Film - Think

The New World (Malick, 2005)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:30:00 +0000

Yet it is not surprising that poets should continue to turn to Heidegger for inspiration and guidance… The poet, he writes, "uses the word - not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word." (Adam Kirsch, “Taste of Silence”)

If Heidegger is right when he claims that whenever art actually happens "history either begins or starts over again," then The New World is about thresholds and beginnings – a series of natural passages lined with images of discovery. So many of this generation of pop culture claim The Matrix as a breakthrough film/philosophy moment. This was such a sad moment for American cultural dialogue, under the impression that The Matrix had achieved something profound. It is the case that Malick has done what The Matrix appeared to do, granting us access to a startling thought world of sustained philosophical reflection in The New World, which writes itself, realizes itself, and annotates itself as a narration of love, being, and the possibility of the “real” to use a Matrix-sullied Baudrillard buzzword. It is about a then undiscovered America, the story shaken loose from all the faux-antique woodcut images that begin the film. And it is also about the great myth of America, one that dismantles and reshapes the stories of people that come into contact with it. But beyond that The New World as a title captures Malick’s mood in every corner of the film, turned towards decisions and thoughts that either open or close us to possibility in an ideal sense – the "New World" being a space of disclosure in which the viewer, along with Malick, erects poetic reconstructions of his title. The New World is constantly referring to itself, trying to name what it is all about, cycling exact copies of themes through different characters in different settings. And these themes, far from being abstract qualities or ideas, are specific evocations of spirituality bound to their natural presentations. It is no coincidence that as a title, Badlands points us towards the barren canyons of their destination, or that Days of Heaven starts to come to an end when the fields are destroyed.

Likewise, the New World is not just a pretty background, but the rich foreground out of which its characters and arcs emerge before any thoughts emerge from them. These beautiful, primordial images of sea, land, wind in the grass – even (if not especially) the parallel grace of Malick’s unadorned England, a cacophony of bells, stone, and quiet geometric gardens – these are the places in which we begin to think about the film and its implications. It is difficult to disentangle these natural images from their Thoreau and Emerson undertones, but we must. The New World is not a utopia in a Romantic sense. John Smith’s voiceover digressions about starting over, losing his name and taking up with Pocahontas in this wilderness, really are digressions. And eventually his character becomes lost in them, mistakenly attributing utopia (a nowhere) to what really is an undiscovered Somewhere (better understood as a “heterotopia” in Vattimo’s sense - Malick simply shifts all those notions of "place" linked to Thoreau and recasts them in true Heideggerian fashion as ways to think about... being). The New World as a vast untamed space forces self-discovery upon visitors, making them consider the newness and transition offered by everything Malick represents as unsettled America. When the initial settlers erect the walls and gates of Jamestown, their course is set resolutely against what Smith discovers during his time among the "naturals." Over time their crops fail to take seed, they attack their own leaders, and they starve in the winter. Even John Smith unravels in the New World, his encounter with newness transposed with his love for Pocahontas. He is a perfect image of someone confusing an experience of transcendence with particular people rather than the places or spaces that are the literal ground of their experience. Eventually struck with this cognitive dissonance, confusion sets in. To use Heidegger's term, he couldn't effectively "dwell" in the New World. This is the sad fate of John Smith, doomed to traveling through a land he has lost contact with, probing Northern Coasts for new passages. As he realizes later, he sailed passed his Indies.

In contrast, Pocahontas is the supreme Malick figure, one that both embodies and endures the transition of his ideal, the New World. In her movement from Smith to Wolfe, Virginia to England, she is an elocution of his entire career in a consistent stream of images. Bouncing like a deer in the tall grass, naming ears, eyes, and noses, enduring the shame and shock of self-realization unto the point of Christian baptism, crossing the sea and emerging in a forest of stone and bells and the clatter of carriages – running her fingers along the hedges of her New World – reveling in the resolution of her long journey and birthing a child as a monument to her hard won insight. The flicker of the "Natural" face-painted blue and sitting, then dashing through the open door into an English garden in the last sequence of images (one which can be mentally recited as a liturgy of the New World) is Malick’s blessing on her evolution. A primitive shout of her past, it reverberates through the garden, through her love for John Wolfe, back across the sea through a storm of music, and stills in drifts of grass and water in the locus of Malick’s originating idea. In this astonishing finale she pretty much becomes Malick’s version of Kubrick’s Starchild – as Kirsch notes above via Heidegger she is like a word that by artful use "only now becomes and remains truly a word."

And yet balancing out the Smith/Pocahontas, Wolfe/Rebecca spaces in the film are foreboding prophecies of the demise of the literal New World that has given the ideal one shape. The thunder of the ships coming to relieve the first round of soldiers at Jamestown, the exile and anglicizing of Pocahontas, and the terrible scene at the end in which she is gawked at by royalty like one of many exotic creatures brought back from Virginia for their pleasure all point to a very Heideggerian critique of American as an "unworld." This "unworld" strips the New World of tradition and resources under the hypnosis of a mercantile logic, becoming America by undoing a previously existing state of affairs. There is an ambiguity to the scenes of Opechancanough in the English gardens at the end. He seems alternately transfixed and horrified by the regularity of these trees and shrubs, disconnected from this manicured earth even though it is real earth, just like in Virginia. This is criticism by Gestalt, as there could be no representation of Jamestown and the New World without an eventual recognition of what is also lost through Malick's ideal of discovery. And from this perspective, the jarring edit of the "Natural" in the concluding sequence (it isn't Opechancanough, but a companion on his journey we see two other times in England at the edges of frames) - sitting and then streaking through the door - looks much different, a last glimpse of the disappearing New World. It is a perfectly equivocal image.

It is interesting to think about the progression from Holly in Badlands - to Abby in Days of Heaven - to Pocahontas/Rebecca in The New World. It is almost as if we can see one consciousness maturing in three different storylines, Pocahontas being the apex of women in a Malick context. There is a little of Holly’s naiveté and Abby’s love story in Pocahontas. And like Campion’s ode to the mystery of women, The Piano, Malick ends The New World with an incredible feminine gesture, a recitation of memory and motherhood. But unlike Malick’s previous female characters, and very unlike the way Ada just barely escapes Campion’s film, Pocahontas is so aware and connected to what has happened in her decision to be Wolfe’s wife and to occupy her New World. Where other directors, Campion and Breillat for example, regress in their presentation of the female gender in order to make their points (they become successively weaker, lacing control, become more objectified), Malick's feminism directs us towards more powerful conceptions of gender roles as his work goes on. There is also a progression in Malick voiceover from Holly to Linda to Pocahontas. The New World narration can be considered clichéd and overwrought, overly concerned with itself. But this would be mistaken, as it would neglect its original narrative time. It is edenic, foundational, the first American love story. If it didn't sound clichéd, it would not have sounded appropriate. By the end of the film he has earned the right for Pocahontas to say something like "Mother, now I know where you live" and expect us to appreciate it. There is a lot of Resnais in how well these characters think through their own imagery.

I can’t help but over-think the film in the same way I do other favorites like The Mirror or 2001. When Wolfe and Rebecca, renamed, made their way across the sea I sank into memories of my wife. I thought of the oceans of spiritual and geographical transition that we have endured together in frightful leaps. I considered our marriage as a New World, realizing that it is us passing through the vast space of our relationship that has rooted me thoughtfully in the world. After all the philosophy, this is Malick’s last word - one that triangulates love, transition, and self-reflection. The final sequence of the film is far from an elegy, being instead a celebration of the successful evocation of Malick’s complicated sentiment in the character arc of Pocahontas, she is dancing in the garden and anointing herself, her son is flickering through the garden, we cross the ocean to Virginia and watch the water dancing in the wilderness.

Days of Heaven (Malick, 1978)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling. (Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells”)

"To dwell is to garden." (Heidegger, “The Origin of the work of Art”)

And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates: That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth. (Deuteronomy 11:19-21)

Most of what could be said about Badlands can be said of Days of Heaven. In many ways the film takes Kit and Holly from Malick’s previous film and reconfigures them for this new space in Bill and Abby, bracketed by references to silent cinema forms and allusions to the Bible. And behind all this is the legend of Malick himself, so exhausted by the production of Days of Heaven he simply disappeared from view, letting these two films speak for themselves over the next twenty years. As it moves a step closer to pure formality than the bare poetry of Badlands, I find it difficult to talk about, more accessible to language I share with others when walking through museums and talking about the paintings that we see.

I am enamored of awkwardly long shots of natural or industrial scenes. The opening to Herzog’s Heart of Glass, much of Roeg’s Walkabout, the middle bits of Ballard’s underappreciated Black Stallion, and P.T. Anderson’s recent derrick shots of There Will Be Blood are handy examples. But Malick’s lengthy shots of the fields, the life cycle of wheat and its harvest have probably set the standard for such cinematography. Giant agricultural machines hum along the furrows of crops, workers brushing behind through the golden stalks. Their scythes flick in sweeps across the fields. Large hoops of wheels rattle past, trains clatter, lines of men and women crest dry hills and sit to rest. Thankfully, much of the film’s dialogue was scrapped for Linda’s halting voiceover, granting us more time to wander with Malick through echoes of Wyeth, Hopper, George Bellows, and perhaps further on after Benton and Wood is the later Van Gogh (of which Heidegger speaks in a hauntingly Malick way, see my Badlands review).

At the center of the story is an image of Ruth (Abby) and Boaz (The Farmer) which is eventually ruined by the envy of Bill, Abby’s lover and partner in crime. And against this current of Ruth’s story is an allusion to Abraham and Sarah. Bill and Abby have fled Chicago with his young sister after he accidentally murders his boss, and decide to tell everyone they are brother and sister to just make things easier. In the Genesis 20 story this references, Abraham likewise claims that beautiful Sarah is his sister, lest the Philistines kill him and take her for themselves. While the grace of the Ruth allusions unfold, the truth of the Abraham allusion dawns on The Farmer, eventually pitting him against Bill and shattering the perfect balance of the film’s many references. After all this is said and done, I have a hard time understanding what is referred to by "Days of Heaven" if it isn’t simply everything Abby and The Farmer could have achieved were it not for the con that began their relationship.

The poetry of the film lies in the ambivalence of the land to the maneuverings of Abby and Bill. But eventually the land responds to their skullduggery with another biblical allusion, that of swarming locusts, a catastrophe further unleashed when The Farmer accidentally sets the crops on fire in his anger at Bill. The land burns through an incredible set of nocturnal edits, taking what the locusts had left. And the land, the foundational Malick poetry that has given their story context, has vanished – along with it the possibility of dwelling, which is the goal of all poetry. There is an incredible sadness to The Farmer’s death, one that is bound up in the intensity of the film’s crafted beauty. It is so intent on directing us towards the logic of Malick’s poetry, towards the possibility of “dwelling” and catching a glimpse of true “days of heaven,” that when Bill kills The Farmer he ends every idea that the film imagined. This sadness may be exemplified in Malick’s biography, who simply drifted away for decades after editing Days of Heaven for two years. I can imagine him sitting there bewildered that Bill would be so foolish, watching hours of such perfectly natural footage vanish in a hectic gun battle.

Badlands (Malick, 1973)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:50:00 +0000

The world was like a faraway planet, to which I could never return ... I thought what a fine place it was, full of things that people can look into and enjoy.

(Holly, Badlands)

Loosely based on the true events of 1950’s spree killer Charles Starkweather (of whom Bruce Springsteen sang: “They wanted to know why I did what I did/Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world), Badlands follows James Dean obsessed Kit and his under-aged girlfriend from murder to murder until Kit stops the Cadillac and turns himself in. Very unlike either Straw Dogs or A Clockwork Orange, seminal violent films released two years before Badlands, Malick is not interested in the psychology of his characters. Unlike Peckinpah, he doesn’t see a need to make us complicit in the act of violence, or like Kubrick, aware of its ecstatic properties. Rather, each violent movement of the film is posed as a poetic moment in Heidegger’s sense of the term, an eruption of the possibility of transcendence in a world that has lost its potential for meaning and direction.

And this is not to say that Malick understands violence as poetry or transcendence. That is, unfortunately, fair to say of Peckinpah. But that Malick has taken the Starkweather myth and understood it in Heidegger’s terms. Having extensively studied, taught, and translated Heidegger, a recognition of his influence seems to unfold Malick’s films, which are cast at a poetic distance and uninterested in modern questions of psychology, motivation, and causality. Badlands lacks any interpretive framework. We wait for it to appear in Holly’s naïve voiceover, but it never does. We are poised for the gavel of moralism to fall when Kit gives himself up, but we find that all the police are enchanted by the murderous myth he has enacted. They are attracted to the pure freedom he embodies in the same way James Dean remains an icon of cool indifference. (As Malick said to Sheen during production: "Think of the gun in your hand as a magic wand.") Malick fails to mark different spaces of the film with any indication of his own personality, and in this way the film quietly grows under the logic of its tangential connection to Starkweather.

And this is all an intentional practice of Heidegger’s dictum on art: "Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone." Likewise, Malick’s genius lies in his ability to limit access to Kit and Holly. Any attempt to think of either as monstrous or evil causes each character, as poetic figures rather than moral figures, to evaporate. And this in no way absolves Kit and Holly from their crimes. It actually puts any moral reflection on their story on better footing, freeing it from immediate directorial commentary or audience response, and attaching it to the deeper questions of meaning and existence in which Malick is interested.

The central image of the film is that of Kit and Holly jetting across the flat plains to Montana in a stolen Cadillac. Its total incongruence best expresses Malick’s interest in holding us at arm’s length, forcing us to read his poem stanza by stanza. It may be during this sequence that we see some of Malick’s thought unconsciously slipping through, the camera often drifting off to the right or left on the empty earth they are crossing. But if anything, these seeming indiscretions are part of his attempt to demonstrate how connected Kit and Holly are to their barren world. Throughout there are overtones of Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. But these literary echoes only more closely link the two lovers immediately to nature rather than circumstance - anticipating the possibility of any analysis, they emerge from it before any thoughts emerge from them. This sense of “nature” and “earth” is well-captured in Adam Kirsch’s brilliant essay on Heidegger and Poetry, “Taste of Silence”:

To understand exactly what Heidegger means by this numinous formula, it's necessary to sketch his complex argument. To answer the abstract question "What is art?" Heidegger begins by setting the reader before a particular artwork—a Van Gogh painting of a pair of shoes. When you wear shoes, he points out, you seldom think about them. Shoes, like all kinds of tools and equipment, are at their best when they are most reliable, that is, when they perform their function silently and unobtrusively. In fact, you only begin to pay attention to your shoes when they stop working properly—when they pinch your foot or when the sole comes off. And most of the objects that surround us share this quality of being instruments, things that we use and ignore.

Looking at Van Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes, Heidegger suggests, something different happens. For the first time, we become aware of the two dimensions or axes in which a pair of shoes exists. On the one hand, we are struck by their physical reality: their weight and texture and color, all the qualities we tend to overlook when we wear them. At the same time, the painting allows us to imagine the life in which these shoes belong—the life of a peasant woman, Heidegger imagines, with her "toilsome tread." Crucially, these two aspects of the shoes—what they are and what they do—are inextricable in the painting. "In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes," Heidegger writes, "there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls."

In this way, he suggests, the Van Gogh painting demonstrates the double purpose of art. Art confronts us with "the earth"—the sensuous reality of the non-human, which we tend to forget or ignore when we are engaged in practical tasks. At the same time, art sets the earth into "the world"—the historical human context in which we work, suffer, and hope.

Malick brings us into contact with the “shoeness” of Kit and Holly. Having ceased to work properly, we become aware of their condition in the world, and the direction their story takes as a consequence. And at the same time, Badlands roots the characters in an actual context from which we can sense despair and its eventual counterpart. Kit is far too engaged in his own myth to ever need anything like hope, and Holly too swept away by the pace of their self-narrating to have discovered a story in which hope is possible. But this really doesn’t matter, as Badlands is more about the possibility of its viewers living in worlds from which the potential for self-discovery has been stripped. It is by no means a hopeless film.

Youth Without Youth (Coppola, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:10:00 +0000

I think most critics have simply rejected Youth Without Youth as a film that was too ambitious to support its own ideas. But I wonder if the opposite is actually true. The film is entranced by these ideas about language, memory, and history connected to the well known philosophy of myth developed by Mircea Eliade, who wrote the story on which the film is based. I think the flaw of the film is that Coppola hedged his bets by trying to make the film more watchable as a story rather than letting it tread its own course through the implicit mystery of the storyline. I can easily see this film having achieved the spirituality of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, a film with which it has some narrative and thematic affinities. But whereas Tarkovsky’s film gives itself over to the abstract rhythms of remembered history, Coppola’s tries to make a story out of themes and images that aren’t very story-like.

The film opens with an elderly Dominic Matei in the late 1930’s realizing he will never finish his lifelong research regarding the origins of human language and cognition. Thinking about this failure, and the loss of his fiancee decades beforehand, Dominic plots a suicide attempt that is thwarted by a bolt of lightning. He survives extra-crispy, his doctor surprised to discover that the lightning bolt has restored youth to his body and mind. No longer 70, he emerges from the hospital a spry 30. This miracle attracts the attention of the Nazis who are eager to reverse engineer Dominic’s secret. He evades the Nazis through a cloak and dagger routine (complete with femme fatale, forged documents, and Matt Damon cameo) until the end of the war during which he discovers he need only pass his hand over a book to completely learn its contents. Such a talent makes his attempt to rediscover the origins of human language and cognition much more efficient. The film then leaps to 1955 in which through a series of misfortunes he discovers the spitting image of his lost love (now Veronica) in cave after having been … struck by lighting and granted a strange talent of her own. Dominic eventually discovers that her talent, which ages her when used, can grant him firsthand access to the first human language. Eureka. And then in a move that ultimately wrecks the film, it turns into a love story.

Though sluggish at points, the film keeps one interested in the potential of its ideas. Eliade described contemporary participation in myth/religion as an attempt at “eternal return.” Through religious behavior we attempt to return to the narrative time of our mythologies. And ultimately, this idea is at the center of Youth Without Youth; Dominic working through the mystery of language until he can achieve an experience of its first expression. The study of language, being his mythology, draws him more and more deeply into its range of mystical possibilities. This is pictured in the film as his sudden rebirth, the electricity that crackles as his hands leech knowledge from books, or the luminous blue glow that appears at significant moments. Eliade also spoke in great detail about the differences between sacred and profane space, and the thresholds that serve as place markers between the two. These thresholds, like church doors or treasured memories, are also indications of our attempts to abandon the here and now (profane time) for the narrative time of our mythologies (sacred time). The Eucharist, for example, is thought of by Christians to be either an act of memory that returns us momentarily to the death of Christ or the actual substantiation of Christ in our present time. Either way, it is an attempt to inhabit “sacred time.”

Youth Without Youth is a love story that treats language as a sacred space, its origin being a sacred time sought by Dominic. His great misfortune is that the very means of his experience of this sacred time conflicts with his love for Veronica, who represents a competing sacred space. His desire for her, which has skipped through many decades, eventually outstrips his desire to discover the origins of language. This would make the film a fairly basic story about intellect versus passion, developed through the wry exchange between Eliade’s ideas. But if this is the case, Coppola’s story telling gets in the way of both the intellect and passion that could have produced a set of memorable images and meditations on love and language.

Elephant (Van Sant, 2003)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:48:00 +0000

(This was to be my annual contribution to Metaphilm, but since it was posted here first in seed form last week it was not accepted.)

I have had a hard time putting my finger on the basic common denominator of Van Sant's Death Trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days), but the last shot of Elephant clinches it for me. Van Sant referred to the film as a “thought machine,” in distinction to the then recent Bowling for Columbine, that would provide a way for viewers to reach their own conclusions about the causes of the Columbine massacre. In this respect, the film has been criticized for its attempt to displace instant moral response with the Bressonian pose of the two shooters - the initial Larry Clark-lite scenes of the two shooters a reprehensible narrative failure. I tend to agree with such criticisms, off-put that Van Sant would treat the Columbine massacre as a formal exercise. But such criticisms also fail to place key shots of Elephant in the broader context of the Death Trilogy, three films intent on exploring spaces related to death, real deaths, and their echoes in cultural memory. This context somewhat blunts otherwise legitimate criticisms of Elephant.

Much of the film in narrative time charts the last few minutes of the school before the shooting begins. Like Van Sant's last four films, the backbone of Elephant is the series of tracking shots of these high school students and teachers that intend to open up a background, to grant the viewer the sort of deep-focus access championed by Bazin, Toland, Kracauer, or any other verité aesthetic. There seems to be a lot of space for play in these films, at least a sense of detachment that permits us time to connect social and ideological dots not explicitly drawn or even shared by Van Sant. This sensibility is only enhanced by the title, that being the thing in the dark room of which we are all touching a different piece (cribbed from a 1989 film about similar killings in Northern Ireland). But I am beginning to think this is all a McGuffin. Van Sant is aware of the expectation related to his resolute use of these long tracking shots, often in close focus on a moving subject. They are passages in time, a filmed equivalent of reflection, movements through a space that comes to life in the screening process. (Bringing to mind Bresson’s classic statement: “My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”)

But Van Sant's passages in time involve characters that we know beforehand are on their way to death. In all three films we have the reverse of the determinism employed by Bresson in A Man Escaped. In the very title of the film we are told what is going to happen to the subject of his long tracking shots. The purpose of the film is not to discover whether a man becomes free or not, but to actually participate wholly in his efforts to obtain his predetermined freedom. Bresson just thumbs his nose at any cheap thrills provided by a less certain escape. Likewise, the course of Van Sant's tracking shots are predetermined. They are not open, they are movements through a space that has certainly contributed to the death of the film's characters but no longer has any influence over them. If Bresson thought his films “come to life again” through some of the same formal characteristics that Van Sant employs, but Van Sant’s films have a different teleology. His open spaces are all preludes to definitive, irrevocable endings. Though in other cases, such tracking shots open films up to us, as in the brilliant final sequence of Haneke's Code Unknown, Van Sant's tracking shots eventually shut the film down like a tetherball winding around its pole, a process set in motion right from the beginning. It would be a formal bait and switch if we didn’t know that Gerry dies, that all these kids at Columbine die, and that Kurt Cobain dies. In this way, Elephant is not just a distasteful formal exercise, but represents a genuine, awful, movement towards death.

This movement towards death is occurs in two ways.

1. The first is that these tracking shots are spatial movements linked to the physical movement of their subjects, and in each Death Trilogy film there is a continual movement towards physical death. This finality seems to conflict with the essence of the tracking shot, but that is Van Sant's tricky little McGuffin. Whereas at the end of 400 Blows the tracking shot concludes in a evocation of the life of its character beyond the film, Van Sant's shots end in death, leaving no other option for the film but the credits.

2.The second way this movement towards death occurs is that each film uses tracking shots to move their characters toward a mythological appropriation of their circumstances. In Gerry, the movement of dialogue farther and farther into the ridiculous idiom of its characters is a movement from the order of language to the chaos of their predicament. This movement towards abstraction is the purest sense of myth. In Last Days, the increase of Christological imagery pushes Blake towards his death, having passed through the Garden of pop culture hysteria, he lays down in a network of allusions. And then in Elephant the final tracking shot poses one of the shooters as a Nietschzean explorer, moving him through sharply configured space towards his final victims as he accumulates cultural associations. The noise of animals in a jungle in the background, the steady hold on his rifle in close focus, the military bent of his identity poses him as some sort of first person PC shooter on his way into Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is in this final shot that we get a sense of the sense of mythical identity shared by the two shooters, one borne in gaming media culture and unconsciously linked to classic death fugues.

So in each case there is a literal movement towards death, as all these films are about the deaths of their subjects. And there is also a movement from reality to abstraction. This move towards the mythical countermands any verité conceptions that may have accrued by the film's end. In each case our prior conception of verité aspects of the tracking shot is subverted, denied, maybe even refuted. This use of such verité formulas in the virtual reconstruction of famous deaths is unsettling, as they unconsciously shift previous modernist conceptions of reality associated with cinema verité to emerging conceptions of reality and identity linked to those cultivated by journalism, gaming culture, and pop culture. All of this occurs in the spaces evoked by the Death Trilogy, the better context in which to watch Elephant.

2001 (Kubrick, 1968)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:20:00 +0000

Is 2001 Poetry?

The best extant commentary on 2001: A Space Odyssey from an intentionally theological perspective hails from the conclusion of C.S. Lewis’ essay “Is Theology Poetry” in the seldom read Weight of Glory collection. The essay is just a reprint of a lecture given at Oxford in 1944 (no doubt in a mahogany cased room with crumpled carpets smelling of rain and tea), a full 25 years before Kubrick’s 2001. I am not the biggest fan of Lewis’ science fiction literature, finding it somewhat too overt in its allegorical self-awareness to match the sheer readability of L’Engle, Chesterton, or other “Christian” sci-fi provocateurs, but apparently his grasp of how science fiction relates to theology (and specifically Lewis’ conception of theology as mythmaking) was well developed:

"Consider for a few moments the enormous aesthetic claim of its [Christian theology] chief contemporary rival - what we may loosely call the Scientific Outlook...Supposing this to be a myth, is it not one of the finest myths which human imagination has yet produced? The play is preceded by the most austere of all preludes: the infinite void, and matter restlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then, by the millionth millionth chance - what tragic irony - the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which is the beginning of life. Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama - just as everything seems against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy-tale. But life somehow wins through. With infinite suffering, against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself: from the amoeba up to the plant, up to the reptile, up to the mammal. We glance briefly at the age of monsters. Dragons prowl the earth, devour one another and die. Then comes the theme of the younger son and the ugly duckling once more. As the weak, tiny spark of life began amidst the huge hostilities of the inanimate, so now again, amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little naked, shivering, cowering creature, shuffling, not yet erect, promising nothing: the product of another millionth millionth chance. Yet somehow he thrives. He becomes the Cave Man with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemies' bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I could never quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the terrible gods whom he has created in his own image. But these are only growing pains. Wait till the next Act. There he is becoming true Man. He learns to master nature. Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the present (for it is a mere nothing by the time-scale we are using), you follow him on into the future. See him in the last Act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rule the planet - and perhaps more than the planet - for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psycho-analysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Hence forward he has nothing to do but to practise virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little pathetic (sic). It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable. The last scene reverses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of all reach of human power, Nature, the old enemy, has been steadily gnawing away. The sun will cool - all suns will cool - the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished, without hope of return, from every inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness, and "universal darkness covers all." The pattern of myth thus becomes one of the noblest we can conceive. It is the pattern of many Elizabethan tragedies, where the protagonist's career can be represented by a slowly ascending and then rapidly falling curve, with its highest point in Act IV. You see him climbing up and up, then blazing in his bright meridian, then finally overwhelmed in ruin.

Such a world-drama appeals to every part of us. The early struggles of the hero (a theme delightfully doubled, played first by life, and then by man) appeals to our generosity. His future exaltation gives scope to a reasonable optimism; for the tragic close is so very distant that you need not often think of it--we work with millions of years. And the tragic close it self just gives that irony, that grandeur, which calls forth our defiance, and without which all the rest might cloy. There is a beauty in this myth which well deserves better poetic handling than it has yet received: I hope some great genius will yet crystallise it before the incessant stream of philosophic change carries it all away. I am speaking, of course, of the beauty it has whether you believe it or not. There I can speak from experience: for I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate it."

Kubrick's reliance on various images in Greek mythology implies that 2001, as the sort of odyssey described above, is a major artifact of Western rational spirituality. It is a perfect example of the storytelling that interests Lewis. The rest of the essay goes on to argue that while the “science” myth is beautiful when rendered similar to Kubrick’s later revelation, the myth offered by theology is arguably prettier. Sidestepping all the traditional science vs. theology questions, Lewis cuts to the quick of what would come to occupy the cultural critics of a few generations later, that being the question of how these different myths are represented and what makes them more or less effective. Though such thinking may not appeal to typical Christian thought at an ideological level, it certainly appeals to the continual need for Christian art and practice to meta-narrate - to re-describe, or even better put, to re-mythologize what Christian theology exposes. And this is where 2001 ultimately succeeds as well. It trades the technical distractions of all these apologetic questions of evolutionary thought for a focus on the literary/mythical history of its core ideology, it turns this history into a stream of fascinating science fictions that ultimately dissolve in a final moment of potent abstraction, and “I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate it.”

The Passion of the Christ is a film that has been misunderstood as often as 2001, and I think Lewis helps us to understand why. The connection between these films is that they are very visually intensive exercises in the imagination of their respective ideologies. The difference, of course, is that one has a sense of historical reference and the other doesn’t. But the relative lack of dialogue and narration in both permit each to be experienced more as iconography than anything else. They are both myths in Lewis' sense of the term that push their respective traditions to their narrative and visual limits. 2001 certainly achieves an abstraction that The Passion of the Christ does not (as that would have been… really weird), but as the best representations of the opposition posed by Lewis in his essay between narrating the myth of science and the myth of theology, parallel reflection on these two films may generate a fruitful ecumenicity in thinking about myth, religion, and beauty in film. At the very least it still startles me that Lewis described my feelings about 2001 many years before it was produced, which may actually make “Is Theology Poetry” his best work of science fiction.

Paranoid Park (Van Sant, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:39:00 +0000

Moving away from the clinical distance that granted us a hands off approach to his recently finished Death Trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days), Van Sant literally takes a step closer to his worn themes of guilt, anxiety, and adolescent angst in Paranoid Park. At times dropping his 35mm camera for tight Super 8 shots of kids floating on skateboards around a downtown Portland skate park, Paranoid Park is a claustrophobic spin on coming of age in a day littered by South Park and Napoleon Dynamite references.

An adaptation of the Blake Nelson novel by the same name, the film centers on a skate park in downtown Portland. An historic haunt for homeless people, street kids, and assorted disaffected youth, Paranoid Park in Van Sant’s film is both a place of transience and a moment frozen in time, the last stand of adolescence exerting itself in the ballet of skaters paced by otherworldly Nina Rota soundtracks from Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Amarcord. The story follows Alex, who is being questioned in the murder of a railway guard close to the skate park. His response to the questioning suggests he was involved with the death as the film skips from past to present, doubles back to retrace its own steps, and swaps Alex’s stilted voiceover for slow motion pans across his daily routine. The film splinters as a painful memory unwilling to be recognized, and Alex moves numbly through Van Sant’s nonlinear structure until we encounter the railway guard’s graphically broken body, Beethoven’s 9th looming in the background.

No stranger to working with non-professionals, Van Sant cast the film through a MySpace call. Alex’s performance in particular is immediately awkward and naïve. But as the story unfolds and we hear Nina Rota, Elliot Smith, Billy Swann, Ethan Rose, and others in the background balancing out the clumsy dialogue, it is as if Van Sant is letting others speak for Alex, lending him a gravity he is incapable of achieving. And ultimately, this is what Paranoid Park is about. Alex struggles to find ways to articulate his sense of trauma, and finds nothing to turn to but the empty appeal of Paranoid Park. Some may find the film a repetitive exercise, as it covers much of the same ground as Elephant. But Van Sant’s careful posture in the film, weaving the mature soundtrack with an inarticulate first person, will appeal to those who have been in the past lulled by his hypnotic connections between pop culture and personal loss.

The Brave One (Jordan, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:15:00 +0000

The Brave One is one of those films that by virtue of plot and shooting location have so many accidental connections to classic films or trends in criticism that comparisons just start piling on their reception. By now we are assured that it references Taxi Driver, is a feminist revenge fable, an artful exploitation flick, or a post-911 justice fantasy. When the dust settles, however, it is hard to distance the film from other classic revenge fantasies like Walking Tall, Death Wish, or Ms. 45, the latter film a benchmark in conscious exploitation.

Of course it is interesting to reflect on the idea that the Jodie Foster who once played an underaged hooker in Taxi Driver is now a popular editorial radio host a few blocks north. An odd bit of tradition history there. But once Foster gets the gun in her hand I am not sure this takes us anywhere further than a generic history repeating itself, this time the revenge fantasy divorced from the political and social logic ascribed to Travis Bickle. In this respect, The Brave One is precisely the sort of film we were warned against in A History of Violence, Foster’s outbursts of violence erotic flickers of power revealing themselves to the viewer as private moments of release. Perhaps a better context in which the film can be described is the still emerging “post-9/11 violence in New York” setting. This tradition probably reached an early apex at the end of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, which closes on a brutal image of self-inflicted violence, if not self-hatred. But a large part of post-9/11 New York filmmaking involves the violence of natural disaster, in which the city is leveled by giant monsters, floods, aliens (The Day After Tomorrow, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds, I am Legend, etc…). Such films immediately link our residual awareness of 9/11 with reflections on life and death via Susan Sontag’s classic essay “Imagination of Disaster”:

“In the [sci-fi/apocalypse] films it is by means of images and sounds, not words that have to be translated by the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.”

Here the destruction of New York becomes a way for its citizens to re-experience the awful imagination of their death and emerge from it unharmed. And such films would have us believe that we are all in some way citizens of post-9/11 New York. It seems in this case that The Brave One has far more in common with the new New York disaster film tradition than that of the 1970's revenge flick. Her character survives her initial trauma alone, survives the further disaster of revenge, and moves on with her life. The conclusion of Sontag’s essay on science fiction and disaster films perfectly describes Foster’s character arc:

“[W]e live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large ration by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors—real or anticipated—by an escape into exotic, dangerous situations which have last minute happy endings.”

There was an explosion of revenge cinema during and after the Vietnam War, the American conscience dealing with itself through Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and eventually Rambo. And at first glimpse The Brave One is well within this genre, part of a number of films that may be similarly related to our current war in Iraq (e.g., in the first Walking Tall the protagonist is a former professional wrestler, in the 2004 remake he is an Iraq veteran). But the difference between past revenge cinema and the recent post-9/11 films such as The Brave One is the way they access Sontag’s commentary on disaster and apocalypse. As revenge films, they are linked to the catastrophe of 9/11, an apocalypse of Sontagian proportions, and thus just as much about revenge as they are about the themes Sontag addresses in her essay. The central scene in 25th Hour takes place with its two main characters looking down at the World Trade Center footprint, placing the film in its shadow. Likewise, the difference between Taxi Driver and The Brave One are not the suggested feminist tones of the latter, but the different space in which it takes place. The side effect of this convergence between the revenge and disaster film in post-9/11 New York is that they are now open to Sontag’s ultimate critique of the sci-fi apocalypse, certainly true of The Brave One:

“What I am suggesting is that the imagery of disaster in science fiction is above all the emblem of an inadequate response.”

At least this is more true of The Brave One than it is a number of films Sontag levels with that criticism.

There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 23:14:00 +0000

Anderson almost attains Herzog’s ecological artfulness with his shots of the process of getting oil out of the ground. These shots are not as technically painstaking as the beginning of Heart of Glass or the boat crossing in Fitzcarraldo, but the same resolute gaze is certainly there. The highlights of the uneven film are the shots that place Plainview around the derrick in its various modes of productivity. Thrusting and pumping, spewing oil into the sky, a pillar of fire in the night.

For someone so adept at character study, however, Anderson doesn’t exactly monopolize on the Nietzschean strength of Lewis’ character, whose potential narrative power is either submerged within or entirely ignored by his raw aesthetic power as a form that simply doesn’t match anything else in the film. He bullies his way through the storyline on the strength of a number of odd personality traits and inflections until the film closes quickly on an unpredictable note. To dump him in that final scene could have been a waste of all the well crafted images that populate earlier parts of the film, but I am starting to find that thinking of him like Stroszek, an intentionally wafer thin placeholder in a film that begs for a rounded and developed character, allows me to gloss over perceived shortcomings in Plainview's presentation. I am not saying I think the film is a masterpiece, just that I may have preferred a largely un-narrated hour and a half of Daniel Day Lewis drilling for oil. That film would have been a masterpiece in the same way Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, or Doug Aitken’s Diamond Sea are such remarkable documents of industrial ecology.

Paris, Je Taime – Faubourg St. Denis (Tykwer, 2006)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:13:00 +0000

This segment of Paris Je Taime is sheer pleasure. It tells the brief story of how a young ex-pat (Natalie Portman) falls in love with a blind man who overhears her rehearsing for an audition. Time lapse photography and snippy little cuts all in rapid montage tell the story of their romance, hitting its peak in a metro car when Portman screams at the top of her lungs to her blind boyfriend’s amusement. Honestly, it is this particular scene that has stuck out to me, her uninhibited shriek and his satisfied grin a graceful image centering the fast pace of the film. I think this film has lingered so resolutely in my memory because it mimics the process by which I remember similar occurrences in my personal history. My own memory is using the film to suggest that I may need to start remembering this way more often. In this case, then, Portman’s scream will always have the timbre of Resnais’ Je Taime Je Taime.

Les Quatres Cent Coups (Truffaut, 1959)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:11:00 +0000

It is always worth not watching 400 Blows for a while before taking it up again for the sole reason that the last shot works best if one isn’t quite prepared for it. I have learned over successive viewings that one can know beforehand in detail the precise form in which the film closes – that being little Antoine staring directly into the camera through an unfocused frame – and it will prove repeatedly to be a startling moment. The shot is a brilliant collusion between Léaud and Truffaut, perhaps accidental, in which Léaud runs along the beach from left to right in an arc with his eyes on something to the distant right of the camera. At the last moment, as the camera drifts to the left, Léaud turns his head slightly and looks directly into the camera.

It is more complex than it sounds (pardon this awful analogy), but like a decent wine there are recognizable steps encountered on each sip:

1. At first one feels unsettled that both he and Truffaut have violated a narrative contract in which Antoine has been third person. Truffaut has always had him wandering about in all sorts of typical third-person humdrum, perfecting what was practiced in Les Mistons. But here he looks at us as if we both recognize each other, a flicker of the first person, and then the film is “Fin.” 400 Blows is like being in a public bathroom, trying not to look around very much without making it too obvious that we are trying not to look. Here Antoine accidentally catches our eye and neither of us is quite sure how to respond. This is Truffaut, before Godard, at his most Godardian.

2. That sense of violation quickly gives way to a recognition of the thoughtfulness of this gesture. The look in Doinel’s eyes is one of youthful apprehension, an innocence just beginning to become aware of itself and therefore lost. This movement to the first person lends a memorable charity to the film as we are able to more completely empathize with the Doinel’s youthful ignorance.

3. Following closely on the heels of this empathy, the “finish” of the shot, comes from the well-known autobiographical nature of the film. At the very least we know that Truffaut mined his own past for the tenor of Doinel. So now here at the end, through the frozen image of Doinel sweeping his eye back towards Truffaut’s lens, we are privy to an eerie parallax akin to what happens with Errol Morris’ Interrotron – a unique intimacy based on the relationship between a lens, its subject, and an audience. The various points of experience in the film converge at the end, Truffaut's, Doinel's, and now ours.

Southland Tales (Kelly, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:10:00 +0000

If this film were a book it would have become a classic, a Snow Crash, Vurt, or Neuromancer sort of classic. And oddly enough it was a book, in the form of six graphic novels commissioned by Richard Kelly to lead audiences up to the premiere of the actual film which served as the narrative conclusion to the entire series. These six novels were compacted into three, largely unread, and then the film opened to mild derision at Cannes.

Which is unfortunate because it simply is a masterful riff on the near-future fiction of Gibson, Stephenson, Sterling, and a few others. The film seems intent on sprawl, the quintessence of all things cyberpunk. The sprawl of urban planning, social systems, information, and eventually the biographies of people affected by these emerging structures. After a long time, Kelly’s film sprawls to a conclusion that to those uninitiated by the graphic novels is as senseless as it is hypnotic. (The storyline wanders quite a bit, which seemed to be the main contention people have had with the film. But it seems to me that this is more a result of the film being the conclusion to a series of six largely unread graphic novels than Kelly's inability to direct the film. The story isn't contained by the film itself, which exhausts itself on tying up loose ends from a broader story.) His knack for the transcendent and uncanny again proven, Southland Tales collapses in a heap of memes orchestrated by perfectly cast pop-culture icons like the Rock, Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, and Seann William Scott. There is a floating ice cream truck, spiritually powered by Scott (yes – Stifler), at the end that works well as an example for the way the rest of the film develops. It is an utterly unpredictable cultural reference that will leave all but the most oddly equipped audiences in the dust. If there is a future for a Tarantino-like fascination with 1990’s pop culture done in Snow Crash mode, then Kelly may have identified its path of least resistance.

Additional comments penned elsewhere:

There is a large difference between interpreting something and alluding to it, or even aping its narrative trajectories. And the sorts of allusions that lead to allegory are much different than the allusions that occur in the cultural web of reference that typifies cyberpunk lit and Kelly's film. This latter context is more Eco than Bunyan. He has said things about the film like: "It’s like if someone took mushrooms and read the Book of Revelations [sic] and had this crazy pop dream… that’s the film in a nutshell." And: "I think for me, I think of a way I guess in which the world could end immediately, and there's obviously the theory of the second coming, the Christian theory of revelation [also sic]."

So he isn't interpreting Revelation at all, rather using it as a structural starting point for this giant sprawl of a film that touches on a lot of current issues and references (that second link is helpful in this respect). When he says things such as, "It was like the city self-destructing, a big comedy about the city self-destructing," it becomes clear that allusions to Revelation are just one of many devices that build this momentum. There is a small collection of films that do this with other sections of the Bible, most often the Gospels, but this is one of the better purely aesthetic uses of Revelation imagery in film I can recall along with films Notre Musique and Heaven. It really is wonderfully poised, Southland Tales being what would happen if MTV ingested the Left Behind series, guzzled a few years of Drudge Report links, and then got sick all over the director's cut of Donnie Darko.

Eastern Promises (Cronenberg, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 23:06:00 +0000

If Cronenberg is going to be remembered for body-horror, for the representation of trauma to North Americans for whom trauma is predominately conceived of in social rather than physical terms, then the now famous scene in the middle of Eastern Promises where a nude Viggo Mortensen graphically subdues two Russian hitmen may be one of his most personal statements to date. The contemporary mind is typically unfamiliar with the physical experience of trauma, our terrors being more immediately related to social or psychological states-of-being such as being imprisoned, alienated, ignored, poor, lost, or any host of conditions related to our preoccupation with wealth, information, and technology. Cronenberg has himself been preoccupied with these emerging forms of trauma, documenting the horror of technology (Rabid, Videodrome, The Fly), information (Naked Lunch, ExistenZ), sex (Crash), and justice (A History of Violence).

We have come to expect some sort of specific intention to Cronenberg’s more unsettling images, and this is certainly the case for Eastern Promises, which at first glimpse is far less cerebral or ideologically intentioned as his other films. The scene in question is literally stripped down, unattended by the thoughtful aspects of Cronenberg’s other body horror. It simply seems an exercise in brutality, an action film where the camera is allowed to watch for a little longer than we are used to. But this seemingly hostile gaze, perhaps in theory similar to the awfully extended scenes in the recent Rambo, is yet another revision of Cronenberg’s fascination with trauma and our responses to it.

In interviews Cronenberg related this particular scene to his personal atheism, explaining that “To me an act of murder is the act of total destruction, it's absolute. There's no comeback, there's no going to heaven, that's it. And it is very easy for that to be veiled or covered up, in a movie especially.” Which, by and large, is a point worth making. But the Cronenbergian rubber hits the road when such points are read in light of previous musings on the body and mortality such as: “For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.”

The relevance of this to similar statements made by Dumont about the body begs for further discussion. But as far as Eastern Promises is concerned, it seems fair to say that the naked Viggo scene is Cronenberg 101, an initiation to the base principles of his body horror. Perhaps in an anti-Bazanian move, Cronenberg looks for these moments in film where life (or at least “life as we know it”) is irrevocably extinguished. And where his body horror often manipulates flesh into enduring reminders of Western presents and futures gone awry, here it simply ruins it, tears it, and breaks it until it ceases to live. This scene certainly isn’t as high-concept as Cronenberg’s previous representations of techno- or info-trauma, but it is as every bit relevant. Perhaps it is even more relevant in an age where videos of beheadings and images of corpses, killings, and assorted physical trauma have become such a viable virtual commodity. The simple conscience of the naked Viggo scene really is what Cronenberg’s body horror is all about.

Control (Corbijn, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:21:00 +0000

I hope the legend holds true that Corbijn jumped headlong into this project as a response to Winterbottom's almost comic reproduction of Joy Division's origins in 24 Hour Party People. Thinking of Control as a corrective, a memorial biopic delicately tailored by Corbijn's trademark sense of composition, grants it a sort of dignity many of its rock star biography predecessors lack.

Though at first glimpse Corbijn's cinematography is marked by a pace and precision that could refer to the ethereal poetry evoked by classic black and white composition such as in Bergman or Tarr (Corbijn's Macclesfield seemed an awful lot like Ramsay's Glasgow), it never strikes out in the direction of transcendence achieved by Van Sant's treatment of Kurt Cobain in Last Days. Rather, Corbijn's Curtis is posed as a product of his environment, and the film traces this cultural biography in methodical detail. Out of his financial difficulties, debilitating epilepsy treatments, and failed marriage, emerges a totally secular figure. Corbijn's Curtis is "the Stranger" and Jim Morrison rolled into one.

The sense of Curtis' personal drama as an absurdist tragedy is only emboldened by the circumstances of his suicide. Corbijn does a sensitive job of tracking the deterioration of his various relationships, fascination with death, and his eventual submission to what Curtis must have considered an unbearable case of epilepsy. This abundance of personal issues seemed to trigger his unexpected suicide right before his first American tour, and in this final hour of his life we find him smoking cigarettes, watching Herzog's Stroszek on BBC 2, and giving Iggy Pop's "The Idiot" one more listen. This improbable, yet entirely true, set of references has always made Curtis' suicide more emblematic than other rock star deaths. One can easily imagine his thoughts at the end of Stroszek, in which Stroszek’s suicide gunshot is followed by close-up shots of an inexplicable series of clanging quarter-slot mechanical animals. The din is unbearable. When questioned about this odd sequence, Herzog mused: “It’s a very big metaphor...but a metaphor for what, I can’t tell you. But I know it is very big and it will stand the test of time.” Such musing becomes all the more haunting in the context of Curtis, eyes closing on a world more Kafka than anything else. And "The Idiot," born out of Iggy's and Bowie's early rehabilitation in Berlin, may have struck a chord of sympathy in Curtis, sunk under the weight of his own seemingly insurmountable afflictions. This collection of images and thoughts become a ready made monument to Curtis' quick life.

There are moments in the film that seem intent on contradicting a skeptical opinion of Curtis and his death. Immediately on the heels of the conversation in which Curtis tells his doting wife that he loves her no longer, the first few chords of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" begin to play. Is Corbijn's “timing that flawed” (as in, it is in unbearably cheesy moment in an otherwise sober film), or could the videographer in him just not resist such a perfect confluence of lyric, image, and biography? Either way, a few scenes like this may serve to give us the only sense of Curtis as “icon” that we actually have on film other than the well-worn videos on You Tube.

How Should We Then Review?

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:20:00 +0000

How Should We Then Review (MHP Column, 1.07)

(A Follow-Up to: “What on Earth is Christian Film Criticism?”)

1. His dilemma is that he professes a belief which he holds saves himself and the world and nourishes his art besides, it is also true that Christendom seems in some sense to have failed. Its vocabulary is worn out. This twin failure raises problems for a man who is a Christian and whose trade is with words. 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.
- Walker Percy

2. Words have two meanings, the definition and the connotation. The connotation goes on no matter what you do with the definition. Modern man destroys the definition of religious words, but nevertheless likes to cash in on their connotation/motivation force.
- Francis Schaeffer

3. There is a great difference between disagreements as to whether there is a Last Judgment and whether there is a German airplane overhead.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

I recently ended a column titled “What on Earth is Christian Film Criticism?” with a plea for response from practicing Christian film critics. I did receive a few responses that have helped me better locate my understanding of “Christian” film criticism on the ceaselessly evolving map of contemporary Christian faith, practice, and theology (which is starting eerily to resemble Lewis’ depiction of purgatory in The Great Divorce). It was suggested that a definition of Christian film criticism, which in the original column was limited to something along the lines of “what happens when a Christian watches a film and then writes about it,” could be expanded several directions. It must include the pastoral angle, enabling criticism to embody the multiplicity of roles we find embedded in the metaphor of “the body” of Christ. It must also become more sociologically and philosophically aware, which is not to say that only grad students can write decent criticism but that decent critics take the task of ideological self-awareness seriously.

Doug Cummings justifiably took me to task for conflating “Christian film criticism” and the evangelical publishing market in which I was implicitly identifying a film-criticism renaissance. In reality, “Christian film criticism” is something with roots far beyond the confines of the evangelical movement both historically and ideologically, and defining “Christian film criticism” must take this rich back-story into consideration. Evangelicalism tends towards solipsism when it “does culture,” disconnected from the history of Christian cultural theory in late Catholic personalism, Dutch Reformed thought, Eliot-era Anglicanism, and the classic filmmakers that have long been thought of as pioneering Christian artists. To say that the current interest in Christian cultural criticism evidenced by Evangelical publishing houses and media outlets is a “renaissance” is a mistake, as there have been important links between Christianity and film ever since the first magic lanterns flickered their way through Victorian boudoirs.

Though this oversight generally characterizes Evangelical cultural criticism, it applies in varying degrees to other areas of Christianity as well. The ratio of good to bad film criticism is remarkably similar across the board from fundamentalism to Catholicism. Taking all this on board, I think I can offer a more definitive definition of “Christian film criticism.” It will be a working definition, subject to future revision, and will hopefully prove as flexible as the medium for which it seeks to mediate. But before we get to that, a few points of consideration along the way:

1. Mere Criticism

Perhaps one of the most notable and public side-effects of the tendency in Christian cultural criticism to neglect its own heritage is the confusion as to what film criticism really is. As it has been uprooted from the rich discussion about culture that took place in Christianity’s recent memory, it tends to be formless, shapeless, unmarked by the intentionality that characterizes more technical film criticism. What we need is a taxonomy, a set of categories that would define the intention of different criticisms for different audiences. Christian film critics need a set of focal points that will sharpen their ability to think through films, or identity markers that will cut through so many of the mixed messages they often unwittingly send to the public square.

Such a taxonomy may look like T.S. Eliot’s four-fold classification of the Professional Critic (which he also called the “Super Reviewer”), the Critic with Gusto, the Academic and Theoretical Critic, and the Critic who is a Poet. The Professional Critic (think: Ebert) frequently appears in places like Christianity Today Movies or Hollywood Jesus. What they review is dictated by markets and readerships, and thus is as general as possible. The Critic with Gusto is a fan of what they choose to review, and unfortunately often disguises themselves as a Professional Critic (it would be mean to name names here). The fervency with which some associate spiritual messages with particular films like The Matrix neatly characterizes this critic. The Academic and Theoretical Critic, certainly the most unpopular in Christian readerships, can be hard to find as they tend to publish in more specialized environments. And the Critic who is a Poet is rare indeed, Tarkovsky and Dorsky coming quickly to mind as exceptional poets of spirituality and cinema.

Eliot’s cast of characters has withstood the test of time, but one still runs into problems when faced with the fine nuances involved with writing on Christianity and film. Can a Christian really be a Professional Critic, which is often characterized by commercial sponsorship? Or how do we distinguish between the Critic with Gusto and the Critic who is a Poet when it comes to theological readings of films? The competing commercial and theological concerns of published Christian cultural criticism leave it uniquely open to such paradoxes. As a majority of Christian film criticism is disconnected from its own heritage, an estimation of these nuances becomes even more important, perhaps providing a way back to the pre-Evangelical success of Christians involved with film. What this taxonomy would actually look like needs more space than this column provides, I am simply interested here demonstrating how crucial this descriptive question really is.

2. The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Christian Film Reviewing

The lack of clarity regarding the different nuances at work in various Christian film criticisms can be easily demonstrated. Since I have just argued that no one has really defined what Christian film criticism is, I am going out on a limb here, but I’ll list several features common to a Christian film review. That these features are common does not mean that they serve as a sine qua non of a Christian film review. They are simply common enough to serve as an adequate point of departure for this conversation:

1. The List: A Christian film review often feels obligated on the basis of the ethical boundaries of Christian faith and practice to inform readers of morally problematic scenes or dialogue. At times, this takes place in the form of an actual list, breaking down the reasoning behind the rating of the film. At others, it takes place in the course of the review. But either way, this watchdog component of Christian film criticism is one of its most historic characteristics.

2. The Questions: A Christian film review will often consider itself to be a conversation starter, so much so that many Christian film review sites will offer discussion guides or sets of questions that are designed to turn the film review into a catalyst for individual or group reflection.

3. The Context: The context of Christian film reviewing has been evolving ever since the advent of blogs and individual websites. But the most widely read Christian film reviews are published in intentionally Christian print or online publications, typically being one component of a wide range of articles including theological, social, and political editorial, as well as straightforward devotional material.

4. The Content: The content of a typical Christian film review is hard to pin down, and I hesitate to make any generalizations here. This is partly because the content of any criticism is shaped by the ideological and social location of the critic. In other words, there are as many types of criticism as there are critics. But it is fair to say that the typical Christian critic finds themselves caught between the desire to do justice to their brand of Christian thinking and the desire to take part in popular culture. This is the tension between being faithful and being relevant, which not only dictates how one writes on a film, but what films tend to be reviewed.

Juxtaposing any of these four features leads to a set of mixed messages that for all intents and purposes may just as well be called the common characteristics of Christian film reviews. What Christian ethic makes it okay to watch and review a film that necessitates the critic making a list that warns readers of the film’s moral failures? If the function of a review is to inform, clarify, interpret, and respond, then why conclude it with a set of questions? Who are these questions really for? Why would a Christian magazine review so many Hollywood films? Does theology dictate the content of a review, or is it the other way around? These questions and more are often raised by a typical Christian film review. While good answers may exist for some of them, the mere fact that they persist is evidence that the practice of contemporary Christian film criticism is theoretically shaky, lacking the critical bedrock it deserves. (Or more pointedly, the critical acumen it possessed long ago.)

Carl F.H. Henry explained in his visionary Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism:

the ‘uneasy conscience’ of which I write is not one troubled about the great Biblical verities, which I consider the only outlook capable of resolving our problems, but rather one distressed by the frequent failure to apply them effectively to crucial problems confronting the modern mind.

Though he has been recently villainized by the emergent church, Henry’s uneasy conscience remains among the most prescient criticisms of the way Evangelicals do church and culture. We are not faced here with a problem of motivation, but of method. Transporting Henry to our context, we could say that if the effectiveness of a film review is directly related to its critical self-awareness, then the effectiveness of a Christian film review is directly related to its critical and theological self-awareness. In this way the Christian film reviewer is faced with the task of working constantly on two fronts, neither substituting one for the other or capitulating one to the other. It simply is the case that many Christian film reviews are neither “Christian” nor “critical,” and we will only recover these fine particularities by forging ahead in a discussion of method and embracing the “easy conscience” it will eventually afford.

3. The Scandal of Christian Film Criticism

One could easily say to all this: Big deal! Most people read film reviews to either make sure they aren’t wasting their money or that their kids won’t hear too many swear words on family movie night. But here the solipsism of Evangelical cultural criticism rears its ugly head yet again. I have suggested that there is a theoretical vacuum in which Christian film criticism operates, and this vacuum must be addressed with a conversation of method, of defining what Christian film criticism actually is. But the point of all this is as practical as it is important: If we fail to respond to this vacuum with a set of focal points, identity markers, and theologically-based critical strategies, someone else will.

And of course, by “someone,” I mean “Hollywood.” Take for example the recent purchase of Hollywood Jesus by Grace Hill Media, the sort of merger between a publicity agent and a media outlet that would typically be deemed “unethical” if it were higher profile. Here the vacuum left by an unfortunate shuffle in the Hollywood Jesus organization has been filled by someone who has a better handle on the marketplace than Hollywood Jesus has on its own critical moorings (this is all post-David Bruce, of course).

Likewise, Relevant Magazine often confuses “criticism” with “advertising,” and this happens in a less virulent form in other Christian media outlets. Typically, this is simply a pragmatic problem. From the perspective of an editor, there is only so much space and cash to go towards a set number of reviews. The outcome is a magazine or online site that is unfortunately marked by faithfulness to a constituency (who tend to see nothing other than multiplex fare) rather than faithfulness to a definition of criticism steeped in the expressiveness of Christian theology.

This scandal of Evangelical film criticism partakes in Knoll’s very Henrian assertion that:

What is true throughout the Christian world is true for American Christians: we who are in pietistic, generically evangelical, Baptist, fundamentalist, Restorationist, holiness, "Bible church," megachurch, or Pentecostal traditions face special difficulties when putting the mind to use. Taken together, American evangelicals display many virtues and do many things well, but built-in barriers to careful and constructive thinking remain substantial.

For Knoll, we are faced here with a theoretical issue, a problem with thinking critically and self-reflectively about our cultural engagement. But in the case of film criticism, I fear that the result of this theoretical breakdown will be commercial in scope. If we fail to establish a critical identity for Christian film discussion, then the marketplace will assuredly provide one for it. What will ultimately be traded away in this exchange is a heritage of ideas, a way of appreciating and responding to film, and the ability for authentic Christian film criticism and production to occur on anything other than a very isolated scale.

4. How Should We Then Review?

In the process of studying foreign languages, one quickly learns that the study of grammar is far more descriptive than it is prescriptive. A textbook on French, for example, does not set out to define rules for the French language but to describe systematically the way it is currently used. In the same way, any discussion of Christian film criticism should be far more descriptive than it is prescriptive, lest we turn the rich vocabulary of Christian cultural engagement into yet another handful of Walker Percy’s poker chips. The discussion that needs to be had, by necessity, will seek to preserve the ecumenical and interactive spirit of its heritage rather than legislate against it.

So rather than making a list of features that should be part of a Christian film review I would rather generalize about the potential future of this conversation. It should take place in the context of specific films, genres, and directors rather than in the form of theological abstractions. It should be collaborative, self-critical, and open to revision. It should result in better criticism and demonstrable gains in the profile of various Christian criticisms in the public square. It should not be limited to critics, but should enable the casual listener or layperson to watch and appreciate better films. It should help people to better negotiate the theological backgrounds of Christian cultural criticism, increasing their awareness of the importance of thinking theologically at the same time that they are thinking culturally. And perhaps most importantly, it should align Christian film critics against the commercial influences that threaten the integrity of public Christian thought. Somewhere in the midst of all this is the definition of Christian film criticism, a way of intentioned response and critique that both references Christian thought and contributes to it, unmediated by the commercial influences that dull our aptitude for discovery.

Found Objects - Joseph Cornell and the Art of Advent

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 22:18:00 +0000

Found Objects - Joseph Cornell and the Art of Advent (MHP Column, 12.06)

1. Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.
- Joseph Cornell

2. Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
- Walter Benjamin

3. I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
- John 14.18-20

Joseph Cornell and the Incarnation of Memory

“Assemblage.” “Avant-Garde.” “Surrealist.” “Found Object.” These are all words that one often hears in relation to Joseph Cornell, one of the more cryptic figures of 20th century American art. Most of Cornell’s artistic output involved the construction of small boxes in which different objects would be arranged opposite one side paneled in glass like a window. A stuffed parakeet on a branch next to a window filled with corks, beneath them the innards of a music box framed by bars of soap still in their flaking turn-of-the-century wrappers. A battered enamel doll in full Victorian garb peers from behind a sprout of bare twigs flicked with white and silver paint. An owl perches resolutely behind a plate of blue glass, curtains of textile poised theatrically on either side. Though this all sounds a bit random, each box really tells its own story, obliquely linking together a set of disconnected elements by forcing the viewer to take on the role of storyteller and to complete the work that Cornell’s finished pieces only start.

These objects were most often the leftovers of Cornell’s addiction to browsing the scores of curio shops dotting street level Manhattan, cluttered with forgotten knick-knacks, chipped and peeling bric-a-brac, and fading faux-Victorian what-nots left over from the jazz age. And in these found objects Cornell found little stories, each one imposing on his work their own weight of memory. This trinket must have belonged to a little girl on 9th street, that bit of magazine was read several times in a dentist office around the corner, that bit of watch was worn by a door-to-door salesman. And thus his boxes found a wide audience in people enchanted by their playfully mixed messages. (Cornell’s knack for expressing the unconscious and unspoken came to a hilt in a screening of his first film, Rose Hobart. After the viewing, Salvador Dali angrily attacked the projector while claiming that Cornell had “stolen the idea from his subconscious.”)

Critics often comment on the similarities in many of Cornell’s boxes, as he seemed to be attracted to birds, images of childhood, and arranged objects to evoke a sense of innocent wonder. But what ultimately binds Cornell’s work together is his fascination for finding things that have been lost, and retro-fitting them into storied poses that enshrine their sanctity as artifacts of memory. Cornell tunes us into the theatrical and poetic nature of remembering, his boxes the abstract equivalent of grainy 16mm family holiday footage, or the picture albums one stumbles across in grandma’s attic. Such artifacts, or found objects, require us to fill in the blanks and imagine some sort of narrative context for what we are seeing.

Advent and the “Incarnational Memory”

I find always find Cornell fascinating this time of year, with Advent right around the corner. It seems that most of what can be said about Cornell can also be said about this stage in the Church calendar. Here are several examples:

1. Cornell is all about montage, about the way in which completely different images or objects can offer up new meanings when creatively juxtaposed. The experience of a Cornell box is invigorating: we are confronted with things we hadn’t considered in tandem and then are pleasantly unsettled when we realize just how well they work together. This is precisely the way in which Advent throws us off balance. God and babies, divinity and stables, virginity and birth, praise and poverty, then and now, promise and expectation. All these juxtapositions are balanced in the incarnation, poised at the center of Christian theology as a narrative of impossible, yet unsettlingly appropriate tensions.

2. Cornell is all about story. Like the incarnation, Cornell sets loose the storiedness of the world and its objects. Cornell’s boxes are themselves the grounding context for his little bits and bobs, allowing us to read them as dramatis personae of open-ended storylines. In the same way, Advent defines the parameters of all Christian self-perception, telling us where the story begins and ends and how it is that we can participate in its conclusion. All of us found-objects are now composed within this narrative, placed just so in the drama of redemption.

3. Cornell is all about memory. The pleasure of negotiating Cornell’s found objects has to do with their antiquity. They are like relics that have been brushed off and showcased in Cornell’s little museums. We process each of his works of art as if we are wandering through a gallery of objects from long ago, imagining a past context for these items removed from our own. And Advent calls us to this same sort of imaginative self-reflection, to read the disparate elements of our own lives within the broader context of the incarnation. In this way, “memory” takes on a grand significance at Advent, as we stand looking through history at the incarnation by means of the recollections of canon and tradition, our vision backlit by the promise of his second coming.

Advent is a time of juxtaposition, storytelling, and the most profound sort of theater. During this time the drama of redemption, its contours defined by the poetry of the incarnation, leads us to a mode of reflection that Cornell seems to understand in his own way.

The Art of Advent

In one of his many journals, Cornell mused: “Nostalgia ok for Wyeth in isolated New England…What is the answer for New York City?" In other words, Wyeth’s stark and symbolic naturalism is fitting for rural America, but does that approach work for the big city? How can we remember a place like Manhattan in such a way that celebrates true nostalgia, rather than a set of memories that falsely glamorizes the past? What a prescient vision of what American art and advertising would become even in his own generation, which saw the rise of Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame.” Cornell’s interesting response to this question can be found in his numerous attempts to answer it by means of his many boxes. Implicit in his work is criticism of a culture coasting on fumes of illegitimate memories.

But perhaps there is an even better answer to Cornell’s question is to be sought in Advent, which empowers a true and abiding interpretation of the past and present. It is an unimpeachable nostalgia. Cornell’s world, like his little boxes, was ultimately private, personal, and afraid of straying too far from home. His artwork is individual, isolated, and intended for private reflection. In contrast, Advent isn’t just a Cornell box writ large, but an entire world waiting to swallow up our own. The art of Advent is then the art of fitting in, of being sensitive to the compositional strategies of the narrative of the incarnation that, like Cornell, has an odd sense of juxtaposition.

When the Child was a Child

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:07:00 +0000

When the Child was a Child (MHP Column, 10.06)

When the child was a child, it walked with his arms swinging. It wanted the stream to be a river, the river a torrent, and this puddle to be a sea. When the child was a child, it didn't know it was a child. Everything was full of life, and all life was one. When the child was a child, it had no opinions about anything. It had no habits. It sat cross-legged, took off running, had a cowlick in his hair, and didn't make a face when photographed. - From Wings of Desire

It struck me, while recently watching my first child being born, that the moment at which I have felt closest to God in this life was one bathed in pain, blood, bodies stretched to their limits, and the dirty detritus of birth. I do not intend to make any rigorous theological claim by intimating that watching this small dark girl coming out screaming into the light and air and gloved hands of cool midwives was the closest I have ever felt to God. It is a thoroughly uncritical statement, theoretically naïve, and smacks of the blandest sort of pop psychology. But in my line of work I rarely get to say things that aren’t footnoted in triplicate, and it is a relief to be able to share something so obvious as if it were important.

For months we saw her through a lens darkly. There in the sonogram like a constellation of fleshy features in space. And then here, screaming beneath the hum of hospital lighting, there being wrapped in a white terry-cloth towel, bits of blood and earth-toned bobs stippling the creases around her swaddled head, black eyes squinting.

But God was also there. Very clearly, almost matter-of-factly. It must have had to do with her birth as the culmination of a creative act, as if He proudly makes the rounds of first time fathers reveling apprehensively in a vague sense of sub-creation. It may be that God enjoys being present in that awful confluence of pain and joy that is childbirth, superintending that improbable set of conditions marked by the ages on either side of Eve’s apple.

And of course over the past weeks my mind has been moved by this experience, fumbling with the fact that the moment I felt closest to God was so marked by pain and the gross issues of birth. There is an analogy in here somewhere to those other times in my life that have been marked by this same paradox. There is an analogy to the process of art, to the strange ability of the Christian to catch those fleeting glimpses of God in moments of awful creativity. Life is not always clean and neat, and Christians should not advocate this myth in either the production or appreciation of literature, film, or artwork. Rather, we should be seeking those moments in which we can catch both God and the world with all its aches and imperfections in one gaze.

It was the presence of God that put the screaming of our smeared little girl into perspective; that clarified it and sharpened it. We perceived the strain of labor as a particularly post-Eden sort of grace. And we are surrounded by analogies to this process, both its beauty and its brutality. As a profoundly Christian and aesthetic experience, it has informed my sense of propriety.

Asher Lev - Represenation and Identity in Christian Art-making

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 21:15:00 +0000

My Name is Christian Art (MHP Column, 9.06)

Note: this column assumes some knowledge of My Name is Asher Lev, but you needn’t have read the book for it to make any sense.)

The fact that he actually painted a canvas titled “Brooklyn Crucifixion” may be one of the lesser known facts about Chaim Potok and his novel My Name is Asher Lev. In a variety of ways, this painting serves as a conclusion to the novel by attempting to hold all the conflicting religious and relational themes of the book together in one frame. You can see it here, and it is actually a great painting (a delightful cubist anachronism somewhere between Stuart Davis and Juan Gris).

Among other things, this painting stands as a testimony to another layer of the aesthetic onion that is Asher Lev. There is the one occupied by Asher Lev, of course, a snowy Hasidic Brooklyn before and after the dawning of the Jewish state. And the one occupied by Marc Chagall, whose biography serves as the archetype for the trials and tribulations of little Asher. And apparently there is that layer inhabited by Chaim Potok himself, who painted this canvas while writing the last few chapters of Asher Lev. It is this one I am currently interested in, having newly discovered it like a Narnia at the back of Potok’s closet.

Many Christian artists and the related cadre of Christian art appreciators have turned to Asher Lev for inspiration, as the difficult pilgrimage made in the book by Asher from an aesthetically ignorant community of faith to the farther reaches of the mysteries of painterly representation stands as a convenient analogy to Christians still laboring under the boot heel of American Christianity’s dismissively modernist understanding of art and image. To be fair, the current shift in the Church towards a theological appreciation of the arts is wrenching open weathered doors and dusty windows, airing out stale theologies bewitched by the black and white of text or entranced by the expository monotone of logocentrism. But Asher Lev will always remain a field guide for any Christian who finds in the gallery or theater a calling, an urge to take up representation as a profession. It is an encouragement to stay the course, to work towards gallery space even though church and family doesn’t seem to get it. But there is another level of inspiration afforded by Chaim Potok and Asher Lev, working together in the history of interpretation to say even more than that already so vibrantly postulated by “Brooklyn Crucifixion” and its troubled background. We will turn to that in a moment.

First it is worth reviewing a few facets of Asher Lev which are particularly helpful to working Christian artists. Here they are:

Asher’s Identity

In the book, Asher is apprenticed to Jacob Kahn by his exasperated parents at the behest of their Rebbe. Kahn, an aging holdover from the heyday of continental cubism, introduces Asher to the practice and culture of art. Kahn soon becomes a new sort of Rebbe to Asher, modeling for him a behavior and disposition that Kahn believes is appropriate for the “artist.” As it turns out, much of Kahn’s teaching is equal parts self-indulgence and self-importance, the typical romanticized pre-Warhol individualist reasoning of the new European art aristocracy that had found their way to America, pockets lined with cash.

Every now and then he has a few good pointers for Asher, but their teacher/student relationship comes to a head when Asher cuts off his payos instead of just continuing to tuck them behind his ears. Kahn says this in response:

You did that because you were ashamed. You did that because wearing payos did not fit your idea of an artist. Asher Lev, a person is an artist first. He is an individual. Great artists will not give a damn about your payos; they will only give a damn about your art. (244)

At first glimpse this is pretty good advice. Asher’s reticence to subsume his religious identity in his artwork or vice-versa had paralyzed him for most of the preceding chapters. However, it just so happens that Kahn is the one who has imparted to Asher his “idea of an artist” in the first place. Not too many pages previously, Kahn has said things like this to Asher:

Listen to me, Asher Lev. As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it. (218)

And:

I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I seem them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they are not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world. (226)

I find Kahn’s criticism of Asher’s payos trimming hard to accept when he himself has sought to move him from his Hasidic moorings into the libertarianism of his modernist romantic vision of “the artist.” Hasn’t Kahn himself clipped his payos? How can he vituperate Asher for doing the same thing? I have the sneaking suspicion that there are two criticisms operating in Potok’s work. He is criticizing the idea that we need to hold our religious and aesthetic identities in tension. But he is also criticizing the bootstrapping idealism of Asher Lev’s era of artists. Asher comes to Kahn because he is paralyzed by the difficulty of coordinating his identity as artist and identity as Jew. But Kahn’s solution simply lands him on the horns of a new dilemma. Kahn’s insistent individualism fails to square with Asher’s intoxication with his heritage, with his family, ultimately with the eloquence of Torah and its community of interpretation.

Asher’s Profession

This brings us to conflict between Asher’s initial conception of what an artist does and what Kahn thinks art is all about. In an early exchange, Asher exclaims“it is man’s task to make life holy.” Jacob is quick to reply that “Art is not for people who want to make the world holy.” Asher’s initial concept of what art can do is keenly Hasidic, steeped in the conception of Torah as a guide to a set of practices that enable one to sanctify the everyday. In contrast, Jacob’s concept is one we all know well. Some of the most awful experiences of historical memory available to modern man are not visits to Civil War battlefields, concentration camps, or war memorials. They are the surprise experiences of things like Picasso’s “Guernica,” Kiefer’s “The Milky Way” or Duchamp’s “Given” in random museums. All artwork touched by war, killing, guilt, obliquely digesting the regrettable imperial indulgences of the early 20th century. They are like stains on our historical conscience.

Kahn is schooled in this sort of art: a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, a shriek of paint, and he seems intent on infusing Asher’s work with this bent wisdom. Whether Kahn’s conception wins out is a matter of how one reads “Brooklyn Crucifixion,” a conversation that needs its own essay to adequately address.

Suffice it to say that Asher’s innocent conception of art as that which can make life holy haunts the rest of the book. It becomes clear to the reader that Kahn has drawn a false distinction between what holiness does and what art does, or rather, what holy people do and what artists do.

Kahn has fallen into the same ideological trap as the Hasidic community that has spurned Asher Lev. Where their concept of holiness is too narrow to include the world of art, Kahn’s concept of art is too narrow to include the world of holiness. I hem and haw over the finer points of whether Asher’s final exhibition in the book represents a victory or a stalemate. I also hem and haw over how aware Potok was of some of the nuances his character has raised. Regardless, in the end Asher seems to stumble upon a professional identity beyond the Schylla of his Rebbe and the Charybdis of Kahn.

Asher’s Choice

There are a number of ways to pose Asher’s choice in the book. His father poses it as one of profession, between artist and whatever it is he would end up doing if he simply decides to stop painting. Kahn poses it as one of tradition, of community. It is between the Hasidic world, and the world of artists. Asher continues to pose it as an existential choice, between the agony of inscribing canvases with images he know will cause strife in his community and the agony of not painting at all.

All such dilemmas as those faced by the practicing Christian artist. That is to say, if they haven’t encountered one of these crossroads, then they haven’t been producing art. But as “Brooklyn Crucifixion” closes the book, it begins to appear to the reader that Asher’s principle dilemma, his fundamental issue, is aesthetic. “Brooklyn Crucifixion” embodies a mode of representation; it is a visual solution to the dilemmas posed to him by faith, community, and teacher. It alienates some, it proves a revelation to others, but to Asher it represents a choice. He stumbles across a language that can describe what it was like to be a Brooklyn Hasid in the 50’s, one that expresses his identity as an artist and his failure to yield to false solutions to the dilemmas posed by his situation. His professional identity is birthed in this choice to pursue a particular mode of representation, to speak one language of images rather than another. In other words, at the end of the day his choice, and Asher’s solution, is to paint. And above all: to paint very well.

Potok’s Painting

The book opens with the following self-description:

I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years. Well, I am none of these things. And yet, in all honesty, I confess that my accusers are not altogether wrong: I am indeed, in some way, all of these things. The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements in a causal chain. (3)

This Asher that opens the book, that narrates his tale of self-discovery, is confident and self-aware of what he does as an artist. It is a far cry from the confused and fumbling attitude of his youth. This Asher is a model for Christian artists in that he has come to grips with his identity as Jew and as artist. He has learned how engage art as a means of representation as well as a means of holiness or truth. And he has learned how to negotiate the choices posed by his unique situation, one which many Christian artists will find themselves in today.

None of this is very new, but it is always worth reviewing. And My Name is Asher Lev is always worth rereading. But what I find most intriguing in all of this is Chaim Potok’s mysterious role. Asher Lev is fiction, but as it turns out, “Brooklyn Crucifixion” isn’t. Potok has put his money where his mouth is, so to speak. It is provocative to ruminate on Asher Lev and the ambiguous layers posed by his various artistic dilemmas. But here, the real ghost in the machinery is Chaim Potok the artist rather than Asher Lev the artist. If Asher Lev is a model for the Christian artist, then Potok himself even moreso.

The final lesson taught by Asher Lev is that we can talk all we want about what Christian art is, but that will never be a substitute for its actual practice. Just as Asher sweats out his dilemmas in paint and thinner, so should we. As it turns out, “Brooklyn Crucifixion” isn’t a fiction at all. Both for Potok and Asher Lev, the discussions were past, the role model defined. All that remained for them was to paint. Likewise, if Christian art is to move forward, it will do so on the backs of canvases, sculptures, and galleries stocked with work.

Judging a Book By Its Cover: The Da Vinci Code Spectacle

noreply@blogger.com (M. Leary) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 21:24:00 +0000

Here are some excerpts from a piece recently published by Veritasse Magazine. The piece is about the mechanics of the process behind book to film productions, using The Da Vinci Code as a test case. I am not sure what their copyright rules are, so here are some select paragraphs:

Harold and the Purple Crayon was always my favorite book as a child. Literally about how a little boy named Harold draws himself through a series of dreamy perils into bed, the book is elegant, simple, and hypnotic. It is so simple that it actually begins right on the front cover, where Harold is already poised with his purple crayon to rush headlong through the book and its wordless narrative. Like all good children’s books, Harold had me hooked before it even left the shelf. Though it may seem immature, this method of book selection tailors my literary tastes to this day. It is what directed me to things like 1971 edition of Swiss Family Robinson, the 1959 edition of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, and on one fateful day, the irresistible minimalism of the old Penguin edition of Catcher in the Rye.

The publishing industry is keenly aware of the fact that the first thing we see of a book is its cover, and the eye of the average bookshop browser can instantly identify at least four different genres from the distance of 10 feet: romance novel, techno-thriller, chick-lit, DIY handbook. The Penguin Classic, the Library of America, these book covers are a badge of honor. Such volumes are most effective when strategically tossed on the edge of a Starbuck’s table, instantly marking it as the territory of someone “in the know.” With great reason, graphic designers will speak reverently of such names like Germano Facetti, innovated Penguin designer, or Fred Troller who introduced Swiss modernism to bookish Americans, and other pioneering book cover artists who wrestled with serifs, tangled with font sizes, and effectively branded literary tastes for generations of publishing. These days, it is no accident that the hand of a housewife in the supermarket, or her husband in the airport, will gravitate towards a particular title.

It is only relatively recently that a hybrid has appeared, an aberrant branch in the evolving art of book cover design. These are what the industry calls “tie-in” covers, what happens to a book after it has been adapted into a film. It is the reason why the alluring artwork on Louis Sachar’s Holes was replaced by a bland ensemble of actors peering across the title. Seabiscuit traded its timeless photo of Red Pollard for something matching the DVD cover of its adaptation. Or for a while, Jack Nicholson’s mug replaced the groundbreaking design of the original cover of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The reason for such aesthetic tragedies is simple: the recognition factor involved with these new covers turns aging classics into new bestsellers. It signals the end of a transition in which a book has ceased to simply be a book, but part of a multi-media package built around an original storyline.

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In Spike Jonze’s delightfully irreverent film Adaptation, we get an insider’s glimpse into the process of film adaptation. In a direct mimicry of the actual struggle of screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann to adapt The Orchid Thief, the film chronicles the efforts of a fictional “Charlie Kaufmann” in adapting the same title. As the The Orchid Thief is more about orchids than anything else, the real life Kaufmann turns to a wild assortment of plot twists and intrigues that plague the story of his onscreen counterpart in order to bring the book to life. What we are left with in this film about the making of a literary adaptation is the sense of struggle inherent to the process. Literary adaptation is more than just the process of transitioning a story from words to images, it is about the conflicting narratives of author and screenwriter and the reproduction of the reading experience in an entirely different aesthetic vocabulary.

I wish Akiva Goldsman, The Da Vinci Code screenwriter, would have had this same struggle in scripting this film. There is no sense at all that what we have in The Da Vinci Code is the result of a long process of wrestling words into images. As already noted, this is not entirely Goldsman’s or Howard’s fault. It is ironic that a book about the vitality and creativity of words, images, and religious symbols in history is so shallow from a literary point of view that it does not lend itself to an adaptation that taps into films provocative capabilities. C.S. Lewis once quipped that Satan’s best ploy was to convince the world that he is silly, just a cad. Likewise, this film will enjoy its mediocre status. Riddled with fantastic historical error, Dan Brown’s preposterous reasoning assaults both the dignified presence of Christ in early Christian theology and his unabated historical influence. The filmed adaptation of his reasoning, however, can really only be charged with the sin of bland sensationalism.

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There seems to be a fairly simple decision making process in place for the publication of these transitional book covers. Allison Barrow of Transworld Publishing, responsible for the British publication of The Da Vinci Code, shared with us the following logic: “Generally if we have already published a book, and we perceive that the subsequent film is going to make a major impact, then we would adapt a cover to reflect the imagery from the film.” If by “major impact” she means that the film does well in the box office, then The Da Vinci Code certainly fits the bill. As the book cover designers pointed out above, it makes sense then that the related cover would bank on the instant recognizability of the film’s major stars.

This poses a precarious relationship between filmed adaptation and their related book covers, and all this discussion of book cover design provides a convenient analogy for the relationship between books and film. There is a sense in which flawed literary adaptations share in the mistake made by their related book covers. Just as these new covers highlight a shallow, marketable image of the film’s storyline, some adapted films fail to transpose the compelling artistry and ambiguity of a given text to the screen. Likewise, just as good book covers serve as an instant point of contact between a reader and a novel, so do good filmed adaptations become imaginative representations of the thematic concerns of a literary classic. Showing rather than telling, they in some way become a symbol or reminder of the reading experience.