Long Pauses

Whatever happened to . . .

2009-06-25T19:51:00.008-04:00

Earlier this week the Toronto International Film Festival announced its first 26 titles, which got me thinking about several really good films I saw there last year that seem to have vanished into the ether. Blurbs are from my write-up at Senses of Cinema:

Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater)

Although I saw very few narrative films that had their world premiere at TIFF, my favourite among them was Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, which is earning much-deserved praise for Christian McKay’s genuinely uncanny performance in the title role. That anyone -- anyone -- could so closely resemble Welles and so effortlessly reproduce his barreling voice would have been unimaginable before this film, but McKay’s greater feat is his knack for the raised brow, the glimmering eye, and the sly smile -- or, in a word, the charisma -- that makes the young Orson Welles of Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai and The Third Man so electric. Linklater has consistently alternated between work-for-hire studio pictures like School of Rock (2003) and The Bad News Bears (2005) and smaller films developed in-house, such as Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). Me and Orson Welles falls somewhere in between. The adaptation of Robert Kaplow’s novel was shepherded for several years by Linklater’s longtime associates Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo and was financed independently. (As of this writing, the film has yet to secure American distribution). Linklater’s formal style is typically unassuming, but the central story of an idealistic teenage artist (Zac Efron) echoes his career-long concern with the creative life, particularly in the final scene, in which Efron and a young writer walk off into the future, determined to become engaged passionately with the world around them. Linklater has great fun with the material, inserting occasional allusions to Godard and Carol Reed, and his recreation of Welles’s production of Julius Caesar captures much of the transgressive excitement that made it such a sensation seventy years ago.

Salamandra (Pablo Aguero)

In the opening sequence of Salamandra, Pablo Aguero's remarkable debut feature, six year-old Inti (Joaquin Aguila) plays alone in the bathtub of his grandmother’s well-appointed apartment. His toys are an American tank and brightly-coloured magnetic letters with which he spells out, in an ironic moment recalling late-‘60s Godard, “U.S. Army”. His comfort and security is broken a moment later when his mother (Dolores Fonzi) returns unexpectedly from prison and whisks him away to El Bolson, an isolated hippy commune in Patagonia. Aguero, like Inti, was raised among the anarchy and recklessness of El Bolson. “When your life is endangered, you become more alive to the sensations around you,” he said after the screening, and it’s much to his credit that the dizzying cacophony he creates in Salamandra is downright overwhelming. While promoting For Ever Mozart (1996) Godard attacked Western governments for their exploitation of others’ suffering in order to promote political agendas: “We made images in the movies, when we began, in order to remember. TV is made to forget. We see Sarajevo, okay, we forget in two seconds. The same moment that we are looking, we forget.” Child in peril stories, like “Feed the Children” commercials, are typically designed to appeal to the simplest and most disposable of emotions, pity. While Inti and his mother are both deserving of our pity, Aguero precisely counterbalances that response, eliciting also our admiration, fear, disgust, respect, and curiosity. Salamandra is certainly difficult to forget.

Nuit de Chien (Werner Schroeter)

Disconcerting in a completely different way was Nuit de Chien (Tonight), the latest feature from Werner Schroeter. A film that can legitimately wear the cliched descriptor “Kafkaesque”, Tonight depicts the night-long journey of returned war hero Ossorio Vignale (Pascal Greggory), who hopes to find his lover and escape with her before their city crumbles in a vague and ever-shifting revolutionary struggle. Vignale wanders into bars, faces down tyrants, rescues a beautiful child, and encounters several femmes fatales -- in other words, he’s a kind of noir hero but one trapped in an absurdist wonderland. Unlike other films in this genre -- say, Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) -- there’s no easily-defined menace here, no corporate bureaucracy or sinister conspiracy pulling the strings. Instead, events in the film turn at random on base acts of human cruelty and irrational political ambition. It’s a senseless and violent world, and Schroeter renders it in a shocking Technicolor that harkens to the heydays of radical political cinema in the early-1970s. I’ve rarely been affected so viscerally by a film’s colour palette: in one overlit shot of two women who have been sexually assaulted, Schroeter’s use of high contrast red and white actually made me light-headed. His images are classically Surreal -- arresting, confrontational, and defamiliarizing.

Genova (Michael Winterbottom)

Like Nuit de Chien Michael Winterbottom’s Genova also alludes to cinema of the 1970s. A direct homage to Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Genova is about a middle-aged professor (Colin Firth) who moves with his two young daughters to Italy after their mother’s tragic death. It’s another interesting experiment from Winterbottom, who over the past decade has averaged more than a film per year. Shifting the dynamic from the loss of a child in the original film to the death of a wife and mother here allows Winterbottom to explore the very different emotional tolls taken on those involved. Genova, like its predecessor, is particularly interested in the ways sexual desire presents itself -- almost against the sufferer’s will -- as a manifestation of the identity confusion and desperate loneliness that accompanies such a loss. The memorable sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now haunts this film as well, both in Firth’s flirtations with an attractive Italian student (Margherita Romoe) and, much more interestingly, in the bittersweet coming-of-age of his teenaged daughter (Willa Holland). Of Winterbottom’s previous films, Genova most resembles, stylistically, 9 Songs, particularly in its use of documentary-like handheld photography and jumpcutting, and both films, I think, share a sympathetic fascination with the pains and mysteries of human intimacy. The ghost in Genova isn’t scary or dangerous but the world it haunts certainly is.

Katia's Sister (Mijke de Jong)

Finally, Mijke de Jong’s Het Zusje van Katia (Katia’s Sister), though far from perfect, is certainly deserving of some critical attention. The film revolves around the performance of Betty Qizmolli, who plays a socially awkward and emotionally impaired teenager. She, her mother (Olga Louzgina), and her older sister Katia (Julia Seijkens) are Russian immigrants living in Amsterdam and surviving on the mother’s earnings as a prostitute. Andrés Barba, the author of the novel on which the film is based, has been commended for his ability to adopt the perspective, if not the actual voice (it’s written in the third person), of a young girl whose innocence and naivete are debilitating. She is a Holy Fool so far removed from the moral complexities of the world that she is literally nameless: when asked in the opening moments of the film what she wants to be when she grows up, the girl can only answer “Katia’s sister”. A friend complained near the end of the festival that he’d seen too many films with “their hearts in the right place”, and this was, for me, a curious exception to the rule. De Jong is working with what is, essentially, a parable, yet her solution to the problem of adaptation is to commit completely to an aesthetic we’ve come to equate, post-Dardennes, with “realism” -- natural lighting, handheld photography with a shallow depth of field, and a slightly overexposed and desaturated image. De Jong’s camera rarely leaves the girl’s side or shoots her from a distance of greater than a medium shot. We don’t watch the world in this film, we watch her watching the world, and it’s that formal discipline that keeps Katia’s Sister from falling apart under the weight of its premise.

SFIFF Diary 4

2009-05-12T10:25:00.013-04:00

Rembrandt's J'Accuse (Peter Greenaway)

The last Greenaway film I saw was Prospero's Books, so I have no idea if Rembrandt's J'Accuse is a return to form, as programmer Rod Armstrong claimed when he introduced it at SFIFF. A companion to Greenaway's recent Rembrandt biopic, Nightwatching (2007), Rembrandt's J'Accuse is an art history lecture disguised as an essay film. In his meticulous dissection of Rembrandt's "The Night Watch," Greenaway alludes to the painter's biography, to the political life of 17th century Amsterdam, to the aesthetic tastes of the day, to romantic intrigues, to the history of technology, and to various schools of relevant academic criticism, but the film seems less intent on uncovering the mysteries of a great painting than on modeling for a contemporary audience the fine and fading art of looking. Really looking. Though drowning in a whirl of images, we are sorely lacking in visual literacy, the film implies. Or, that's certainly what I found most interesting about it, at least. Formally, Rembrandt's J'Accuse is an odd bird. Each of Greenaway's arguments is presented logically and in sequence (such is the burden of a linear medium), but it has something of the quality of a Flash presentation or a late-'90s CD-Rom. I can imagine it being spliced into hyperlinked elements and finding a home as an interactive museum kiosk. (I almost certainly would have preferred to explore it that way.) Greenaway's talking head even appears throughout the film like a pop-up window, reading from the script in a resounding, pedantic tone that rivals Terrence Davies's.

The Other One (Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic)

My expectations for The Other One skyrocketed during the opening title sequence, which is a beautiful montage of high-angle, nighttime shots of a mostly-empty, twelve-lane highway. It reminded me of a Claire Denis film -- the helicopter ride that opens I Can't Sleep or the rooftops of Paris in Friday Night. The wide highway leads eventually to a toll station. Then, as I recall, Bernard and Tridivic cut to their heroine, Anne-Marie (Dominique Blanc), who proceeds to drive a hammer into the side of her skull. Anne-Marie, we learn, has recently ended her relationship with a much younger man, freeing him to meet someone more appropriate. When she later learns that his new partner is also d'un certain age, she comes unhinged. She fails, embarrassingly, to seduce him, she cyberstalks, she begins to hallucinate. With The Other One, Bernard and Tridivic are positioning themselves somewhere in that line from Sirk to Cassavetes to Almodovar, all of them male directors preoccupied by strong women of fading beauty and sexual power. Blanc's performance is impressive, and the style of the film is often suitably claustrophobic and disorienting, but something has gone awry in the structuring of this film. That cut from the toll station to Anne-Marie's bathroom is the first of countless ellipses, most of them chronological jumps, both forward and backward in time. It's not confusing -- I never struggled to understand what was happening, or when -- but the cutting creates a flatness or stasis in the main character, a woman who is presumably becoming transformed through a moment of crisis. Particularly during the last half hour, as my patience waned, I thought often of Fien Troch's disappointing recent film, Unspoken, which also seems to assume that fixing a camera long enough on an actress will necessarily reveal the complexity of her character (exactly the wrong lesson to be learned from the best practitioners of contemplative cinema). Sirk, Cassavetes, and Almodovar (at his best) empathize with, are curious about, and have an essential understanding of their heroines. I don't doubt Bernard and Tridivic's commitment to Anne-Marie but the film lacks a trustworthy guide behind the camera.

Why I don't read (or write) music reviews

2009-05-08T23:15:00.009-04:00

"It's music inspired by Disney films." -- Annie Clark on her new album, Actor (recorded as St. Vincent)

"One would hardly expect the phrase 'Technicolor Disney nightmare' to become an overused idiom anytime soon, but it's a good bet you'll see some iteration of it, written or otherwise, in just about every reference to this album." -- No Ripcord

"if it sounds a bit like the kind of dark, violent fairy tale Disney might have made had they not strayed so far from their Grimm roots, well, that’s a pretty fair take on the album as a whole." -- The Hurst Review

"imagine Trent Reznor scoring an old Disney movie—princesses and demons battling in a swirl of distorted synth noises, orchestral strings and pianos." -- Culture Bully

"Marrow is the perfect mix of Disney musical meets rock n' roll." -- Sputnik Music

"The sophomore album from St. Vincent employs a cacaphony of sounds to create its Grimms brothers atmosphere. And indeed, Clark even looks like a Disney heroine." -- AOL Music

"The way that Clark’s trilling voice delivers melodies that skip and soars overtop richly-appointed arrangements, you could imagine these songs soundtracking any animated Disney film" -- Chromewaves

"Estas canciones nacen como un score imaginario para escenas de cintas como Badlands, Picnic at Hanging Rock y algunos clásicos de Disney como La Bella Durmiente y La Dama y el Vagabundo." -- Flaming Milk

"And like a Disney flick, the tune has a happy ending, with a soothing mix of accordion, acoustic guitar, and skyward vocals. However, Michey Mouse [sic] probably won't approve of Clark's lyrics about 'painting the black hole blacker,' quarreling with a lover, and keeping secrets in a relationship. Oh, well." -- Spin

"Clark’s sweet vocals carry a tinge of malice, and set against the fanciful, dreamy arrangements, they often recall a golden-era Disney-villain." -- Tiny Mix Tapes

"Annie Clark may look like an animated Disney heroine sprung to life, and the influence of willowy, ethereal singers and songwriters such as Feist and Tori Amos is obvious." -- STNG

"The whole project at times seems Disney-ish in its aims, soaring with its whimsical orchestral arrangements and painting scenes that you really want to see brought to life in animation." -- Express Night Out

"‘The Stranger’, the ambulatory opening track of Actor, is indicative of St Vincent’s efforts: kitsch strings, reminiscent of 60’s easy listening or a mournful Disney soundtrack, give way to a storm of fuzzed-up guitar." -- Wireless Bollinger

"Even when the music is at its most dramatic, as when songs slip out of placid, Disney-esque string accompaniment into jagged, distorted guitar passages, Clark consistently understates her characters' angst, and buries their negative emotions under layers of denial, stoicism, and subservience to the desire of others." -- Pitchfork

Okay, I like this one: "The fantasy of Disney is juxtaposed with the sweep of Morricone, David Mamet’s unsettling dramatic form and the alienation of Philip Roth." -- Music Remedy

SFIFF Diary 3: 575 Castro St.

2009-05-07T09:57:00.033-04:00

Dir. by Jenni Olson

Rather than write about the "Voices Carry" shorts program, which was a jarring and poorly curated combination of Roy Andersson/Terry Gilliam wannabes and thoughtful documentaries, I want to focus, instead, on 575 Castro St., Jenni Olson's cleverly conceived piece about Harvey Milk. The film is seven minutes long and consists of only four static shots, along with an opening title that contextualizes what we're seeing:

In February 1977, the San Francisco Gay Film Festival was born when a self-described “ragtag bunch of hippie fag” filmmakers got together and projected their Super 8 short films on a bed sheet. Many of these films explored gay themes, but (like many other experimental films of the era) many were simple light and motion studies. Most of these films passed through Harvey Milk's Castro Camera Store at 575 Castro St. for processing.
In 2008, the Castro Camera Store was recreated at that address for Gus Van Sant's film MILK. This film was shot on that set.

I've quoted the text in full because it's as essential to Olson's project as any of the shots are. It's as essential as the soundtrack, which is an edited recording of the "In Case I'm Assassinated" tape that Milk made while seated alone at the desk in his store. The film works wonderfully on the most basic level -- that is, as a haunted image. When I spoke to Olson after the screening, she told me how overwhelming it was to visit the set, to listen to Milk's voice, and to know that it was here -- right here -- that he contemplated his imminent murder. She's translated that experience well to her film, which is ghostly and deeply moving. But, of course, it wasn't right here that Milk made his tape. This is a meticulously dressed set. That's Sean Penn in the top-left corner (see the image above). It's artifice. Make-believe. Harvey's been gone for more than thirty years now.

Borrowing an idea I used last September when writing about James Benning's RR, here are a few more ways of looking at 575 Castro St.:

As a history of film technology -- I'd forgotten that Milk owned a camera shop, and didn't realize he processed Super 8 there and played a role in the making (literally) of gay cinema. That made the experience of watching 575 Castro St. interesting in two ways: first, Olson's film was projected not onto a bedsheet but onto a large screen in a stadium-seated multiplex; second, shot digitally, projected digitally, this "film" required no physical processing whatsoever. Olson didn't need a shop like Harvey's. Her medium is ones and zeroes rather than celluloid. You can even watch 575 Castro St. online.

As a "simple light and motion" study -- I wish I were familiar with the specific films Olson is alluding to in the text of the film's opening title. A longtime collector, archivist, and critic of LGBT cinema, she is presumably offering her film as an homage to those who came before her and claiming her place in their line. Each of the four shots lasts a bit longer than the one that precedes it, and the final shot lasts for nearly three minutes, or just under half of the film's total run time. It's a beautiful image. Sunlight reflecting off of passing cars illuminates the wall and gives a curious movement to the static shot. I would have happily watched it for several minutes more.

As tragedy tourism -- One consequence of the extended shot lengths is that viewers are allowed the time to thoroughly and freely explore each image. As a result, we become consciously aware of the artificiality of it all. The opening shot could be from 1977, until we spot two late-model cars pass outside the storefront windows. The last shot could be vintage as well, until we recognize Mr. Penn. I have a theory that, because 21st-century Americans' lives are marked by such comfort and politeness (generally speaking), we have a strange desire to associate ourselves, personally, with other people's tragedy, as if doing so will grant us access to some hidden, distant experience and wisdom. Hence the Martin Luther King, Jr. museum at the Memphis hotel where he was gunned down and, more recently, our commitments to "never forget" the victims of 9/11, the Virigina Tech shootings, the Minnesota bridge collapse (remember that one?), and on and on. When the Harvey Milk museum is eventually built, somewhere in the Castro, Olson's film will likely play on a constant loop there. Which isn't to say it's not genuinely moving. It is. But it's also one step removed from the genuine. It's a tourist destination.

As a comment on the Hollywood biopic -- I've bumped Milk to the top of my Netflix queue, although, truthfully, even as a great fan of Gus Van Sant, I don't have high expectations for it. Traditional biopics -- and especially Hollywood productions about recent historical figures -- are hamstrung, I think, by a wealth of extratextual pressures. Large budgets demand large returns, and that economic pressure necessitates the transformation of a complex, messy life into a coherent and familiar narrative. (Steve McQueen's Hunger is a recent and remarkable exception that proves the rule.) Hollywood biopics also tend to be marketed as acting showcases and "prestige" pictures, which forces audiences to view the film through a thin veil of celebrity. Plus, there's always that nagging problem of verisimilitude. (I've always liked E. L. Doctorow's response to critics of his "inaccurate" depiction of real historical figures in Ragtime: "I don't know if these events actually happened, but I'm absolutely confident they're true.") Again, that photo of Sean Penn is key here. 575 Castro St. challenges every formal tendency of the Hollywood biopic -- it's short, slow, contemplative -- but, in a way, it is a Hollywood biopic. On a practical level, an independent filmmaker like Olson would rarely have the resources to access and dress a location like this. And, presumably, those of us who are interested in a film like 575 Castro St. approach it with those same preconceptions about Penn's performance and celebrity, even if we haven't seen Milk. (Such is the nature of contemporary media saturation.) It's a clever interrogation of the form, I think.

As a document of progress -- Finally, as uncanny and heartbreaking as it is to hear Harvey Milk confess his fears, there's something celebratory (not quite the right word) about 575 Castro St., too. This is not a nostalgia piece or maudlin reveille. Even down to its digital form, it is very much a document of the present moment. When Milk mentions that, rather than rioting on news of his death, he would rather see "five, ten, a hundred, a thousand rise" and come out, we know that his dream is slowly but steadily becoming realized.

Anticipating the Limits of Control

2009-05-05T16:36:00.004-04:00

"Another thing: Tilda Swinton (identified as “Blonde,” and lightly suggesting to me Bulle Ogier in Rivette’s Duelle) observes to the Lone Man at one point that she likes films even when people are just sitting around in them and not saying anything — a declaration followed by a long pause."

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum on Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control

SFIFF Diary 2

2009-04-30T14:05:00.011-04:00

Oblivion (Heddy Honigmann)

Four years ago, on my first trip to the San Francisco International Film Festival, a couple friends and I had our liveliest debate after a screening of Ellen Perry's The Fall of Fujimori, a documentary about Peru's recent political history told mostly in the first person by Fujimori himself. On one side of the debate were those of us who felt the strength of the film was its subtle ironies, particularly its use of the contemporary context (the early days of Bush's war on terror) to undermine the elected dictator's self-aggrandizing justifications of his anti-democratic domestic policies. On the other side were those who argued that people in power are afforded ample opportunity to speak for themselves and that the filmmaker was morally obligated to condemn Fujimori outright. It was a fun -- and heated -- exchange. Heddy Honigmann's latest film is a fascinating answer to that discussion. Oblivion is also told in the first person, though this time mostly by aging, blue-collar workers who, in several cases, literally served (whether food or drink or services) several past presidents and dictators, including Fujimori. I've only seen two Honigmann films, but in both I've been startled by the candor she elicits from her interview subjects. Here, her camera lingers awkwardly on a man who admits with some shame that after working for more than 30 years in one of Lima's finest restaurants, he had never had an opportunity to take his wife there. A 60-year-old leather worker hides his face when he's overcome by emotion while remembering all he lost during the days of runaway inflation. An adolescent shoeshine boy stares blankly into the camera and tells Honigmann, “No, I don't have any dreams. No, I don't have any happy memories.” She intercuts these stories with footage of young, self-taught jugglers and acrobats -- homeless kids -- who perform in busy intersections during red lights. They're graceful and full of life, their performances have a startling and kinetic beauty. The juxtaposition is complex and loaded with ambiguities -- a reflection, I suspect, of Honigmann's personal relationship with her home country.

Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

To recycle a line I've used before, I'm often more interested in what a film does than what it's about, and Bradshaw's first narrative feature, Everything Strange and New, does quite a lot. The opening shot (pictured above) is a long, static take accompanied by an explosion of percussive, dissonant music -- a self-conscious announcement that this is not another of those suburban stories about disaffected fathers and husbands. As it turns out, it is one of those films, but I'll credit Bradshaw for his experiments with the genre, particularly his working-class lead character, Wayne, and for his often fascinating photography. One or two shots approach Bela Tarr territory (if Tarr shot a low-budget dv movie). Had the film ended 20 minutes sooner, I would have even applauded Bradshaw's success at blending avant-garde techniques with more naturalistic storytelling. But a plot turn in the final act -- and, more importantly, Bradshaw's cynical handling of it -- caused me to reevaluate everything that came before. Everything Strange and New is cruel to its characters in a way that comes off as smug rather than searching.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)

I've already written a bit about this film, but I want to quickly mention a scene that, to me, encapsulates all that distinguishes Denis's take on the small, family drama from most other films in the genre. The morning after the “Nightshift,” Noé (Grégoire Colin) announces to Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Joséphine (Mati Diop) that he's leaving for a job in Gabon. Rather than dealing explicitly with the fallout from his decision, Denis cuts, instead, to a closeup of Lionel (Alex Descas), who's walking home, presumably after a one-night-stand. She then cuts on an eyeline match to Joséphine climbing precariously out of their top-story window with a bottle of cleaner and towels in her hand. We are given, cinematically, the perspective of a father watching his child in danger. Or, at least that's how I read the image the first time. On repeat viewings, there's something much more interesting in Lionel's expression: his intimate and hard-won understanding of his daughter's behavior, his realization that she's cleaning, which means that she's upset, which means that it's his job to go soothe and protect her. This plays out in the next few minutes in a wonderful scene in which their history is revealed through gestures. There's text -- Joséphine shaking out the bedsheets, looking through family photos, and arguing with her father -- and there's subtext -- not only the loss of their mother/wife but also their deep familiarity with each other and with moments like this. (We can immediately imagine them having a hundred other similar confrontations -- her cleaning, him stoic, with arms folded.) Characters in movies expertly express their feelings; real people, in my experience, typically don't. Yet those of us in successful, long-term relationships manage to communicate anyway. 35 Shots of Rum is rare for managing to capture that peculiar kind of intimacy on screen. Ozu would approve.

Zift (Javor Gardev)

A Bulgarian film noir? Yes, please. Although a bit too stylized (in the Tarantino sense) for my tastes, Zift is a hell of a lot of fun and could probably find a decent audience in the States if a distributor packaged it properly. (First-time director Gardev must surely be taking studio offers for his next film as we speak.) The movie borrows liberally from classic Hollywood noirs, most notably a reenactment of Rita Hayworth's iconic number in Gilda, and the black-and-white cinematography honors that legacy while updating the camera movements for contemporary audiences accustomed to a more frenetic pace. The two lead actors are fun discoveries, too, particularly Tanya Ilieva, who, frankly, is one of the sexiest women I've ever seen on screen. Zift was on my radar last September at TIFF, so I'm glad to have finally had a chance to catch up with it.

Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

Wild Field belongs to a class of films I'm drawn to at festivals. I rarely expect them to be great (and they rarely are), but I see them less for their stories or formal innovations than for the opportunity they provide to watch people in a part of the world I would never have a chance to see otherwise. (Tulpan is another recent example.) Wild Field is set in a remote region of the Kazakh steppes, where a young doctor lives Thoreau-like, tends to a handful of locals, and pines for his girlfriend back in civilization. Although I can't find confirmation for this, I suspect this is an adaptation of a novel. I can imagine the protagonist's inner life being a playhouse of ideas for a gifted writer, and the moments of magical realism that pockmark the film could flower beautifully in prose, but Kalatozishvili fails to find a cinematographic analogue, and the pacing of the film suffers for it. Still, I was perfectly content to study the landscape and faces for 90 minutes or so.

SFIFF Diary 1

2009-04-26T14:32:00.002-04:00

Adoration (Atom Egoyan)

There's certainly no mistaking an Atom Egoyan film -- the non-linear narrative, the technology fetish, the intertwined obsessions with history, identity, and trauma, and all of those secrets and lies. Closest in spirit and form to Ararat, Adoration is another interesting jumble of ideas from Egoyan that, to my surprise, works more often than other critics had led me to expect. I especially like the scenes between Scott Speedman and Arsinee Khanjian, who are the only two actors in the film who consistently make Egoyan's dialog sound like words an actual human being might speak. (In Egoyan's defense, the performance of language and identity is a central concern -- and plot point -- of the film, so some of the awkwardly-heightened language is clearly by design. Egoyan alerts the attentive viewer to this fact by formal means, though I'm not sure if that defense justifies the unfortunate shifts in tone he creates.) Egoyan's at his best when he manages to balance his wealth of ideas with drama, when his characters transcend the intellectual and psychological conceits they are intended to embody. That happens often enough in Adoration, particularly in the final act, to make it my favorite of his films of the last decade. (I'm still eager to see Citadel.) One final note: Mychael Danna's original score is fantastic, but I'd prefer to hear it alone on a soundtrack album. I suspect I would have liked Adoration a good deal more if Egoyan had trimmed 75% of the music cues.

Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)

God bless you, Catherine Breillat. When Bluebeard started last night around 9:40, San Francisco time, I'd already been awake for 19 hours. Who else under those circumstances could put me at the edge of my seat, giggling and gasping at the nerve of a film? A playful and stylized period piece in the (formal) vein of Rohmer's Astrea and Celadon, Bluebeard is a wicked dismantling of a fairy tale that, although lacking Breillat's trademark nudity and explicit sexual content, is no less obsessed with bodies. Mary-Catherine (Lola Creton), Bluebeard's young bride, is one more Breillat heroine, tempted by, curious about, and fearful of both sexual desire and by sex itself -- by the physical, biological realness of it. I can't think of a better image to represent Breillat's cinema en toto than a shot of the massive, shirtless Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) being watched unnoticed by his waif, virgin wife. Brilliant film.

General Orders

2009-04-24T16:08:00.004-04:00

"This documentary was original and captivating. At first I was thrown off by the long pauses, but then I came to understand that they were intentional and added to the meditative, prayerful motif."

-- from a review of General Orders No. 9 (dir. Robert Persons)

A preview of things to come?

2009-04-22T16:51:00.004-04:00

My contributions to the fake Criterion thread at The Auteurs.

Anticipating SFIFF

2009-04-20T20:51:00.010-04:00

I'm going to be in San Francisco next week for a technology conference and decided to stick around for a couple extra days to catch some films at the festival. I've order twelve tickets but am excited about fewer than half of them, partly because the lineup is a bit underwhelming, partly because my schedule prevents me from seeing some of the more interesting selections. But it's April in San Francisco and the university is covering most of my expenses, so I ain't complaining. Well, maybe I'm complaining a little. I'm fated to never see the new Assayas and Martel films, apparently.

I'm getting in early Saturday afternoon and will be around for a week, so drop me a line if you want to meet up.

April 25
Adoration (Egoyan)
Bluebeard (Breillat)

April 26
Oblivion (Honnigman)
Everything Strange and New (Bradshaw)

April 28
Wild Field (Kalatozishvili)
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (Greenaway)

April 29
Voices Carry (shorts program)
Our Beloved Month of August (Gomes)
Good Cats (Liang)

April 30
Zift (Gardev)

May 1
The Other One (Bernard and Tridivic)
35 Shots of Rum (Denis)

Films of the '80s (part 1)

2009-04-17T14:15:00.001-04:00

Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)

Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) leaves her controlling, bourgeois husband André (Guy Marchand) for Loulou (Gérard Depardieu), a petty criminal and top-notch lay, and all hell breaks loose. In my tweet about Loulou I described it as "the missing link (for me) between early New Wave & contemporary naturalism," which, like so much of what goes on in the twitterverse, is pithy and imprecise. Like Jules and Jim and a number of films from Godard's first phase -- and also like so many of the classic genre films they're riffing on -- the love triangle here is a site of class conflict and shifting sexual and gender dynamics. Who's the Whore here? Who's the John? Pialat's style allows plenty of room for the performers (is Huppert ever not amazing?) and ratchets up the cruelty and emotional suffering. My favorite scene takes place at a family reunion of sorts for Loulou and his kin, which plays like something from a Bruno Dumont film.

Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)

Given Cruising's checkered reputation, I was disappointed to discover that it's little more than an uninventive serial killer movie. That a film set in New York leather bars was financed and widely distributed in 1980 is fairly interesting in its own right (note to self: learn more about Lorimar, who also produced Being There the previous year), but the only aspect of Cruising that really piqued my curiosity was Al Pacino. I'm not refering to his performance, which is refreshingly low-key and out-of-balance, I guess. I'm talking about Pacino himself. He's bulkier and more muscular in this role, which has the incongruous effect of making him seem smaller. That and his wardrobe made me consciously aware of his body for the first time. Cruising is structured as sensationalized tourism ("And on your right you'll see that this breed of American Homosexual signals his fetishes with a brightly-colored bandana in his back pocket"), but its real transgression is its foregrounding of the gay male body, which, regrettably, remains a charged political act even now, three decades later. I guess it deserves some credit for that.

Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

My only memory of Atlantic City, which I saw one other time nearly twenty years ago, was, of course, the lemon scenes. I had no idea it was such a strange film. Populated with quirky, two-dimensional characters and structured around over-written and weirdly implausible plot turns, it's closer in spirit to Sundance-approved American indie cinema of the last decade than the continental drama I was expecting. But, really, it's impossible to not love Burt Lancaster here. Lou Pascal, the aging and never-too-important gangster he plays, is quietly dignified and kind, which makes him pitiful in the best sense of the word. The final shot of Lou and Grace walking off together after one last score is as sweet and joyful an image as you're likely to find.

American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)

Another loose adaptation of Crime and Punishment, this time by way of Robert Bresson and Jerry Bruckheimer (there's a pairing!), Paul Schrader's third film as director is never less than watchable, thanks largely to Richard Gere's performance, which is appropriately charismatic, pathetic, and vacuous. Schrader now admits he's unsure whether the moral transformation Gere's gigolo experiences in the final scene is authentic or "one that was simply imposed on him by his maker." I share his ambivalence. That American Gigolo places a distant third in a race with Bresson's Pickpocket and the Dardennes' L'Enfant isn't a surprise, but given their radically different modes of production, I find it hard to fault Schrader. It's an interesting narrative experiment from a Hollywood release of 1980.

Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

Amidst the formal fireworks on display here -- the mesmerizingly elliptical cutting, the fast zooms, the unexpected music cues -- what I found most shocking was Theresa Russell's performance, which gives life to a role that, on paper, is little more than a misogynist fantasy. But, damn, she's good. The image I captured above is from a scene on a bridge, where her reunion with Alex (Art Garfunkel) is spoiled by his pettiness, and her response is so natural and solicitous that, for a second or two, she breaks the movie. All of Roeg's machinations are undone by the sudden intrusion of uncalculated emotion.

Grown Ups (Mike Leigh, 1980)

Made for BBC2 Playhouse, Grown Ups is about Dick (Philip Davis) and Mandy (Lesley Manville), a working-class Canterbury couple who are settling awkwardly into adulthood and their first home. Next door live one of their former teachers, Mr. Butcher (Sam Kelly), and his wife Christine (Lindsay Duncan), who, at first glance, seem the very models of middle-class civility. And that, of course, is the joke. Leigh has great fun contrasting the cold pedantry of Mr. Butcher with Dick and Mandy's crass and loud-mouthed affection. The star of the film, though, is a nearly unrecognizable Brenda Blethyn, who plays Mandy's older sister Gloria -- a kind of spinstery, 30-something cross between Vickie Pollard and MadTV's Lorraine. (Here's a nice clip of Gloria in action. The entire film is available on YouTube.) Grown Ups reminds me that I need to spend more time with Mike Leigh.

Voyage en douce (Michel Deville, 1980)

Thanks to Dan Sallitt for making several mentions of Deville, the first great discovery of my little jaunt through the '80s. I'm rarely caught off guard by a film these days, but Voyage en douce, a film I'd never heard of by a filmmaker I'd never heard of, offered one surprise after another. On paper, it sounds like late-night Cinemax fare: two women spend a weekend in the south of France, ostensibly in search of a vacation home, but devoting much of their time, instead, to remembrances of their sexual awakenings, casual flirtations, and, in the words of that old Monty Python sketch, "candid photography" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). From the opening sequence, though, Deville establishes his authorship and makes obvious that titillation is not his chief concern. About À cause, à cause d'une femme (1963), one of Deville's collaborations with Nina Companéez, Dan writes: "[They] are interested, not in the mechanics of their commonplace plots, but in an affectionate and profuse evocation of the feminine principle, and in giving a deadly serious account of romantic love. . . . To give full play to their concerns while remaining faithful to their narrative task, Deville and Companéez direct us to the important stuff largely through cinematic form." The same can be said of Voyage en deuce, particularly in its final act, when Bunuel-like moments of surreality disrupt the women's stories by blurring the divide between fantasy and memory. A stunning film, and one certainly worthy of more than a capsule-length response.

Senses of Cinema Issue 50

2009-04-14T11:09:00.003-04:00

I have three interviews and a brief essay in the new issue of Senses of cinema:

My favorite brief exchange was edited out of the Denis interview:

Hughes: One of my favorite moments in any of your films is Gregoire Colin’s dance scene in U.S. Go Home, so it was great fun to see him dancing again. As soon as that scene began, I thought, “Now this is a Claire Denis film.”
Denis: {laughs}
Hughes: I also had the biggest smile on my face when “Nightshift” kicked in.
Denis: {laughs} Me too! Such a great song.
Hughes: I imagine you having a huge record collection.
Denis: Yes! {laughs} Yes, yes.

A Death in the Family (1957)

2009-03-31T22:20:00.001-04:00

By James Agee

Note: I just found this intro to an essay I never wrote and thought the quotes were worth posting.

Throughout A Death in the Family, Agee's prose alternates between moments of simple and startlingly evocative description, as here, near the beginning of the novel . . .

He took his shoes, a tie, a collar and collar buttons, and started from the room. He saw the rumpled bed. Well, he thought, I can do something for her. He put his things on the floor, smoothed the sheets, and punched the pillows. The sheets were still warm on her side. He drew the covers up to keep the warmth, then laid them open a few inches, so it would look inviting to get into. She'll be glad of that, he thought, very well pleased with the looks of it. He gathered up his shoes, collar, tie and buttons, and made for the kitchen, taking special care as he passed the children's door, which was slightly ajar.

. . . and moments of unadorned psychology, as here, near the end:

I am aware of what has happened, I am meeting it face to face, I am living through it. There had been, even, a kind of pride, a desolate kind of pleasure, in the feeling: I am carrying a heavier weight than I could have dreamed it possible for a human being to carry, yet I am living through it. It had of course occurred to her that this happens to many people, that it is very common, and she humbled and comforted herself in this thought. She thought: this is simply what living is; I never realized before what it is. She thought: now I am more nearly a grown member of the human race; bearing children, which had seemed so much, was just so much apprenticeship. She thought she had never before had a chance to realize the strength that human beings have, to endure; she loved and revered all those who had ever suffered, even those who had failed to endure. She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the might, grimness and tenderness of God.

I suppose this would put Agee's novel somewhere in that line from modernists like Stein, Hemingway, and W.C. Williams ("No ideas but in things") to the mid-century The New Yorker school of Raymond Carver and his minimalist disciples. What distinguishes A Death in the Family from those others, though, is the directness of Agee's analysis and the complexity of his renderings.

Films of the '80s

2009-03-20T12:12:00.003-04:00

At TIFF 2007, I caught Les Bons Debarras (Francis Mankiewicz, 1980), which screened in the Canadian Open Vault program. Regularly included on short lists of the greatest Canadian films, it's about a precocious adolescent girl and her single mother surviving in a small town in Quebec. Steve Gravestock has written about the film in Cinema Scope, and Girish mentioned it in his post on Quebecois Cinema.

While watching Les Bons Debarras, I was struck by how familiar it felt. I was eight when the film was released -- near enough to the age of Manon (Charlotte Laurier) that I was able immediately to recognize that particular era of childhood, even if her experience of it is so much different from my own. Much of the credit for the film goes to its cinematographer, Michel Brault, who is best remembered for being a father of cinema verite and for his collaborations with Jean Rouch. We often associate naturalistic styles of narrative filmmaking with the '60s and '70s, and it's obviously experienced a great revival in the last decade-and-a-half, but in the '80s a film like Les Bons Debarras was something of an anomaly. I remember thinking at the time that I wanted to find others like it. I was reminded of that again last week while browsing through this "Best Films of the 80s" discussion at The Auteurs.

Thanks to the fine folks at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, I was able to pull out the most critically acclaimed films of the decade and order them by overall rank (download pdf). Not too many surprises near the top. A lot of Scorsese, Kubrick, Lynch, and Spielberg. Among the films I'm eager to revisit or, in most cases, to see for the first time:

Once Upon a Time in America
Local Hero
The King of Comedy
The Dead
Love Streams
Reds
The Verdict
American Gigolo
Bad Timing

Any other gems hidden among the wreckage of so many blockbusters? What are the other great, lost films of the '80s?

St. Nick (2009)

2009-03-05T21:11:00.002-05:00

Dir. by David Lowery

In the interest of full disclosure I should acknowledge first that, although we've never met face-to-face, David Lowery and I have been exchanging emails for about three years now. I've long admired David's writing, and, at the risk of speaking for him, I think we both recognized in the other a shared sensibility. Even before seeing a single frame of David's first feature, I was rooting for it, curious to see what his style would look like when stretched to 85 minutes, and hopeful for him as well, both personally and professionally. This perhaps leaves me unqualified to be a true critic of the film, though I'd like to think that if I didn't care for St. Nick, I'd have the integrity to say so -- if for no other reason than because I believe David would be genuinely curious to hear the unvarnished truth.

I also want to mention up front that I hold an irrational bias against "child in peril" stories, so when I first read the plot synapsis -- "The adventures of a brother and sister trying to survive, all on their own, out on the plains of Texas" -- I worried that I'd be kept at some emotional or intellectual remove from the film. I'm happy to report that's not the case.

The opening shot of St. Nick lasts for just under 90 seconds, the first minute of which is from a fixed camera position. Along with occasional, diegetic noises, the soundtrack also includes manufactured sounds -- an unnatural wind and a synthesized drone of some sort (you can hear it in the trailer above). In combination, the sound and image, especially after the camera begins unexpectedly to dolly back, announce that St. Nick, despite its "regional" setting and digital video aesthetic, is a self-consciously authored film in the formal sense -- more "Euro art house" than "American indie" (to borrow two marketing cliches); more The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan, 1997) than Shotgun Stories (Nichols, 2007). Atom Egoyan is a surprising but useful point of comparison, I think. Lowery's slow dollies over the wooden floorboards of the abandoned house where the brother and sister take refuge reads like a poignant homage to Ian Holm's dream sequence in The Sweet Hereafter. There's a sorrowful nostalgia in both shots.

And there's a sorrowful nostalgia in both films, too, which points to the most interesting aspect of St. Nick: it's point of view, which, while attaching itself most closely to the brother's perspective, always remains just outside of it, in the same way that great children's books usually do. I have no complaints about the look of St. Nick -- particularly in the interior shots, Lowery and cinematographer Clay Liford make images that belie their small budget -- but I couldn't help but wonder how it would all look in rich black-and-white film. In a recent blog post, Lowery acknowledges that Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955) is a source of inspiration, and I was also reminded of To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan, 1962), both in the basic plot setup and in its careful, childlike attention to things -- crayons, rolls of string, discovered bones, makeshift tools, matchbooks, and other bits of miscellania that kids collect and transform imaginatively in play. I use the word "things" deliberately, because one reason St. Nick avoids being the typical "child in peril" film is by observing the thing-ness of the objects without reducing them to symbols. Symbols require a doubled perspective -- that of the filmed world, where a cigar is just a cigar, and that of the author, who winks knowingly at the audience, thereby inviting us to feel superior. It's a recipe for sentiment and pity, neither of which, thankfully, are of much interest to Lowery. (I'll resist the urge to quote Tarkovsky yet again on this site, although I think he's also a useful touchstone for discussing this film.)

The best example is the way Lowery shoots the Texas plains. American "regional" cinema (again with the ironic scare quotes), especially that of the indie variety, has an unfortunate tendency to come off like tourism, in the sense that the camera is too often set up in front of objects that only reinforce our preexisting sense of the place. "The South," for example, is often reduced to a now-vacant and picturesque block of what was once a small town's main street before the interstate and Wal-Mart moved in. By comparison, I realized only a few minutes into St. Nick that I had no idea what the Texas plains looked like, especially not in winter (I assume), when the trees have dropped their leaves and taken on the aspect of a Tim Burton film or a Chris Van Allsburg book:

Lowery loves these trees, but there's nothing explicitly symbolic in the way he shoots them. Rather, they're true images of the particular place from which this particular story and its particular emotions sprung. And that, I think, is the source of the film's lingering resonance. The nostalgia is Lowery's, and because it's true for him, it's true for us as well.

(Apologies if that doesn't make a damn bit of sense. The older I get, the less capable I am of articulating what it is I most admire about art.)

In an effort to write something that sounds a bit more like a film review, let me add this. First, the performances Lowery gets out of Tucker and Savanna Sears are something special. There's very little dialog in the film, but when they do speak, each listens intently and reacts naturally and without self-consciousness. Perhaps the best compliment I can give to the young actors and the crew is to say that I was often reminded of those great films Haskell Wexler shot in the late-'60s and '70s, when he'd hold his camera at a distance and just observe the performers, always managing to catch them just as the mask dropped. I'm also grateful to St. Nick for sidestepping a couple potential pitfalls. When the boy attempts to make serious conversation (and does so in a way that sounds an awful lot like a character in a movie attempting to make serious conversation), the girl diffuses the moment like all little sisters would -- with a smile and a fistfull of dirt. And when Barlow Jacobs (Kid from Shotgun Stories) shows up briefly as the reluctant authority figure, Lowery allows him to be a well-rounded and recognizably real character. I was dreading that scene from the moment it became inevitable, but each time I've watched St. Nick it's been among my favorites.

St. Nick premieres March 15 at South by Southwest.

Blipiography

2009-03-01T20:28:00.029-05:00

Inspired by all of those "25 Things" memes floating around Facebook right now, I thought it might be fun to put together a mix CD that would be a kind of musical autobiography. But it turns out that reducing 36 years down to 80 minutes leaves too many holes, so, instead, I've coined a new term: "blipiography." Each day in March I'm going to Blip a song. 31 days, 31 songs, ordered sequentially. I'll update this post throughout the month, and you can also follow this little experiment on Blip.fm and Twitter. Each song will remain available online as long as Blip is able to find them. The blipiography is a fleeting gesture, I guess.

"Artistry in Rhythm" by Stan Kenton
I am my father's son. He still tells the story of how when he and my mom would put me down for naps, they'd tune the radio to the easy listening station and leave it beside the crib. I've been listening to Stan Kenton, The Four Freshman, Burt Bacharach, and a hundred big bands since I was in utero, and I suspect it's the main reason I still need musicianship, harmonic complexity, and melody in my music. It's certainly to blame for my too-long obsession with prog rock, but we'll save that for another day (or three) midway through the month. This recording of "Artistry in Rhythm" now sounds to me like the soundtrack of a killer film noir -- something with Ann Savage and Glenn Ford, maybe. And that piano break? Kenton's hands must have been massive.
"Flowers on the Wall" by The Statler Brothers
I doubt I heard "Flowers on the Wall" more than once or twice between 1979 and 1994. As a kid, though, in the late-'70s, I used to pull out my parents' Statler Brothers record, place it as delicately as I could on dad's console turntable, and lower the needle again and again on this song. I think my audiophilia was probably born in those moments. Those of us who are buying up vinyl today -- or, at least those of us over the age of 30 -- are all nostalgists. We'll argue the necessity of dynamic range and the virtues of old school mastering, but I think we're really after the physical gestures -- lifting the turntable cover, choosing a side, dropping the tonearm, reading the liner notes. It's only fitting then, I guess, that cinema's nostalgist par excellence, Quentin Tarantino, would drop the needle on "Flowers on the Wall" in Pulp Fiction. Sitting in that Tallahassee theater in 1994, I was shocked to discover I still knew all the words.
"Tom Sawyer" by Rush
I've written about this song before, but the short version of the story is this: a week or two after the release of Rush's Moving Pictures I was at my friend Dave's house, and his older brother played "Tom Sawyer" for us. I don't remember now if we listened to the rest of the record, but we listened to "Tom Sawyer" over and over. And then I went home and told my mom I needed a copy of that Rush record -- the one with the creepy cover and that awesome song on it. "Tom Sawyer" is probably more responsible for my love of rock music than any other song. Seven years later Rush was also my first big rock show -- the "Hold Your Fire" Tour, featuring a video display, laser lights, an epic drum solo, and all the decadence a 15-year-old could handle. I still don't have a f---ing clue what this song means.
"Magic" by Olivia Newton-John
When I began mapping out a playlist for this blipiography, the two periods that were hardest to pin down to just a few songs were my college years and pre-adolescence. College makes sense. I left home, started forging my own life, fell in love. Pre-adolescence came as a surprise, though. I suspect the music of that time is so vivid because it's the moment when we first become aware of popular culture as an identity-defining marker (not that kids are able to describe it that way, of course). There are, for the first time, "cool" songs and "not cool" songs. Songs become directly associated with social experiences in ways they never have before. Picking one pop single from 1980-81 was tricky because all of them invoke for me the same kind of nostalgia. They all taste like pizza, sound like Space Invaders, and smell like roller skates. I settled on "Magic" partly because, like "Flowers on the Wall," I haven't heard it often over the years, so its affect hasn't been softened by repetition -- certainly not in the same way Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" and Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" have. Also, it's a nice tune. And Olivia in 1980? Hot.
"Rosanna" by Toto
Again, I could have chosen a dozen other songs. I turned 10 in 1982 and got a small stack of classic rock albums for my birthday -- Led Zeppelin IV, Van Halen I, Exit . . . Stage Left, Blizzard of Oz -- but I was totally obsessed with pop music. On the way to church every Sunday morning I'd hear numbers 40-37 of Casey Kasem's countdown, and we'd be back in the car, headed for lunch, just as he began the top 10. I mean, just look at the top songs of 1982. "I Love Rock and Roll," "Centerfold," "Don't You Want Me?" "Eye in the Sky"! "Rosanna" is a big one for me, though, because: a. Toto IV was one of the first cassette tapes I owned and b. that synth solo. I was five years into my failed life as a pianist then and already owned my first Casio keyboard. The guys in Toto, I could tell, were musicians in a way that, say, Human League clearly weren't. "Rosanna" is still a great pop song. Plus, it gets extra props for giving us the Porcaro shuffle.
"Panama" by Van Halen
I can so clearly picture me and my seven friends sitting around a table in the Magothy Middle School cafeteria, all of us wearing identical Van Halen concert t-shirts. They were baseball-style t's, with 3/4-length black sleeves and a white body. It was the 1984 tour, the last one with Diamond Dave, and it made a one-night stop at the Capital Centre over in Largo. They played "Running with the Devil" and "Jamie's Crying" and "Jump" and all of our favorites. It was awesome. Probably. I wouldn't know, actually, because I didn't go. In fact, only one of us went -- Jason, who had an older brother and was willing to collect our money and buy our shirts. He handed them out the next day in our first period history class, and each of us walked a bit taller for a couple hours. In my memory, I associate all early-80s pop metal (VH, Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot) with that history class. We talked about music constantly in there and did our best to dress the part, which, regrettably, in 1984 meant leather Nike hightops with dayglo laces, denim jackets with rock band pins (pre-Facebook flair), and, occasionally, tiger-striped bandanas. Yes, really. Eddie Van Halen was not only our guitar god; he was a fashion icon. Good times.
"Pleasant Valley Sunday" by The Monkees
In the summer of 1986 Mtv ran a Monkees marathon, and like thousands of other kids here in status symbol land, my sister and I became obsessed fans. My dad had the patience of Job on our family vacation that year -- 14 hours from Maryland to the midwest, 14 hours back, and all we wanted to listen to were the two Monkees tapes we'd been able to find. (Mickey, Peter, and Davey were as shocked as anyone by their newfound fame. Most of their music had gone out of print.) In late-August, just before school started, we even managed to see them in concert (my first) on a bill with Herman's Hermits (minus Peter Noone, a.k.a. Herman), The Grass Roots, and Gary Puckett & the Union Gap. Like most young crushes, my interest in The Monkees faded quickly. But years later, after I went off to college, I heard a band cover "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and realized for the first time what a smart and killer pop song it is. Like so many of The Monkee's hits it was written by hired guns, in this case Gerry Goffin and Carole King. For the record, my favorite Monkees song is still Mike Nesmith's "Sweet Young Thing," which, unfortunately, can't be found by Blip right now.
"Pretty in Pink" by The Psychedelic Furs
That John Hughes wrote and produced a film of the same name in 1986 is totally a coincidence, I assure you. Thanks to the greatest radio station ever, WHFS 99.1, I'd been made aware of the Furs long before Molly Ringwald sewed that dress and broke Duckie's heart. Young love is the reason for this selection, though. In the spring of '87 my folks took my sister and me on a European vacation, and while there I met a girl in our tour group. My first real crush. She was there with her high school French class, and by the end of the second day of the trip we were sitting together on every tour bus, learning how to talk to each other. It all came rather easily, which was a pleasant surprise given how shy I was. We exchanged letters for several months afterwards and then, eventually, inevitably, fell out of contact. I bought two tapes in a little store near Canterbury Cathedral, U2's The Joshua Tree and The Psychedelic Furs' Talk Talk, and listened to them constantly that summer. Every song from both albums, but especially "Pretty in Pink" and the last few tracks on side 2 of Joshua Tree, still remind me of young love, which is a feeling worth remembering, I think.
"Sheep" by Pink Floyd
So many ways to write about this song. There's my first job at Subway, where I worked with a girl who had a huge music collection and who one day handed me a 90-minute cassette tape with Animals and Wish You Were Here on it back-to-back. There's the night in the spring of '88 when I stood somewhere around the 50 yard line of RFK Stadium and watched the reunited Pink Floyd work through so many of their songs (though not this one, regrettably). There's all those nights throughout high school when we'd listen to this and other albums in Paul's bedroom or while driving around in his old Camry. I hope all young music fans still go through a Pink Floyd phase, and I hope they still listen to Animals. I picked "Sheep" because of Rick Wright's opening solo (I still play it to test a keyboard's Fender Rhodes patch) and because it's Roger Waters at his most misanthropic.
"Medicine Show" by Big Audio Dynamite
I could put together an exhaustive "Darren working fast food jobs" playlist, but no one would want to hear it because it would consist mostly of late-'80s pop hits like "Never Gonna Give You Up," "Got My Mind Set On You," "Wind Beneath My Wings," and "My Prerogative." Lord help me. How did pop music get so bad, so fast? Fortunately, someone at Subway had managed to wire an old tape deck into the store's audio system, so we'd get a reprieve from the "freshest mix of 80s hits!" as soon as the manager left. One of my coworkers at Subway -- the same girl who gave me the Pink Floyd cassette -- brought in This is Big Audio Dynamite one night, and it was really unlike anything I'd heard before. Like every other suburban white kid in the '80s I'd learned about sampling from Fat Boys records and Licensed to Ill, but I'd never heard it used in the context of rock or new wave music. I wonder how much cred I'll sacrifice by admitting that I came to The Clash by way of B.A.D.?
"Heart of the Sunrise"
Next week, when I get to the college years, I'll probably be so distracted with all the talk of meeting Joanna and falling in love and, oh yeah, going through my jam band phase, that I might forget to mention the fact that for two years there I planned to become a composer. I managed to not suck just enough in my audition to be admitted to Florida State's music school but quickly discovered, upon arriving there, that I did not -- and would not ever -- possess either the chops or the desire necessary to be anything more than a casual musician. For a short time, that realization broke my Rick Wakeman-loving heart. In high school nearly all of my closest friends were musicians (and I'm pleased to discover through the magic of Facebook that many of them have managed to make a career of it). And because we were real musicians, we loved prog rock -- the more obscure, syncopated, and navel-gazing, the better. Incomprehensible lyrics? Yes, please! Concerts performed on ice? Absolutely! Tolkein-like album covers? Totally! I still pull out several of those records from time to time -- the first King Crimson album holds up really well, as do the ones from the 80s with Adrian Belew and Tony Levin; I like parts of the Gabriel-era Genesis records; and there are three or four Yes albums that still make me want to get out my Hanon. "Heart of the Sunrise" is as good as prog rock will ever get.
"Terrapin Station" by The Grateful Dead
To quote our President, "I inhaled frequently. That was the point."
"Three Days" by Jane's Addiction
Like every other 19-year-old music fan in 1991, I played the hell out of Nirvana's Nevermind and Pearl Jam's 10, but I never felt a connection with the grunge movement. I was still living at home in our middle class neighborhood, going to a community college, and feeling relatively content. I was too pampered and naive to be alienated. It was only a couple years later, after I met Joanna and inherited her copies of Facelift and Dirt, that I made any personal connection to the Seattle sound. It's still a good day for us whenever "Man in the Box" comes on the radio. In the summer of '91, I did go to the first Lollapalooza, though. A couple random memories: drinking beer in the parking lot beforehand and regretting it almost immediately; watching my friend Andy run headlong into the pit during Henry Rollins' opening set and not finding him again until eight hours later; chatting up Ice-T, who was out exploring the fest after his set with Body Count; seeing thousands of empty water bottles being tossed around while Siouxsie and the Banshees were on stage; retreating to a tent during Nine Inch Nails, due to a screaming headache (beer + heat = wicked dehydration); finding a comfortable spot 100 yards from the stage, taking a seat, and watching Jane's Addiction close out the night.
"Two Trains" by Little Feat
I've written several times before about my deep love for Little Feat, so I'll keep it short. If told to pick just one album before shipping off to a deserted island, I'd almost definitely grab my copy of Waiting for Columbus, their epic live recording from 1978. Lowell George died too young, damnit. He was barely 34, two-and-a-half years younger than I am now, and still had so much great music left in him. (Plus, I bet he would have gotten a real kick out of seeing his daughter's recent successes.) This live recording of "Two Trains" from 1974 catches him near his peak.
"I Got the News" by Steely Dan
Yes, this blipiography now includes a guest vocal from Michael McDonald. Somewhere, Joanna is rolling her eyes. My love of Steely Dan is untarnished by irony, I assure you. Midway through my first year at the local community college, I abandoned my efforts to swallow the overwhelming, soul-destroying boredom I experienced each time I walked in to Calc 2 and, in the process, also abandoned my plans of becoming an engineer. Instead, I found the music department, registered for a couple theory and history courses, joined the jazz band, and declared myself a music major. All of us in the rhythm section were rock fans first, jazz second, and Steely Dan was the perfect middle ground. One day one of the guitarists (there were three, as I recall) challenged me to pick out the chord clusters in "I Got the News," which I proceeded to do, and we hacked our way through a few measures. Aja is still one of my favorite albums.
"Goodbye" by The Sundays
Today's selection came down to a three-way race between "Sister Cry" from Hollywood Town Hall by The Jayhawks, "Try Not to Breathe" from Automatic for the People by R.E.M., and this great track from The Sundays' second album, Blind. All three came out in 1992, and all three were in heavy rotation in my Cawthon Hall dorm room. Although it's been a while since I tried, I bet I can still sing along with every word of that Jayhawks record, which was my first exposure to alt-country and which is full of brilliant pop songs that even a hack like me could play on an acoustic guitar. I remember buying the R.E.M. album solely on the strength of the 5-star review in Rolling Stone. It's still my favorite of theirs. I went with The Sundays, though, because many of my fondest memories of that first year away at school revolve around live music. The Sundays played a show at The Moon in early-'93, and it was on that night, standing just a few feet from Harriet Wheeler, that I first understood the groupie phenomenon.
"Driving Song" by Widespread Panic
I think I may have mentioned earlier that I smoked quite a bit of weed in the early-90s. Hence my jam band phase. It all started with the first Blues Traveler record, which led me to the first H.O.R.D.E. festival, which led to The Aquarium Rescue Unit and Phish and, yes, The Spin Doctors, all of whom made frequent stops in Tallahassee. My favorite, though, was Widespread Panic, who I must have seen 7 or 8 times, including once at the legendary and long-demolished Hammerjacks in Baltimore, where John Bell and I drank some beer together. I totally get the jam band scene -- I remember experiencing some fairly ecstatic moments at those shows -- but even a relatively interesting track like "Driving Song" just doesn't do much for me these days.
"A Different Drum" by Peter Gabriel
One of the bigger challenges of this blipiography was deciding where to insert Peter Gabriel. I considered mentioning the release of So in 1986, which was the first album of his I ever owned. Or I could have put him in my high school years, when I threw myself into his earlier releases (Security remains one of my desert island discs). Us is another album I associate with dorm life, and that tour was the only time I've ever seen him live. But Passion, Gabriel's soundtrack for Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, is probably the recording I've listed to most often over the years, and it's also the first CD I ever gave to Joanna. We were just hanging out together as friends then, and I remember suggesting it might be good music to help her fight through some writer's block. The next semester she used another track from the album to score her first short project in film school. This will be the first of three or four entries that all remind me of young love.
"When It's Raining" by The Samples
I think I first heard The Samples in the summer of '93, when they played at the second H.O.R.D.E. festival. That was a tough summer. Joanna and I had begun seeing each other as friends that spring, so the last thing I wanted to do was return to Maryland for three months of summer school at the community college. I'd get up most mornings around 10, make deliveries on the lunch shift at Pizza Hut, sleepwalk through physics class, then go out with friends. I remember coming home one night and telling my mom I might be having a breakdown. I spent a lot of time alone in my car that summer, listening to the Cocteau Twins, Chris Isaak, the massive collection of Stax singles, and No Room by The Samples. That CD remained a permanent fixture in my car throughout the fall, when I returned to Tallahassee and fell desperately in love with my wife.
"Possession" by Sarah McLachlan
Sarah McLachlan's 1997 release, Surfacing, won a couple Grammys and sold 11 million copies, and that success repositioned her in the music marketplace. Her first two records were played on college radio stations, and her early vidoes ("Into the Fire") could only be spotted on Mtv's 120 Minutes. I say all of that to say this: It's difficult now, more than a decade after McLachlan became Ms. Lilith Fair and that singer your aunt really likes, to remember how impressive a single "Possession" was when it was first released. I still don't know how to write about love, but it occurs to me suddenly that Fumbling Toward Ecstasy was an appropriately-titled soundtrack for Joanna's and my early years together, when we struggled to drop our guards and trust each other.
"Strange Waters" by Bruce Cockburn
After we got married, Joanna and I moved to Wilmington, NC, where I spent a year-and-a-half enjoying myself in graduate school and she spent way too many days working crap jobs and praying for it all to end. God bless her. Wilmington just wasn't the right place for us. It never felt like home. Which is maybe why I'm only picking one song to represent our time there. "Strange Waters" is one of my favorite songs, and I'm in the habit of calling it my all-time favorite hymn. "Everything is bullshit but the open hand" is just about a perfect summary of my theology. When I asked Bruce about the song years later, he said, "I’m saying to God, [laughs] 'Somebody said you would lead me beside still waters.' But that hasn’t been my experience. These waters are fairly troubling. And yet it's going where it has to go, and so clearly. It feels clear to me, anyway."
"Pyramid Song" by Radiohead
I lost track of Radiohead between "Creep" and Amnesiac, which is the album that made me a fan. And, honestly, I might not have paid too much attention to it either if some editor at TCM hadn't cut together this brilliant promo for their Tarkovsky series. I launched Long Pauses in 2001, inspired largely by my obsession with Tarkovsky's films. At the time, only a few were yet available on DVD, so TCM's series was an event for me. It was my first opportunity to see Ivan's Childhood and Chris Marker's brilliant essay, One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, and was a significant catalyst in my cinephilia. Generally, Joanna is not a great fan of live music, but seeing Radiohead a couple years later was a thrill for both of us.
"Lowdown" by Wire
I was a late-comer to punk and post-punk. Maybe this is related to my earlier comment about grunge -- that my life was too sheltered and polite to ever allow any acknowledgment of profane emotion (not that the exercise of profane emotion is the only appeal of loud, fast rock and roll). Anyway, through an alignment of the stars I can only describe as Divine, I happened upon punk and post-punk just as Napster hit, which meant that I suddenly had a hard drive full of The Clash, Pavement, The Fall, The Minutemen, Television, The Stooges, and The Ramones. But Wire's Pink Flag was, and is, my favorite of the lot. "Lowdown" gets the nod for its unexpected and miraculous appearance in Pedro Costa's film Ossos.
"I Heard You Looking" by Yo La Tengo
Years ago, I wrote about my first Yo La Tengo show, which also happened to be the first and only time anyone has ever threatened to kick my ass. I'd made the mistake of telling some drunk asshole to shut up. Didn't he notice that Ira was singing a quiet song? Or that Ira was standing ten feet away? Anyway, my newfound love of YLT seven or eight years ago coincided with my newfound love of noise, and Ira can orchestrate distortion with the best of 'em. Painful remains my favorite of their albums.
"This Is Love" by PJ Harvey
"Carry Me Ohio" by Sun Kil Moon
"Political Scientist" by Ryan Adams
"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Sufjan Stevens
"Drunken Butterfly" by Sonic Youth
"Remember the Mountain Bed" by Billy Bragg and Wilco
"Like a Rolling Stone (live)" by Bob Dylan

Updating . . .

2009-02-11T16:24:00.003-05:00

A friend pointed out recently that several of the links on my blogroll were broken, so I used this as an opportunity to update and reorganize the whole thing.

The Spitting Image

2009-02-01T13:43:00.004-05:00

Guinn "Big Boy" Williams in City Girl (Murnau, 1930)

From IMDb:

The son of a rancher-turned-politician, Guinn Williams was given the nickname "Big Boy" (and he was, too - 6' 2" of mostly solid muscle from years of working on ranches and playing semi-pro and pro baseball) by Will Rogers, with whom he made one of his first films, in 1919. Although his father wanted him to attend West Point (he had been an officer in the Army during World War I), Williams had always wanted to act and made his way to Hollywood in 1919. His experience as a cowboy and rodeo rider got him work as a stuntman, and he gradually worked his way up to acting. He became friends with Rogers and together they made around 15 films together.

Judging by his appearances in City Girl and in Borzage's Lucky Star (1929) and Liliom (1930), "Big Boy" was often cast as a dim-witted and arrogant sonuvabitch.

Heartbeat Detector (2008)

2009-01-19T22:20:00.004-05:00

Dir. by Nicolas Klotz

Heartbeat Detector is a tricky one. Immediately after my first viewing a couple weeks ago, I went searching for decent writing about it but found slim pickings. Judging by the responses of most critics I've found online, it's little more than a too-long and "oh so European" corporate thriller. Unflattering comparisons to Michael Clayton are the norm, and there's a not-so-subtle (and strangely patronizing) animosity running through the reviews: that a film would seriously compare the workings of modern capital to the Holocaust is just too much, apparently.

This kind of "critic of critics" metacommentary is boring, I know, but I mention it because, to be honest, all that really interested me after that first viewing was trying to make sense of the first hour of the film, nearly half of which is given over to a series of mesmerizing, Claire Denis-like musical sequences. Heartbeat Detector is the first of Klotz's films I've seen*, but it was obvious from the opening moments that he's a formalist, that the real work of the film is being done with the camera and mise-en-scene, and that the "Corporate Manager as Oberführer" theme is being explored in a dialectic with something more generous and ineffable. Those critics who proved themselves unwilling or unable to write about form did this film a real disservice.

This is the first of what I hope will be several posts about Heartbeat Detector. My goal, eventually, is to make sense of those music sequences, though I suspect it will take several steps to get there. For the record, I've tweaked the levels of my screen captures in order to make them more "readable" at this size. The film's original palatte -- at least as it's reproduced on DVD -- is darker and less vibrant.

Have a seat

First, a genre convention. Simon Kessler (Mathieu Almeric) is a human resources psychologist at a German multinational corporation that he calls "S. C. Farb." (That the film is being told by a limited and possibly unreliable first-person narrator has also gone largely unnoticed.) In the opening moments of the film, he's called into the office of Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), the company's second in command, who informs Simon that the board is growing concerned with the increasingly erratic behavior of Farb's CEO, Matthias Just (Michael Lonsdale). Simon is assigned the task of investigating and evaluating Just's mental fitness, thus turning him into a kind of generic, film noir detective.

His conversation with Karl Rose proves to be the first of many fact-finding interviews for Simon, and the staging of these interview scenes is one clue to Klotz's formal strategy. When he first enters Rose's office, Simon is invited by Rose to sit in the middle of a couch, which leaves his superior in the unnatural position you see in the first image below.

Klotz then cuts to a static, close-up of Rose and holds him there for several minutes as he tells Simon about Just. Notice that the scene has been designed in order to fake an odd variation of a shot / countershot that very consciously refuses to make an eyeline match. The voice-over narration might be Simon's, but the camera remains as distant as possible from his subjectivity. Notice, also, the flat background behind each man's face. This is a subtle doubling motif that draws a visual parallel between Simon and Rose/Just.

Have a seat (part 2)

The scene with Rose is reenacted several minutes later at the home of Matthias Just. After raising a toast with his guest -- "a l'histoire" -- Just also invites Simon, by way of a hand gesture, to take an awkwardly close seat beside him.

And again Klotz cuts to an unexpected p.o.v., this time between and behind the men. We see only Just from this perspective. Simon excuses himself and exits the room, leaving us behind, still far removed from his subjectivity.

"The sight of her neck game me incredible pleasure."

Following his late-night conversation with Just, Simon is invited back for a second conversation, this time with Just's wife, Lucy (Edith Scob). Here, Klotz begins with a more traditional shot / countershot. (Although the mise-en-scene is odd here, too. The chairs are unnaturally positioned in the middle of the room, and the short lens further isolates the characters from their surroundings.)

The bigger surprise, though, is the next cut, which jumps fully into Simon's subjective point of view. Not coincidentally, this scene follows immediately the longest musical sequence and marks the beginning of the film's second act. I'll probably return to this moment in a future post.

Have a seat (part 3)

There are several other interviews I haven't mentioned yet, including the critical conversation with Arie Neumann (Lou Castel) that ends the film and that I'll have to deal with later. But, finally, I'm curious about this scene that takes place in the apartment of Just's secretary and former lover, Lynn Sanderson (Valerie Dreville). As in the earlier conversations with Rose and Just, Simon begins at a remove from the other person, but in this case it's Lynn who invites herself to take a more intimate seat beside him.

After she divulges more secrets about Just, she stands, leaves the room, and returns, at which point Klotz cuts to one of the only insert shots in the film: Just's gun, neatly wrapped.

Along with providing some narrative information, the insert allows Klotz to move his camera to the other side of the couch, which gives us visually balanced close-ups.

And?

At this point, I haven't gotten much further than did the reviewers I criticized in my opening paragraph. My conclusion, so far, is pretty obvious: that, in typical noir fashion, Simon begins the film as a detached, clinical observer before gradually being consumed by his investigation. Klotz mirrors that transformation with his camera, moving from an objective p.o.v. to a perspective more closely aligned with Simon's subjectivity.

What we're also seeing, though, is Klotz's considered attention to actors' bodies and to physical space. The cinema is not a story. It can't be adequately described in narrative terms.

* If anyone out there can help me see Klotz's earlier work, let me know.

Camera Test

2009-01-04T20:52:00.005-05:00

Joanna and I gave ourselves a new camera for Christmas, a Nikon D90, and I'm only now beginning to test it out. I took it to the barn this afternoon but the light was terrible until just as I was getting ready to leave. A small storm moved in, and for about five minutes before the rain started to fall the woods became desaturated. I felt like I'd stepped into Deadwood. { hi-rez }

2009 Film Diary

2009-01-01T00:01:00.006-05:00

See also: by director | by title | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008

January
7	Lazybones [Borzage]
14	Street Angel [Borzage]
15	Murnau [Murnau]
17	Heartbeat Detector [Klotz]
21	Lucky Star [Borzage]
22	Liliom [Borzage]
29	City Girl [Murnau]
February
7	Miró l’Altre [Portabella]
7	Tren de Sombras [Guerin]
8	Cuadecuc, Vampir [Portabella]
March
2	Transformers [Bay]
4	St. Nick [Lowery]
13	Lucky Life [Chung]
28	Loulou [Pialat]
30	Forgetting Sarah Marshall [Stoller]
April
4	Cruising [Friedkin]
6	Adventureland [Mottola]
7	Atlantic City [Malle]
9	American Gigolo [Schrader]
11	Juno [Reitman]
11	Bad Timing [Roeg]
12	Grown Ups [Leigh]
16	Voyage en deuce [DeVille]
18	The Class [Cantet]
19	Heaven's Gate [Cimino]
25	Adoration [Egoyan]
25	Bluebeard [Breillat]
26	Sugar [Boden and Fleck]
26	Oblivion [Honnigman]
26	Everything Strange and New [Bradshaw]
28	Wild Field [Kalatozishvili]
28	Rembrandt's J'Accuse [Greenaway]
29	575 Castro St. [Olson]
29	Our Beloved Month of August [Gomes]
29	Wild Cats [Liang]
30	Zift [Gardev]
May
1	The Other One [Bernard and Tridivic]
1	35 Shots of Rum [Denis]
3	Cutter's Way [Passer]
17	Rich & Famous [Cukor]
21	The Reckless Moment [Ophuls]
23	Reds [Beatty]
24	Local Hero [Forsyth]
24	I Love You, Man [Hamburg]
30	7th Heaven [Borzage]
31	Momma's Man [Jacobs]
June
3	Vernon, Florida [Morris]
4	Ladies and Gentleman, The Fabulous Stains [Adler]
6	Body Heat [Kasdan]
5	Up [Docter]
7	The Last Waltz [Scorsese]
11	Summer Hours [Assayas]
13	The Hangover [Phillips]
21	Thief [Mann]
22	Raging Bull [Scorsese]
27	Read My Lips [Audiard]
28	I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar [Garrel]
28	Twin Peaks: Pilot [Lynch]
July
3	The Forest for the Trees [Ade]
4	Divine Intervention [Suleiman]
5	In My Skin [de Van]

Films of 2008

2008-12-31T22:02:00.001-05:00

Best of 2008

This year, for the first time, I submitted an official Top 10 list, abiding by the "one-week theatrical run in the States" rule. The full write-up can be found at The Auteurs' Notebook.

Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke)
In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin)
Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
Paraguayan Hammock (Paz Encina)
Love Songs (Christoph Honore)
The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat)
Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo)
The Romance of Astree and Celadon (Eric Rohmer)

In the three weeks since I submitted that piece I've caught up with a couple other well-reviewed films, and I suspect that one of them, Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz), would have bumped Rohmer from the list had I seen it sooner. I'm eager to watch it again.

Favorite New Films I Saw in 2008

As I mentioned in my write-up for The Auteurs, these year-end lists offer a really frustrating glimpse into the state of film distribution. If I hadn't spent ten days in Toronto, the list below would include one film, Love Songs, which, it's perhaps worth noting, played at TIFF '07 and which I saw more than a year later when it finally found its way to DVD. Someday, hopefully, Senses of Cinema will post their next issue (it's already more than a month late), which will include my essay about many of these films.

RR (James Benning)
When It was Blue (Jennifer Reeves)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)
Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso)
Revanche (Gotz Spielman)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
Winter / Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky)
Horizontal Boundaries (Pat O'Neill)
Love Songs (Christoph Honore)
Birdsong (Albert Serra)
Salamandra (Pablo Aguero)
The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Hunger (Steve McQueen)

Favorite Discoveries of 2008

This list is a lot more fun. Older films that I saw for the first time in '08. Limited to one film per director, listed in alphabetical order. This was a great year for silent films -- starting with the Ford at Fox boxset, followed by a trip to San Francisco for the Silent Film Festival in July, and ending with a brief trip through Murnau. With the recent release of the Murnau, Borzage and Fox set, I suspect 2009 will be a good one, too.

The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincent Minnelli, 1952)
Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, 2000)
Faust (F. W. Murnau, 1926)
Four Sons (John Ford, 1928)
Jujiro (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1928)
Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
Life on Earth (Abderrahmane Sissako, 1998)
The Lovers on the Bridge (Leos Carax, 1999)
Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 2004)
Platform (Jia Zhang-ke, 2000)
'Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier, 1986)
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)
The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962)
The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)
Vers Mathilde (Claire Denis, 2005)
Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)

2008 Mix

2008-12-31T11:58:00.000-05:00

Side A

"Moneda Sucia" by Flormaleva (opening title music from Liverpool)
"Magick" by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals (from Cardinology)
"Replica" by Beck (from Modern Guilt)
"Jazz" by Esbjorn Svensson Trio (from Leucocyte)
"Lassoo" by The Duke Spirit (from Neptune)
"Strange Overtones" by David Byrne and Brian Eno (from Everything That Happens Will Happen Today)
"Man Made Lake" by Calexico (from Carried to the Dust)
"Betray" by Son Lux (from At War with Walls and Mazes)
"Mississippi Goddam" (by Nina Simone from To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story)

Side B

"Only for a Moment" by Black Taj (from Beyonder)
"We Call Upon the Author" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (from DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!)
"Gold for Bread" by Blitzen Trapper (from Furr)
"Threads" by Portishead (from Third)
"Blue Ridge Mountains" by Fleet Foxes (from Fleet Foxes)
"Inside a Boy" by My Brightest Diamond (from A Thousand Shark's Teeth)
"De bonnes raisons" by Louis Garrel and Ludivine Sagnier (from the soundtrack of Love Songs)
"Dreamin' of You" by Bob Dylan (from Tell Tale Signs)
"Eat Yourself" by Goldfrapp (from Seventh Tree)
"A Change is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke

If the Side A/Side B thing seems pretentious, there's at least a little method to my (nostalgic) madness. See, ideally, one who listens to this mix will take a short break after Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam." Frankly, I don't know how anyone could hear that song and not need to stand up, walk around, pour a stiff drink, smoke a cigarette, something. Recorded live just a few days after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., it's as painful an expression of rage and sorrow and disillusionment as you're ever likely to hear. The lyrics alone are enough to get me, but, goddam, listen to Nina's voice when she sings (at 6:17):

Why don't you see it?
Why don't you feel it?
I don't know . . .
I don't know.

Nina's mourning Medgar Evers, four little girls, and, as she calls him, "the King of Love." I won't pretend I can empathize with her, and I don't mean to strike a ridiculous pose of suffering (is there anything more insufferable from a wealthy white guy?), but I offer this recording as a summation of my myriad feelings about the George W. Bush era and about this strange and terrible place that I love and where I have chosen to make my home. To paraphrase another blogger, "If you hear this song and feel moved to tears, then you are a kindred spirit." Actually, I'd be content to reduce this entire mix down to just three songs: "Mississippi Goddam," "We Call Upon the Author," and, for obvious reasons, "A Change is Gonna Come," which is not a new song, of course, but which has become new in a new context.

2008 is dead. Long live 2008.

Long Pauses was inspired, years ago now, by a Denise Levertov poem that compares the act of writing to the existential adventure of composing of one's life. "Making Peace" opens with the image of "A voice" calling out from the darkness, which I've always taken as an allusion to God; like Levertov in her later years, I still call myself a Christian, even if a somewhat unorthodox one. By Levertov's calculus, "the poet" -- whether a literal artist or, figuratively, an individual composing her life -- is imbued with a creative imagination and the will to exercise it. We are holy potential. We are capable of great things, she suggests -- "peace," "justice," "mutual aid" -- if only we choose to shake our lives free of "the imagination of disaster." It's all a beautiful extended metaphor, culminating in this description of something like grace:

A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light--facets
of the forming crystal.

Lovely. And still inspiring after all these years. But after listening to "We Call Upon the Author" twenty or thirty times, I'm tempted to start another blog that shifts Long Pauses 20 or 30 degrees on its axis -- a site that is more profane and bitter and funny. I'd call it "Prolix!!!! Prolix!!!!" and it would be a kind of fiery Jeremiad. It would be considerably less lovely. In "We Call Upon the Author" Nick Cave also calls out to the Author/Creator but he finds one with a bit of an "imagination of disaster" problem Himself. There's no vibrating lights or facets of forming crystals in Cave's America. It's a much more recognizable place: "rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious disease, global inequality, and deepening socio-economic divisions." Come on, Author, can't you cut some of this shit? "Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!"

In other sounds . . .

I haven't heard enough new music this year to justify putting together a Top 10, but the other 16 songs here represent a good deal of what I've been listening to. According to iTunes, "Inside a Boy" wins the "play count" race for the year, which seems about right. "Strange Overtones" is my favorite pop single (if it's accurate to call a Byrne/Eno song a pop single) since Kelly Clarkson's "Since You Been Gone." "Magick" is a pretty great pop song, too -- one of many on Cardinology, the tightest collection Ryan Adams has ever released. And "Dreamin' of You" proves, to no one's surprise, that Bob Dylan's rejects and cutouts are golden.

Beck, Son Lux, Portishead, and Goldfrapp all put out really good records that find crazy beauty in electronic noises. Calexico, along with new-comers Fleet Foxes and Blitzen Trapper, mined different veins of Americana and found some jewels. The Duke Spirit and Black Taj made two of the best guitar-driven rock albums I've heard in quite a while. And as a film guy, I also had to include two cuts from movies I loved this year: "Moneda Sucia," Flormaleva's surf-y opener from Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool, and "De bonnes raisons," Louis Garrel and Ludivine Sagnier's pop-y duet that opens Christoph Honore's Love Songs. Ah, Ludivine. Be still my beating heart.

The much-coveted "Long Pauses Song of the Year Award" goes to "Premonition: I. Earth" by The Esbjorn Svennson Trio (E.S.T.), which wasn't included in the mix because, at more than 17 minutes, it would have eaten up a fourth of the disc. I added "Jazz," instead, which is a somewhat more traditional piano trio performance. "Premonition: I. Earth" is like something from another planet. E.S.T. was formed 15 years ago, and Svennson and drummer Magnus Ostrom played together even longer. You can hear that history in the precision and invention of their improvisations. I only wish I'd had a chance to see Svennson perform live.

Top 10 Live Shows of 2008

The ordering of this list is determined largely, I've realized, by where I was sitting and by the energy in the room. Sonic Youth is the only band that still makes me bounce around in a pit with kids half my age; Wilco, who are probably America's Great Rock Band right now, put on an amazing performance, but I was too far away from it and spent too much of the night feeling like a spectator rather than a participant.

Sonic Youth
Tom Waits
Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin, and Buddy Miller
My Brightest Diamond and Clare & The Reasons
The Duke Spirit and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Lou Reed
David Byrne
Elvis Costello
Iron & Wine and Blitzen Trapper
Wilco and John Doe

Send me your mailing address if you want a copy of the mix. I'd love to get something in return, but it's not necessary.

Faith And Spirituality In Masters Of World Cinema

2008-12-14T12:08:00.002-05:00

I'm proud to announce the publication of Faith And Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, edited by my friend Kenneth Morefield. Cambridge Scholar's Publishing has posted the table of contents, Mike Hertenstein's introduction, and the first chapter, "Bergman's Trilogy of Faith, Persona, and Faith in Narrative" by Bill Scalia (download PDF). As a further tease, here's the introduction to the chapter I contributed, "Pedro Costa’s 'Vanda Trilogy' and the Limits of Narrative Cinema as a Contemplative Art":

The main problem with narrative in film is that when you become emotionally involved, it becomes difficult to see the picture as picture. Of course, the laughing and crying and suspense can be a positive element, but it’s oddly nonvisual and gradually destroys your capacity to see.
-- Michael Snow (Snow, 67)

The same moment that we are looking, we forget.
-- Jean-Luc Godard (Walsh)

For experimental filmmaker Michael Snow, a viewer’s ability, literally, “to see” is of first importance. Snow came to film relatively late in life, having explored first the fields of music, painting, sculpture, and photography, and cinema for him has never been primarily a storytelling medium. Rather, he treats the foundations of film—mechanically produced light and sound moving in time—as just more artistic material. Snow’s most famous film, Wavelength (1967), for example, is essentially a 45-minute, continuous forward zoom through a New York loft, accompanied by an electronic sine wave that over the course of the film modulates gradually from its lowest frequency (50 cycles per second) to its highest (12,000 cycles per second). Wavelength deliberately rejects the traditions of narrative cinema and foregrounds, instead, the structure and mechanics of film. For Snow, then, a comparison might be made between the typical movie viewer and an impatient museum-goer, who rushes from portrait to portrait noting only the names of the historical figures represented there while overlooking completely all that distinguishes one artist’s brush or canvas from another. Artistic form vanishes amid the simpler pleasures of narrative.

Placed within the context of a discussion of faith and spirituality, Snow’s warning about the dangers of narrative cinema takes on an obvious metaphorical meaning as well. Religion is, to borrow the Evangelical parlance of the day, a “worldview,” a lens through which people of faith examine every issue before claiming a moral position, forming judgments, and acting (or choosing not to act). Snow’s demand that we see “the picture as picture” implies an attentive, active observer as opposed to a passive consumer of images. He is warning against what theologian P. T. Forsyth, in his writings on aesthetics, calls “the monopoly of the feelings,” whose aim is to move men rather than change them. For Forsyth, hardly an iconoclast himself, the error “is the submersion of the ethical element, of the centrality of the conscience, and the authority of the holy” (qtd. in De Gruchy, 74). Narrative cinema, with its seamless cutting, heroic faces, and manipulative musical cues, is particularly well-equipped to monopolize one’s feelings and co-opt one’s imagination, thus rendering the passive religious viewer pliable to anti-religious ideologies. The Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky calls this tendency "tragic": "if art can stimulate emotions and ideas, mass-appeal cinema, because of its easy, irresistible effect, extinguishes all traces of thought and feeling irrevocably. People cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola" (179).

The work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is a useful test case for a discussion of the limits of narrative cinema as a contemplative art. Without abandoning narrative altogether, Costa has over the past two decades moved progressively toward abstraction and, in the process, has discovered his own brand of what avant-garde filmmaker Nathanial Dorsky calls “devotional cinema”: “a way of approaching and manifesting the ineffable” (Dorsky, 27). In particular, Costa’s trilogy of feature films set in and around Fontainhas, an immigrant slum in Lisbon, demonstrates an increasing dissatisfaction with the tropes and traps of conventional cinematic storytelling. In the “Vanda Trilogy,” as it has become known—Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), and Colossal Youth (Juventude Em Marcha, 2006)—Costa pays homage to other spiritually-minded filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, and Yasujiro Ozu, while also borrowing from the formal and explicitly political legacies of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, and Daniele Huillet, the latter two of whom are the subject of Costa’s 2001 documentary, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?). Costa’s films are infected with the same nostalgia for Modernism that characterizes so much of today’s art cinema, where the rigor of Bresson and the alienating camera of Michelangelo Antonioni threaten to inspire a new “Tradition of Quality” characterized by expressionless faces, glacial pacing, and calculated stabs at transcendence. But what distinguishes Costa from his contemporaries is his uncynical commitment to form and ethics, which are bound in his films not by transcendence but by imminence—that is, by the sacred dignity of the material, human world.

20 Actresses

2008-12-09T23:16:00.002-05:00

I could tweak this for another week and still be dissatisfied. Part of the 20 Actresses Meme.