Film - Think

I am very happy to announce the release of Filmwell, a daily updated blog on film, criticism, and related matters. It is an honor to be working with this lineup of contributors.

Most of the writing I used to do here at Film-Think will now simply be posted over there. I will keep this site updated with fresh links as often as possible.

Due to the amount of places I am writing outside of Film-Think, I am having to do a bit of a redesign here.

All the archives are still present.

I have been off and on involved with a local gallery/studio space here in St. Louis that often sets up exhibitions. This month, there will be an open studio night for which I have programmed an hour's worth of shorts. The Solanas isn't actually my first choice, but since no one is sending me the Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film set for review, and I lost my Maya Deren discs, I kind of ran out of time. I hope to be able to do this again sometime when I will be able to DJ short films into more invigorating orders and patterns.

Here are the program notes:

Luminary Open Studio Short Film Program

“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'”

Stan Brakhage

This selection of short films is interested in the exchanges that happen between film and additional material. CGI, hand animation, bits of moths and leaves, paint, scratches in celluloid by metal tools - these are all alternative film processes that challenge the way we see, experience, and appropriate the projected image.

Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004 – CGI/Stock Footage/35mm - 14 min.)

Landreth refers to the animating process that takes place in Ryan as psychorealism, which is just a snappy way to describe the way he uses color and form to enact the emotions of his subjects. Through the use of CGI and embedded footage, Landreth stages an interview with Ryan Larkin, a seminal hand-animation artist who has fallen on hard times. Ryan is a compassionate look at addiction and the creative process, as well as an engrossing ode to a past age of short format filmmaking.

Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963 - Moth Bits/Tape/16mm - 3 min.)

Brakhage took piles of moth wings and pressed them between two strips of clear tape. He then passed this long strip through a 16mm film printer, and out came one of our most treasured short films. Brakhage described it as “What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black.” But the flutter of these dancing moth bits also challenges the idea that cinema is inherently fictional, disembodied, and disconnected from the physical ebb of life.

Eye Myth (Stan Brakhage, 1967 - Paint/16mm - 9 sec.)

Though it passes by in the blink of an eye (it took Brakhage a year to paint), Eye Myth is a complicated parable about the way looking and storytelling relate. Can the eye tell its own stories, produce its own myths? If so, what do they actually look like? What exactly is this man trapped in the paint at the end of Eye Myth? These messy ontological riddles haunted much of Brakhage’s filmmaking.

The Wold Shadow (Stan Brakhage, 1972 - Glass/Paint/16mm - 3 min.)

While walking through the woods one day, Brakhage encountered a shadowy image that he could only reproduce by filming through glass that had been painted frame by frame. What he came up with was several minutes of film in homage to whatever it was that haunted him about nature throughout his life, expressible only through these multiple screens of image that passed through his acute perception, painterly hands, deliberately affected celluloid, and then the projector.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (Stan Brakhage, 1981 - Paint/Plant Material/16mm - 3 min.)

A close cousin to Mothlight, this short film is an ecstatic celebration of nature in a crescendo of projected paint and plant material. It is a fine example of Brakhage’s commitment to these lengthy construction processes that confront the viewer with a microcosm of pure cinema. Imagine putting this together frame by frame, 24 frames per second, 3 minutes worth of film.

The Stars are Beautiful (Stan Brakhage, 1974 - Voiceover/16mm - 18 min.)

This is a grueling, atypical Brakhage film that most people fast-forward through. He breaks his silence in this one to recite a litany of ad hoc creation myths that have much to do with why he became a filmmaker in the first place, and layers these thoughts over footage of clipped chicken wings and assorted farmland terrors. Watching Brakhage work with actual footage, clipping it, merging it, and stretching it across and abstract narrative, is an odd experience.

Kindering (Stan Brakhage, 1987 - 16mm - 3 min.)

Kindering is built on shots of grandchildren playing in a backyard split by streams of color and shadow, unexpected light, and massive jump cuts. You get a glimpse of Brakhage’s love for childlike perception in the film, which is enhanced by the way something far more sinister and consuming threatens to overtake his original footage.

L’homme sans tête (Juan Solanas, 2003 - CGI/35mm Film - 18 min.)

This acclaimed short is about headless man going on an important date in an industrial wasteland. On his way, he stops off at the head shop to pick just the right noggin for the occasion, and has troubled settling on the right visage. Crafted over four years through painstaking CGI, Solanas’ film is as painterly as a Dutch master (or is it a Magritte?). It is hard to see the incredible amount of work it took to create the film through its jaunty, romantic exterior. But Solanas’ film is a fledgling experiment in the kind of immersive world-building that mainstream cinema has begun its slow movement towards.

(Sorry for the meandering review. This one will hit my annual list as soon as it has had a theatrical run. Or has it? Or should that even matter? Regardless, I am still trying to gather my thoughts on it and keep coming up short.)

You may reach a point in your life where you look around yourself and wonder: When did the bomb drop? You are feeling survivor emotions, thinking victim thoughts, haunted by the specter of an anonymous trauma. You look through the hum at those close to you, your brother, your lover, your children, and you can see traces of the same fallout settling in every crack of their unspoken thoughts. You watch it spread like a black cloud across the hidden rubble of our most private frames of mind. In your quietest moments you puzzle over what happened, and when it happened, and whether or not something actually happened. But the unshakeable sense of loss and apprehension, a built-in catalog of crises, lingers for no apparent reason and begins to inform your sense of what it means to be human. We often link this fallout to a broken relationship, an experience of abuse, or any number of the awful eventualities that we use to define ourselves and name the emotional wavelengths that seem to have no other source. But over time you may become convinced that this mythopoetic apocalypse is simply the default condition of life.

Alejandro Adams’ Around the Bay is hardwired into this sense of trauma. Not simply in terms of its storyline, which in a detailed way tracks the life of a single father, his unmanageable son, and estranged daughter, but in the very fabric of its rhythmic edits. I once heard Claire Denis say that her L’intrus is “not realistic, but it is real in its feelings” and that “it is a proposal.” That little key unlocked a lot of her films for me (especially Vendredi soir, which in this respect is a high point of her career). I wouldn’t say that Around the Bay shares in this same kind of structural provision that elicits a fairly Barthesian brand of reader-response. But it is caught in a similar web of representational issues that compels Denis to produce films with a relative opacity, a compassionate disregard for an audience steeped in what are ultimately less rewarding narrative patterns. There are ways in which the storyline of Around the Bay could have been told in more immediately engaging ways, as it pretty much has been in a myriad other films and sitcoms (distant father, lost daughter, unmanageable son, yada yada yada). But these evaporate quickly, don’t they? We see these kinds of characters so often that at some point we simply stop seeing them. Adams’ solution to this problem, a sort of auteur compassion for those he discovers in his storylines, involves consciously abandoning traditional directorial processes for the chance that he may be able to snag a bit of pure cinema from a stream of unadorned DV. And he does.

The distant father becomes a formal device, imparting his numb disassociation from everything to the slippage between image and audio. The fragile stoicism of the daughter takes its shape over long stretches of shoe-string verité vignettes until collapsing in the final moments – the film’s first truly coherent image – which bears the burden of all these loose threads. The young boy, who seems a bit tangential to the whole affair, really is at the center of the film’s chaos. He is an incarnation of Adams’s sense of wonder in some scenes, and charts the meandering vigor of his directorial process in others.

Adams' films are filled with the Bressonian tedium of life. They become overdetermined. Too long. Too many of these tenuous sequences. A man reading the paper. A dead fly. A peanut butter sandwich. Back to the paper. He is rubbing his chin. Then taking a shower. A little boy climbing a tree. But despite the difficulty of maintaining this grueling pace, the minutiae accumulates and begins to look like something, almost like a story. It is interminable, but there is definitely something in there. And then the film edits over to his daughter talking to a co-worker about how her estranged father has just lost his job and his girlfriend left him, and it all snaps into place. This rubber-banding effect persists throughout the film, cycling the audience through montages that only gain traction later. All the formal dislocation, which is precisely that felt by its characters, gains greater clarity as the soundtrack begins to slip later in the film. Conversations slide across fades to black and unexpected edits. Background noise eclipses conversations previously begun. An ocean of crickets invades the spaces in which we would expect to find declarations, impassioned explanations, or even less poignant bobs of narrative info.

Around the Bay has some sharp representational axes to grind. But Adams is deft enough – via a Leigh dramaturgical luckiness, a Dogme aloofness, a quietly uncollected Cassevetes determination, he is a name-dropping choose your own adventure – that any meta-critique of cinema as a Platonic arbiter of otherwise genuine flickers of those seemingly untappable gestures of broken humanity becomes a means rather than an end. He could pose himself as provocateur, but submits himself to the gentle development of his script instead. This is fine, indulgent cinema. It isn’t refined at all. But it appeals to the tectonic flux of narrative that engages our personal editing processes. Loss and forgiveness proceed along these leaps and cuts in which our personal scripts bleed together despite our desire for them to cleave neatly. I was shaken by the final strokes of Around the Bay, which isn't merely a formal exercise, but a memorable description of this broken family.

Curator recently posted a short piece on JCVD and related issues. Excerpts:

In the beginning of JCVD, Jean-Claude action heroes his way through a five minute single take of guns firing, fists flying, and bombs bursting. Jean-Claude sweeps in sweaty arcs through debris, pirouetting through walls and flames, and battling villains across several planes of action like an artist. It is beautiful. The camera floats in and around this film within a film in such a way that for a brief moment grants transcendence to Jean-Claude’s typically straight-to-video exertions. But this unexpected glimpse of Van Damme in all his glory quickly gives way to a court scene custody battle in which his daughter frankly tells the judge she would rather be with her mother because all the kids at school laugh at her when her dad is on TV in crappy movies...

What we hear in this monologue is not as important as its delivery, and its context – a film in which Van Damme has skillfully acted through a stack of parallel storylines. His hypnotizing dance through the opening five minute long tracking shot of his latest action film says something about Van Damme. He has been unjustly ignored and marginalized. His iconic status lends his now mostly straight to video performances both a note of shame or tragedy, and a corresponding smirk of schadenfreude from a mercurial audience. But this iconic status is also what makes JCVD much more than an exercise in snappy filmmaking. It drills down into what it means to feel as lost as the real life Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the way we shoulder the burden of our mistakes that can’t simply be written out of the script.