and the powerless.”
Staley is talking here in general about the intellectual possibilities opened up by accepting “autobiography” as a legitimate scholarly enterprise, which becomes problematic when one considers the range of people affected by it. It is easy to talk about people in the past that we have no personal connection to. But what happens when we begin to talk about those who are part of our personal history? There is an established ethic in place for narrating history, but what sort of ethic is there for telling stories about the present? How do we do autobiography without hurting other people? I think the answer lies in forms of compassion. Not pseudo kindly speech-acts such as: “with all due respect”, “as far as I can tell”, or “things were different back then”. But compassion as a hermeneutic, a way of literately interpreting and reorganizing our memories as they bubble up in response to something we are reading or watching. This theme is implicit in Staley’s essay, but I have become convinced that this sort of autobiographical compassion exists out there in the world because I have seen it in films like Wendy and Lucy.
Reichardt has said that Wendy and Lucy isn’t autobiography in terms of narrative detail. She did some couch-surfing in her youth (and travels with a dog), but nothing that approximates Wendy’s lonely sojourn. Yet the film is her response to the dread increasing awareness of our economic interconnectedness, the shocking knowledge that my 401k really is connected to a few hundred jobs in northwestern Ohio. In this context, Wendy is Reichardt’s potential victim. She is powerless and voiceless because she is cashless, and as Reichardt’s creation Wendy is doomed to the political whims of her response to the American economic illness that has made her fictional plight so relevant. Thankfully, though there are a few characters within the confines of the film that demonstrate kindness towards Wendy and her furry pal, it is only a compassion on the part of Reichardt that keeps the film from slipping into the same dark oblivion towards which her character is traveling. On the way to a seasonal fishing gig in Alaska, Wendy gets stuck in an Oregon town while waiting for her car to get fixed. After getting written up for shoplifting by the local constabulary, Wendy loses her dog Lucy. Like a horrible stretch of dominoes, this series of events turns quickly against Wendy, and the film tracks her all the way to its inevitable end. It isn’t Reichardt, however, that is to be blamed for slowly decreasing Wendy's range of social and financial choices, as we have just hopped into the story long after this chain of events had begun. It stretches much farther back, beyond Reichardt’s reach, into the recesses of the vanishing American dream.
If it weren’t for Reichardt’s poetic deliberation throughout the film, the only logical end for Wendy would be her eventual “re-victimization,” as Staley puts it. This quiet auteurist energy runs against the grain of the Kafkian senselessness of her predicament and the barely intelligible rhetoric of those few characters on the margin that could be considered as belonging to Wendy’s haphazard demographic. The effectiveness of her style, which also granted Old Joy an unexpected gravity, maintains her dignity as a mode of Reichardt’s response to all the social problems critiqued by the film. She “stands with” Wendy and “speaks her truth.” And then the audience, as a witness to this compassion, responds in turn. Sicinski has criticized Reichardt for “a dubious preoccupation with a certain strain of Americana, to the detriment of providing a clear picture of how disenfranchised people in our country actually exist today.” Because Wendy is white, bumps into Will Oldham, and vanishes on a train, she is actually a stand-in for a kitsch version of the “poor.” She is only a moderately successful imitation of a Bob Dylan heroin that is more at fault for her predicament than the director lets on. But I think his criticism misses the way in which Wendy and Lucy are tragic figures in a cultural subtext beyond Reichardt’s own control. Wendy’s whiteness isn't an issue, and neither is the way Reichardt elides her personal responsibilities. What is at stake in the film, where it either succeeds or fails, in is the teleology of Reichardt’s storytelling. Over this, she does have control, and frames Wendy as a social critique with a compassion that allows us to witness her flight into a lonely darkness as something other than an “exotic embellishment” to an otherwise “unconvincing argument.” (And perhaps even unravels some of the Sicinski-irking Jack London stereotypes of the Great North that fed the romanticizing of cash-strapped pilgrimages like Wendy's.) The film isn’t autobiography, but it works like autobiographical criticism should: standing with people within our narratives rather than allowing them to be overtaken and re-victimized by the ease of hindsight. As Buechner said, “Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.” This is the kind of compassion that Reichardt seems to get, and that permits Wendy and Lucy to peter out in shadows.
More gratuitous Staley:
“There are, you know, powerful metaphors outside the Bible that shine in the darkness. They shine even in the deep night of the winter solstice. Sometimes they light up the night with a sudden shower of fiery shooting stars. They may be ancient words, spinning through a myriad of galaxies as old as the universe herself, but many are young, personal words that the darkness cannot grasp or overpower. They wind around the framework of our lives; they come alive and live with us and in us, and find us a place in the world. These words, the old and the young of them, haunt our memory. They are the ones we recall when we are on the move, when we are uprooted from the places and the people we know and love.”
Wendy and Lucy are this kind of metaphor.
In honor of the passing of Fr. Neuhaus, I have collected most of the few references to different films in his First Things column. He didn't talk about movies too much in the journal, and all of the actual film criticism and review was undertaken by other writers. But from time to time he would refer to a particular movie, and I would invariably chuckle or nod. Sometimes both. I just could never imagine the man actually sitting down to watch a movie, but the offhand incisiveness of these references suggests otherwise. Say what you want about the man's politics, but he had a remarkable facility with texts of all kinds.
On Borat:
I saw a couple of trailers for the film on television and admit that I laughed out loud before I wondered whether I should...
Others have noted that Borat, like Michael Moore with his assault-interview tactics, exploits people who are simply trying to be nice. The niceness so typical of Americans is a fair target for mockery, although, all in all, niceness is to be preferred to nastiness. The argument is, however, that Borat doesn’t so much mock the niceness of his victims as he portrays their niceness as dumbness and bigotry. And then there are those complaints by interviewees that Borat or the producers of the film actually lied to them about what they were being asked to take part in.
I have more than enough moral questions of moment to occupy my time, so I don’t think I’ll make a major project of Borat. But I have been persuaded not to add my $10to its box office success. In truth, it didn’t take that much persuading, since I haven’t gone out to a movie in a long time.
On One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:
"The above is in no way intended to lend support to the enemies of Western Civilization who suggest that, in our kind of insane society, the asylum is the refuge of the sane. One thinks of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization or the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on the Ken Kesey novel of that title. Nor should we sentimentalize the tradition of the “holy fool,” in which fools, holy or not, were often left to die in their squalor. The question of how to deal with the intolerably strange is probably one of the truly intractable problems in a world that is far short of the promised Kingdom of God. The contribution of Thomas Szasz is in cautioning us against the delusion of thinking that we have solved the problem or are on the way to solving the problem by telling ourselves that the strangeness is one medical problem among others."
On Da Vinci Code:
"Critics of Grace Hill and others who are party to this game are understandably puzzled about why evangelical Christians are plugging a story that alleges that the gospel accounts of Jesus are fraudulent. Of course, the line is that you can’t criticize something without having seen it. Which is nonsense with respect to more conventional pornography, and with respect to the spiritual pornography that is The Da Vinci Code. In addition to the suspicion of anti-Catholicism, one might also “think low” and ask just how much Grace Hill Media is getting paid to do Sony’s dirty work. Most poignant, of course, are those evangelicals who think they are “engaging the culture” and have hit the big time when Hollywood gives them “a place at the table” to discuss the pros and cons of blasphemy against their Lord and Savior."
On The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe:
"In two months the big-budget movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe will be released. The Disney people are putting on a full-court press with evangelical and Catholic leaders. It is reminiscent of the promotion of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Of course, Gibson was responding to massive and vicious attacks on his film, beginning many months before its release. I gather from a couple of people who have attended a screening of the Narnia film that it follows Lewis’ story very faithfully with no watering down of the Christian themes. If so, I see no reason to carp about Disney making big bucks out of it. It could be a further encouragement for Hollywood to turn away from productions of deadly dull decadence, or at least to recognize that there is money to be made also in films affirming religion and virtue. There are few studios that operate on the basis of altruism or zeal for the gospel. If Disney gets richer, God’s people are edified, and some pagans are converted, that’s not a bad outcome. As Michael Novak might say, such is the genius of capitalism."
On Les invasiones Barbares:
"No two times and no two places are entirely alike, and no time and place was very much like Quebec in the 1960s. As Father Raymond Leclerc says in the 2003 film Les Invasions Barbares: “You know, way back, everybody here was Catholic, just as in Spain or Ireland. And then, at a very specific moment—it was during the year 1966—in only a few months, the churches suddenly emptied out. A very strange phenomenon, one that nobody has ever been able to explain...
As a tour guide in the provincial parliament building explains to a tourist puzzled by the prominence of a crucifix, C’est l’histoire, madame—“Madam, that is history.” The official motto of Quebec, emblazoned on its license plates, is Je me souviens—“I remember.” Among the things they remember, along with the endless battles with English Canadians and the struggle to assert themselves as a “nation within a nation,” they remember when Quebec was Catholic. A few remember it fondly; most remember it in order, by remembering, to make sure it will not return."
I really wish the guy had taken on more of the First Things film assignments. Have any more, feel free to send them in.
"Why did Jesus go 'round with all them reindeers?"
(Ali G)
In yet another installment to a growing body of non-canonical Jesus images, Sasha Baron Cohen has a Black Jesus in store for American audiences.
From the The Sun (yes, The Sun):
"The gay fashion correspondent from Austria, played by Sacha looks set to infuriate religious groups with one of the key characters a black model called Jesus who wears a loincloth and a crown of thorns. Test audiences in the US have seen an early edit and the more religious members at the screenings failed to see the funny side."
I can't imagine this being more left-field than Black Jesus, but I can already gather what sort of response this is going to get should it make the final cut. Personally, I am ready to see what Cohen has to say about Jesus beyond what we can glean from this highly informative clip:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fincher, 2008)
Even though this is a film that has already been made a few times (Forrest Gump, Big Fish, etc…), I enjoyed all the little Fincher touches that bend Button's rays of history through a thin lens of magical realism. Finally alighting on the paradoxical subtexts of Birth, after more than a few nods towards the elusive marital bliss of The Time Traveller's Wife, the film leaves a lot of space in its wake for reflection on time and marriage. It is nice metaphor for the way our love for people changes according to their needs. We love those closest to us in quantum, relative ways, according to the dance of time and circustance. Can the story be taken as a confession? As Fitzgerald's preemptive apology to all those who would suffer through his slow devolution through alcoholism? Those final images are almost terrifying in this respect. Written early in his career, he at least seemed already in touch with the seduction of literature as wish-fulfillment. Regardless, this is a great story about love and time and the sad inevitability of change.
“But there can't be any love... 'cause there aren't any people.”
(She’s So Lovely)
If Bazin was right when he said, "the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up in love," then The Wrestler is just barely cinema. It is nice to look at, and is by far Aronofsky’s best film to date, but despite frequent nods toward the development of its broken characters he still seems distracted by things like the perfect 80’s track, the proper strip club mood, or catchy flashbacks. Pi, the abhorrent Requiem for a Dream (one of the most pro-addiction films ever made), and the muddled film-school daydream The Fountain (which squanders so much rich imagery), these are all films that are content move their characters around Aronofsky’s chessboard of technical intrigue. His films unfold like a Yahtzee scorecard, attempting to check off predetermined sets of edits and tracking shots in such a way that characters become subordinate to their own blocking. All the buzz about Mickey Rourke’s performance was exciting; I thought that maybe Aronofsky had turned the corner with an actual character study. But as a “proactive documentary,” the film does little to grant Ram any substance other than a flirtation with a redemption subtext and a few scenes with his abandoned daughter.* This criticism is not ignoring the fact that Ram’s character is by nature paper thin; the causes and effects of his anachronistic superficiality is the whole point of the movie. Aronofsky’s ambivalence towards his characters in The Wrestler is demonstrated in the paint-by-numbers movement of Ram through a storyline that has all the depth of a Euripides third act. In his century BCE, Euripides made some interesting narrative moves. But a character with Ram’s awfully modern teleology deserves better than a stripper whose big conundrum is that she can’t date clients, a daughter who is mad at her daddy for staying at the bar for too long, and a service job that pushes his social skills to their limit. By the time we get to the end of the film, Ram’s demise neither fulfills nor subverts the dread that has been growing throughout the film. It simply punctuates it, one more wound in Ram’s broken flesh. It is no different than the end of Nacho Libre, in which Jack Black soars senselessly (yet beautifully) through the air towards the credits. It isn’t the end of Ram in any significant way, it is just the end of the film.
And I get it. That last image is a barbaric yawp, a bold flicker of pure cinema that enervates the history of Ram with a thousand volt pulse of his visceral spirit. But what Aronofsky doesn’t get is that even as a construct, Ram deserves much more than this. At the end Ram recognizes the sacrificial nature of this last performance before his “family,” all those in the audience that have participated in his slow defeat over the years. As it is, Aronofsky has made the audience of The Wrestler part of this ironic family, and the last image is just as lost on us as it will inevitably be on them. And here is why: Aronofsky doesn’t love his characters. Not like Herzog, who treats Kinski’s similar impotence with compassion (friend and fiend), and doesn’t let us leave Stroszek without shouldering the anxiety of its lost soul. Also not like the Dardennes, who in their “proactive documentaries” enable us to love all the broken people in The Son or Rosetta in a John 15 way. Even P.T. Anderson forces us to stumble around with a litany of characters at the end of their rope. Noe even ends Irreversible with an embrace and a kiss. We could go on and on in this list, but unfortunately, Ram would never show up on it. Potential compassion is expressed through positioning the film as “The Passion of Mickey Rourke.” In Ram, his iconic Barfly status is redeemed, the frozen mask of scars accrued from years of boxing granting the film a literal sense of trauma. There is also a stream of references to Isaiah, and sacrificial scars, and the hiss of a traitorous crowd (and even “Ram” harkens back to Abraham and Isaac). There is a sentimentality in every toss of Ram’s hair, one that circumvents Kurt Cobain for the uncomplicated zeal of the 80’s. And Rourke’s mesmerizing performance keeps us at the surface level of his character until we sadly realize that is the only layer - an exhausted will to power. But at no point is Aronofsky hardwired into any of these potential narrative outlets for more than a moment, and I am not sure why. I just don’t understand how a character as perfectly conceived and richly performed as Ram is allowed to exit the film in a vapor of Aronofsky flair. He gets close here to the realism that he claims is the goal of his “proactive documentary,” but Ram remains every bit the pawn in his stylistic gambit as he is in the ring. By the end of the film, Aronofsky hasn’t actually justified all the damage he has done to this massive character. It turns out to be nothing other than a formal device. It's just torture.
* ”I call it proactive documentary, because I think in a real documentary everything is reactive. If you’re watching Cops and a guy runs away and then a second later the camera chases after the guy and goes after him, we didn’t have that second delay. We kind of knew what the scene was about and we knew where Mickey or Marisa was going to go. So we were able to choreograph that. We kind of had this proactive style where we were working with the actor to give a documentary feeling, allow realism to happen, but we were ready for it.” - This is as tautological as cinema gets. You can’t block and edit scenes like this and cry “realism” at the end.
