Film - Think

Introducing Filmwell

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:18:00 +0000

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.

Under Construction

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:47:00 +0000

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.

Short Film Program at the Luminary Center for the Arts

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:13:00 +0000

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.

Around the Bay (Adams, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:26:00 +0000

(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) JCVD, etc...

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:34:00 +0000

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.

Revanche (Spielmann, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:33:00 +0000

Reviews of films by people like Spielmann often resort to words like "clinical," "cold," "sterile," and other quasi-backhanded descriptions for an approach to filmmaking that banks on long static takes across uncluttered narratives. This kind of pacing and mise-en-scène appears to consist of a detachment that results in that odd kind of cinema transcendence or functions as a set of artificial barriers against the confusing excesses of expression and emotion. This detachment feels like a broken current between director and actor, or director and this world within the lens. Or more specifically, the director and everything that exists in their neatly constructed universe conjured out of the barest minimum of narrative material and set in motion even thought it feels a bit incomplete. Too soon it seems, because we want more to sink our teeth into. So we say: sterile, clinical. They seem detached in the same way that Paley's watch is disconnected from the Watchmaker, but with less moving parts.

And this kind of detachment is often mistaken for some kind of clinical or cold attitude in the director's work, which I have noticed in reviews of Revanche. But often the opposite is the case, and Revanche is a great example of how this works. Spielmann's camerawork is completely controlled and moves in unadorned angles across its planes of action. It spends long periods of time watching its central character chop wood, traveling, thinking, etc... Whether via Tarkovsky's plaintively spiritual pacing or Dumont's steely resolve to resist expressive embellishment, these kinds of films are not as much about ideas and gestures as they are about passing time in a particular way - in Revanche for example, passing time after a staggering personal loss. And it isn't quite the case that Revanche is completely controlled because there are several instances in which the camera begins to move of its own accord. In the most striking of these, Spielmann tracks with a car turning off into the forest, but at the apex of the turn the camera continues moving forward, slowly, into the trees beyond and then it sits for a moment and stares blankly at the trees.

This momentary lapse in Spielmann's grip on the film is telling. It tells us that his control over the lens isn't sterile, or clinical, or cold. It is actually very compassionate and benevolent. It directs the entirety of our focus to the gnawing despair felt by its main characters, and allows us to track the fragile spread of pain and loss throughout the film as plainly as possible. This particular scene comes at the awful moment on which the rest of the film pivots, Spielmann's small personal gesture here echoing loudly in its spacious interior. It is a sad moment, this drift the cinema equivalent of speechless shock. Spielmann's frame by frame decision not to rifle through the emotional toolbox for pat soundtracking, editing, or similar devices is actually very impassioned. His apparent detachment is the only way that these images can actually contain the unruly mess of real emotions that are at the center of the film. So Spielmann isn't clinical as much as he is sacrificial, abandoning personal flourishes for the sake of his agonized characters. We wouldn't be able to see them as clearly through the haze of less exacting edits. And what we are left with is a study of that kind of despair that leaves us reeling, confused, and unwilling to be part of a life that works like it does in Revanche. It is not really about coping with trauma as it is about how silly it sounds when people talk about "coping mechanisms" after certain kinds of tragedy.

For more on what Revanche is actually about, Robert Koehler has a great review.

Brand Managing the Church: The New Christian Film Industry

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:03:00 +0000

"Christian filmmaking is coming of age. Christian filmmaking is coming of age!"
(Doug Phillips, SAICFF organizer)

"...not all things are profitable."
(1 Cor. 6:12)

So I was sitting there in my car early on Saturday morning listening to NPR and all these Christians start talking. It was disorienting to say the least. The "fly-over state evangelical Christian" is one of NPR's most cherished stereotypes, and many of the people interviewed in this segment did little to contradict this set of assumptions. Wagon-circling? Check. Moralizing? Check. Polarizing? Check. Gobs Of Money To Blow? Oh most definitely, check.

It was the much-discussed bit on the St. Antonio Indpendent Christian Film Festival, which recently handed out prizes to films in a range of categories. The $101,000 prize went to The Widow's Might, a film by 19 year old auteur John Robert Moore about a woman about to lose her house to foreclosure and the people that help her keep it. Apparently there is a lot of singing in it, which means I will watch it. I am a sucker for any film in which people sing lines that could otherwise be spoken (though I doubt it has much in common with Honore's Love Songs, which is the best recent film of this ilk). And I will also watch it, because if someone associated with the festival is to be believed, The Widow's Might represents the adolescence (see above quote) of an industry that took its wobbly fledgeling steps with... that Left Behind movie? Spare the rod, spoil the child. More on that later.

Here are some choice bits from the vision behind the festival:

When a people worship sensuality or embrace dark visions of reality, it is always evidenced in the arts. There is no neutrality! On the other hand, when a nation fears and loves the God of Holy Scripture, their religious commitment is evidenced in the music they play, the way they dress, and their vision of family life... The future of our culture will be waged in the hearts and souls of the people of this nation. The vision of the Jubilee Awards and the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival is to make one of the many steps needed to lead men to Christ, to train Christians to actually think like Christians, and to take back the culture for the Lord Jesus Christ in the area of film by encouraging, motivating, and rewarding those uncompromising, creative, and innovative filmmakers who are willing to take the narrow path... More than ever before in the recent history of our nation, we have access to the tools for waging a new form of cultural guerilla warfare against the elites who would redefine the biblical family out of existence and present a dark and nefarious vision of reality to the future. We need Christians to challenge the present culture of death, infidelity, perversion, and ethical malaise by boldly proclaiming the crown rights of Jesus Christ over every sphere of life and thought — including film. God has given us a tremendous window of opportunity. We must seize the day!

All boilerplate culture wars stuff. There is so much to respond to here that it is difficult to distill my discomfort with this kind of visioneering into an easily readable blog segment. For starters, I am not so sure Christianity isn't about embracing "dark visions of reality." I can think of few descriptions of reality that touch the desperation at the heart of the Bible's holistic narration of sin and its effects in the world. It is only in the context of this "dark and nefarious vision" that the unthinkable largesse of the Bible's parallel description of grace takes shape. The gospel embedded in the span of story, poetry, and prose from Genesis to Revelation takes on a stunning range thematic shapes and forms. It is expressed by murderers, bitter depressives, diseased flesh, prostitutes, broken bodies, and any other contemptible thing it can think of between the Garden of Eden and the crystal streets of the New Jerusalem. It is terrible and wonderful, destructive and creative, ugly and beautiful all at once. If we want to start drawing thematic lines in the sand, the gospel and the Bible aren't going to be much help in finding valid starting points. The Bible is just as violent (Revelation 19:13), sensual (Proverbs 5:19), and dark (Mark 16:8) as it is hopeful and edifying.

The truth is that vision statements like this aren't making Biblical distinctions at all. This simply isn't how the Bible works. They are not even cultural distinctions. They are marketing distinctions. By framing the differences between Hollywood media and Church media in these kinds of a-biblical thematic terms, this vision statement isn't drawing the dramatic line between spiritual life and death that it thinks it is. It is simply drawing a line between two different kinds of products: We don't want to see your filth, Hollywood. We are going to make our own films. We are going to leverage our market. We are going to buy tickets and go to them. We are going to award them prizes! Then we are going to buy them when they come out on DVD. We are going to do this until until the pile of our products over here is bigger than your pile of products over there. This will be our signal that we have won the hearts and minds of the* culture. We will gain total thematic dominance over your dark and nefarious visions one DVD and related study guide at a time.

Is this really the "narrow path"? If so, why does it look exactly like the broad one that has led Hollywood to destruction? This kind of Christian film marketing is theologically insane. In the NPR story, Fireproof producer Stephen Kendrick explained why the film was such an instant success: "We did a lot of screenings showing the film to 'influencers,'" he explained. "That would be pastors, ministry leaders, those would be people who speak to the audience." The worst effect this envisioned Christian Film Industry would have on American christianity has little to do with these films themselves. I have no problem with people having family friendly media around. And the loss of narrative intelligence that accrues from being immersed in such didactic media is easy to deal with. The most deadly fallout is the culture that appears in the wake of Pastors and other ministry leaders being thought of as "influencers," which is an awfully Orwellian euphemism for "advertisers." This subversion of the Church by business in the guise of evangelism isn't worth whatever it produces.

*N.B.: Not just culture, but the culture. Far more ominous. It's what we drive through on the way to church.

Some Questions:

1. Is Christian filmmaking really coming of age? The lack of historical consciousness in such a statement is alarming. There may be a certain market coming of age, one that is linked to the success of things like Left Behind and Fireproof. But theology and the entire symbolic network of Christian thought have been at the center of cinema ever since David Livingstone toted magic lanterns all the way down to Africa. Tarkovsky, Bazin, scattered all through Film-Think are key figures in film history that had a very imaginative and culturally influential Christian impulse. Ingmar Bergman spoke often about how even though he became agnostic, all the Christian images he had picked up in his devoutly Lutheran home lurked in the recesses of his narrative consciousness. This indomitable presence of Christianity can be readily tracked throughout the last century of film history. And then, of course, there are the numerous Christians that are working quite successfully in the American film industry already. Christian filmmaking is as old as the medium itself.

2. Should a Christian ever spend 200 million dollars on a film production?

It Is Finished

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:47:00 +0000

What is Redemptive Cinema? (Christianity Today's 10 Most Redeeming Films of 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:28:00 +0000

Parallel to a different Top Ten of 2008 films, Christianity Today has posted a 10 Most Redeeming Films of 2008 list. Intrigued by the idea that I could also create two lists this year, I have gone ahead and written one as well: my 10 Most Redeeming Films of 2008. Surprise! It is exactly the same as my original list. My list is already packed with moments of redemption in every sense of the term on the theological spectrum from Guiterrez' overly political construction to Aquinas at his most bridal mystic. Cinema has an inherent capacity for redeeming spaces - street corners, buildings, entire cities - from the accretion of degrading myths about class and commerce (Still Life, My Winnipeg). Its ability to actually see people rescues them, and by extension ourselves, from the awful fate of being unknown or unheard (Red Balloon). Its immersive potential confronts us with biblical images and allusions in culturally significant ways, an immediate form of piety (Silent Light) that redeems biblical images and concepts from their overuse in the Hollywood system. Like the theological concept of redemption itself, cinema is bold enough to tangle with abortion, war, and religious oppression and actually win (4 Months..., Aleksandra). I have a vested interest in redemption, in its multiple and master-narrating biblical forms, and these kind of redemption-critical thoughts are what help me discover good film every year.

Christianity Today describes their reasoning on the list as follows:

So, what's a "redeeming" film? The definition varies, but for our list below, we mean movies that include stories of redemption—sometimes blatantly, sometimes less so. Several of them literally have a character that represents a redeemer; all of them have characters who experience redemption to some degree—some quite clearly, some more subtly. Some are "feel-good" movies that leave a smile on your face; some are a bit more uncomfortable to watch. But the redemptive element is there in all of these films.

So they are honoring films that contain a "redemptive element" that can be traced through a redemptive figure, theme, or narrative structure. I can buy that. And I can buy it despite all the problems that are part of talking about what makes something "redemptive" in the cinema. As a matter of fact, I also consider "redemption" to be a controlling critical factor in what I think of as "good" or "bad" cinema. But I would want to expand it, even redeem the term "redemptive" from the way it is so easily tossed about in evangelical cultural criticism. By now it is subject to Walker Percy's condemnation of how generic Christian vocabulary has become: "The old words of grace are worn smooth as poker chips and a certain devaluation has occurred, like a poker chip after it is cashed in." It can be used in the same sentence as "movies that leave a smile on your face." It can be disassociated from other critical concepts enough that it becomes the umbrella term for yet another list chosen of films from a given year. It has become a catch-all self-identifying term that appeals to a rapidly growing market of evangelical film-goers. What happens when "redeeming" becomes a successful market index?

Let's face it, we often cash redemption and all of its cognates in pretty quickly, when we could be spending its capital on those things that the Bible heaps it upon so lavishly. All those beautiful hopeless Ruths, the enslaved, the solipsist Gomers, the spoiled lands, etc... In film terms, redemption has an international scale and an aesthetic pulse. It redeems the world's poor and oppressed from their representation in a disorienting, dishonest TV universe of news bites, special interests, and marketing strategies. As a critical concept it looks for those marginalized voices out there with cameras and handfuls of shooting scripts, artists filling out festival schedules with independent productions of fragile human ideas, and unadorned reminders that people and places can actually be rescued, reconciled, adopted, and all these great verbs that are associated with redemption. And it buys back, bit by bit, all those weak ideas about redemption that have become so watered-down and denuded by Hollywood's use of the image as an easy narrative device, a handy way of tying movies up in neat packages, or something that lends depth to otherwise flat characters.

If we want to use "redeeming" with all of its Christological force as a certain way of looking at films, then we will have to go far off the beaten track, see things we don't want to see, and spend time and money on things that studios and publicists are telling us are worthless.

Regardless, here is the CT list. (Nice to see Wall-E, The Visitor, and Shotgun Stories on the top bit):

1. Wall-E
2. The Visitor
3. Gran Torino *
4. Horton Hears a Who
5. Rachel Getting Married *
6. Fireproof *
7. The Dark Knight
8. Shotgun Stories *
9. Slumdog Millionaire *
10. Man on Wire

The Ones That Got Away:

As We Forgive (Mark Moring) *
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Russ Breimeier) *
Defiance (Camerin Courtney) *
Doubt (Josh Hurst) **
The Fall (Brandon Fibbs)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Brett McCracken)
Iron Man (Alissa Wilkinson)
Ostrov [The Island] (Steven D. Greydanus) **
Pray The Devil Back To Hell (Todd Hertz) *
U23D (Jeffrey Overstreet) *
Wendy and Lucy (Peter Chattaway)

Representation of Rome in Film Seminar at the International SBL Meeting in Rome, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:54:00 +0000

I just recieved an email this morning with news that Dr. Laura Copier (Universiteit van Amsterdam) is looking for papers on the representation of Rome in Film for the International Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Rome this upcoming July.

It is nice to see ISBL picking up some more film related topics, especially with Laura Copier's name attached. I met her briefly at the 2007 San Diego meeting and was thrilled to discover an actual film critic at SBL. She told me all about her dissertation ("Preposterous Revelations: Visions of Apocalypse and Martyrdom in Hollywood Cinema 1980-2000"), which must have done well in defense. Abstract:

My project focuses on the recycling of Biblical images and narrative structures regarding the Apocalypse and its conceptions of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in contemporary Hollywood cinema. I examine to what extent representations of martyrs and self-sacrifices are informed by traditional religious notions of Apocalyptic martyrs and self-sacrifices, and how these notions are reproduced, but also transformed and redirected in the process of transmission. Hollywood cinema can be regarded as a site of re-use and re-interpretation of Christian and non-Christian visual and linguistic traditions. However, these adaptations and interpretations are performed by a secular, not (explicitly) religious system. In her book Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History Mieke Bal provides a methodological framework for integrating visual and linguistic traditions of interpretation. She proposes the term ‘quotation', which consists of both iconography and intertextuality. Taking my cue from Bal's theory of quotation, Hollywood may recycle certain elements of the original texts; the discourse of the historically precedent text still exerts its power in the new text. Therefore, I examine the influence of the precedent text. Once the historical source is traced, I analyse in what ways the new text is an active intervention in the earlier material. And finally, I attempt to define the transfer of meaning from past to present and from present to past. This implies a radical rethinking of Hollywood as a mere duplicator or recycler of ‘original' images and narrative structures. Here, one could perceive the original to be functioning as an after effect caused by the images of Hollywood cinema.

I won't make it to Rome this year, which is depressing as both this and a nifty papyrology session will be underway. But I would love to talk about the cruciform indictment of paparazzi in La Dolce Vita if I could.

White Lightnin' (Twitch)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:28:00 +0000

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)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:22:00 +0000

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.

Heartbeat Detector (Klotz, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:03:00 +0000

"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.

Jerusalema (Twitch)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 03:12:00 +0000

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.

Bronson (Twitch)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 03:05:00 +0000

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.

Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:24:00 +0000

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.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus on Film

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:42:00 +0000

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.

Borat's Black Jesus

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:24:00 +0000

"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)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:33:00 +0000

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.

The Wrestler (Aronofsky, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:39:00 +0000

“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.

2008 Top Ten

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:52:00 +0000

1. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas) - Cycling image by image through the idea of things being revealed and unveiled, the time-lapse Genesis imagery that sets the film in motion culminates in a theologically rich network of visual and thematic allusions – as if Regygada’s natural cinematography needs an additional shove towards the transcendental. My favorite introduction/conclusion set since Herzog’s Heart of Glass.

2. In The City of Sylvia (José Guerín)- Guerín deposits many narrative crumbs along the trails left by his elliptical wayfarer, sketching his way across Strasbourg’s cafés. Stacked in long and flat compositions, the film is a masterful exposition of plane, profile, and geometric suspense. And a little Manet too.

3. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien) - Simon’s red balloon is a perfect evocation of Bazin’s idea that “the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up in love.” It is a companion, a reference, a cinematic apology bouncing on the sharp edges of his mother’s impenetrably adult world – only Hou’s acrobatic direction keeps it afloat.

4. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke) - As horrific as it sounds, if an apocalyptic Gursky and Tati mash-up could be imagined, then Still Life would come close. The film captures the rhythm of erosion in a town exiling its own inhabitants. Fragments of poetry, documentary, and social critique – this film is a negative image of his last one, The World.

5. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu) - It is frightening that the resolute honesty of Mungiu's massive takes still doesn't prepare us for the film's final shot. 4 Months... somehow does its subject justice, legitimizing its events as traumatic before moralizing them as mistaken.

6. Aleksandra (Aleksandr Sokurov) - Sokurov’s dreamstate approach to trauma has the odd effect of holding history at arm’s length while enshrining its awful implications in imagery crafted to overcome the quick pace at which corresponding news footage evaporates.

7. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin) - I learned a lot from My Winnipeg, including but not limited to: how to straighten out a hallway rug, how to sense the presence of subterranean rivers and negotiate their philosophical implications, and that a “gynocracy” smells like the inside of a purse. Finally, we see the man behind the curtain.

8. Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz) - I can't understand the odd response most reviews have to Heartbeat Detector's reference to the Nazi Germany. It derives from precedent, and is sufficiently awful to give historical form to the Bacon-ish corporate horror Klotz is attempting to express. The lyrical way Klotz moves so adeptly across a wide range of expressions in this film reminds of of Godard in full Notre musique form. And there's Code Unknown panache in its ending.

9. Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings) - Lee and Will’s sweded First Blood is a fable of first contact, an untutored reaction to the fake relief offered by Hollywood storytelling. But despite the difficulty of Will's first media-bending interaction with cinema, his impulse to rediscover himself in the task of culture-making is a “younger evangelical” touchstone.

10. Secret of the Grain (Abdel Kechiche) - What makes Secret of the Grain so engrossing is not just Kechiche’s expressive camerawork, but the success of this massive cast in believably staging a wide range of immigrant joys and griefs. Just like the simple dish offered by Slimane’s restaurant, its few exotic components are irreducibly complex.

-----

The rest:

11. The Visitor
12. A Christmas Tale
13. Wendy And Lucy
14. Encounters at the End of the World*
15. Shotgun Stories
16. Paranoid Park
17. The Island
18. Man on Wire
19. Taxi to the Darkside
20. Wall-E (On account of the first act.)

*(I am duty-bound to appreciate any attempt by Herzog to extract apocalyptic first things from the wind-stripped ends of the earth. Here his proleptic natural musings merge well with his wry explanation for the people he found in this place rife with things to encounter. But despite the flourish of some underwater sequences, Herzog's typically expressive approach to nature was oddly absent. This was to be a collision of two of my favorite immovable objects, and there was a distinct shortage of sparks.)

Favorite Discoveries/Re-Discoveries:

The Ascent (Shepitko), The New World Extended Cut (Malick), Vagabond (Varda), Nazarin (Bunuel), Killer of Sheep (Burnett), Badlands (Malick), Satantango (Tarr), Hail Mary (Godard), The Case of the Grinning Cat (Marker), First Dream and The Passing (Viola)

Flight of the Red Balloon

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:33:00 +0000

"To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams."
(de Chirico)

"For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy, for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms."
(William Gibson)

Flight of the Red Balloon came into focus for me towards the end when a simple step back of the camera in Simon’s apartment reveals a second staircase that we had never seen before, and it leads to his bedroom. And I say “Simon’s” apartment even though it is his mother’s, and his nanny’s, and contains the activities of all those adults that pass through his life, because this film is about him. It is not a “children’s film” in the oblique way of the Lamorisse classic Hou references. But it is about children, and the way their narrative worlds imaginatively intersect with the stresses and insecurities of adulthood. The end of the film has Simon and his class in the Musée D’Orsay learning about Vallotton’s “Le ballon.” Slowly the children become aware of the shifting perspectives in the painting from overhead to profile, the odd sense of distance cultivated by the red ball in the corner. It is disorienting once you become aware of the subtexts implied by these impressionist angles – the adults in the background part of a world connected but disjointed from this young boy’s game. Are they arguing? Is this a clandestine rendezvous? We, like Simon, aren’t sure. But he does see his faithful red balloon skipping off the skylights of the gallery.

This eponymous balloon has attended Simon through the entirety of Hou’s film, which at times seems like little other than an excuse to gaze on Paris both in wide boulevard shots and cubist explorations of its narrower alleyways. But amidst these brilliant digressions, the red balloon loops and floats, keeping us tethered to Simon and all the turmoil in his little apartment. Abandoned by his father, his mother (Suzanne) makes a living through puppet theater and renting out the flat beneath her. The puppet business, itself another layer of theater in Simon’s life, takes up so much of Suzanne’s time that she hires a Taiwanese nanny to help out. As Suzanne becomes overwhelmed by a tenancy problem and other personal issues, Son becomes even more embedded in their harried household. We become more aware of Simon’s sense of loss when he shares memories of his father with Son in their walks around the city. But soon Son becomes another point of dislocation between Simon's red balloon universe and the impenetrable world of adults. As a film student, Son spends her time filming Simon and gathering footage for a short-film homage to Lamorisse Le ballon rouge. They way Hou films her holding her camera, tightly tracking Simon’s movements, and relying on digital manipulation becomes a parody of what Hou is actually doing. Son’s lack of technique foists a special kind of neglect on Simon that is only subverted by Hou’s intense tenderness towards this little boy.

After spending enough time in Simon’s apartment, itself perched like a balloon at the top of their tenement, the nature of the presence of this balloon as something other than an intriguing formal device becomes clear. It is a token of love for Hou. It is an expression of a joyful, immediate cinema – the focal point of a seductive cinematography. It is like a tour guide across this city he obviously has profound affection for. It attends his little protagonist in the way we distract children during times of crisis, bumbling past windows, doors, and trains at precisely the right moment. And it allows us to connect to the way children self-narrate, as Simon inscrutably, yet gracefully endures the trials of his mother by means of imagination. In other words, the red balloon is a perfect evocation of Bazin’s idea that “the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up in love.” It channels the compassion of Hou’s art into every corner of this deceptively dark film. Flight of the Red Balloon is punctuated by dislocations and misleading angles, his cinematography expressive of the difficulty of navigating adult life. It is against these sharp edges that Simon’s balloon continually bounces without bursting, Hou’s acrobatic direction keeping it afloat.

(It is interesting to note that Vallotton, who painted the scene we see at the end, is one of the great modern woodcut artists. Many of Hou’s Paris scenes have this graphic sensibility.)

Secret of the Grain (Kechiche, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:39:00 +0000

I am not sure exactly what the “secret of the grain” is other than a metaphor for the mysterious way in which families stay together despite financial hardship, longstanding bitterness, and infidelity. The original title of the film translates simply as “couscous and mullet,” a dish as simple and straightforward as this film, which also contains but a few hardy ingredients. Slimane, a patriarch of sorts, is downsized after working for decades at the shipyards in Sète. With no other job skills to offer, he decides to renovate a rusty ship into a quayside Tunisian restaurant that will feature his ex-wife’s memorable couscous. The film, however, really isn’t interested in this storyline until the second half, during which we follow Slimane and Rym (the faithful daughter of his girlfriend) through the process of obtaining the necessary licenses and clearances to park a boat in the middle of Sète and open a restaurant. Until then, Secret of the Grain is a breathless rush through Slimane’s extended family and the tenuous ways they live with each other though divided by generational gaps, loosely kept secrets, and the struggle to make a life in France. After running into piles of red tape, Slimane decides just to pull the boat up to the pavement and invite all the necessary officials on board for a night on the house. It is his hope that showcasing his vision for the boat will grease the wheels. But in the scramble to fill these tables and provide a truly North African vibe for these important customers, the subtext of all these family squabbles comes to a hilt. Our last trek through the city with Slimane is memorable.

What makes Secret of the Grain so engrossing is not just Kechiche’s handheld camerawork, which darts naturally from face to face throughout conversations and periodically sweeps across the beautiful port, but the success of this massive cast in believably staging a wide range of joys and griefs. At the center of the film is Slimane’s close relationship to Rym. Here the generational pulse of the story beats steadily, Kechiche steeping us through all these family issues into the difficulty of being an immigrant (Cummings notes in his review that Kechiche refers to “the mullet” because it is such a robust, adaptable species). The end of the film is an extended, exotic dance number, in which Rym intentionally bridges the gap between her youth and Slimane’s heritage, between his desire for a role and the licensing of his restaurant. It ends unexpectedly in a number of ways, but most noticeably in the manner Kechiche abandons any pretense of accomodation. Throughout the film his characters have been accomodating to France and to each other. And we have been accomodating to his filming style and the density of this simple story. But when Rym takes the stage, Secret of the Grain hits its stride as a meditation on heritage and family. In Rym's dance we become outsiders to this family and their struggles, sitting like these city officials in Slimane's restaurant. It can be difficult to keep pace with Kechiche's camerawork for so long - but Secret of the Grain is irreducibly complex. Just like the simple dish offered by Slimane’s restaurant, it only consists a few indispensible components.

In The City of Sylvia (Guerin, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:45:00 +0000

As soon as the knee-jerk Mulvey reactions settle down, and all the mild Hitchcock references evaporate, a broad network of potential allusions begin to come into focus as In the City of Sylvia unfolds. It is a quiet film about a man (a Marienbad “El”) on a lonely holiday in the bustling but quaint Strausbourg that opens as a still life: an orange, an apple, and a map in Cezanne repose within the frame. He spends the bulk of his time either staring forlornly into space, or sketching the profiles of women at various street cafes. The camera tracks this minimal activity with a corresponding stillness, spending long takes in static shots of his hotel room, alleyway intersections that he has long since passed, or the conversations of people sitting at cafe tables around him. Minutes of film pass on a pretty face, the nape of a neck, or wisps of hair in the breeze. Pencil to paper, he captures a pleasing angle of flesh in the gesture of a line, sketching along the bare planes of interest charted by the camera. In this flattened bustle of the café, bodies near and far are brought into proximity with each other like puzzle pieces, a woman leaning towards a man at one table appears to be kissing the cheek of a man at a table in between. In several edits, disembodied limbs and halves of faces are scattered about the frame, alternately masking and disassociating the subjects of El’s shifting attention. Throughout the city people pass in reflections; their identities shift and elide even as he captures them on his sketch pad. A rhythm of similar characters scattered about his typical routes develops, their presence and absence sounding notes of potential narrative. An identical sentence of graffiti appears periodically on different walls, yet another set of storied images that traverse this deceptively simple film.

Eventually, he thinks he recognizes a woman he met in a bar the last time he vacationed in this city, and begins to follow her around. In their meeting, the voyeuristic hesitancies of the first act of the film take conversational shape, the only point in the film at which Guerin broaches any subject other than the wordless shuffle of faces and profiles. After this, the film begins to get a bit foreboding, culminating in the lengthy shot of our Byronic wanderer at the bar where he first met this girl. Around him people dance to the overly loud soundtrack through a few songs, and the intensity of Guerin’s patience zones us in a Wavelength way onto El's conversation with a woman sitting next to him. She is uninterested. It is a taxing, musical moment, one that first brings to mind the personality of Godard’s bar scene in Vivre sa vie but later the inexplicable physicality of Denis Lavant at the end of Beau Travail. It is framed by a shot of the bartender directly ripped from Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.” Around it erupt all the possible Death in Venice and Ulysses allusions, and the host of literary navel-gazer references that energize the spare emplotment of the film. Through this narrative aporia at the bar (the inevitable consequence of Guerin's fascination with windows, mirrors, and limited POVs?), an ellipse in the film emerges - one that causes us in a creepy Hitchcock way to revisit the possibility of alternate narratives scattered throughout the open spaces of the previous acts. (My first thought was: He is a serial killer. He probably killed Sylvia and has repressed the memory. My second thought was: I got all that backstory from these few static takes. And then: What other stories backtrack through these bare patterns?) I guess what we really have In the City of Sylvia is a set of stackable images that can be rearranged at will with little affect on their present rhythm. It is silent cinema with a hyper-realized Bazinian sense of wonder. Or a Ricoeur rubik's cube that can be emplotted across a variety of planes.

Ten Alternating Theological Theses on Art

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:59:00 +0000

A few days ago Ben Meyers posted 10 Theological Theses On Art, which were then creatively responded to at This Blog, which posted 10 Alternative Theses on Art. I would like to respond to both, as I find it difficult to fully identify with each as theological realizations of either the artistic impulse or aesthetic experience. Neither are hardwired into Advent, neither deal specifically enough with this question at the level of the practitioner (the great lacuna in theological aesthetics), neither are flexible enough such that they are able to circumscribe what Vattimo refers to as the “oscillation” of contemporary art and its attendant critical languages:

“The ambiguity many contemporary theories take to be characteristic of aesthetic experience is not provisional: it is not a matter of mastering language in general more completely… On the contrary, art is constituted as much by the experience of ambiguity as it is by oscillation and disorientation. In the world of generalized communication, these are the ways art can (not still, but perhaps finally) take the form of creativity and freedom.” (The Transparent Society, 60)

With all that in mind:

Ten Alternating Theses on Art

1. Inherent to the incarnation and resurrection is a built-in aesthetic that becomes formally recognizable through its continual critique of Art as the production and arrangement of physical material. We need to be able to think of the incarnation and resurrection as art before we can adequately think of anything else as art. But we also need to be able to think of the incarnation and resurrection as a form of criticism before we can adequately critique anything else. Godard famously said: The best way to criticize a film is to make a film. Similarly, the creative trajectory that is thematically rooted in Genesis 1 and extends through the incarnation and resurrection is such a critical and creative event, a cosmic installation piece that by its mere existence critiques all other aesthetic occurrences. Art and criticism are engendered by the same aesthetic impulse.

2. God's role in the resurrection is directly parallel to His role in the creation of the world, which tells us a lot about how we can think about art. It always refers theoretically to the Word becoming flesh, the production of thought and expression in materials, physical materials - that which we can hear, see with our eyes, behold, and touch with our hands. Art is the arrangement of materials in communicating ways; doodling in the dust, so to speak.

3. God initially describes himself as a creator of fallen creators. On this same narrative arc, the resurrection is the high-water mark of his inconceivable creative intelligence. It involves the restoration of humanity by an act that doesn't just celebrate Christ's accomplished work but the defeat of all that which robs the earth of its Artist's signature. The resurrection is a material victory, fashioned out of the same substances that had fallen in the beginning. To bend Tarkovsky's metaphor, it is God sculpting in time. If we were to link an Advent aesthetic with biblical theology, we could see Romans 8 describing all artistic activity within the context of the earth "groaning and laboring." The artistic impulse, the desire to materially produce thoughts, patterns, and compositions, is both an echo of God's creative activity and the response of His creation to its own fallenness. In this way, art is theodramatic recitation. It is liturgical.

4. The practice of art is a social process, a communicating process. God accommodates Himself to us in both creation and resurrection, and the practice of art understands this analogical process. There is an idea that through knowledge of a particular material (oil, metal, film, etc...) becomes communicable. A "good" work of art is one that by successful use of craft and material becomes articulate. I guess this is the aesthetic of "The Word became flesh”: Every work of art is subject to evaluation based on how it relates to the incarnation's validation of creativity and human-ness.

5. I am always looking for the stories that fall apart and don't connect, the films with ragged edges and black hole gaps, or paintings that conjoin contradictory terms. My experience of life isn't always consistent in itself, and I want art that helps me to negotiate the possibility of living both thoughtfully and joyfully in the face of contradiction. Nothing is really going to add up until the eschaton. Until then, I will lean on Brakhage’s self-refuting flickers of paint, Richter's constantly evolving media, Faulkner's blank mutterings, Denis' inconclusive proposals. Even Herzog's farcical blithering. Such things leave space for hope. Art is aporetic, and incoherent.

6. Apocalypse ruptures self-narrations, societies, or states of affair that appear to be consistent and replaces them with narrative worlds that actually are. Art should be striving for a consistency that doesn't actually exist in the world, unveiling its myths by opposing them with even more coherent possibilities. So I will also cling to the world-building of Wenders, Tarkovsky, and Malick. I will treasure Rilke and Bradbury. Art is coherent, apocalyptic.

7. Art is a reclamation of space; it envisions a return from exile. Art recycles all the rubble.

8. As there is no place or time the Advent is not addressing, interpreting, and engaging with newness, the notion of speechless art a theological impossibility. All art is pedagogy - it first instructs us in its own grammar, and then tells us things about time and space. It is only the politics of Advent that are able to distinguish between what is properly didactic and what is propaganda.

9. The end of art is justice. Adorno claimed that it would be “barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.” This would be true if Advent were not proleptic, if exile really was an absolute, and if art could not speak representationally beyond the confines of our historical memory. As art is the echo of Advent, it is the only way to speak un-barbarically after Auschwitz. Chagall is to be preferred to Adorno, whose marital images contain a truly dialectic historiography of trauma (as if he is saying: Life is hell, but my wife... she is so beautiful.")

10. Any theological thesis on art is simply an addition to the tradition-history of the incarnation and resurrection as they embed themselves in culture. Our aesthetics must be flexible enough to dialogue with the incredible range of languages and dialects that comprise what we think of as Art. It is easy to develop a theological estimation of a particular form of artistic expression. It is a much more difficult task to develop a theological estimation of a variety of artistic expressions. Critical grammar and vocabulary slip and shift dramatically as they move across different media, often emerging from the form of the material they are addressing. Our theological “theses” on art must be able to engage with the locational and material spread of these language games with theodramatic integrity. Whether it be film, dance, architecture, graphic design, painting, etc…, the aesthetic of Advent is an ever-increasingly adaptable mode of critical response to what Vattimo refers to as the “oscillation” of contemporary art in all its forms. We don’t need 10 theological theses on art – we need 50 or 100 that attend our gallery-walking and film-going like a twitter feed.