Film of the Month Club

Writing the City

2009-08-07T18:35:00.001-07:00

(This is coming a bit late, but I'm happy to have the extra time... I didn't even get the film until late in July, and am glad to have a chance to work something up about it...)

One of the things that struck me about Hands Over the City was the number of representations of the city that appear. So much of the film is structured around ways of describing the city. We see Nottola's model (above) - we see several maps - we see his office, with a map painting on one wall, huge photos of the city on other walls, as well as windows looking at the city, and the model itself. But the city is represented by more than just images - there are words and numbers about the city, reports, statistics. The archive room is as much a representation of the city as the maps are.

But none of these representations are adequate - they are often quite flawed. The episode discussing the common wall of the house that collapsed is a case in point: the officials explain that they had no way of knowing - the scale of the map would make a meter thick wall 1/2mm wide line - their pens have 1 mm nibs - they can't represent the real width with their tools. It's a common theme - the reports are all accurate, in their way - but all miss things. You see the various officials making excuses and avoiding responsibilities - but their information, their maps, records, etc., are all equally ambiguous. The representations of the city tend to hide it as much as reveal it. Da Vita gets at this, with his all too apt metaphor - everything was by the book, but the book needs to be rewritten...

While most of this misreading and ambiguity is unintentional, Nottola emerges as a character who can exert willing control over things. He is determined and focused, he knows what he wants. And he sees - and he promises a view of the bay to everyone.. He can imagine it, and represent it - hreates the big model - his office is lined with maps and pictures. He is a visionary - he imagines the city as it will become, he sees it when it is not there. He will build it - but before he builds it, he imagines it, he is, rather literally, a writer of the city:

Now it is true, he is as apt to see the profits he can get as the biuldings he can build - he still falls into that class of ambiguous villains, the 20th century developer. There was a nice piece in the New York Times about a new book about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, her campaign to stop him from bulldozing Greenwich Village for a superhighway, or driving an interstate through Washington Square Park. Nottola is in the same vein as Moses - more of a crook, maybe, but still, someone trying to realize a vision of a city - though a vision that usually forgets about the people living there. Or reduce them to lists of names...

Anyway - it's a good film about a pretty substantial part of 20th century social history - the reinvention of cities. A process still going on - there are echoes of this film in recent films about urban renewal - Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, or Jose Luis Guerin's Under Construction - complete with the tour of the new buildings - handsome, safe, boring, and priced out of reach of the people who are being displaced...

Crashing Walls and Broken Politics in Rosi's Hands Over the City

2009-07-22T07:27:00.000-07:00

"You know what the true sin is? Losing."

Francisco Rosi's Hands Over the City compels the viewer to witness multiple layers of political compromise by creating a mosaic of inevitability. From the very first long shot of the converging city, we get the sense Naples is constructed of surface-level promises, hollow walls, and slick facades. Rosi wants to reveal what's hidden underneath, behind, or beyond the surface, the bottom line of possibility and progress. It's a film of great focus, almost too much so that we sometimes forget about the everyday man and woman hurt the most by the corruption. But Rosi constantly reminds how our surroundings can represent true intentions, both the morally corrupt and the honest, specifically the manmade and natural walls engulfing each dynamic moment in the film.

As Chris stated in his introduction, Rosi's "characters are important only to the extent they represent political positions and power", however each contains a professional/emotional duty complicating their role as a politician. Nottola and his scheming speculations show a self-righteous, arrogant businessman manipulating the political machine to make money. But his posturing about power and role as a councilman mask an infantile desire to build, to construct something large for the entire city to see and admire. De Vita is an engineer first and a leftist second, so his primary concerns are with the buildings themselves - the intricacies and fallacies of these structures and how they will affect they everyday working man. Finally, the Doctor, who not ironically is a centrist, gets torn, abused, and pushed from one side to the next, ultimately siding with his moral authority as a physician to fight Nottola. But each of these characters becomes defined not by their actions or reactions, but by the spaces Rosi creates for them.

Hands Over the City uses walls and textures unlike any film I've seen, paralleling character to mise-en-scene to provide a window into how and why the film is so political. Rosi begins this motif during the opening sequence as he tracks the morning transgressions of a local neighborhood, highlighting a construction site and the pummeling sound of a pile-driver. As two men attempt to get breakfast, a gigantic piece of concrete falls into frame, leading to a series of collapses bringing down an entire building. For the everyday person, identity and hope become crushed by the fabricated walls built by their politicians. Nottola's office on the other hand is crisply wallpapered with an intricate map of the city, covering his walls with a sense of detail and preciseness high atop the city. Later, we see his likeness plastered on the walls outside, like an infection spreading undeterred. Also, every politician's house contains wall to wall paintings, a suffocating indication of wealth, as if these are the only witnesses to the shady dealings occurring before them. In the city council chamber, the walls are cold stone, simple, undeterred. Rosi still sees temporary hope in this space, where Democracy can blossom into something more than a springboard for greed. Later, Rosi uses archival footage during the election rally to show walls of people, angry, passionate, motivated, but hood-winked, a documentary element ripe for consideration. Finally, the outside space of the development project provides a disturbing finale to the film, where so much possibility should grow strong, but in truth more of the same politicking will fester, turning the ground into swiss cheese.

Of course, there are countless more spots in the film where space defines the message and mood of the film, and I'm eager to see if anyone has any thoughts on this motif. Also, Rosi's use of pans, tilts, and zooms could inspire an entirely different thought-process on the film, but one still linked to the issue of space.

July's Film: Hands Over the City

2009-07-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

For this month's film, I wanted to select one I had not seen before but from a director whose work fascinates me. Hands Over the City (1963) is Francesco Rosi's follow-up feature to his debut Salvatore Giuliano, about the Sicilian independence movement. Hands Over the City keeps the focus on the politics of Southern Italy; in this case the narrative revolves around real-estate speculation in Naples and the problem of political corruption.

To call it a narrative, though needs qualification. For starters, Rosi mixes fiction and documentary, less so here than in Salvatore Giuliano, but the project of the film seems at times closer to what we are used to documentary films doing than fiction films. There are at least two ongoing complaints about Hollywood's politics: 1) it reduces all political problems to personal problems; and 2) it uses politics as McGuffin, a narrative hook that is quickly discarded. Hands Over the City is the polar opposite. Characters are important only to the extent they represent political positions or power. Political deliberation is shown unfolding without the normal emotional catharsis we might expect. It's not a difficult film like Straub/Huillet or even a latter Godard film, but it's a different kind of difficult: the detailed and detached approach can overwhelm a novice or casual viewer. Conversely, multiple viewings can be rewarding.

Some questions I have for Film Clubbers:

Hands Over the City is pretty clearly a political film, but I'm wondering how? With whom do with sympathize and how? My gut feeling is that we sympathize differently than in other political films, but I'm still not sure how this works.

What of Rosi's style? It's often considered as part of a realist vein in 60s Italian cinema. What does it share with other art films from the period? What's distinctive?

The Oxford Guide to World Cinema characterizes Rosi's work as "rationalist." Is that a fair assessment, and if so, how does this play out? What is the relationship between Rosi's work and other intellectual, politicized cinema?

These are hardly exhaustive questions, but they speak to my interests in selecting the film. I'm looking forward to see what discoveries others have in the film.

An Illustrative Film

2009-06-30T16:39:00.001-07:00

I don't think it's too much a stretch that documentary studies - and documentary as a general community ideal - has been preoccupied with two questions: the problem of power (i.e. ethics) and the problem of truth. ...No Lies has found such a central place in the academic film canon because it so succinctly and slyly dramatizes these concerns. My only surprise is that it has taken a while for its reputation to grow: it's been taught at Temple University perennially, but I get the feeling that a renewed vogue for reflexive pseudodocumentaries (non-comedic mockumentaries) has given the film a new exposure.

The ethics and reality-effect critiques are front and center, but what interests me is another film theory problem: spectatorship. Of course there are more than two models of spectatorship, but there is one major split in theoretical understanding of narration. One line of film theory tends to think that the positioning of the viewer with the camera's gaze is the main determinant of meaning and even a film's politics. ...No Lies seems to draw from this theory, by suggesting what Peter referred to as the "rape" of the camera in the film, namely that documentary involves not only an unequal relation between maker and social actor but viewer and social actor. Voyeurs, we are all complicit in the grilling the main character receives from the cameraman.

Another line of theory stresses that the emotions, meaning, and politics of a film relies more on intangibles or nonmechanistic ways of communication. Nick Browne's reading of Stagecoach, for instance, argues that the viewer's sympathy is with the person looked at rather than the agency of looking, as spectatorship theory would have it. In ...No Lies, too, the emotional impact comes from our discomfort in seeing the protagonist treated the way she is. The tight framing, the emotions she registers, and the uninterrupted take all contribute to and draw upon conventions of discomfort.

The reflexivity of the film in fact relies on the gap between these two. If viewer-positioning of the camera did not matter at all, the film would have no thematic impact; it would be merely a personal drama rather than a theoretical commentary. If there was no way to subvert the normal viewer-positioning through emotional means, the critique would not be clear. We would merely be implicated in the camera's "rape," not aware of it.

"O.K. babes, You're in the Movies" The Evolution of a Performance

2009-06-29T22:08:00.000-07:00

No Lies is that odd film that has almost as much going on outside the frame as it does inside it. And although this certainly makes Mr. Block’s film unique, especially for its time, it concerns me that focusing on the “trick” this film seems to pull off with the audience, takes attention away from discovering just how exceptional a performance this is by Shelby Leverington.

Because I am so absolutely obsessed with her performance, I feared having access to the rehearsal tapes might change my views on the work. It did in a way, but, oddly enough, for the better.

I found it very curious to see that the basic change in beats (to use an acting term), which sort of change with each room they enter, were established from at least the first filmed rehearsal. I guess that is not a big surprise; even the loosest improve still has to have some structure to follow. But, now I can appreciate how smooth and flowing Shelby and Alec followed each other (from room to room and emotion to emotion) all the while adhering to “the woman’s” motivation to get to her movie, despite the rough and rugged emotional terrain they travel through before she exits the door.

This flow and adherence to her character’s objective (simply to leave and go to the movie) is really what helps make …no lies seem real. In real life, isn’t it so true that these little things like keeping a date with friends, seems to be of so much more importance than finishing an insanely emotional and impacting conversation with someone, one that can literally change your very psyche. Shelby’s character HAS TO go to the movie. (As an almost related aside, one of my earliest memories of television is of Three’s Company. I couldn’t get past the fact that characters would come into the apartment and NOT close the door. It bothered me to no end and completely shattered my suspension of disbelief.)

In the first filmed rehearsal, she recounts the rape incident, at times, with something just short of delight, at one point calling herself an “exposed rape-ee” with a smile and a laugh. It’s really not until “the cameraman” asks point blank “It didn’t turn you on to be raped?” that she lets the joking go completely. Alec wouldn’t dare ask this question in the final version (although he comes close) because Shelby’s tone is not nearly as light at any moment in the final film. She makes light of things, but there is a deep pain present, even in these moments; her smiles are a defense mechanism then, a way that allows her to reveal this stuff with the camera on her. To me it is so interesting to see this actress get to that point, step by step.

Mr. Block tells us that Shelby viewed something called The Rape Tape, which comprised of woman telling the stories of their victimizations, both by rapists and sometimes by the people that were supposed to help them following the rape. With these various details, she was able to develop a composite and apply it to her character. And through her training in “method” work, she was able to link herself to these details and find the emotional connection that made it so powerful and real and create, as Glenn said, “something harrowing we can't quite put our fingers on”. One of these details, which she implements in the filmed rehearsals, but not in the final version, is about her condition just following the rape, attempting to walk up the stairs and being “reduced to the physicality of an old woman, I couldn’t walk more than one step at a time”; a powerful image, and perhaps one that would have added more power to the final piece, but, for whatever reason, was left out.

The most interesting difference between the second taped rehearsal and the final film (which are much closer to each other than the first and second taped rehearsals), is the choice Leverington makes to tell most of her rape story from the bed rather than, in the filmed version, from the chair. The difference is, in my thinking, astronomical. The movement she makes to the bed seems deliberate and does not work in her character’s underling objective, which is to leave and go to the movie. If Shelby thought this movement to the bed was needed in order for the viewer to realize that her character was in a different “place” than when she was putting the makeup on, it is such a relief to see that all the reveal of change that is needed is accomplished, in the film version, simply by her turning around and looking directly at Alec (and us) for the first time in the film. It would be interesting to find out if this was an adjustment made by Mr. Block or if Leverington herself had the instinct to make that choice. I really feel like it would be a much less successful film if this seemingly tiny choice was different.

Glenn calls this performance a “master class of method acting”. Obviously I agree. But I would go even further to say that, just because its viewership is not on par with other great film works, it doesn’t mean that this performance shouldn’t be appreciated as one of the most successful ever put on film. Not simply because this woman happens to pull off something that seems real, and not even simply because she achieves a certain undeniable emotional power in this work, but because a phenomenal truth is reached. Marc asks “Is this the truth of simply never taking cinema verite for granted? Or, more radically, any notion of any single truth?” I can’t put my finger on it. But maybe the answer lies in what weepingsam said: “It retains its power even after you know all the facts - but it makes you think about what it means to talk about fiction telling the truth...” Or maybe it’s the voices of the unheard, speaking through Ms. Leverington; the composite - alive…forever.

...no lies Rehearsal Tapes

2009-06-27T00:10:00.000-07:00

Mitchell Block has given us the great privilege of access into the process of creating ...no lies. Here are two recordings of rehearsals, the first one held at the directors home and the second on the set of the film. Fascinating viewing for anyone interested in how this incredible performance was developed.

Rehearsal Tape 1

Rehearsal Tape 2

Your Eyes Never Lie: Wells of Subtext in '...no lies'

2009-06-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

As per Peter's advice, I read nothing about Mitchell W. Block's short film ...no lies before viewing it, and I too initially thought it was non-fiction. I wonder how anyone going into this film cold would doubt its validity as real life? ...no lies creates such a strong, improvisational candor through its subject that the viewer feels as if they are witnessing something they shouldn't, watching as a woman delves into a dark place she swore never to visit again. Waves of emotion rush forward through the eyes of the Woman (played by Shelby Leverington in a master-class of method acting), dancing with the camera back and forth as if looking for some sort of lifeline. Does she find it? A troubling question, and this push pull relationship makes ...no lies a fascinating experience.

At the beginning of ...no lies, the Cameraman films the The Woman preparing for a date, gazing at her in the mirror as she puts on makeup. The Woman's eyes focus on the task at hand, avoiding the gaze of the camera, even going so far as to say how uncomfortable the mechanism makes her feel. Then The Woman moves into her bedroom and the camera follows, as if calmly pestering her in the way a seasoned paparazzi would a tenured movie-starlet. She puts on earrings, tells of an uncomfortable meeting with her mother, and still avoids the camera, which films her via another larger mirror. When the woman tells the Cameraman about the rape, her tone stays the same, casually laughing and making light of the situation as if giving in to the pressure of the camera, possibly hoping it will now leave her alone. But of course, this confession only ups the ante, and the Cameraman keeps pushing the Woman into various stages of revelation and fear. During this progression, her eyes gradually begin to latch onto the camera, forcing the viewer to listen as the details of her experience unfold. By tracking the eyes of the Woman, we get a sense of the devastation deeply rooted inside. It's no surprise the film ends on a close-up of the her eyes, tracks of tears ruining the makeup on her face, imbedded seemingly forever.

Throughout ...no lies, Block uses multiple long takes to situate the performance in a familiar reality, forcing the viewer to assume some sort of realism is being represented. But the impact comes from how Leverington's eyes avoid this relationship between form and function, deconstructing the idea that everything the camera sees is undeniable and tangible. Her eyes create a performance outside of the film's scope, something that reaches far beyond that apartment, into a subtext that tells a disturbing truth about our own expectation, something harrowing we can't quite put our fingers on.

- Thanks to Peter and Mr. Block for allowing us to discuss this film.

"Ask me no questions..." (an interview with Mitchell W. Block)

2009-06-14T19:25:00.000-07:00

Mitchell W. Block's short bio on his blog (found HERE) doesn't mention the work that brings him to the Film of the Month Club, "...no lies". He's had a long successful career as a Distributor and Producer of hundreds of films and is the President of Direct Cinema Limited. But don't think he's forgotten about his film school gem.

I reached Mr. Block, via telephone, in his Santa Monica office.

Peter Rinaldi: What was your reaction when you heard that I wanted "…no lies" to be the film of the month?

Mitchell W. Block: I thought it was a great idea. It was perfect timing because I’ve been trying to find ways to put my films up so people could see them.

What was your reaction when it got into the National Film Registry?

Well, it had been up before, so I was pleased when it finally made it past the bureaucracy.

When in the course of this film’s life did it start to be used as a public service tool?

Immediately.

Did you ever expect that to happen?

No. Because I was, like most film students, in a program, like virtually all programs, which never talks about how a film is used, or how films make money. You make films without regard to audience or market. When the film came out, a number of very smart film distributors said “This is a classroom film that can be used for training.”

That’s really ironic considering, and I don’t want to make any assumptions here, but I am assuming you made it with the intention to kind of throw the audience off once they realize it was not real.

No.

No?

No, I had to make a movie to get an MFA. And I only had seven weeks of prep time. So, I’d been a producer for a long time and if you think about it, the easiest kind of picture to make is a film with one location, two actors and so on. So the form was very much the function of being just a smart producer and the content was trying to figure out what I could do with the form. So it’s like all my pictures, where I work backwards, because my brain works that way.

Surely you must’ve realized, after the film is made, that what you have here is something that people might take to be not so much fiction, as, perhaps, a moment caught on film that was real. That really wasn’t the goal? To cultivate these performances to make them appear, for lack of a better word, “real”?

Well, they are real. I mean, the performance, everything about it, is real.

Well, (laughs) this could turn into an interesting discussion, but what I am trying to say is that, yes, she may have been playing “herself”, but the situation certainly wasn’t real.

Well that’s the joy of making a fictional movie. You create something on the screen that, because of the form, people read as real, when in fact it is fiction shot to make it look like it is vérité.

What was the reaction when it first screened? When it played at someplace like the Flaherty Film Seminar, where everyone expects a documentary, was there controversy?

Well there generally is controversy because people get pissed off at “the cameraman” for treating a woman like that. That’s inappropriate. And people get pissed off when they find that they were fooled.

So they are pissed off at the cameraman and then, when they realize there is a “filmmaker”, they are then pissed off at you.

Yes.

I read that Shelby Leverington watched rape victim tapes to get some back-story material to work with, but what kind of work was done to help her get into the place she needed to get into to sustain this performance through these long takes?

The back-story was something she used to help create that character, which is really a pastiche of her. I mean she’s really that character, who had not been raped, and, being very much a trained New York actor, could draw upon her Method approach to pull that performance together. The other thing is that Shelby and Alec (Cameraman) were very good friends and remain so to this day. So we have the benefit of that relationship already being there, which is almost like a boy/girl relationship between them, which is the idea of the film-- this guy that has a girl “friend”, which is not necessarily a date, and he has this camera and he has to do a cinematography assignment and he sets up the equipment in her place and she says she’s going out with friends to see a movie, “I’ll let you shoot me.” He says “Okay, I only have one magazine, one load, ten minutes, so just let me film you getting ready”, etc.

There is a fine line between a good film with great performances (that no one actually processes as having been an actual moment that was captured in reality) and a film like this that most people, having no preconceptions, would, due to the level of performances, process as being a “real” moment captured in reality. For this reason, this performance, to me, is something beyond just exceptional. She reaches a truth that people find a hard time processing.

We’re looking at an actress who came out of method acting in New York. Her whole approach was to be the character, to be real. So Shelby simply succeeded in creating this 15 1/2 minute character that people read as real. And you have to just say “What a good piece of work”. And it was done in multiple takes, just like a movie. So there’s no magic, it’s just being professional.

You relayed the story of the police captain that asked you for the name of the police officer who interviewed the woman in the film because he believed it to have actually occurred. When you see a reaction to the film taken that far—

That’s not a surprise. People used to contact Robert Young for medical advice. I think the audience reacts to any program and believes there is a transformation of the actor into that character. And that’s not at all surprising.

"...I'll tell you no lies" (an introduction, and the story of my own introduction, to ...no lies)

2009-06-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

My name is Peter Rinaldi, I am a filmmaker from New York City. I also have a film blog called SIN-E-FILE at The Boutros Boutros Follies.

(If you are about to read this having NOT seen the film ...no lies, I would advise you do so before reading further. Watch it below.)

In 1972, Mitchell W. Block was working as the Line Producer on Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. This left him little time to complete a full-scale film of his own, which was required to get his MFA from NYU. As he writes in The Truth about NO LIES, he thought he “should do a work that would be ‘easy’ to make. Limited locations, interior practical location, a short shoot, few actors, low shooting ratio, no period costumes, no score, etc. Keep it really simple.” The result is sort of a cinematic miracle.

In the spring of 1995 I was in a similar situation. I was a film student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. I had just completed my third year project, a film that seemed to polarize the class and faculty. Having had little money and not enough sufficient time to devote to a full scale production, I conceived an idea that involved basically a woman against a wall.

I showed it to my boss at the time, documentary filmmaker George Nierenberg. When it was over he didn’t have a lot to say about it, instead he starts to scan his towering piles of VHS tapes in his living room. “You have to see this documentary”, he tells me. “Documentary” is what he calls it. He doesn’t tell me anything more.

When ...no lies was over, I was so shaken by it that I hadn’t noticed the credits. George and I started talking about it. When it became apparent to him that I hadn’t seen the end credits, he told me what they said(the woman played by Shelby Leverington, etc.) and I didn’t believe him. He replayed the tape. Okay, “The filmmaker put that there so as not to embarrass the woman”, I concocted. There was no way this was acted. I couldn’t believe it. Once I watched it again, knowing now that this was, indeed, a performance, I was blown away.

Is it really necessary to go through the process of thinking you are seeing a moment captured on film that occurred in reality, and then, at the end, realize that it was manufactured like most films? How much does this play in its potential appreciation? This can be a point of discussion, but, regardless, it is how I experienced it, so it is, in turn, how I presented it to people when I showed it, on a VHS tape copied from George's.

I showed it to everyone in my life. “I have a documentary to show you. It is only 15 minutes.” I don’t remember all of the reactions but once in a while, it knocked someone out. What was it about this film that impacted us?

Alec Hirschfeld (L) Shelby Leverington (Center) and Mitchell Block during NO LIES shoot

When the Film of the Month Club started, I dreamed of being able to present ...no lies, but I knew that it wouldn’t be worth it if we didn’t get Mitchell Block involved. I reached out to him and he graciously granted my request to put the film online so it would be available to us and he agreed to an interview.

In our interview, which I will post later in the month, I tried to find out from him if he intended to trick the audience from the beginning or did he realize, after it was made, that he had a fiction that looked impeccably like fact. After all, there is nothing in the film that leads the audience to the understanding that what they are about to see is real. Block doesn’t outright lie, like other fake documentarians do, by presenting written or spoken documentary style, fact-like information (like Peter Greenaway’s The Falls). Even so much as a date at the beginning would imply non-fiction. Some, however, might consider the title to be the written info that puts the viewer in the mind-frame of “fact”. So, can Block really be called a trickster simply because of the title? What is even leading us to believe that Block’s intention is to fool the audience at all?

Well, ...no lies played at the 1974 Flaherty Seminar, a place where people generally expect to see a documentary. It caused controversy and discussion on what “real” is in film and the emotions wrapped around such notions. If Block didn’t conceive the film as a trick, it certainly was one now. As George Nierenberg and others have theorized, there are three “rapes” that occur with ...no lies; the offscreen rape of the woman, then the figurative one inflicted on her by the “cameraman”, then we, the audience are taken advantage of by Mitchell Block. I would take this a step further and say that Block can’t do the act alone. In my case, Nierenberg himself helped in the violation by calling it a documentary, the Flathery Seminar too. Perhaps if you simply found this film somewhere and watched it, you wouldn’t feel like it was trying to trick you into thinking it was real...or would you? Wouldn't you just think, if you appreciated it, that the actors were just doing their jobs well?

Let’s forget for a moment about Mitchell Block’s “trick”. This film is (and is about) a performance. Shelby Leverington. Once this performance was made know to me as such, it became, in my mind, one of the greatest I had ever seen on film. Nuanced and complexly structured so as not to appear so, I can write (and just might) a moment by moment analysis of it. Its success does not rest simply on the fact that people think it is not a performance; its authenticity runs much deeper than that. She manages to haul her character through varying emotional terrains with no sign that the “vehicle” is on pre-laid tracks, and in such a limited amount of time. Mitchell Block is also planning on giving us the added honor of viewing the “Rehearsal Tapes”. Would it be weird if I said I am thinking about NOT viewing them? I don’t think it's right. Like reading a first draft of a masterpiece; rewarding on one hand, and forever damaging on the other. As a filmmaker, I am tremendously interested in the work it takes to get to something this successful. But as a viewer, in this case, I'm obsessed with this performance, not with the process.

Last year, No Lies was accepted into the National Registry, an honor bestowed on only a handful of films from each year. Here’s what the press release said:

Done in faux cinéma vérité style, Mitchell Block’s 16-minute New York University student film begins on a note of insouciant amateurism and then convincingly moves into darker, deeper waters. Opening with a scene of a girl getting ready for a date, the camera-wielding protagonist adroitly orchestrates a mood shift from goofiness to raw pain as an interviewer tears down the girl’s emotional defenses after being raped. One of the first films to deal with the way rape victims are treated when they seek professional help for sexual assault, "No Lies" still possesses a searing resonance and has been widely viewed by nurses, therapists and police officers.

Yes, the film has had a life as a tool to train police officers and others to better assist rape victims. Block has marketed the film for such public service use since its release. A police captain actually asked Block for the name of the officer who interviewed the woman in the film. To reprimand him in some way? We can assume, I suppose. Did he not see the credits? What about the pretty obvious cut? The looped bit of dialogue? Maybe there is a mysterious quality in their performances that reached something that, even if they gave a bow at the end, some would not waver in swallowing as some kind of truth. Mystically, Ms. Leverington speaks a truth for victims that can't speak, or have been hushed. Is this the "fact" that we want to believe?

Indeed, in many ways this film is a lie, but can you think of a film that has this much truth? That is, I think, what makes great film art. And ...no lies, to me, is just that. And I'm excited to know what you think.

...no lies, verite and feminism

2009-06-09T06:23:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Peter for introducing me to this film and for doing the work in making it available to us. It is a great little film, I think, and I'll glad I got the chance to see it and try to think it through. This may not make total sense if you don't recognize some references, but it's the only way I could really describe my reaction.

First of all, even though I came to ...no lies with no prior knowledge, I could not watch it "pure"; this is because I had already encountered this approach before in the great feminist work Daughter Rite (Michelle Citron, 1978). It certainly seems that Citron was influenced by Block, although I'm not sure if Citron would have seen it (I'm guessing she might have, since she was writing criticism for Jump Cut before becoming a director). Citron's film is about 50 minutes, and features a number of verite-style situations involving two sisters. The most powerful moment occurs when one of the sisters describes being raped by one of her mother's boyfriends when she was a young girl. However, at the end, we are informed that we had been witnessing not a documentary but rather a fictional construct.

The reasons why Citron chooses to do this are very much contextual. Feminist filmmaking in the 1970s begins through the use of cinema verite, talking heads documentaries that allow women to speak in their own words about their own experiences. However, this was quickly challenged by feminists who wanted to break with this idea that cinema verite realism could produce an objective truth. The call was for a documentary practice that joined with a cinematic materialism – a concern with the form of cinema’s signifying practices – and a political materialism – a concern with the concrete social practices that underpin ideology. Citron’s film can be seen as an example of this kind of feminist approach to the documentary. Her problem was trying to make a film about relations between women in the family without producing a simple cinema verite confessional or a fictional portrait of a representative family. Citron’s strategy is to reconstruct and juxtapose different forms: cinema verite, soap opera melodrama, home movies and journals. Citron thus problematizes identification itself – its false and easy notions of truth. Citron replaces more conventional and unitary REPRESENTATION OF with multiple, overlapping and contradictory RELATIONS TO: a polyphony of female voices in relation to the issue of mothers and daughters within patriarchy. Thus if the film is feminist, it is also post-structuralist to some degree, although certainly not to the degree of a Derrida or a Foucault: there is still a feminist foundation.

Likewise, I thought about Block's film within its context. The other film that came immediately to mind was Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary (1968), one of the first extended questionings of verite and the notion of cinematic truth. But Block is up to something more, I think, something quite radical in its view of cinema and reality. That he chooses to use the subject matter of rape is not at all surprising and not without precedent in modernist explorations of cinema. Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961), as Lynn Higgins has convincingly argued, is very much about the seduction/ rape as a metaphor about the elusive nature of storytelling and fiction. Block uses rape here at least partly because as a crime it hinges on who is telling the truth. Or, so we think. As Peter points, there is more than one rape here: he mentions the camerman's rape of her and the director's rape of us. But, I think more important is the rape by the police, especially the man asking her for details of the crime. And here's where I would qualify the statement about Block "raping" the audience: I think if this wasn't fiction, if I was in fact "real" or we were made to think it was, it would be more of a rape, especially of the woman we see filmed. At that point, wouldn't we be victimizing her just as the policeman, wanting to hear the sordid sexual details of her ordeal?

I would consider ..no lies a work in dialogue with feminism, or at least useful for feminist appropriation, but not really feminist itself. I think this is because there is no real foundation here. I would draw an analogy with feminist like Judith Butler drawing on Foucault. Citron drew on Block's film to make a more complex feminist film than the tradition before it, but still stayed in that tradition. ...no lies seems to me a more open work, but also one that feels bleaker, more despairing, almost verging on the nihilistic. What perhaps mitigates this is the amazing performance Peter mentions. But even so, as Peter says: "Mystically, Ms. Leverington speaks a truth for victims that can't speak, or have been hushed. Is this the 'fact' that we want to believe?" This seems to speak to a pessimism around truth that is the dominant mood of the work, very different in this respect from something like Daughter Rite, which for all its deconstructing of verite never questions the women's stories and situations (hence its feminist foundation). Nevetheless, Peter also states that it is a film that contains "so much truth". Is this the truth of simply never taking cinema verite for granted? Or, more radically, any notion of any single truth?

...no lies

2009-06-08T13:23:00.000-07:00

Film of the Month for June.
...no lies
a film by Mitchell W. Block

Three Half-Ironies

2009-05-31T19:44:00.000-07:00

I didn't feel an immediate "in" for a post on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, so I thought I'd take a page from Nicholas Rombes and freeze the film at the :10, :40, and :70 minute marks...

In themselves, these stills evidence a fairly deliberate widescreen composition and cinematography. Still #1 to me captures the distinctive aesthetic sensibility of the film... it is at first glance the kind of vista landscape shot we associate with the New Hollywood Western/road movie, but it's actually a composition exploiting foreground and the diagonal. Shot #2 is perhaps a textbook rule-of-thirds illustration.

Beyond the formal traits, the shots exemplify three facets of the theme. Glenn gets at the crux of the theme when he notes the "lyrical clash between classic Western genre traits and 20th century progress." Like many of the 70s American films, Thunderbolt and Lightfood combines genre and allegory; in this instance, the genre film seems sandwiched in between and exposition (a preacher who turns out to be a criminal) and resolution (a schoolhouse preserved as a hollow marker of History) with weighty allegorical dimensions. In the above stills, however, we get the bare genre elements with larger meaning: the car (which Peter so well diagnoses), the male buddy-couple, and the gun. The thematic project of the film seems to be to take each of these and repurpose it, infuse it with irony.

The cynic in me thinks the film actually says less about violence, masculinity, and mobility in American life than it conspicuously shows that it is saying something about these things. Or perhaps, it is sincere in its ironic critique, but that the critique is so close to other films (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, $, Jeremiah Johnson, etc.) that it's hard for me to take it as something other than second-order seriousness.

It's particularly worth pointing out the gender politics of the film. This is the sort of film that would be (and perhaps was) a prime target of a certain era of feminist (Molly Haskell) and gay/lesbian (Vito Russo) criticism. My first inclination would be to move beyond the contemporaneous gender critiques, but in sum I think they're spot on: there's a misogyny and homophobia that hides behind the half-ironic pose of critique: the narration allows us to know that these anti-heros are flawed (because of homophobia and misogyny) while not ever putting the spectator in empathy with, say, the women of the film. Or else, these elements are written off as the generic part of the film, while the "real" auteur film hiding beneath is about more high-minded truths. I bring this up in part because the contradiction so pervades the film (the almost-gay kiss, the drag, the prostitutes, the youth making out) and in part because it gets to the genre-auteur contradictions of the New Hollywood.

Grand Theft Cimino (Random impressions: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot)

2009-05-07T22:42:00.000-07:00

It used to be that if someone asked me to name the ultimate 'car film', Three Lane Blacktop would pop into my mind first. But not anymore.

There is not nearly the same level of car fetishism in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, but Cimino is definitely trying to say something with autos. The title characters are in seven different automobiles before credits roll, four of them they stole. And even though they are always moving, they don't seem like they get anywhere.

Even a plan is worked out by drawing on a car.

Parallels to the Western genre are no clearer then when the cars are "taken to water".

There are so many scenes where the cars are not on any road at all. It is really strange and yet, because of the scenery, oddly beautiful and familiar. Replace the car for a horse and we have a period-piece.

It feels like, in the hands of another, less sincere director, the off-road abundance would approach tacky; the connections with the Western would be heavy-handed. Instead it comes off subtle and grounded in a reality that masks it. It wasn't even affecting me on the first viewing.

Jeff Bridges brought such an energy to this performance, a playfulness and spirit that worked so well with the material. When an actor makes choices that so totally create an understanding in the viewer that the words are spilling right from the character's mind, it's magic.

The sorrow and pain that Lightfoot has is only revealed cryptically, and contrapuntally to Thunderbolt. Like in the scene where Lightfoot talks about how he started on the road, after meeting a woman on a train. "Now you can't stop" Thunderbolt interjects. Lightfoot looks at him. It's a full shot, but we can still see, through Bridges' look, not just an acknowledgment of that truth, but a sadness in it as well.

Maybe someone can help me understand the significance of Thunderbolt having the white convertible Cadillac in the end, which Lightfoot revealed is his goal in the beginning of the film. Did Cimino simply want him to die a "hero" in his dream car?

Once again, the FotMC is blessed with another interesting and rewarding selection that fell under my radar all these years. Looking forward to other discussions. Thanks Glenn.

Pearls of Wisdom: The Death of Friendship in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot

2009-05-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

The New Hollywood of the early 1970's merged their love for European Art House cinema with traditional home-grown genres (Western, Noir, Musical), challenging cinematic forms and expectations to establish new possibilities within narrative storytelling. Hopper, Penn, Rafelson, and Bogdanovich laid the foundation for Altman, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Lucas. But these filmmakers either descended into artistic obscurity or ascended to blinding mainstream stardom. Somewhere on the fringes of these polar opposites resided a few filmmakers keen on blurring even the most standard aesthetics, forcing the viewer into an uneasy and fascinating cinematic space. This is the realm of Michael Cimino.

On the surface, Michael Cimino's debut film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) appears to be a standard Clint Eastwood vehicle, co-starring Malpaso regulars George Kennedy and Geoffrey Lewis along with a young and spry Jeff Bridges as the titular Lightfoot. It's a heist film with comedic trimmings and road movie ruminations, all framed by a changing view of the West. However, looking at it in historical context, when American audiences were still reeling from the devastating social and political conflicts of the 1960's and early 1970's, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot presents an uncomfortable and complex clash of ideals between a naive, empowered youth and a disgruntled old-guard. Ironically, these altercations often take place in golden fields of wheat, or alongside rivers flanked by angular mountainsides, often framed by cloudy blue skies; or Anthony Mann country. Cimino and Eastwood see this power struggle as a key factor in certain harrowing situations, and it's no accident characters are left with the tragic results alone and uncertain.

As far as debut films go, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot makes an astounding impression. The lyrical clash between classic Western genre traits and 20th century progress formulates a deceptive pattern of shifting tones, where comedy and tragedy are flip-sides of the same stubborn coin. Each character defines themselves based on this tension, ultimately complicating the traditional master/disciple relationship by revealing a deep sense of longing and regret. In the end, the pearls of wisdom sprinkled throughout the film take on an unsettling resonance when the very idea of friendship becomes smothered by greed and jealousy.

I'm eager to see what everyone else makes of this poetic and haunting film.

Mabuse Wrapup

2009-05-02T16:12:00.000-07:00

Before we move on to May's selection, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, I want to thank the club for the chance to host this month's film - and for an excuse to keep rewatching Mabuse The Gambler (and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse) for a month... That was a major motivation for choosing this film: I found it fascinating, full of things - stylistic, thematic, structural - that I thought were there but wasn't quite sure - but without some kind of external pressure, I'm not sure I would have put the time into it.

I'm certainly glad I did - the Mabuse films are as rewarding a batch of films as I've watched in a while, and they are films that lead me out from them as well. I hope I manage to continue working through Lang's filmography; I hope I get the chance to go backwards to watch films like Fantomas and other Feuillade (and others - maybe Joe May) series'. I hope I get some more posts out of these films - one of the things I most like about writing on the internet is that it doesn't quite have to be finished - you get to work through ideas in public, a bit, posting drafts and revisions and sketches, in ways you can't really do in other forums. The chance to keep coming back to the idea is a valuable one...

Anyway - I hope I haven't bored you all to death, and sorry for picking such a monster of a film. It could have been worse, I suppose - I could have been inspired to write about Berlin Alexanderplatz. I have to credit Eric Rentschler for this fascination with German film: I am taking a class with him (at the Harvard Extension School), and it has been very inspirational. And for Lang, it is hard to beat Tom Gunning's book...

And now - I'm looking forward to Glenn Heath's discussion of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.... Before I turn into Mabuse myself...

A Note on Pacing

2009-04-30T18:09:00.000-07:00

This month has gone too quickly for me - I wish I had more time to spend on this film. It's been a while since I have tried to dig into a film in depth like this - it's gratifying... though with the opportunities for dissecting films afforded by modern technology, it can start to get out of hand... Anyway - before the month is up, I wanted to get at least one more post up, about one striking element of Lang's style in Mabuse - his manipulation of the pacing of the film. He works consistently with a kind of alternation, fast and slow - though always tending, both within sequences and in the film(s) as a whole, to speed things up as he goes. And he develops these contrasts both between shots and in shots - still shots alternate with bursts of action to create another layer of of the pattern.

And of course - he alternates between the two halves of the film. Part 1 starts with the kinetic train robbery and Mabuse's dazzling tour of the city, before slowing down for later scenes; Part 2 starts with most of the characters still - usually brooding, haunted, maybe drunk... And much of the early part of the second film retains that slower pace - slow action (lots of talk), slow movement, slow cutting... These are interspersed with action - and of course the the action comes more frequently as the film progresses... a pattern appearing in most of the segments of the film.

Take this sequence near the beginning of the second film: starting with Count Told visiting the state prosecutor, telling him his story (cheating at cards, his wife has left him), cutting to Mabuse's place and the aftermath of a drunken party, then to the Countess, Mabuse's prisoner - Mabuse visits her and threatens her - but Told calls Mabuse, seeking psychiatric help... The sequence I'm thinking of lasts about 5 minutes - but shows, in that five minutes, the variations in pacing, and general acceleration I mean. In fact - thanks to the magic of iMovie - we can see the cuts (you may have to click on it to see it clearly), see the shots getting shorter as the sequence progresses:

Basically - we start with a 35 second shot of Told and Von Wenk, followed by a 22 second shot of Told (including an inserted dialogue), then a series of somewhat shorter shots - 12 seconds, 3, 11 - of the countess waking up and Mabuse's party; then a 52 second shot of the party, 44 seconds of Told and Von Wenk (including dialogue, though always cutting back to the basic two shot), then a series of shots of Mabuse and the countess, many of them involving movement, as he chases her around the room - 7 seconds, 17 (more on this below), 3, 4 (Mabuse), a 6 second dialogue card, 4 (shot of the countess - which is exactly the same length and the preceding shot of Mabuse), 8, 2, 3, 2 - another dialogue card (3 seconds) - 6, then a 17 second shot of Mabuse coming to the phone...

That's the overall pattern of the sequence - starting long, with slow movement, no action, then growing faster, both cutting and movement, before slowing down as the next sequence begins. The same pattern occurs within the shots, during the direct confrontation between countess and Mabuse. She has been unconscious - she wakes up in his house, locked in a room. He comes in from his drunken bash, thinking to molest her, she fights him off, tries to escape... The centerpiece of this sequence is a 17 second shot that recapitulates the overall pacing of the sequence: starts slow, explodes into action, stops - then explodes again. Here it is:

It starts, as many shots do, with a very quick dissolve:

This reveals Mabuse leaning over the countess - they hold this pose for about 5 seconds:

Then the countess makes a break for it, and Mabuse grabs her:

They struggle - and come to a halt, and hold this position (a very tense, violent pose, actually, Mabuse basically pinning her there) for a few second:

...before she makes another break...

... which leads to the cut - to a blank door, and the countess bursting into the frame:

It's a powerful effect - the alternation of long and short shots, of slow, deliberate movements and gestures and quick, violent movements; integrated with the variations in shot scales - long shots and closer shots alternating, shots of big spaces and tight spaces; even the varying transitions - short dissolves, longer dissolves between shots, alternating with abrupt cuts; and the variations on how the cuts come - cuts to empty spaces that people jump into, say... Everything aimed at generating tension, and doing it...

Mabuse contre Fantômas

2009-04-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

A note on the "character" of Mabuse.

Who is Dr. Mabuse? This is a difficult question. Mabuse is the Great Unknown. It's impossible to define his character on its own. Mabuse always needs an opposition. His defining characteristic is his role as an antagonist; he only exists when there is someone trying to find him or defeat (which is distinct from thwart) him. Mabuse is just a name for a certain evil; he's a folk tale. So, in order to be able to write anything longer than a sentence about the character of Mabuse (not really a character at all--a something rather than a someone), we always need a comparison. Mabuse is always "this and not that," but never a particular characteristic that stands on its own--the only things we have with any certainty are his name and his villainy.

Fantômas, on the other hand, is always there; he escapes as often as Mabuse seemingly dies, and his actions stir society to find a solution (for this reason, perhaps, Juve and and Fandor are generic--they could be any policeman or any journalist, and are therefore closer to Mabuse in conception that Fantômas; it's maybe for this reason that they serve as Fantômas's antagonists in every film, whereas every Mabuse movie needs new heroes). There are a thousand Mabuses, but only one Fantômas.

So: Mabuse and Fantômas. Both originated in popular novels and then found their way into silent serials, returned in the early sound era and then in the 1960s. Lang started a small Mabuse craze with his last film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, and it continued through the decade with a series of spin-offs, the best of which were directed by the krimi expert Harald Reinl. Fantômas had been in a few films in the early 1930s and late 1940s (his absence during the Occupation is conspicuous), but he returned in full force in the 1960s in a trio of brightly-colored capers starring Jean Marais. Both characters are popularly associated with the major directors (Feuillade and Lang) who originated them, and both have been reinterpreted by later, equally distinctive filmmakers (Pál Fejös's Fantômas talkie, Claude Chabrol's 1990 remake of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, Dr. M). Historically, they're no so different. But history's just a footnote. Fantômas is vindictive while Mabuse is vengeful. The specificity of Fantômas means that his presence has weight (there's always a surprise when we discover that someone is really Fantômas in disguise), while Mabuse's shifting identity and clairvoyance means that his presence is always assumed. While Fantômas is a villain, Mabuse is an evil.

1, 2, 4, 8, 16...

2009-04-20T19:20:00.000-07:00

Despite my rather slow output of posts about Mabuse, the fact is, there are endless things to say about it. I mentioned style in a comment to Peter's post - the way it seems to blend older types of film styles - tableau staging, slow pace, exaggerated poses and so on (many of the things raised by David Bordwell in his writings on 1910s cinema) - with the faster, analytical editing of classical cinema... Having watched the film a couple times, in fact, I have to say Lang's blending of these styles - especially, his control of the pacing, of everything in the film - the speed of the action, the actor's movements, the editing - is absolutely extraordinary. There's a post there, that I hope I get to before the month is up... And building on that eclecticism - one of the daunting elements of the Mabuse films is how much is in them - realism and expressionism; serial crime stories and modern, self-contained stories; technology and magic; entertainment and art films; tight story telling and broad, documentation of the world as it is... So much.

For now though, I want to take a look at one element of the film's world - the use of doubles and parallels, in characters, situations, and so on. The double is one of the great themes of German films - it's obviously not limited to German art, but it's probably not an accident that we use the German word for a doppelganger. Doubles and Faust figures - which is a variation on the double: the devil who grants power and wishes in exchange for the soul... The two combined in Student of Prague, one of the foundational German films - with a Mephistophilis figure taking the student's reflection as his price....

Mabuse is also something of a Faust story, though with Mabuse playing all the parts... But it also contains, within it, a fairly elaborate system of parallels among its characters. Mabuse himself has a double in state prosecutor Von Wenk - the film alternates between them, they are matched adversaries - Von Wenk dons disguises, like Mabuse, trying to move, undercover, through the underworld... Around them, the other major characters are arranged in pairs, sometimes loose, but usually fairly explicit. Cara Carozza, the dancer, loved (once) by Mabuse and now by Hull the playboy, is echoed in the figure of the Countess Told, caught between Von Wenk and Mabuse, replacing Carozza in Mabuse's love (or lust, or desire, or whatever it is); both women end up prisoners, and the countess identifies with Carozza... Hull the playboy, meanwhile, is doubled by the Count - both are rivals with Mabuse for a woman; both are ruined at cards by Mabuse's hypnosis; both draw Von Wenk into the story, and lead him closer to Mabuse. Both die, at Mabuse's orders, but both deaths contribute to Mabuse's own fall.

Meanwhile, the film itself is a double - released in two halves (like Kill Bill, or Che!), with scenes and situations repeated between the two films (sometimes within one half of the film). Scenes, games, situations, shots, are all repeated, replayed, with variations. Here, it will be easier to show than tell:

Here for example, are two shots, one from the first half, one from the second, of the Countess Told: in the first, she is at a gambling den, where she watches, uninvolved, curious - in the second, she is a prisoner of Mabuse, held in a room by herself.... She is unconscious in this shot, and helpless - a prisoner (itself a parallel, at that point in the film, to Carozza, who is being held prisoner by Von Wenk...). The shots are almost mirrors of one another - she's in a similar position, facing the opposite direction - with the color schemes almost reversed (dark covers, white covers - or look at how her dark dress in the second shot rhymes with the white feathers in the first one):

Or another parallel - both Mabuse and Told haunted by ghosts. Told is ruined by Mabuse hypnotizing him to cheat at cards - he sinks into madness and drink, seeing visions, pursued around his house -

only to end up forced to play cards with his own ghost:

A situation Mabuse repeats, almost exactly. Pursued by ghosts -

Forced to play cards by ghosts - who accuse him of cheating - as Told's ghosts accused him... (and notice the screen directions of all these shots: Told on the right, looking left, as he's pursued, then on the left, facing the ghosts during the card game; and Mabuse on the left during the pursuit, on the right for the card game...)

Mabuse, though, is different from the rest. He may be part of the system of doubles and parallels, but he is outside it somewhat as well. The simplest reason is that he is his own double - he keeps replacing himself. And here, as in some aspects of the structure of the film, the doubling principal becomes a serial principal - he is not a double so much as a series. And a series that, as the film goes on, and especially as we move to the sequels (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and onwards), becomes a mechanically reproduced series - first through words, but then through machines (loudspeakers and recordings) and so on. Copies of copies of copies, disembodied, dissipating into words, sounds, images... copies without originals... pages scattered on the floor.

I'm trying to not get hypnotized by Dr. Mabuse

2009-04-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

Once again, an incredibly interesting and exciting selection this month. Thank you Weepingsam. This film falls right in the cracks of my film history knowledge. And, once again, the FotMC has presented me with a film that I might never have gotten into on my own. Now, if it only wasn't this overwhelming!

To be honest, I was having trouble even following it in the beginning. I was not prepared for the way the story was playing out. I ended up putting on the commentary by David Kalat (I have the IMAGE DVDrelease. The KINO edition doesn't have this commentary but it is a much better restoration. Ironicly, the image is signicantly worse on the IMAGE release). He has a few strange moments in the way he presents information at times, but overall it is a tremdously insiteful and entertaining track. And, most importantly, it put me in the proper mindframe to take in the movie in a benificial way. So I am going to have another go at it. It is still an potentially overwhelming film. There are a lot of ways to approach this one.

I wanted to post this because I am seeing that the posts aren't happening yet and we're in the last third of the month. Maybe others had the trouble with it that I had. Maybe not. But I felt the need to express my experience with the film(s) so far. Yes, this is a difficult 4 1/2 hour silent work, but it is not only important, but extremely exciting too, and I am very happy that it was selected.

I hope to have more to say before the month is out.

Mabuse and his World

2009-04-09T18:40:00.000-07:00

Hello again. I hope I can get a couple posts up this weekend, to get into Mabuse.... I will start with the basics. I'm afraid this is likely to be a rather dry and schoolish post, but I want to lay out some parameters first - I'll try to move on to aesthetics in upcoming posts. What is this film? A very long, almost 5 hours, story of Mabuse the Gambler, master criminal. It owes a clear debt to serial thrillers, from Lang’s own Spiders to Feuillade’s films - the length, the type of story, the structure (it’s still organized in 20 minute chunks, basically) - though stitched together more carefully, and designed throughout as a single, unified work. It’s a fantastic looking film, Lang’s eye already well developed, and German studio technology was humming along as well. Stylistically, it is an interesting hybrid - it carries on some of the older, tableau style sets and shots of 1910s films, alongside some very crisp editing, and a strong sense of pacing, space, the emotional weight of style. The contrast between tableau style shots and the more “modern” dynamics of editing and staging seem quite intentional: Lang seems uses the different sense of time and space for expressive effects. I will return to that - his alternation of pacing (of action, editing and so on) is a fascinating effect.

The film proclaims itself a “Picture of our time” and part 2, a "Play of People of our Time.” It is a product of its time - 1922, the inflation, when German currency was spinning out of control. It's made fairly early in the worst period of inflation - a dollar was worth around 300 marks in early 1922 - 7500 marks in late 1922 - 4.2 trillion marks in November 1923. But Mabuse, especially in the stock market scheme that opens the film, represents the kind of speculation and manipulation that contributed to that disaster. It's a record of the society of the early 20s in Germany - the chaos and violence, the decadence, the sense of despair and inertia in Germany, the cynicism that came out of WWI. It's also a record of a moment in modernity - it's a record of Berlin as one of the key cities of the modern world. Berlin was a newer city than it might seem - doubling in size between 1910 and the 20s (from 2 to 4 million people*) - and technologically new. It is a world of trains and phones and newspapers and movies, of information and movement, and this is all front and center in Mabuse.

Let me get to Mabuse the character: Mabuse, the "Spieler" - the player. In German too, the two meanings work, play to gamble, play to act - Mabuse the actor, then. Lang wastes no time establishing that parallel, beginning the film with shots of Mabuse going through cards with head shots, equating his disguises with the game. Mabuse is an odd kind of gambler - he doesn’t leave much to chance. His criminal schemes depend on careful and precise manipulation of time, space, objects, information - look at the dazzling opening sequence, a train robbery timed to the second, involving a mugging, dropping a package off a bridge from a moving train into the back seat of a moving car that passes a telephone pole at a precise time, with Mabuse following along at home, with his watch, able to know to the second when his phone will ring. And that opening theft itself is the beginning of an elaborate scheme to manipulate the stock market - which does not depend on the stolen information, but on manipulating the information about the theft. As a gambler, it’s the same - he doesn’t leave anything to the turn of the card - he doesn’t even cheat: he hypnotizes his opponents so they misplay their hands to lose. And he does it with the gaze - a deadly stare into their eyes - or the back of their head, if that's convenient - or by playing with things, a pair of Chinese glasses, say... but always, with the eyes...

In the end, he is as much a director as he is an actor or gambler - he operates by telling people where to go, what to do, making them do it if they don't want to; everything is timed and precise, he leaves nothing to chance. His schemes are played out in the film as vignettes - where his manipulation of the people, things, spaces, is mimicked by Lang's manipulation of the same - that opening sequence, say, times everything just as carefully as he does, and leaves even less to chance - since its edited together.. and since Lang gets to use trick shots.

But this ties back to Lang's interest in the world of his time - in the ways modernity has changed space and time. Mabuse manipulates space and time, and uses the technology of space and time (trains and cars and clocks and telephones, all the ways people move and communicate differently now), to run his schemes. He's a media creature, and a manipulator of the media, as he manipulates the game. He depends on the game continuing, on the stock market continuing, on the trains running on time. When people are late, or leave early, or kick up a fuss over losing, he is thwarted...

That is one aspect of the character - there are more. Readings of Mabuse the character add another significance to the ideas of Mabuse as man of a thousand faces - he has many precedents and parallels in German film and culture. (I hope to return to this in another post, as well.) I commented on my blog, a month or so ago, about the similarities between Mabuse and Faust - that relates to the question of modernity, I think, though also, obviously, that of power and evil. Mabuse is a Faust figure who serves as his own Mephistophiles. For Siegfried Kracauer, Mabuse was one of a series of tyrant figures in Weimar cinema - representing power and chaos, together... Kracauer linked him to Nosferatu - another tyrant, with hypnotic powers, a creature of shadows (though not of disguises, unlike Dracula and Mabuse) - another creature of 1922 Germany. And the questions about identity raised by Mabuse are extended out from him - he has 1000 faces - he also has his very own doppelganger/stalker, in State Prosecutor Von Wenk. The doubling of characters and situations in the film (which after all has two parts) is an essay in itself...

* I know this from Anton Kaes - this essay specifically, though I think he mentions it in other contexts as well... "Leaving Home: Film, Migration, and the Urban Experience." New German Critique no. 74 (Spring/Summer 1998): 179-192.

Permit me to Introduce Myself - Dr. Mabuse

2009-04-01T18:13:00.000-07:00

Happy April Fool's day, Film of the Month Club readers! I bring you this month's film - Fritz Lang's Mabuse the Gambler - a great film, and a great character, to whom Lang returned twice more in his career.

I apologize for picking a 4 1/2 hour silent film for this month's discussion (though things move along nicely over those 4 1/2 hours) - I admit I am choosing it for a number of selfish reasons. One is, I am currently taking a class on German cinema, with Eric Rentschler, and so am already immersed in German films. I've been watching them, reading about them, thinking about them, can piggy back blogging onto that, which given my inherent laziness, has value. But more than that, the class has brought home to me just how shallow my knowledge of German films is - and how shallow my knowledge of Fritz Lang is. I may have seen M many times, and Metropolis quite often - but not much else. And finally seeing Mabuse, a month or so ago, left me most definitely wanting more. It's a marvelous film - a portrait of its time, a superb document of the beginnings of modernity, one that reflects a definite critical intelligence about modernity. Lang's continuing interest in the media, in information and technology and information technology, in the operations of the modern city, in the notion of the manipulation of information to manipulate people, is all present in this film in a very potent way. And they are all issues that are relevant today - media, stock market manipulation, technology - it's a portrait of our time...There's too much to say about it - it is good then to linger on it awhile.

So then.... It is important (to me) that I have only seen it once (as of tonight) - it's a chance to explore something relatively new. My plan, then, is this: I hope to post one or two pieces on the film itself, probably taking off from things that came up in the class. (And that I alluded to on my blog at the time.) The remarks above can probably indicate my interest in the film as a historical document - both as a historical object, and as a critical work in itself. History and formalism (for lack of a better word) are my passions - and this film scratches both those itches. After that - I also hope I can track down Lang's other Mabuse films - while that's not necessarily the purpose of this blog, I certainly hope to use this as an incentive to look at Lang as a director, Mabuse as a character, and so on. I suppose this too is a result of the context - I came to this film in the context of the history of German film: so tracing that history is a big part of what I want to do here.

And finally - I hope others will jump in as well. It's a big film - there's plenty of room for everyone. I look forward to any coming discussions.

Final Thoughts

2009-03-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

Before the month ends and we move on to another film, I'd like to thank Chris for allowing me to choose this month's selection. Thanks also to Marshall for his comments and thoughts and to the few others who joined in. Although there wasn't a lot of discussion, I enjoyed what there was and I benefited from trying to articulate my thoughts on this film and on Hong in general. As many could probably tell, I'd like to write more on Hong in the future, in article or even book (especially if my Korean improves), and this experience was very useful in that regard. I hope others found the film and the discussion of some interest, or that perhaps they will track down this film or others by Hong in the future. I certainly think the films are worth the effort. And by all means, of course, I'd be happy to hear from late comers before the month is over or even in the coming months as replies to any of my Hong blog postings.

Also, in Hong news, he is currently in post-production on his latest film, which should be out later this year. Also, he has completed a short film which will premiere at the Jeonju film festival in Korea (April 30-May 8). It is part of a three film "Jeonju Digital Project" in which the festival invites three directors to make a digital short. Further details are available here (go to the JIFF news section and click on "Jeonju Digital Project 2009").

Two Shots That Intrigue(d)? Me

2009-03-16T06:55:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd mention a couple of shots that intrigue me, shots that are seemingly meaningless.

One is Munho going back and asking his wife to let him in at the beginning of the film:

Another is the shot of Seon-hwa arriving to meet Mun-ho and Heon-jun:

When re-examining the film, both of these moments seemed difficult to place. And perhaps, I thought, they are not meant to be. But, the more I thought and read, the more this seemed unlikely. In a film as pared down as this one (even by Hong's standards), it is highly unlikely that they don't serve some purpose. Then, with the mentioning of repetitions, I noted that both shots have their doubles.

The shots of Mun-ho are subtly replayed at the end of the film, when Mun-ho's male student Min-woo approaches Mun-ho and Kyung-hee in the hotel room:

And the shot of Seon-hwa arriving can be seen as a mirror of the early scene in which the woman Mun-ho and Heon-jun gaze at before their flashbacks finally exits the scene in a car:

Now, we can see these as formal repetitions that work as a whole to offset the quotidian realism of the narrative. And/or we can start analyzing these for deeper meanings. Part of me wants to avoid the later, to remain intrigued by the shots instead of forcing an explanation. I remember watching Lynch's Mulholland Dr. and really enjoying it, but then not loving the film nearly as much (to the point of even being bored) once I had a certain framework in which to read and explain what was going on. And the other hand, one cannot and should not shut down these critical impulses. One can only hope that any given film is strong enough to resist their assault.

Staying Wide: Some random and disjointed [my apologies] thoughts on Woman is the Future of Man

2009-03-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

(This may sound like a joke, but I have given up "going online" for lent. So this post was written weeks ago, and has been scheduled to appear in the middle of the discussion (hopefully!) of Woman is the Future of Man. Therefore, I hope I am not either repeating things that have already been posted, or interrupting a tremendously interesting post-by-post dialogue of a certain theme (not that anything like that has ever happened). Regardless, accept my apologies for both posting blindly and randomly and for not being able to continue any discussion that may result from this posting or any others. I hope you will understand.)
Thanks to Marc for getting me over my unconscious avoidance of New Korean Cinema. In fact, I have been actually avoiding, less unconsciously, Asian cinema as a whole for a while, I don't know why. Embarrassingly, I own only one Asian film! (In the Mood for love). One of the many great things about this club is getting a chance to see films that you might not have looked into.

I'd like to share with you a quick personal thing. I am a filmmaker. I want to grow as a filmmaker. It's all I want to do. But I dream also, in my old, more experienced age, of being able to teach filmmaking. I already keep a journal in which I only put thoughts, ideas, and tools that will help me to teach film one day.

Last year, I was so struck by a particular scene in Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream ("struck" in a bad way) that I had to write about it in my "Teaching Journal" because I had never seen an example of a shot choice that was so blatantly wrong for the particular moment that was occurring. It was a full shot (or "wide shot". the differences are ambiguous, debatable and likely nonexistent) and it stayed a full shot for the entire tense filled, Plot-Point-Making scene, when it was screaming for individual character shots at certain key moments to emphasize certain necessary things. Now, even as I am writing this, it sounds like, just by saying a certain shot should be implemented, I am trying to turn something into convention. But what needs to be remembered is that certain moments ARE ALREADY conventional in their very foundation, and if the filmmaker should simply choose to cover it "unconventionally", it doesn't make it unconventional, it just makes it ineffective.
Being that I am still a student in many ways and not a teacher yet, I learned, from this moment in this film, that sometimes you can't just "stay wide". This, in a way, is part of a continued learning of film grammar.

It wasn't until I saw this film of the month, Woman is the Future of Man, that I realized in a more concrete way, why that scene in Cassandra's Dream didn't work.

We never get a close-up in this film, or even a medium shot. Hong "stays wide". Other directors who tend to keep a distance on their characters often use mise-en-scene to bring a character to isolation in the frame; no, not a close-up, but in a way an isolated character in a frame is a close-up without being close. Hong doesn't really do that. If a character happens to be the only one in the frame, it seems to just have happened that way. He is not creating that isolation as commentary, the camera is just "documenting" objectively. And it is this objectification, this avoidance of presenting any character in a relation-stimulating individual medium shot, that keeps us from fully identifying with anyone, thereby remaining able to stay away from judgement and/or sympathy. In this film of multiple voyages into pasts and the resulting confrontations in the present, it is tremendously effective. In that long, important scene in Cassandra's Dream, a very different film, it doesn't work.

Having seen WitFoM a second time, I remembered, with interest, my temporary frustration, on first viewing, at not being allowed to see the face of the waitress that they both try to "employ". I wasn't realizing yet her use in the film. I was merely holding tight to a conditioned expectation having been bombarded, in my traditional film-going life, with more conventional moments that a scene like that hints at, and knee-jerkingly expecting a certain view that other films have given me in that moment. (How many times does this happen that I am not conscious of?)
I was also so inspired and impressed with the subtlety of the performances and the presentations of these particular character's emotional states at any given time. How rare to witness a director so respectful of our patience and intelligence as an audience (to this degree!). Does his other work share this quality? I'd be interested to know.
(Some random DVD grips: It's hard to be sad about New Yorker Video going out of business when I was so disappointed by a couple of [what some people might call small, but I consider] big deals. 1) As much as I respect Scorsese as a film historian, I don't want to be "forced" into either watching an introduction or hurriedly turning it off. Yes, I want to see that introduction. Follow Criterion's lead and place it as a separate option. 2) Why are the subtitles laying smack in the middle of the lower frame!!!!!?!?!?!?! How annoying. Once again, can't these designers look at stuff that works well and implement it?)

The Red Scarf: Dream Structure in Hong Sang-soo

2009-02-28T22:48:00.000-08:00

"I wanted to create a very artificial repetition, an arrogantly funny repetition in a space that pretends to be real." (Hong Sang-soo)

Re-watching Woman is the Future of Man, the conclusion took on a greater importance, beginning with the dream sequence at the soccer field. In my first viewing, I didn't really recall the importance of the red scarf, but on a second look it seems to dominate the mise-en-scene of the last section. It actually provides the only real clue (other than Mun-ho's eyes closing) that we have entered a dream sequence (this is typical of Hong). The presence of the scarf in the rest of the film, for myself, was a reminder of this dream, and I found it difficult to not see the last scenes of the film as dream/nightmare. And upon a second viewing and reflecting back on the rest of the narrative, it also de-stabilized the reality of anything before the dream as well. I should add that this reading is heavily informed by my own interpretation of Hong's latest film, Night and Day, which ends with a dream sequence that really caused me to re-examine the rest of the narrative ( I am anxiously awaiting the DVD release so I can have a second viewing). Incidentally, Night and Day's dream alludes back to his first film, The Day a Pig Fell in the Well, which similarly has a dream sequence near the conclusion.

When I say the reality of the earlier scenes was de-stabilized, I do not mean to suggest a "whole film is a dream" kind of interpretation. Rather, it is a more modernist idea of a certain unreliability at the heart of the narrative, a questioning of who is telling/showing me this, and why. The most obvious example of this is in the two "flashback" scenes in the first half of the narrative. After a brief opening outside of Mun-ho's house, Mun-ho and Heon-jun have a long conversation at a Chinese restaurant, filmed in one long take of over six minutes, although with a few lateral camera movements to and from the front counter. Mun-ho gets angry at Heon-jun for having hugged his wife when they visited him in America, and gets up to leave. Following an attempt at seducing the waitress, he looks out the window and makes eye contact with a woman across the street. The next portion of the narrative is signalled as a flashback, cutting from Heon-jun's look.

This is also the first music we have heard since the opening credits. The music continues into the next shot, in which we see Heon-jun exit a cab and pass in front of the camera.

The next shot shows a man enter the frame, at which point the music stops.

Re-watching the film, this whole sequence seems quite ominous, although I did not interpret that way on first viewing. Nevertheless, I do think it is meant to be disconcerting in some way even without knowing what will happen next. We see the man with Seon-hwa (who we haven't been introduced to yet) and learn he is an old high school friend who has just finished his miltiary service. He aggressively forces her into a cab with him. The next shot is of Seon-hwa entering a restaurant and sitting down with Heon-jun, where he tells her that she was raped by this man.

The question becomes, and this is not an unfamiliar one within art cinema, who is telling me this? It cannot be Heon-jun, since he was not there. But it could be his imagining of this episode. But then, why the ellipsis of the actual rape itself? Is it because he does not believe her story? Or is his story questionable? The next sequence shows the two at a love motel, where he rather violently watches her genitals and has sex with her in order to "cleanse" her. The scene is quite uncomfortable and cannot help but identify Heon-jun with the same behaviour of this "aggressive and phallic man" (as Huh Moonyung calls this character and other marginal male characters in many of Hong's films [71]). This is especially so because we are presented this scene almost in place of the rape scene that has been "cut".

Next there is a scene at the airport in which Mun-ho brings Seon-hwa in order to have a tearful farewell to Heon-jun, who is leaving for film school in America. We next cut back to the restaurant for another long take of five minutes in which Seon-hwa is discussed. After Heon-jun leaves the table, there is a narrative and formal repetition in which Mun-ho asks the waitress to pose nude for him, she refuses (as she did with Heon-hun), and then the camera follows her to the counter. The camera pans back at Mun-ho looking out the window at the same woman as Heon-jun. After her ride finally arrives, Mun-ho's flashback begins.

It is tempting to see this flashback as more clearly Mun-ho's. He is in every scene, and the sequence ends with a rather unflattering sequence in which he prematurely ejaculates. However, the first scene of the flashback shows him forcing himself on Seon-hwa, at which she gets angry and says that "You're all animals. You and that bastard just want sex. Real animals." The fact that she mentions Heon-jun and implicates him with Mun-ho, who had just tried to force himself on her, is suggestive of sexual violence that is constantly referred to and ellided. It should be noted that while they are waiting for Seon-hwa later in the film, Mun-ho says to Heon-jun that she called him a "real animal", not a complete lie but omitting the fact that she said the same thing about Mun-ho as well.

Another oddity to Mun-ho's flashback is the strange doubling of Seon-hwa's friends.

These two shots appear before and after the scene in which Mun-ho forces himself on Seon-hwa, and they seemingly erase it, as Mun-ho and Seon-hwa meet at the wedding and seem to get along well, agreeing to meet the next day.

This dream-life effect continues in the rest of the narrative, culminating in an actual dream sequence and then a repetition of the rapist character from earlier. Kyunghee, Mun-ho's student with the red scarf, has a jealous and obsessive classmate, Minwoo, who follows her and Mun-ho to a love motel. This character brings the narrative full circle, both literally and figuratively. All of the male characters are stuck in some way, unable to break out of circular thinking, especially as centered around women and sexuality.

What to make of these observations? I'm not sure. Hong's films seem to me to be very elusive in their meaning. But I do not think that they are apolitical, as some critics and even Hong himself has claimed. Certainly, they are less overtly political than many of the First Korean New Wave directors that dealt with the highly charged politics of Korea's immediate past. And compared to Lee Chang-dong, Hong's films lack a real political force, partly because of their content but also because of their less direct, more ambiguous style. To view Hong's films as imaginary, dreams and fictions is not the same as saying they are lies, but they are nevertheless unreliable as any kind of foundational truth. They are examples of a post-structuralist skepticism that can and of course has (repeatedly) been seen as conservative or reactionary because of its apolitical nature.

As much as I admired Hong's films at first viewing, I did feel they were somehow lesser than Lee's more straightforward political films. I still feel this way to some extent. I don't think Hong's greatest films can be compared to the artistic and social force of the masterpieces of a director like Lee or, perhaps more so, a Hou Hsiao-hsien. But I'm starting to find a greater appreciation of what Hong is trying to achieve, not only artistically but also socially (for me the two are as impossible to really untangle as form and content). If the personal is political, than Hong's work is clearly very socially charged. But form is also a social statement. As much as I continue to love Lee Chang-dong, a third viewing of his 1999 film Peppermint Candy revealed a certain crudity in the form that may make the film less progressive than its message indicates. This attempt at analyzing Woman is the Future of Man, on the other hand, has revealed a much deeper, more critical film than it first appeared.

Apologies for the length of the post, and for its roaming nature, but this is what blog postings are useful for, I think, especially to those of us used to more academic writing. Anxious to read other accounts and perspectives on the film.

WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN: A Film by Hong Sang-soo

2009-02-28T19:23:00.000-08:00

Woman is the Future of Man is Hong Sang-soo's fifth film, and it is the sixth of his films that I encountered. Thus it is impossible for me to analyze this work without Hong's other films in my mind. In particular, in what ways does this text act as a transition between what came before and what would come after?

A couple of things stick out. It is Hong's shortest film at 87 minutes. All of his films before this were at least 20 minutes longer. This is partly because of production problems:

"There was a large section where it was shot out of sequence. It was a reminiscing autumn scene, but in the editing room the content wasn't the problem but the beat was too loose. No matter how we tried, we couldn't control the pace by editing. During that process, the part up to the present ending was perceived as a whole and thought it was neat this way. I was lucky" (Huh, 73)

As a result, the story is much more direct and condensed than his earlier films, and the structure is simpler as well. This extends into the style of the film. For example, the Average Shot Length (ASL) of Hong's films are:

The Day a Pig Fell in the Well : 24 seconds
The Power of Kangwon Province : 33 s
The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors : 53 s
Turning Gate : 58 s
Woman is the Future of Man : 99 s
Tale of Cinema : 64 s
Woman on the Beach : 71 s

Hong's earlier films have a more expressive editing style that he gradually moves away from. This reaches its zenith in Woman is the Future of Man, which contains only 51 shots. This is also the last film that Hong makes before he begins using the zoom lens to enter into a scene. There is no movement forward or backward in the entire film, either through editing or through the zoom (with one exception I discuss below). All the camera movement is lateral, and has a strangely mechanical feel that is not unlike the zoom of the later films. In other words, this is the most minimalist film from a director known as part of the whole "asian minimalist" school. After this film, Hong would increase his cutting and add a zoom lens in order to present more variety and overt directorial expression, although he would not return to the relatively (I stress relatively) heavy editing of his first films. I don't think it would be inaccurate to refer to Woman is the Future of Man as Hong degree zero.

However, this is countered by one element in the film: the use of music. This is Hong's first time working with the composer Jeong Yong-jin, and it marks a turning point in his scoring practice. Music was used very sparingly in his earlier works. In his first film, The Day a Pig Fell in the Well, there is an alienating, modernist score played at the beginning, an overt effect very much at odds with the filmmaker Hong would become. By the time of his fourth film, Turning Gate, music had disappeared completely with the exception of the end credits. But when he started working with Jeong, music starts to take on a greater importance in Hong's work, as Hong has acknowledged:

"In the past, I rarely met with the composers and recognized their independence. I wanted to try something different with Jeong Yong-jin because he is young and communicates well with me. He isn't the type of composer who would say 'leave the music to me.' I discuss things with him more often than any other composer I worked with." (69)

The use of music gives the impression of being quite prominent in the film, although in fact there is not a great deal of screen time with musical accompaniment. Besides the opening and closing credits, there are 10 other short bursts of non-diegetic music (according to my count), each lasting around 15-20 seconds. But the music does not act as an "unheard melody" that is meant to go unnoticed. Instead, Hong uses music to end shots and transition into a new scene, and thus makes it hard to ignore. Not being well-versed in music, I'd be curious to read any thoughts people may have about this new aspect and how it may or may not be an expressive technique to counter the overall minimalism of the visual style.

So, what is the effect of this greater austerity? Well, perhaps perversely, it made me think more about the very few short takes that occur. If you'll forgive one last dose of empirical data, the 51 shots can be broken down as follows:

0-10 sec: 4 shots
0-30 sec: 4 shots
30-60 sec: 10 shots
60-90 sec: 9 shots
90-120 sec: 11 shots
120-180 sec: 6 shots
180-240 sec: 5 shots
240 sec-over: 2 shots

Thus, Woman is the Future of Man features more shots over three minutes than it does shots under ten seconds. So, is there any particular significance to these short takes, the way we would expect especially long takes in a more conventionally edited work to take on greater importance? As it turns out, I do think these shots are more loaded or let us say expressive than ordinary, although in one instance I think this is something of a parody. During Mun-ho's flashback, he tries to force himself on Seon-hwa and she gets upset, yelling at him that he, just like Heon-jun, is an animal who is only interested in sex. The next shot is the shortest of the film, of a chrysanthemum with two bees. The obviousness of this symbolism I find rather amusing, especially since the rest of the film is so empty of this kind of loaded and singular meaning. Even the conversation between Mun-ho and Seon-hwa that follows makes explicit reference, with Mun-ho pointing out how beautiful the flower is and Seon-hwa stating that it seems to attract the bees. This reduction of the chracters to a natural world of sexuality both conveys a certain accuracy in terms of their behaviour while at the same time being overly simplistic. If the film shows nothing else, it is how human sexuality is far too complicated to be reduced to the level of bees.

Another short take provides the only example in the film (at least that I recall) where we move into a scene. Mun-ho and Heon-jun are sitting on Seon-hwa's couch and Mun-ho looks at a picture. Hong cuts to his point-of-view of Seon-hwa as a little girl, dressed in traditional Korean clothes. Agian, this rare short take and even rarer cut into a scene makes this shot even more heavy with meaning. The attempt by Heon-jun to return to his past is an attempt to place Seon-hwa is this place of purity and innocence, similar to his attempt to "cleanse" her by having sex in the hotel room earlier. Woman seem to be the future of man only because men seem unable to deal with the future as opposed to the past.

Also of interest is the fact that one of these short takes recalls an earlier one. The first short take of the film occurs at the 12 minute mark, and takes place immediately after Seon-hwa has gone with her former high school friend in a cab. We see her enter a restaurant, where she will meet with Heon-jun and tell him that she was raped by this man. In another short take later in the film, we see this same space from a different angle in the first of three pictures taken by Heon-jun that he is showing Seon-hwa. This is an easy detail to miss; I only noticed after going back and looking at the short takes and trying to interpret their significance. But I think it is important. This repetition emphasizes the dream-like nature of the whole narrative, and also, for myself, is part of a greater reconsidering of the whole first half of the narrative. This will be the subject of my next post.

Huh Moonyung, Hong Sang-soo (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007)

Some Concluding Thoughts on The Three Caballeros

2009-02-27T10:41:00.001-08:00

While I confess to some concern about making a "dud" selection, as week after week passed with few voices choosing to engage the film, I must say that the overall conversation -- between the comments and the posts -- has proven quite gratifying.
Indeed, as Chris noted in his post, my choice to offer this as a FOTMC selection derived from my interest in hearing others comment on the film as a film. I've done the kind of research on these films that Marc mentions as possibly necessary, including days and days screening the various versions in different languages released to specific markets as well as reviewing -- and producing -- variously overheated cultural studies prose about the films as ideological texts or historical documents. Yet none of that has helped me to make sense of this film as a film.
I'm gratified that some FOTMC folks have found the film(s) compelling, and not especially surprised that others have found them less than interesting. That said, I find that I'm pondering a set of questions about our disparate ways "in" to a film.
First, I wonder about the "auteur" question that Peter raised -- which I understood to be the idea that this film was multiply authored and thus defies conventional "auteurist" approaches to cinematic analysis, which presuppose a singular vision as a defining feature of cinematic composition -- and its application to Disney, or any animated production. Indeed, Walt Disney was always what we might call a "corporate" filmmaker. (I'm using the term "corporate" here in its ensemble sense, or a group of people perceived to act as a singular entity.) Though Disney himself did draw, animate, envoice, direct and produce certain productions; very early on, he "farmed" out much of the labor. So, in some ways, it seems the case of Disney also tests our limits in contemplating as an intrinsically collaborative -- indeed, "corporate" -- medium.
Second, I find that I'm wondering if the film makes more sense when considered as "experimental cinema." The value FOTMC commentators seem to have found in the film seems more in that tradition of cinema criticism, than in either film history or in more auteurist approaches. (My own background is as a cultural historian who approaches a broad array of popular culture texts through the lens of performance studies/theory, so I'm fairly unschooled in "experimental cinema" as a tradition.)
Finally, I'm struck -- after our fairly energetic consideration of such issues within Bad Influence -- of the relative absence of commentary about "taste" in the film. A number of commentators, perhaps more than any previously chosen film, professed that Disney and/or animation more generally were just "not their cup of tea". I wonder, then, how such issues of "taste" inform the the shaping of critical vocabulary more generally.
Thanks, everyone, for being game for this/my characteristically off-kilter choice for February's Film Club. Even though the conversation wasn't huge, I found everyone's contributions clarifying to my approach to the film. What's more -- I always thought that "real" film studies types would know just what to make of this defiantly odd film. I'm now relieved to learn that it's not just me who's both completely flummoxed (and also quite fascinated) by this wackadoo little movie.

A Personal Introduction to Hong Sang-soo

2009-02-27T06:49:00.000-08:00

This is a brief intro to my own relationship with Hong Sang-soo's cinema in anticipation of March's film of the month, Woman is the Future of Man. I will add two or three short posts on Sunday about the film itself in order to start the discussion. Of course, others can feel free to ignore my posts and go off in their own direction. I'm actually curious about other people's reactions, since I think mine may be fairly idiosyncratic (but maybe not). Look forward to hearing people's thoughts.

I saw my first Hong Sang-soo film almost a year ago. I had been living in Korea for a few months, and noticed Hong's first film, The Day a Pig Fell in a Well (1996), for sale on DVD. I had heard of the film and of Hong, so I decided to give it a try. My reaction was not overly enthusiastic (see my initial review here), especially at first, but something about the film intrigued me. At around this time, I also purchased a book on Hong by Huh Moonyung, part of a series on directors published by the Korean Film Council. The more I read about Hong, the more I wanted to see more of his films. I purchased his next two films, The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) and The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) (see respective reviews here and here), and my interest started to turn to fascination. I'm not entirely sure why, since although I liked the films, they did not overwhelm me as absolute masterpieces. There were probably a number of factors, but the major ones that come to mind are:

(1) Hong's films explore modern day Korean society in a way that feels very authentic to my experience in the country;

(2) Hong's films are much more interesting taken as a whole than as individual parts;

(3) He is a very distinctive director in terms of theme and style;

(4) His formal rigour coincided with my own increased interest in formal concerns;

(5) He has an almost obsessive interest in sexuality.

I mention this last quality because I think it is a relevant one to my own and probably others interest in Hong. This is hardly unique. Art cinema and sex have always had a fairly intimate link. And this interest in sexuality connects with my first point about Hong's take on Korea feeling very authentic. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the sexual nature of Hong's films gives them an appeal that caused me to track down all of his films, something I haven't done with all of the directors that I admire. At the same time, the other factors are equally important. Hong's uniqueness is in using his obsessive formalism to focus on topics usually treated in very uninteresting ways.

Following his first three films, I was unable to track down his other films immediately. The next Hong film I saw was his most recent, Night and Day (2008), which played at the Jeonju Film Festival (review here). Although recognizably a Hong film, it also differed in very exciting ways, and the experience of watching one of his films in an audience added a very different element to my view of Hong's work. It is useful to point out that Hong has never achieved a mass audience in Korea, unlike his contemporaries Park Chan-wook and Lee Chang-dong. He has also not played the art house circuit like Kim Ki-Duk. Hong has had the support of critics, both in Korea and outside the country, but unfortunately, his reputation is such that Night and Day came and left fairly quickly in Korea, despite the fact that it is in many ways a crowd-pleasing film. The audience in Jeonju enjoyed it, but it seems Hong's reputation as difficult kept the box office numbers down.

Moving backwards, I next saw Woman on the Beach (2006) (review), followed by Woman is the Future of Man (2004) (review), Turning Gate (2002) (review), and finally Tale of Cinema (2005) (review). More than any other director I can think of, Hong is very difficult to evaluate, especially on a film by film basis. If I had to rank his films in order right now, I would probably go with:

Night and Day

The Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors

Woman is the Future of Man

Woman on the Beach

The Power of Kangwon Province

The Day a Pig Fell in a Well

Turning Gate

Tale of Cinema

However, there is no director who I've encountered (at least among those who have made many films) with such a small margin between his or her best and worst film. Hong's consistency is quite remarkable. Even more impressive is that each film since The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors can be thought of as a transitional text in some way. Hong has acheived that rare balance of continuity, growth, and unity.

It is as a Hong film, and in relation to his other work, that I will begin my discussion of Woman is the Future of Man. More to come.

Quick Questions for the FOTMC about The Three Caballeros

2009-02-20T18:47:00.000-08:00

Does the fact that this film, The Three Caballeros, is not in any way an auteur film (in this case, I simply mean "authored" from one [or 2] mind[s]) make it harder to find an approach in which to discuss it?

I am asking because this might be the first time we've had a film of this kind as the film of the month. How does the ambiguity of its intentions and sources affect your view of it?

It is a tremendously interesting work, but it is not stimulating much discussion. And I guess I am just trying to figure out why.

What Fascinates Me

2009-02-12T08:17:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Brian for the fascinating pick this month. He alludes to the fascination these films hold for cultural studies and film studies scholars as ideological texts. I haven't delved into those readings yet, but I was struck by a trope that Peter's post gets at: the feminization of Latin America. The Three Caballeros (US, Brazil, Mexico) of course are the key powers in the Western hemisphere that the Good Neighbor policy sought to align. By figuring Latin America as feminine, the film implied a masculine paternalist role for the US. It legitimizes the Monroe Policy in the World War II world stage.

But Brian's post asks how we begin to understand the film as film. I'd suggest a few areas that fascinated me watching Three Caballeros. First, abstraction. Disney films of this period could often veer away from representation proper into a play with visual and aural elements. And its approach to representation in general showed a visual inventiveness. My favorite moments tended to be the most purely abstract ones:

Second, the blend of live action and animation. Normally, I'm not a fan of the blend (maybe bad 70s examples soured me as a child), but I loved the interplay between the two spaces here. Shadows, for instance, could reflect from real objects onto drawn ones...

... and in the process make the three-dimensional live-action person look flat and unreal. Or, shadows could be cast from the animated characters onto a live action space...

Finally, I was interested in the film's use of optical printing. For instance, there are several moments of freeze frame:

But particularly striking are the rain-wipes that create dazzling watercolor-y effects.

These effects interest me because they show a greater Hollywood lexicon of effects in the mid-40s, but also because they take effects with fairly conventionalized use in live-action films and give them a different function in the animated film, either more playful or more expressive.

"Doggone This Confusion!"

2009-02-10T22:50:00.001-08:00

I suppose if I were more familiar with Disney's early output, especially Fantasia, I would be less impressed by The Three Caballeros. But as it happens, I came into this viewing knowing very little about the evolution of animation and was kind of pleasantly shocked at the cinematic imagination on display here. I'm wondering if the initial obligations to the OCIAA removed, or in the least lessened, certain obligations to narrative and even stylistic coherence, thereby freeing up the minds and artists at work here to really give us something special, for the most part.

It has such a wildly playful and insanely free-form style that its almost hard to watch. I'd be very interested to know what kids think of it. I was trying to imagine what it would be like to watch it as a child. It's funny to me that Disney tried to promote it to an adult audience by highlighting the "beauties" and the Latin music, because, in a way, I think it might be completely acceptable only to a child's sensibility. (I don't partake, but, I imagine it is also perhaps one of the great movies to watch while high)
A better film historian than me would have to chime in here, but, isn't the whole aspect of the "film" in this movie kind of ahead of its time? For example, in the first sections, the way it plays with the narrator/subject relationship. Some of the sportive ways it plays with the notion of itself as a film reminded me of Ophuls' La Ronde which is 6 years later and considered inventive for similar approaches.
It was refreshing, and I suppose somewhat disturbing, to see a cartoon animal so absolutely bonkers for human chicks. One of the reasons I feel asleep (totally "R.E.M asleep") in WALL-E was because I couldn't wrap my arms around the love story with all that metal. It's a little easier to swallow cartoon beasts in love(at least they can subtly add some femininity/masculinity to the designs), but nothing beats Donald Duck after "supposedly" Latin American women.

I only say "supposedly" because it looks like some of these scenes were shot near the Santa Monica pier with those locals. Regardless, we are sure to never again see so much lust on display from an animated character that doesn't say "Diggity, diggity, all right!"

These sequences go on for so long and are so obsession-filled, that it strikes me as hilarious that there would be a sense that this was keeping in line with the idea that it intended to "cultivate good will" with these other American republics. One walks away from the film with the impression that one of the major reasons to head down south, if not the main reason, is for the girls.
Without the burden of a narrative, and with imagination, inventiveness and stylistic freedom, this film approaches pure cinema. It can almost be called Avant Garde at some moments. This surprised me. It's really a shame that it is laced with this boring propaganda. The way it plays with film form is almost worth the viewing, if live action girls running for their lives from Donald Duck isn't enough.

(Title of post is from a line Donald Duck says as he is being teased by girls. A line I would never have deciphered had it not been for subtitles)

Introducing The Three Caballeros (1944/5), or What Exactly Is This That We're Watching?

2009-02-01T15:42:00.000-08:00

I write to welcome the Film of the Month Clubbers to the relatively short film I've chosen for this, the shortest month of February.

Walt Disney's The Three Caballeros (1944/5)

The Three Caballeros is the second of two films that Walt Disney developed as part of a brief producing partnership with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), led by Nelson Rockefeller. Put simply, as part of the U.S. State Department between 1940 and 1944, the OCIAA sought to utilize U.S. cultural production (film, radio, and live performance as well as journalism in all media) to cultivate good will among the "other American republics" in the Western Hemisphere and, in so doing, to counter any potential inroads made by Italian or German filmmakers. With the financial and diplomatic support of the OCIAA and the U.S. State Department, Walt Disney and several of his key directors and animators traveled to selected South and Central American countries (including Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil) in 1941. The purpose of this trip was to develop material for a projected series of films aimed toward cultivating pan-American affinities and promoting cooperation against European propagandistic incursions. The first resulting film -- the 42-minute featurette Saludos Amigos (1942/3) -- intersperses four animated shorts with documentary footage gathered on that trip. With additional financial support from OCIAA, Disney's team took another trip in 1943, this time to Mexico. Drawing upon material from both trips, Disney developed The Three Caballeros (1944/5) -- a more thoroughly animated feature, which folds the live-action footage into the animated spectacle following a narrative throughline featuring Disney's popular Donald Duck character as he meets two new characters, a Brazilian parrot José Carioca (originally introduced in Saludos Amigos and a Mexican rooster Panchito (making his character debut in this film). Released in 1944/5, The Three Caballeros arrived to theatres just as the OCIAA's operation as a semi-autonomous division within the U.S. State Department was ending and also as the popularity of such "Good Neighbor" era cultural projects was on the wane. Perhaps as a result, as film historian Eric Smoodin has noted, the Disney company promoted the film's blend of live-action and animation to an adult audience by emphasizing the array of Latin American beauties featured in the film and underscoring the film's extensive use of popular "Latin" musical styles. Though still listed commercially as among the "Disney Classics," neither Saludos Amigos nor The Three Caballeros have really entered the Disney canon, nor have the array of animated characters introduced within these films become especially iconic.

In the last several decades, a handful of scholars (in cultural studies as well as cinema studies) have found the films interesting as documents of this peculiar historical moment of explicit cooperation between the U.S. culture industry and the U.S. federal government. Perhaps as a result, much of the existing scholarship addressing Disney's "Good Neighbor" films emphasize them as "ideological objects," texts whose cultural interest derives from their "artefactual" status. And, while I find such "ideological" explications of these films to be intellectually enlightening and often quite entertaining, I yet wonder whether these films -- especially 1945's The Three Caballeros -- hold additional interest as "cinematic artefacts." What might yet be said about these films as films?
So, Film of the Month Clubbers, what do you see when you look at Walt Disney's The Three Caballeros? What do you think we're looking at when we're taking in the spectacular incoherences, absurdities and phantasmagorias of this film? Put another way, what the f*** do you think is going on in this curiosity from the Disney vault?

-- Brian (aka StinkyLulu)

Talking to Myself About the Commercial Influence

2009-01-29T22:41:00.000-08:00

I was having a coffee at Atlas Cafe when I ran into myself. I said "Why not come over? I got some cake from a Polish grocery and it'll take two of me to eat it." So I went over to my apartment. We sat down in the kitchen.

IV1: Have you written your post about Bad Influence yet?

IV2: No. I'm really late. You?

IV1: No. I've been playing with words, but they don't really come together. They don't make an essay or a post or whatever.

IV2: Maybe we should talk it over. If it can't be an essay, maybe it can be a conversation. Anyway, writing is just talking to yourself, trying to convince yourself of something. Anyone who reads a blog post is just overhearing someone else's mumbling. And a dialogue is usually more interesting than a monologue.

IV1: Ok. Well, let's start with the truth. I’ve never liked any of Curtis Hanson’s movies. But I like this one. It’s one of those works that alter your perceptions of other works by the same author. Like how Carlito’s Way makes Scarface a better movie and Scarface makes Carlito’s Way a worse one. So Bad Influence makes L.A. Confidential seem better, but the memory of L.A. Confidential also taints my experience of Bad Influence. It's even got a great start. Opening credits are something we don’t talk about very often, even though they happen to be parts of the movie. I used to really dislike 1980s and 1990s American credits, where some action builds in the images, accompanied by music, while the credits are displayed in a small font, as if a small font is less obtrusive that a large one. But I’ve come to understand them. Overlaying credits creates a direct connection between the film and the people credited. It’s like the artist’s signature at the bottom of a painting—which, we shouldn’t forget, is an integral part of the painting itself. So every image becomes “signed” by various people—the main cast, the editor, the casting director and so on and so forth until the last credit, which is always for the director, because he or she, of course, gets the last word.

And I like the shot that “introduces” Spader’s character. I don’t mean during the credits, where we see him and Rob Lowe doing something mysterious. The credits sequence is like a glimpse of a stranger at a party. You don’t quite understand who they are, and there’s a lot of other stuff going on. But then, very suddenly, you’re introduced. And here it happens when he opens his mouth. His voice is a little weak. He asks a question.

IV2: Well, you remember Heartbeat Detector, right? I think one thing I admired about it was its devotion to a corporate image. I mean that every room looks like an advertisement for that room, the way people wear their clothes or drive their cars looks like a commercial for those items. It’s like the characters of the film are trying to project this idea that these items are worth it. Like, nowadays, the way people wear Bluetooth headsets—they have this strange relationship with them where they try to look like the people on the Bluetooth headset box. Or the way iPod owners insist on using the white earbuds instead of getting better headphones. And, starting with the moment Spader opens his mouth, we enter this world where the mise en scene is modeled on advertising, on stock photography. Everyone’s desks are arranged like old computer ads, very orderly. Early on, when Spader’s feeling down, he goes to the bar where he first meets Lowe, and even that is lit like a beer commercial.

IV1: Well, the aesthetic ideas behind Hanson’s images are ultimately indebted to advertising of one kind or another. It weakens a lot of his other films, but it strengthens this one. More print advertising—magazine ads, motivational posters, travel brochures—than anything else. Settings like the zoo, the clean wharf with its fishermen, for instance, look like they could belong in a travel magazine. When the bands are playing--and there are two "rock club" scenes--there are shots that look just like glossy music videos. And what was 8 Mile if not an advertisement for Eminem, an advertisement for the kind of glossy grittiness you also see in his music videos and concerts?

IV2: Yes, and the sex scenes have this Cinemax quality to them, which works for them rather than against them. As though images of the world have invaded the world itself. Advertising has supplanted experience. Spader's character lives his life very carefully, like he's the guest at some hotel. A guest at his own anniversary party. It’s a world that is enveloping and is unfulfillingly comforting. It can replace everything without actually being anything. And this is true of both Spader and Lowe's worlds. Neither one has more depth. Each one has invested too much into his own ideas to let go. Lowe needs his power and Spader needs his comfort, and both notions are equally marketable and empty.

The Perils of Masculine Intimacy in Bad Influence (1990)

2009-01-16T11:14:00.000-08:00

Curtis Hanson's Califor-noir Bad Influence (1990) impressed me mostly as a "downlow" narrative of male-male courtship, depicting the peculiar perils of same-sex intimacy. I don't think I read the film as "gay" in any way. Nor do I find it especially homoerotic (despite the camera's lurid titillation by the seedier tinge of Rob Lowe's beauty).
Rather, what I find most interesting in Bad Influence is Hanson's provocatively cinematic exploitation of queer(ish) visual tropes as a way to evince the essentially uncertain perils of male-male intimacy. I'm also fascinated by the fact that Hanson, presumably developing this film in the later 1980s, was able to make a film about the erotics of masculine intimacy while somehow eliding/escaping certitudes of gayness and/or straightness.
Most centrally, and putting aside for the moment the (open) question of whether or not Lowe's Alex is "real," Bad Influence is "about" the relationship between Spader's Michael and Rob Lowe's Alex (if that is indeed his "real" name)...
I love that the environment of Alex and Michael's first real interaction -- the piers, just after Michael has checked out the men's room and discovered it closed -- is a physical location rife with "cruising" metaphor.

And that their subsequent exchange -- a battery of awkward greetings, dropped glances, and coy smiles -- is as fraught as any flirtation, a feinting encounter that becomes all the more electrifying for the speed with which it evolves into a thrilling new relationship.
I found it impossible to forget the obliquely erotic charge of this first encounter between Michael and Alex, especially as their impromptu "date" continued, first to a dive bar where they seemed only to be interested in each other and then to an underground nightclub where their scopes widened. Here, I think it worth noting how Hanson uses the "code" of the underground nightclub network to mark the next three beats of Alex and Michael's evolving relationship.
First, it's a bit of role play, requiring a touch of subservience on the part of the masculine subject. And while I wouldn't go so far to say that Lowe's Alex is the aforementioned "dominant athletic female" (though it is a somewhat amusing thought), I would suggest that the personal ad "code" does cue Spader's Michael for the "role" he takes in his subsequent relationship with Lowe's Alex. In the scenes that follow, Alex is calling the shots and Michael's learning the pleasures of taking orders. By the time of their next big night together, the two men have experienced a somewhat surprising degree of physical intimacy.
So it may be little surprise that Spader's Michael finds himself thrust into the throes of a minor identity crisis, as when he visibly bridles when Lowe's Alex voice calls from behind: "Gay White Male!"
Spader's Michael is, of course, visibly relieved to realize that "Gay White Male" is not his new title but (like "Dominant Athletic Female" before it) merely the "code" for Alex and Michael's next adventure. This moment, too, is when I become convinced that Hanson is using such "code" to underscore that Michael and Alex are getting a little too close. Indeed, the "Gay White Male" evening of adventures commences a phase when things between Michael and Alex start getting scary, when their macho playdates transform into a set of dangerous secrets that Michael must learn to guard -- to "closet" -- lest they destroy the careful construction of his public persona. The homosexual horror of this next phase in Alex and Michael's evolving intimacy is enacted gruesomely, first in their shared predatory late-nite rampage (which includes the bizarrely sexual attack on the donut shop guy, an assault which culminates when Lowe doesn't "shoot" the dude's head off, but instead "squirts" in his mouth)...
And which continues as Alex stages his careful incrimination of Michael, a nefarious scheme which promises to render permanent their passing intimacy.
At this moment in the narrative, Alex's motives beg for elaboration, yet Hanson doesn't budge. Perhaps as a result, Bad Influence becomes more interesting than it should be. And, for me, the unknowability of Alex's motives clarified the gendered operation of identity-theft noir pics more generally. At this juncture in the narrative, I found myself reflecting on the identity problems in movies like Fight Club and Strangers on a Train or, say, Single White Female or The Hand That Rocks The Cradle or Rebecca. In this screening of Bad Influence, though, I realized that the threat in female-centered identity surrogation noir is most often that of a kind of erasure, where the ominous figure (either the new friend or the absent predecessor) threatens to stealthily overtake the life of the central character, until she must fight back in order to protect her own integrity/personhood. In male-centered pics (like Fight Club or Strangers on a Train or Bad Influence), on the other hand, the ominous new character is not so much about identity dissolution/displacement but more about the threat of unveiling a core, intimate truth about the male protagonist. (As when, here, Lowe's Alex taunts Spader's Michael with the breathy allegation: "I didn't make you do anything that wasn't in you already.") The thrill of male-centered identity surrogation films often follow from one man's choice to reveal his true desires to a charismatic male stranger and, subsequently, how this other man chooses to utilize this intimate "secret" to compel the protagonist to do terrible things. It's a fascinating, gendered tension -- identity dissolution versus identity revelation -- that I don't think I would have discerned where it not for the curious peril of masculine intimacy in Bad Influence. It's also why, to my mind at least, why the third beat in Alex and Michael's relationship is cued by the final bit of personal ad "code": Fun Loving Couple.
While Alex has wreaked his desired havoc in Michael's life and is ready to move on (to a porny threesome with two women no less), Michael decides brings a third into the drama of his primary relationship with Alex. And not only is Michael's "third" a man, but it's Michael's brother Pismo (Christian Clemenson). In this moment, the model of masculine intimacy embodied by the Michael-Pismo dyad (a signal of the intrinsic, if imperfect, reliability of filial trust) stands in a conclusive contradistinction to the Michael-Alex dyad (an example of the perilous thrills of the mancrush). And, of course, with the normative masculine intimacy of his connection with his brother to moor his unsteadiness, Michael's relationship Alex ends where it began -- in the cruisy isolation of the pier -- with one man decisively communicating to the other who's on top.
All told, Curtis Hanson's Bad Influence is a surprisingly rich exploration of the perceived perils of masculine intimacy and, in the best noir tradition, Hanson is somewhat astonishingly unapologetic in his use of queerish/erotic visual tropes to explore the uncertain terrain of male-male emotional infatuation.

-- Brian (aka StinkyLulu)
for my unedited ramblings on the film, see also StinkyBits.

Ambiguity

2009-01-11T17:30:00.000-08:00

I want to try to develop some of the issues raised in comments about who actually exists in Bad Influence. Not so much because I think it matters who exists or not - but because the way film hints at the possibility, and then does not resolve it, raises points about information in films that I find fascinating.

So who is real? The film sets you up to wonder about Alex, especially - even raising the point explicitly. Pismo says the cops won't believe he exists - and that's the plot in the last third or so - how can Michael (and Pismo) prove that Alex exists, and that he did these things, not Michael? That's what happens in the last act - they chase down evidence that Alex exists - finally trapping him on the Manhattan Beach pier.... But what's interesting about the question is that the film doesn't resolve it. It maintains its ambiguity to the end. In fact, it probably raises more questions about what is real, without answering them. What about Pismo? He's even more ambiguous than Alex, if you think about it. We don't see anyone interact with him other than Michael and Alex. What's more - his function in the plot is as a kind of return of the repressed. He's more Michael's physical double than Alex (a fact the film plays with, from his introduction on.) He shows up at MIchael's door, asking for money, paranoid about an old drug conviction, or later, telling Alex he has "the fear." Which prompts Alex to ask Michael what he is afraid of, what he wants.

The question of what is real isn't all that important in itself. The symbolic links among the characters are obvious enough, and don't depend on their literal identity. What is interesting is how the film handles the possibility, and how it fits with other aspects of the film. How does the film handle it? By hinting at it - then raising it explicitly, and setting it up as the point of the story - then seeming to resolve it - but, rather pointedly, not resolving it. Most of the hints, in fact, are more about the symbolism than the reality of these characters. Alex doesn't really seem to be anything but a slumming gangster of some kind when he first appears. He plays tempter - plays Faust - though he also seems to be acting as Michael's id, or enabling Michael's id. The characters are linked - most clearly in Alex's first appearance in the bar. We see Michael at the bar drinking a beer - we see him in a fight, getting pushed around - then we see a closeup of a hand, breaking a beer bottle on the bar - then we see Alex. But that hand breaking the bottle - it's certainly edited to make us think for a second that's Michael... But even this is just a symbolic link - and symbolism isn't ontology.

Once Alex's existence is named as a problem, though, this manipulation of information becomes significant. You realize that the film has not shown us who beat Patterson, who killed Claire, you realize that no one has seen Alex except Michael (and Pismo and Claire, but one is as reclusive as Alex, and the other is dead). No one but Michael has talked to Alex on the phone. It is possible to put Michael and Alex in the same place for any of the important moments - and possible to rationalize Alex's presence (as Michael's imagination) at places where there seem to be witnesses (like the fiancee's party.) Episodes like the robberies are played ambiguously - we see Alex's face, but Michael wears a mask, and acts completely dissociated from the crimes, enough to make us question the point of view they represent. And everything that might count as evidence - the videotape, even the pictures we see at the beginning of the film, before Alex meets Michael - have disappeared, been destroyed, etc. Now: by naming the question (of Alex's existence) in the film, it sets you up to expect a resolution. The film never plays the story as if Alex didn't exist - everything is structured as if it were a mystery to be solved. And indeed - the ending of the film seems to solve it: Alex's confession is on tape - then he is shot....

And yet the film maintains its ambiguity. Alex's body doesn't come to the surface - no one actually watches the video footage. Michael walks off to talk to the police - but Pismo lags behind, and we don't actually see Michael meet the police. Nothing is resolved.

I think this is important. It does a couple things: one is, I think it links it to another branch of films, to art films - Antonioni and the like. It shares some of their aesthetic - the stark, urban landscapes, the blank white walls, the fascination with photography and video; and it shares their ambiguity, and interest in ambiguity. The unanswered questions of who killed who, or if anyone killed anyone, of Blowup or Terrorizer or a Michael Haneke film. I don't know how much connection there is to those films, probably some, though even without direct links, many of the ideas and images were in the air in 1990.

It's also important for foregrounding the question of evidence, in the film, and for film watchers. What constitutes proof that something is "real" in a fiction? Most of the time, we take it for granted - if the filmmakers put someone on screen and show something happening, we assume it is actually happening, within that fictional world. So why would we doubt that? Why would we ask if 2 characters are really the same person? Why would we ask if something was a figment of someone's imagination? and if the problem comes up - how do you decide, in the film, what is real and what is not?

How does this film suggest that Alex is not real? I'd say: 1) his introduction, that ambiguous cutting around the bottle; 2) by foregrounding the story templates, doppelganger stories, Faust stories; 3) by manipulating what we see and don't see - and then foregrounding the manipulation, so we notice that the film seems to have arbitrarily skipped something like Patterson's beating. 4) And finally - by making it an explicit problem for the plot - by having Pismo and Michael realize that they have no way of proving that Alex exists.... Or - how does the film prove that Claire (for instance) is "real"? Well - as I said in a comment: she's on tape - other people see her on tape. That's how we know Michael is real. We see people that we can't reduce to Michael's perception, and those people react to him: thus we know he "exists." And that evidence is missing for Alex - and for Pismo. Alex does not appear anywhere Michael is not, or if he does, Michael's independent existence can't be proved; there are no pictures of him (and he has no intention of letting anyone get any - they won't knock over a convenience store, it has cameras), no one hears his voice. Same with Pismo - again - only Michael and Alex see him, except at the club - which we could read as "really" Michael. (I think there's enough time to at least pretend Michael's trip to get the gun is not simultaneous.) No pictures of him, no one else hears him talk. And when there is a real chance of two of them being seen (as when they are trying to dispose of the body, or even at the end), Pismo conveniently disappears when people come along (or the film stops.)

But likewise - how would we prove that Michael and Alex are the same person? Well - the film could tell us, explicitly (as in Fight Club.) Or we could imagine a final scene - Michael telling the cops how Alex did what he did, showing them the tape - and we might see the tape, and see Michael confessing the crimes... Or we could see the cops coming to the end of the pier and see that what we thought was Michael was Pismo - and then see Michael's body in the water. There are undoubtedly more subtle ways of making the point - but of course, the film does none of them.

Anyway: that is all for now. By rooting through all this, I don't mean to say that the characters really are the same person, or that the question of whether they are or aren't is all that important. What I think is important is the fact that the film does not resolve the question - and that it does raise issues about knowledge and reality in film. The ways it relates those questions to technology - might be another essay...

Doppelganger

2009-01-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

Some great posts so far. Weepingsam's remarks on light and Peter's on the motif of "stuff" both answer, in their own way, Glenn's central question: what is the relation between the corporate world and the sexual/violent noir world?

Let me start my answer by noting that Bad Influence is built around doppelganger obviousness. By obvious I don't mean that's how everyone reads it (though the comments to the latest post suggest many do), but that the film evacuates other interpretive possibilities. One thing I find interesting about dopperganger narratives is that the "evil" double never gets psychological depth. The same holds true for Bad Influence, even when the editing positions a series of point-of-view shots from Alex.

What's particularly striking - and why I call this obvious - is that unlike some other doppelganger narratives (Strangers on a Train, say) Alex hardly seems to have a psychology at all. "The cops won't believe this guy even exists." I don't believe he exists!

The thematic obviousness is in many ways a nod to noir, where Big Ideas got expressed in pulp form. However, neo-noir does not fully sum up this film. Certain moments of pastiche are there, particularly in the directional lighting, the slow tracks, and the costuming/makeup of the fiancee...
(remarkable how a Veronica Lake look comes across more as Color Me Beautiful...)

Rather than retro-noir, I'm inclined to say the film owes much to the film gris - films like Body and Soul or Force of Evil, which allegorized capitalism as criminal activity. That said, when pressed, it's hard for me to figure out what the film is saying exactly about business or what its target is. Office politics unfettered from morality? High finance? Consumerism? Credit economy? Is Michael the bad guy with his Sharper Image loft and credit card debt? Or Alex with his Armani suits and nightclub hookers-and-coke dissolution? I'm interested in possible interpretations film clubbers might have.

Finally, I should note that all this allegorization comes at the expense of women. There's a long-standing feminist critique of noir, particularly the femme fatale. But here the women are not even interesting characters, but rather pawns for the screenplay. And am I right to say a subsidiary theme is that carpe diem means men should not get involved seriously with women? In other contexts, that might be welcome libertinism, here it soured for me.

Bad Influence: vice, versa and virtue

2009-01-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can
— Roger Waters, “Echoes”

I’d like to thank Glenn Heath for suggesting Bad Influence (1990) as January’s Film of the Month. Until now it’s been a forgotten noir hinged on the back end of the ‘80s, a decade rife with sleepy, sleazy thrillers patiently awaiting our discovery — preferably through groggy eyes at 3am on cable. It’s also a vital part of director Curtis Hanson’s ignored oeuvre, a gaggle of seemingly disparate mainstream pictures most critics wouldn’t own up to admiring. Fortunately, if just for the sake of this brief reflection, I’m not in the same league as ‘most critics.’

    Set in that mythical movie world where beautiful twenty-somethings undergo dizzying rites of passage, unaffected by the mundane concerns of food, rent and insurance premiums, Bad Influence follows James Spader, a corporate overachiever with dubious morals en route to his dark side. Beau hunk Rob Lowe is the guide, sinister yin to Spader’s complacent yang, a nasty parasite feeding on his host’s good nature. In time, their Faustian association provides Spader with a few depraved perks: severance from an impending (and likely suffocating) marriage to a tidy socialite, shameless sex with undemanding dollbabes, and a rapid ascension up the corporate ladder. The price is high, as backs are stabbed and bridges burned while Spader goes topsy-turvy.

    But the end result is maturity at the cost of Lowe’s decadent self-centeredness. It’s a violent journey to self awareness, prompted by the conflict and merger of opposites. These are recurring themes in Hanson’s work: the grieving housewife forced from lethargy by a psychotic in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992); the intellectual husband impotent against tough criminals in The River Wild (1994), his weakness overcome by a strong, motherly wife; the clean, naïve cop evolving through corruption in L.A. Confidential (1997); academic dreamers chasing rainbows in Wonder Boys (2000); the singer hacking away at his oppressive roots in 8 Mile (2002); the battling sisters in In Her Shoes (2005) finding peace in a dimension beyond careers and sex, a retirement community.

    Overlooked (if not slighted) by cinephiles, Curtis Hanson remains faithful to the basic narrative conventions of old Hollywood. Indeed, had he been born forty years earlier, it’s easy imagining him churning out working class melodramas at Warners. Although Bad Influence is slick and sensational, it’s also lined with sharp digs at mainstream values. When Spader begins to lose the trappings of his life — coworkers bail on him, friends and fiancée evaporate, along with his clothing and furniture — truth and self preservation become paramount.

Bad Influence and Neo (not so) Noir

2009-01-05T18:54:00.000-08:00

One of the interesting features of neo-noir, probably following in Chinatown's footsteps, is the use of light, in place of darkness. Bad Influence follows that trend -light plays a key role in its look, throughout. It begins in darkness, and certainly, shadows and dark are significant in the film - but it is remarkable how much emphasis there is on light.

Its key spaces (Michael's workplace and his apartment) are bright, airy places, with white walls, bright lighting, windows, white decor.

When he moves outside, much of the story takes place under the brilliant LA sky:

Meanwhile, as the deeds grow darker, darkness enters the film, as well - though light remains significant. The robbery spree the men go on leads them through dark streets, but the actual crimes occur in the light.

And light itself is a significant part of what is seen. The light of the TV screen is a recurring motif, the TV and camera are integral to the plot; plot points also depend on a tail light, the light of a refrigerator door opening, etc. Even incidental details like the dance routine at one of the underground clubs are built around lights:

And here is darkness, framed in light:

It's a strong pattern throughout the film, and helps establish a theme, maybe: that light hides our bad impulses - darkness reveals them. That may overstate it - the film does fascinating things with what it shows and hides, puts onscreen or off... but its use of light (and whiteness, and glass, surfaces, etc.) is quite remarkable.

Alex Lies and Videotapes

2009-01-04T20:48:00.000-08:00

I thought Rob Lowe did his job well. He played Alex with the perfect mixture of attraction and menace. Why did this surprise me? Where do these low expectations come from regarding some actors? With Lowe, I can't remember being disappointed by a certain performance of his. (to be fair, I also can't remember loving his work. But I guess that just adds to my point) Why was I gearing up for some schlocky work? (Is it really about the 'Rat Pack' or the sex tape? Is that shit still in my mind? How did it even get in there?) I don't like having these unconscious feelings or prejudices going into a viewing. Makes me wonder what other unconscious attitudes potentially affect my first intake of a film.

Stuff

2009-01-02T03:01:00.000-08:00

What follows are some random thoughts on Bad Influence. Stress on "random".

We are given little in the way of motive for what Alex does. We know he was sinister, in some way, before meeting Michael, that's about all. Alex keeps repeating that Michael "asked for this". Just as he forms Michael into the "take no shit" man his corporate success demands, Alex alludes to a certain hatred for this game, and perhaps punishes Michael for his weakness in even playing it. Like an evil version of The Secret, Alex tells Michael to "make it happen", then terrorizes to make it so, "covering his bases" all the while.

MAKE IT HAPPEN

In the scene that starts the process, Alex sits in the almost kitsch Venetian shadows (behind bars) and says "Tell me what you want, Mick."
Michael is confused and Hesitant. "Mick?"
"Tell me what you want, what you're afraid of." He is still in shadow.
Michael is still hesitant to tell him. He stumbles.
Then, moving away from the shadow, Alex says "Just for fun, come on, tell me, what are you afraid of?"
This frees Michael from his hesitation. "I'm afraid of getting married, I guess." They discuss it. "Done." says Alex.
Alex then moves back into the shadow. It is a closer shot. The shadow seems more prominent.
"Now tell me what you want more than anything else in the world."
Michael isn't hesitant anymore. Alex is in. He can present his dark side and get a response. Michael reveals that he wants the senior analyst position.
"Drink to it. Make it happen", commands Alex. They toast.
"Make it happen" repeats Michael. Alex smiles.

STUFF

Alex can be viewed as a manifestation of "passive excess". Passive, in that Michael has no attachment to his 'stuff'. This 'stuff' representing the byproduct of corporate greed. Alex uses this stuff to wreak havoc in Michael's world.

Alex scans Michael's 'stuff'. "Very nice." he says low. Spots the golf clubs. He laughs to himself. "Do you play?", he asks.
"No. Never" answers Michael.
He doesn't play golf. Why does he have the clubs? Just because it's what he thinks he should have?

When Alex takes his stuff away, Michael wants it back, only because "it's mine", but just as easily tells Alex to "keep it". "So the stuff makes us even?" "Yeah", answers Michael, "the stuff makes us even." This forces Alex to take it to the next level. He has to take away other 'stuff'. With the unused golf club, a symbol of corporate recreation and excess (and Michael's passive excess), Alex kills Claire.

THE VIDEO CAMERA

"Why did you get this?" asks Michael's brother as he stares into the video camera.
"I don't know, it was on sale".
"Do you need it?"
"That's not the point"
What does Micheal mean? What IS the point. Is it that Michael feels he has to have it, that this is what people like him have in their lives? Even though he can't produce a reason why he has it.
Pismo senses the trouble with it.
"You better give it away. Cut your losses", he says.
"You're not making any sense."

Alex uses this camera to 'help' remove that which Michael is afraid of...

...then terrorizes him with it.
Finally, Michael turns it on Alex.

I find this shot, one of the last, to be very interesting. Michael staring into the mysterious waters that Alex's body never rose from. He is basically staring into the mystery that is (was) Alex. "The cops won't believe this guy even exists" was Pismo's worry. The camera, the only thing that will save him now, sits next to Michael.

Excuse My Behavior: Introducing Bad Influence

2009-01-01T10:15:00.000-08:00

Neo-noirs, the modern day cinematic evolution of the classic Film Noir, mix old and new aesthetics to deconstruct, challenge, and ultimately re-define their genre fore-fathers. Films such as Body Heat, Gloria, and Blue Steel just to name a few, seamlessly flip preconceived genre notions via archetype reversals and plot twists. But the layers of these films aren't merely skin deep. By inserting subversive modern day critiques (social, technological, political) into narratives obsessed with sexual deviancy, fatalism, and greed, neo-noirs intentionally provoke strong and provocative reactions from the viewer. To me, Curtis Hanson's seedy and brutal Bad Influence brilliantly evokes these themes and will hopefully open up a plethora of inroads for discussion during the month ahead.

Here are a few possible starters. There are two separate realities battling for supremacy throughout Bad Influence; first, the corporate void of corrupt ideals, greed, and lethargy which is Michael's (James Spader) reality, and second, the dark underbelly of sexual manipulation, violence, and crime defined by Alex (Rob Lowe). How do these separate levels of existence compliment, contrast, or overlap each other? To what extend does Hanson construct these spaces through juxtapositions of Noir visuals and music? And lastly, how does the key motif of power vs. submission become an off screen element in ways contrary to mainstream Hollywood fare (and later Hanson films as well)?

Bad Influence has plenty of dirty little secrets to tell, bits of sleazy wisdom that describe an American obsession with power and the inevitable futility of trying to control one's fate. Let the mind games begin!

The Film of the Month: Bad Influence

2009-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

As Ignatiy's "Utopian dream[of] getting a group of people to watch and consider a film no one watches or considers" comes to an end, one could gather from the postings and discussions that the group was, for the most part, surprised at what Absolute Beginners had to offer as cinema and discussion. So many different approaches are available from a selection such as this, and it was fun to see what the next one would be.

I was also enlightened by the discussion that stemmed from Thom's question "Why term the 1980s "the great 'lost decade' of cinema?"

Glenn Heath's January selection, Bad Influence (Curtis Hanson, 1990), technically just missed that decade, but it harbors the look and feel (and sound!) of it. Having today just seen this "nasty and great Neo-Noir", as Glenn calls it, I anxiously await his introduction to help me wrap my arms around this, once again, intriguing and discussion-stimulating selection.

Just remember one thing. You asked for this. Happy 2009!

Questions on High Concept

2008-12-29T13:19:00.001-08:00

The complex color palette of lighting

I have to admit Absolute Beginners was a little inscrutable for me. It was not quite like any other film experience I've had. For starters, it was tremendously busy visually. Tonally, it straddles camp, nostalgia, and bathos. Its reference and sensibility is distinctly British. (I still haven't figured out what Teddy boys were about.) To my eyes at least it's neither popular cinema nor art cinema, but some in-between.

So let me just toss out some assorted ideas, some of which dovetail with what others have been saying here and in the comments.

The Lost Decade. Ignatiy refers to the 1980s as a lost decade. I think he diagnoses how cinephilia has tended to overlook it. I don't think Absolute Beginners solves that for me entirely (it lacks the formal and narrative rigor I've come to love), but it does remind me that 1980s cinema had a remarkable complexity - visually, narratively, and politically. For the film historian, there's the exciting possibility that we can draw connections between filmmaking practices (Hollywood, art film, British television) previously thought separate.

Genre. Absolute Beginners seems to tap into a wider British nostalgia film (Terrence Davies) and the subgenre of pop-music nostalgia film (The Commitments, for instance). How would people classify this film? How did contemporary viewers classify it?

High Concept Art Film. Justin Wyatt has argued that a high concept approach defined post-1075 and particular 1980s Hollywood, distilling down the visual style and simplifying narrative structure and subsuming both to the logic of marketability. Arguably, a similar transition affected European art and popular cinema, such as in France's cinema du look. Here, too, there's a hyperstylization that exploits the saturation of newer film stocks and borrows from music video and advertising, only without the clear marketing hook of the Hollywood narrative.

The visual language of music video.

Pop Music. David Bowie and Ray Davies both reprise their star images in this – and contribute to the soundtrack – but the pop musical influence seems to run deeper. There's the nostalgic bent in 80s UK pop (Tracey Ullman, the Bluebells, Madness, the Smiths, etc.) And, too, sophistipop had a similar combination of jazz and pop music idiom that seems to inform Absolute Beginners. I kept think of Simon Frith's terrific essay "Art Ideology and Pop Practice"... I don't his reading of 80s British pop music fully explains this film, but it goes a long way.

Ideology. It's probably cliché to read all of 80s British cinema as about Thatcherism, but Absolute Beginners seems to be about, well, Thatcherism.

Wolfenden meets Handsworth Riots: the specificity of British history.

Historical Time and Absolute Beginners

2008-12-28T14:48:00.000-08:00

I headline this post with a screencap of Colin snapping a shot of Big Jill for a variety of reasons...most especially, perhaps, because this snapshot evokes the many ways Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners demonstrates the im/possibility of capturing any moment in time. (I also use it to sweeten your indulgence of my admittedly unbaked musings on this remarkable film.)

Absolute Beginners seems in many ways to be "about" the many accidents of generational timing, or the idea that you are who you are in no small part because of where and when you were born. As Temple's film begins, there's no shortage of historical referents, ranging from the scrapbooky imagery of the opening credits to the voiceover that overlays the historical frame (1958 - when the war of our childhood was finally over - when the option of being a teenager came to Britain). There's little doubt the film imagines itself to be "about" the cultural foment immediately prior the legendary Notting Hill riots. Yet, at the same time as such historical context frames our entrance into the cinematic landscape, the film's sonic and visual aesthetics (not to mention its casting and costuming choices) also cue another temporal frame: that of Thatcher's England, the post-modern, post-punk era in which a newly multicultural generation of Britons took the stage.

I happened to screen Absolute Beginners within 24-hours of seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This accident of timing amplified what I most admire about Absolute Beginners investigation of historical time. Where David Fincher's Benjamin Button (a similarly whimsically epic contemplation of love, loss and the problem of time) endeavors to create the illusion of "accuracy" in its depiction of "past" historical moments, Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners adopts an approach I find more enthralling but struggle to name. Perhaps it's that historical time telescopes in Absolute Beginners so that the past is present as it moves inexorably toward the future? Or maybe it's that each ostensibly separate moment in historical time nests, each within the other, so that there is no present without its being contained by the past? Or might it be the simpler metaphor -- that historical time filters any view of the present (not unlike how the colored gels used by Temple's DP so dramatically filter our view of the action)?

Among the many ideas swirling in this film, I emerged most compelled by Temple's ideas about historical time because, partly, I found the film's telescoping/nesting/filtering to be so productively provocative (in contrast to the stultifyingly contrariwise trajectories of Fincher's Button). More substantially, perhaps, Absolute Beginners is a retro/pomo musical told through various pop styles, with the complex histories of each musical style underscoring each narrative beat of the film. Through thinking about Temple's approach to time, I finally caught a glimpse of why Absolute Beginners was a musical: pop music enlivens the past so that it and the present become contemporary and contemporaries. Few things anchor the accident of generational timing more than pop music and, in Absolute Beginners, Temple used the distinctively retro/pomo aspects of 1980s British pop music to telescope the intergenerational history of Britain's post-WWII transformation. It's a remarkable move, really. Very different than, say, the questions raised by what might be this film's closest cousin, John Waters's Hairspray (1988), and reason enough to warrant this attentive re/visit. Thanks for the challenge.

-- Brian Herrera AKA StinkyLulu
(see also my unedited ramblings on the film here)

Inside/Outside: Spatial Conflicts in Absolute Beginners

2008-12-28T11:23:00.000-08:00

- Hello all. My name is Glenn Heath, longtime hibernator, first time poster. I run a film blog called Match Cuts and enjoy teaching Film Studies in San Diego, CA. I look forward to the growing success and participation of this blog.

The opening sequence of Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners, anchored by a dynamic long take/tracking shot down a bustling London street circa 1950's, immediately establishes a racial barrier between interior and exterior spaces. Colin, Temple's hip young hero, glides through the thick crowds of various archetypes snapping pictures and introducing each with the efficiency of a true insider, while never losing the beat of the outside environment. Prostitutes, cops, sailors, and party-goers all mix to form a melting pot of exuberance. But this facade of multiculturalism reveals distinct fissures when Colin and his girlfriend Suzette exit a nightclub, the excitement of the party almost overflowing onto the street. They are followed closely by an interracial couple, Mr. Cool and Dorita, arguing about proper public etiquette for their relationship, with Dorita delivering a powerful finale - "It's one thing in there, but it's different on the streets."

This response foreshadows a building tension between contrasting races, classes, and cultures in Absolute Beginners, a defining theme that comes to violent fruition in varying ways. The film challenges this fear of progress and the need to keep it inside, or hidden from the outside world, while portraying youth culture as a complex and daring force able to overcome corporate greed and artistic bastardization. Amazingly, Temple sees hope in his spastic protagonists and dissects interior spaces to clarify their specific potential, ultimately separating them from the staggering disappointments of adulthood. If David Bowie's conglomerate King comes to represent the draw of selling out, Colin and inevitably Suzette overcome this enormous void of consumption (best displayed in Bowie's dance number) and seek out the hidden joys of struggle, of tolerance, and of artistic collaboration. But even in the final moments of victory, after the brutal and bloody riots consume Colin's vision of Notting Hill, there's a sense of urgency toward deflating the power of bigotry and hate, that such destructive qualities could still crop up in the darkest corners of society and grow into a pandemic.

Absolute Beginners might not be a great film, but it certainly has a lot of ideas on its mind. Maybe most interestingly, the film struggles to reveal how space directly reflects ideologies of all kinds, and how we view ourselves within these walls, real or imagined.

Playing Watchmaker

2008-12-17T22:22:00.001-08:00

Analyzing a movie can be like taking apart a mechanical watch. I imagine a Swiss pocket watch, with a chain that clips onto a vest pocket. Peter Rinaldi has written that Absolute Beginners is a movie that doesn't always work. It's the watch that has to be set a little too often. So let's play the repairman. Let's take the watch apart on our little work bench and break it up into the little gears and bits of sub-machinery that make it run. I'll use the above diagram, made in 1919 by Harry Chase Bearley, as my guide. So, loupe firmly planted in my eye, here are the first parts I see:

1.First or main wheel to which mainspring is attached

This large wheel makes me think of the revolving floor at the film's upscale party, which in turn made me think of the revolving stages used by well-funded theatres: the kind where several sets are built so that they can be rotated in and out between scenes.

Absolute Beginners is a film that could only be made on a sound stage and a back lot. The artificiality, the careful design of the settings, gives it a hyperreality unachievable in location shooting (conversely, there is a dream-like element that is only possible to achieve by shooting on location).

Another film springs to mind, made the year before: Year of the Dragon, by Michael Cimino. Cimino originally set out to shoot the film in Chinatown, but when that fell through, he had sets built in North Carolina (like the set of Leos Carax's Les Amants de Pont-Neuf, a gigantic recreation of Paris built in Montpellier). Had Year of the Dragon been shot in the real Chinatown, it would have been a very different film.

The cutaway set of Colin's house uses an image (found, as mentioned by Peter, in The Ladies Man, Tout Van Bien and The Life Aquatic, to name a few) that, despite its roots in theatre, has a fascinating effect in cinema. It allows us, in a single framing, to see several things going on at once, giving us a view of reality that's very different from the way we actually perceive it (see also: a previous Film of the Month, The Intruder). It is the ultimate wide shot, one that shows reality wider than we can ever actually experience it, showing connections between physically separated elements (another ancestor: the translucent floor in Hitchcock's The Lodger, which shows the feet of the upstairs neighbor; if there was ever an image that made a case against the concept of a "silent" image, this is it). This very complicated image is united by a single sound: a song.

8.Balance

Here is a movie that spends its first two-thirds as a musical comedy and then becomes a melodrama in the strictest definition of the term: a fictional performance (-drama) with songs (melo-).

3.Third wheel

Reading the name of this part makes me interpret it idiomatically, as the thing with no useful purpose that unbalances something. The extra person. But of course nothing is ever useless. An arbitrary addition creates something new. A work is made up of all of its elements, not just the ones that have a clear function. The credits in a movie last just as long as a scene, so why don't they ever get discussed (after all, they're part of the movie, too)? And the opening (photographs on a red background with the names of important individuals) and closing credits (scrolling upwards over a long shot of movie rain pouring down on the set) are set to the same song: "Absolute Beginners." Which points the way to the third wheel in the production: David Bowie, who gets high billing on most advertising for the film despite playing a fairly small part.

Bowie wrote the song to the film under the condition that he also got a role. It's Bowie's baritone ad man who steers the film towards Tashlin when it wants to go Minnelli. Bowie's musical number, it should me mentioned, was written by the singer himself .

9.Hairspring

The hairspring of a watch is the coiled piece of metal that regulates its movement. Our first instinct is to think of the script. First instincts must be resisted. Scripts have the distinction of being the only part of a film that can be tossed into a waste basket.

The film could be structured by the musical score, a combination (like the film itself) of a little original composition and a lot of adaptation, mostly of decades-old pieces. The bulk of it is by Gil Evans, but most of the musical numbers are composed by the performers: Ray Davies' "Quiet Life," the aforementioned Bowie song ("That's Motivation"), Tenpole Tudor's ode to Ted culture and the little cameo performances, like Sade's number in the club. Attempting to be commercially successful by cashing in on the popularity of these singers, the film gives the music the first priority in terms of how it should pace itself.

The "dollhouse-like/cut-out set/wide shot" study

2008-12-16T17:29:00.000-08:00

Tout Va Bien (Jean Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin; 1972)

Absolute Beginners (Julian Temple, 1986)

The Life Aquatic with Steven Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004)

Quiet Life

2008-12-15T23:15:00.000-08:00

Does anyone have a theory why Ray Davies' character sings directly into the camera for the Quiet Life number? No one else does. Gives it a very music video feel, no?

First Impressions of Absolute Beginners

2008-12-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

I'm Peter Rinaldi. I'm a filmmaker from New York. First time posting here. I also contribute various material to The Boutros Boutros Follies, including a film column called SIN-E-FILE, named after Godard's claim that he "has the sin of the cinephile". Nice to have this place to hang with fellow sinners.

This film selection is what FOTMC is all about. It is possible, though unlikely, that I would have eventually come across Absolute Beginners. But, without Mr. Vishnevetsky’s introduction, and the very nature of this “club”, I doubt I would’ve looked at it with the attention it deserves. I am a big Beatles fan and I walked away from a forced viewing of Julie Taymor’s Across The Universe with a sincere appreciation of Ms. Taymor as an artist. I feel like that experience prepared me and opened my mind wide enough to take in Absolute Beginners.

Watching it, I was reminded of Taymor’s film, along with One from the Heart and, and oddly enough, Do the Right Thing (Despite the race issues, which might make an interesting comparison, I’m speaking purely visually). And, as the camera kept moving, I couldn’t help but think perhaps Temple screened some Orson Welles and Max Ophuls in preparation for this ambitious undertaking. Some came before and some came after this 1986 film, but I think it is a stretch to think Temple was significantly influenced by, nor an influence of, any of these. [It can get silly to talk too much about influences. Take a look at this first line of an IMDB review. Maybe someone can tell me if this is joke: “Julien Temple's "Absolute Beginners" is probably more well known for it's breathtaking and legendary opening tracking shot through a gloriously campy backlot version of London's SoHo District (so influential it even served as an in-joke in Robert Altman's ‘The Player’)”]

Maybe we can discuss this, but I don't think Absolute Beginners is a great film. It doesn't have a depth that even approaches great work. But what is really fascinating for me is just how far it is from being a bad film, or even a mediocre film. This is where I am reminded of Across the Universe. A bad film is not one that fails. (What does "failure" even mean in art?) A bad film is one that is created without purpose, clear intent, without a singular vision. Temple has a vision with this film (like Taymor had with her film). It might be derivative. It might be corny, or even slightly embarrassing sometimes. But every shot seems to be done with a confidence and a force that is expressive and exciting. That can’t be said of even some great films. That alone might not make a film great, but it does make you keep watching with respect and appreciation. And all of the performances are on the same tonal page. Not an easy task with this kind of stylized work. This is the sign of a good director. The audience is never insulted. And if your mind is open enough, it is an enjoyable, even cinematically rewarding, time.
Thanks, Ignatiy, for this selection. I am excited to see what others have to say about it.

An (Absolute) Beginner's Guide to Framing in Cinemascope

2008-12-15T17:23:00.000-08:00

stills from Absolute Beginners

Why Absolute Beginners? (An Overture)

2008-12-15T12:57:00.000-08:00

Picking a topic for Film of the Month Club has an active element to it. When you pick a film, you're making a statement: you're telling everyone the sort of movie you'd like to see discussed. There's an idealistic element as well: your vision of Film of the Month Club, and of film discussion in general ("This is the sort of film we should be discussing.").

Chris Cagle e-mailed me a few months ago, asking whether I wanted to pick a film for Film of the Month Club to cover. I wrote back quickly: Absolute Beginners. A movie that doesn't have a very strong critical reputation, wasn't commercially successful, and doesn't even have a cult following that I'm aware of. It's, as auteurism has taught us, a "Julien Temple film," though I'd rather say it's a "movie directed by Julien Temple." It's neither refined nor always rewarding. It's undeniably a product of the great "lost decade" of cinema, the 1980s. So why Absolute Beginners?

A person writing critically (let's call him or her a critic, regardless of actual profession) should be able to write a hundred different essays about the same film, just as a filmmaker should be able to make a hundred films from the same set-up. This is does not invalidate criticism; it reaffirms it as a vital act. If there was only one correct answer, there would be no reason to ask questions, just as if there was a clear right and wrong there'd be no reason for morality or ethics.

Similarly, there is no right or wrong type of film to write about, no right or wrong directors. Many uninformative essays have been written about Fritz Lang. Many insightful things have been written about Tony Scott. It's rare that you read something original about film noir, yet people continue writing about it, when there are hundreds of equally valid genres that no one takes seriously (pornography, for one; American action films, for another). So my pick of Absolute Beginners represents a certain Utopian dream: getting a group of people to watch and consider a film no one watches or considers. To look directly into something that normally exists in our peripheral vision, that we only see out of the corner of our eye.

And the writers and the readers will find there's as much here as in any other film.

Kinship

2008-12-01T11:02:00.000-08:00

Compared to some of Su Friedrich's work, Sink or Swim is a film that does not directly address lesbian identity. Of course, there's no obligation for a lesbian filmmaker to thematize and foreground her sexual identity. But Friedrich often does, and in an autobiographical film about the filmmaker's frought relationship with her father, coming out, stigma, or navigating straight kinship as an adult lesbian never enter into the film. This flows, in part, from the appropriation of structural filmmaking to intermediate between Friedrich and the film's autobiographical persona.

There is one segment, though, in which lesbian sexuality appears directly. Titled "Kinship" the sequence continues a motif on kinship that runs throughout the film (her father, an academic, has written on kinship structure while being seemingly unaware of how his abstraction of kinship gets in the way of connecting with his own family). Yet the father is absent from this segment. Instead of the child's voiceover (a few other segments, like "Ghosts," lack it), a German lament plays (the leider her mother would listen to?) over three types of shots: handheld camera recording plane, train, and car travel; contemplative shots of nature, seemingly in the rural West; and two women in a sauna who eventually embrace under the shower.

Part of the power of the sequence comes from the lack of voiceover or sync sound accompanying the images and from the black leader before the final embrace shot.

A complexity meanwhile emerges from its uncommunicativeness in narration: we as viewers are not sure what the relation between these three strands, nor between a given strand and kinship. Even the connotation of the shots is unclear: is the lone figure in the desert landscape a sign or isolation or a marker of home movie accident? Is one woman in the shower consoling her crying partner, or are they embracing in romantic or sexual joy? This uncommunicativeness, of course, is the hallmark of experimental work which by nature tends to avoid programmatic meanings in favor of ambiguous and evocative ones.

But the step back from communication is itself, structurally meaningful in the film. Sink or Swim has a number of sequences, each with a range of communicative possibilities. In some, the image and sound line up. The image may not be the literal recording of the event described by the girl's voiceover narration, but it is consonant with it: shots of a lake, or of the filmmaker in her home. In others, the apparent mismatch is a device of defamiliarization; we come to see the drama related in the voiceover in unrelated events, such as children ice skating, or a first communion. Finally, as in Kinship, the mismatch between images and exposition opens up an interpretive breach into the film: what is the relation?

To my eye, the meaning is second order. The point of the segment is that lesbian kinship is distinctive, with its own emotional bonds, yet it is also difficult to express. Without actually saying it, the film seems to suggest that the lesbian (or maybe just the filmmaker herself) is isolated from straight kinship culture while also creating something of her own.

Sink Or Swim: An Alphabetic Countdown in Images

2008-11-17T04:34:00.000-08:00

[This is cross-posted with my blog Only The Cinema, where it is a part of my ongoing "Films I Love" series, which is intended to highlight my favorite films with a brief analysis and a selection of screenshots.]

Sink Or Swim, Su Friedrich's experimental short in which she attempts to express, through a wide variety of techniques, her ambivalent experiences with and feelings for her often-absent father, has a rigorous formal structure driving its autobiographical narrative. The film consists of 26 sections, each one titled with a single word, the first letters of which count down through the alphabet. The film opens with a segment titled "Zygote" and ends with a section that has three titles, all from Greek mythology: "Athena," "Atalanta," and "Aphrodite." There is one screen capture here from each of the film's 26 alphabetical sections, mimicking the film's structure and demonstrating the discrete feel and methodology of each separate part in the film's whole. The titles sometimes consist of deadpan jokes or puns (the "X Chromosome" section is simply a sustained shot of an elephant's trunk, for obvious reasons), but more often the titles relate obliquely to the images they introduce. There is, in addition to the stories provided by the film's voiceover, a secondary narrative running through the film that is sustained wholly by the titles and their relationships to the images. Friedrich's lesbianism is brought in almost exclusively in this way, particularly in the sections entitled "Temptation" (images of female bodybuilders) and "Kinship" (in which, at one point, an image of a lesbian couple embracing in a shower is slowed down and manipulated with video processing). These subtexts largely go unspoken, so that the film becomes a story about desire developing, placed in opposition to the filmmaker's antagonistic relationship with her father.

Sink Or Swim: Introductory Thoughts

2008-11-10T18:50:00.000-08:00

[This is cross-posted with my blog Only The Cinema. These are my introductory thoughts about November's Film of the Month. I will be posting in more detail about specific aspects of the film as the month goes on, but hopefully this will get the conversation started to some degree, both in comments and in other people's posts. If you haven't seen the film yet, I suggest you do so before reading, since the film (like all films, really) is best experienced with a fresh perspective.]

The title of Su Friedrich's autobiographical essay-film Sink Or Swim comes from the implied moral of one of the stories she tells about her relationship with her father, a robotically unemotional, distant, authoritarian figure for whom she holds very ambivalent feelings well into adulthood. In the story, she tells her father that she wants to learn how to swim, so he takes her to the deep end of the local pool, sits her down to explain the mechanics of swimming, and then simply throws her into the water to figure it out for herself. The lesson is obvious: learn to swim, or sink like a stone. This is a shocking story, a horrifying account of a father whose behavior towards his children at times verges on (or even crosses the line into) outright child abuse. And yet Friedrich presents the tale, as she does everything in the film, with a cool, even tone. The film is sporadically narrated by a young girl (Jessica Meyerson) whose childish, hesitant reading of the voiceover text gives the film the aura of a nostalgic ode to childhood, an impression that works against the sometimes horrific nature of the material being remembered. Friedrich deliberately distances herself from these intensely personal stories, searching for universality in her own life. The film is more than anything else an attempt to process and explore the ways in which childhood experiences shape a person's thoughts, attitudes, and outlook later in life.

The film is rigorously divided into twenty-six uneven parts, each of them corresponding to a letter of the alphabet, which proceed in descending order through the titles of the segments: "Zygote," "Y Chromosome," "X Chromosome," "Witness," and so on. This is the logic of childhood, attempting to arrange complicated events into nursery rhyme containers, a conceit that shows up in the soundtrack as well when the narrator murmurs sing-songy children's tunes or recites schoolyard poetry. The structure is complex and subtle, with texts and subtexts running in parallel through the visuals, the narration, and the one-word titles, which appear as onscreen text announcing each new section. The relationship between these three elements is complicated, sometimes coming together to enforce one another and enhance the overall point, while at other times the separate elements are telling different stories.

Early on, in a section titled "Utopia," the voiceover relates how Friedrich (always referred to as simply "the girl" from the film's third-person viewpoint) and her sister were not allowed sugar or TV as children, and how they got to indulge each of those luxuries once a week at a neighbor's apartment. There, the girls would get ice cream sundaes, sit in the dark and marvel at a televised circus. Friedrich accompanies this story, naturally enough, with circus images, but there is an undertone of forbidden sexuality in the images that is not present in the young girl's narration: a pair of circus performers, two shapely girls with horse tails and bare bottoms cavorting around; closeups on acrobats and strongmen whose form-fitting outfits emphasize their muscular bodies. This suggestion is carried over into the next section, "Temptation," which transitions naturally from the toned, athletic bodies of the circus performers to a closeup on the bikini-clad torso of a woman bodybuilder, while the voiceover describes the Greek myth of Atalanta and Hippomenes. The relationship between the images, titles, and voiceover in these two sections suggests an unspoken narrative beneath the text: the development of lesbian desire interwoven with a childhood fascination for mythology (those powerful, statuesque goddesses) and the carnivalesque. In this way, Friedrich explores the ways in which the child flows into the adult, without venturing into simplistic cause-and-effect chains. Rather, the film's unique structure allows her to view her life as a continuum, to see traces of various threads in her life as they develop through her personal obsessions and interests over time.

Among these, the most important thread is obviously her relationship with her father — and from that, the notion of fatherhood and parenthood as a generic concept. Friedrich explores this subject in many ways. Throughout the film, the voiceover returns periodically to stories about her childhood, usually illustrated with images that are only obliquely related to the story being told. The thrust of the film is to make its highly specific narrative more universal, to move away from this specific girl with her distant, somewhat abusive father (who ultimately leaves the family when Friedrich is around 11 years old). She is not talking about herself; she is talking about "the girl" and "the girl's father." And her images are often just as generic, just as timeless. She pairs the swimming anecdote with peaceful images of a community pool and the kids swimming in it. There is nothing to suggest the deadpan horror of the story itself. Later, after her father leaves, she describes her mother's erratic behavior, dispassionately recounting a scene where her mother placed Friedrich and her sister on a windowsill, high above the ground, and threatened their father, down below, that they'd all jump to their deaths. The father, true to his nature, simply stares at them, shakes his head, and walks away. This harrowing, unbelievable story (appropriately contained in a section called "Insanity") is accompanied by prosaic images of a hospital, suggesting the mental breakdown of Friedrich's mother following the divorce. When the story reaches its climax, the camera pauses, looking out a window, an unpopulated view substituting for the emotionally fraught content of the story.

This distanced, objective approach reaches its logical endpoint in the section entitled "Ghosts," which consists entirely of a static shot, manipulated to be a negative image, of a typewriter as Friedrich writes a letter to her father. Since the image is a negative, her words show up white on black paper, accompanied only by the sound of the typewriter. This is the most direct section of the film, in many ways: the only one in which Friedrich uses the "I" and discards the third-person disguise of the narration, and also the only one in which there is some direct sound. Throughout the rest of the film, the soundtrack is almost clinically clean and polished; whenever the voiceover pauses, which is frequently, there is complete silence. There's an aesthetic purity to this approach, and Friedrich only rarely compromises the soundtrack's dichotomy between minimal speech and absolute silence: in the "Kinship" section, she accompanies images of travel and a lesbian shower scene with a Germanic opera piece that her mother loved, and in "Ghosts" the typewriter clicks and clatters above a backdrop of tape recorder hiss, an intrusion of noise into the film's austerity. The text in "Ghosts," typed rather than spoken, is more directly autobiographical than the voiceovers, shedding the artifice of "the girl" to speak directly about how Friedrich's mother reacted to the divorce. It is the film's most personal and unmediated segment, but it is also aesthetically remote, forcing the audience to actively read this story as the words appear one by one, rather than simply listening as they had to the others. Even while briefly stepping closer to the material of her story, Friedrich makes sure that she does not eliminate the artifice that constrains her autobiography into a form where she can explore and examine it at will.

Throughout the rest of Sink Or Swim, Friedrich deals with her father's legacy in a more indirect, objective manner. One segment approaches him by discussing a book he wrote, which posited that the goddesses Aphrodite and Demeter, representing romantic love and motherhood, were once aspects of a single feminine diety, who was split in two because of men's discomfort with the dual nature of women. Friedrich cleverly illustrates this essay by alternating between pieces of art that could represent the two goddesses and their distinct aspects: for Demeter, Christian iconography showing the Madonna and child, and for Aphrodite, Japanese erotic prints. Friedrich subtly accentuates the surprising similarities between the two forms of art, bolstering her father's argument by transitioning from an image of the baby Jesus suckling at his mother's nipple to a much filthier image of a man nestling in his lover's breasts. In another scene, she attempts to understand her father in anthropological terms, filling the screen with a family diagram that traces her father's progress from Wife #1 to Wife #2 to Wife #3, but obviously explains little. Meanwhile, the sequence "Homework" is completely silent and consists only of images from 50s family sitcoms, showing a scrubbed, smiley vision of family happiness through a haze of static and video distortion. Friedrich lets these images sit without commentary, the media fantasies of fatherhood and family violently disconnected from her own experiences. The film fits all of these varied approaches and aesthetic techniques comfortably into its formal structure, as Friedrich uses all the means available to her to better understand and express the feelings and ideas brought up by thinking about her father.

November Film of the Month: Sink Or Swim (Su Friedrich, 1990)

2008-10-31T22:00:00.000-07:00

Hey there, I'm Ed Howard, a film blogger and comics blogger, and I've been asked to provide November's Film of the Month selection. I thought long and hard about this decision, and there were many films I considered, including some I hadn't seen and therefore wanted to explore for the first time. But ultimately I went with a somewhat safer choice, opting for a film I know well and in fact consider one of my favorite avant-garde shorts. It's also a film that's perhaps less known outside of super-specialized film "ghettos" like LGBT cinema, or simply avant-garde cinema in general. There's an unfortunate tendency to take films that deal with gay issues or other niche thematic concerns and to treat them as though they're only of interest to a small subset of the population. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the case of the remarkable filmmaker who I'm urging everyone to check out this month.

The film is Sink Or Swim, a deeply personal and formally imaginative autobiographical essay made by Su Friedrich in 1990. It's a rumination on her childhood, and especially her relationship with her father. I won't say any more about it here, and I'll leave it to each of you to discover the film's unique formal structures for yourselves. I know other posters usually include reviews at this point, but I would strongly warn you not to read anything ahead of time. There's no possibility of "spoilers," per se, but it's a film that's best experienced with very little idea of what it's like ahead of time. That said, if you have seen the film or really can't resist piquing your curiosity further, Fred Camper has written a really great analysis/review of the film. There's also an interesting review by Michael Zryd at Senses of Cinema.

For those who wish to follow my lead and watch Sink Or Swim this month, the film is available, along with most of Friedrich's other films, on DVD from Outcast Films. This DVD also features two of Friedrich's earliest short films, Cool Hands, Warm Heart and Scar Tissue, so you can catch a glimpse of the filmmaker's (relatively modest) beginnings. While I'd like to see everyone buy the DVD directly from Outcast, thus supporting a small DVD company, the film is also readily available from Buy.com (the cheapest price I see online), Amazon, Greencine, and Netflix.

The Narrative Seme

2008-09-24T07:29:00.000-07:00

L'Intrus wears its obtuseness on its sleeve, so it's not a stretch to posit that the film is as much
“about” the confusion in watching as it is about a putative narrative. Another way of saying this is that the film is a narrative that's also an experiment in narration. It's a tough (impossible?) narrative to parse out fully, and I cannot claim any special insight. What I'm tying to figure out – and I'd love to hear what others see – is how exactly the narrational experiment works. After all, it seems that L'Intrus is less capricious in its storytelling than in a rigorous presentation of information that induces confusion (among other responses) in the spectator.

The rigor, I suspect, lies in the heritage of the art cinema in L'Intrus as well as Denis's departures from art cinema. Like the art cinema, L'intrus plays with ambiguous presentation of narrative events. Unlike art cinema, it suggests that a coherent narrative exists behind the storytelling, that we are watching events excerpted and condensed to the straining point of comprehensibility. In this, the narration relies extensively on ellipsis and secondarily on the possibility that an abrupt cut signals not the usual ellipsis but flashforward, flashback, or subjective material (dreams?). The following shot sequence seems typical:

On one hand these seem to fall neatly into scenes (continuous time-place chunks of narrative): shots 1-2 end scene A (Hong Kong party), the last shot begins scene C (boat ride to Tahitian isle), and the ones in between comprise scene B (flight to Tahiti). On the other hand, the demarcation into scenes presents problems. First, while we as viewers of art and postclassical films are used to the "shock cut" transition to a new scene, all of the transitions in L'Intrus proceed the same way. That is, they lack the conventional "punctuation" signaling a scene transition (type of edit + timing of the edit in relation to the completion of screen action). The only way the spectator can create "scenes" out of the shots in L'Intrus is to recognize common characters and settings - they/we lack the cues in the editing. In art films, transition punctuation can be avoided selectively (one of my favorite examples is the shock cut in Il Posto from the New Year's party to solemn office) but is rarely ignored for the entire film.

Second, the scenes above cohere in space-time but aren't scenes as we often understand them. In a classical film, action is concentrated in scenes so that the action between scenes is insignificant. The above example would seem to follow this practice: it is not narratively important to see Louis leave Hong Kong, arrive at the airport, catch a cab from the Tahitian airport to the boat, etc. Yet, often the narratively significant action does take place between scenes.

The scene in which Louis wraps up the dead body is a case in point...

We do not know what becomes of the body, who the dead man is, how or why he ended up on Louis's property. (Tell me if I'm missing something!) In an art film or a post-classical puzzle film, this kind of enigma could be evoked only to be answered later one - the puzzle film, in fact, is defined by the tidy-ness in which it answers these enigmas. But without such resolution, shots and scenes like these function as pure, floating narrative semes, basic building blocks of narrative information that never actually build into anything.

Forgive me if I'm belaboring the obvious; I'm trying to articulate why I find the film so difficult and alluring. I'm certainly curious what others make of the film and its narrative stategies.

September: The Intruder

2008-08-31T21:09:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Marilyn for pinching during the summer doldrums here. I still have some things I want to write on Fireman's Ball, and don't mean to close down any discussion folks want to add, but I'm realizing it's time to announce another month's film. I decided to go this time, with a contemporary film, Claire Denis' L'Intrus/The Intruder (2005). It's readily available on DVD.

A festival hit from a now-established European art-cinema auteur, it's a film that I'm sure many will have seen already, but its aggressively experimental nature (among other things, it's an exercise in film narration) should give us plenty to talk about and justify members' close attention to the film. For neophytes, don't worry if it doesn't make much narrative sense at first: it's a challenging movie. I look forward to seeing what FOTM clubbers find in the work.

In the meantime, I am setting up a Google group for film club members. That way we can set up a schedule in advance, and I can keep the housekeeping discussions offline.

Chaotic Bodies: The Firemen's Ball Beauty Pageant (part 2)

2008-08-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

This is part 2 of my visual essay about the beauty pageant sequence of The Firemen's Ball, the first part of which is here.

The scene's furiously edited montage continues with a shot of a somewhat older woman being chased by the mob, dragged into the contest unwillingly along with all the younger girls.

Forman then cuts to another of his shots of disconnected bodies, the heads chopped off and unseen. In this shot, the man swooping up the woman in his arms always keeps his face turned away from the camera as he spins with her. The woman's face is hinted at, glimpsed briefly from around the man's arm, which mostly obscures her from view. Individual identity is continuously deconstructed and subverted in the film, as Forman tends to view people in the abstract, as symbolic representatives of groups and ideas rather than as individuals in their own right. This deinvidualization is superficially aligned with the tenets of Communism itself, but Forman's concept of the crowd is more subtle and ambiguous. On the one hand, he stresses the dehumanizing effect of such representations, critiquing the Communist understanding of individuals — and yet his crowds are also the site of anarchic communal energy and celebration. This dialectical tension between positive and negative interpretations of "the masses" runs throughout both this scene and the film as a whole.

Another cut back to the stage, where the announcers are growing tired of waiting for the chaos to settle down — and resigning themselves to the growing certainty that it never will subside anyway. Their authority melts further away each time Forman cuts to them, as they appear more and more frazzled with each shot. The next time Forman cuts back to the stage, later in the scene, the announcers are gone altogether, and they've left the crown lying on the stage unattended. In this film, the powers in authority have essentially abdicated their right to this authority through abuse and incompetence. On one level, the film is about the (rightful) loss of faith in sources of authority and order, and the by turns liberating and destructive chaos that results.

More wild fun in the crowd, a rare moment in which Forman privileges a woman's reaction amidst all this chaos, without chopping her up into her constituent parts. I'm not too sure why, but this girl at least seems to have been spared this treatment throughout the scene, as she appears several times, always with a greater than usual emphasis on her individual reaction. This is one of the elements that complicates Forman's understanding of communal representations — within his crowd scenes are reminders like this (and the shot of a girl looking out from between undifferentiated heads that I discussed in the first part of this article) that every crowd is composed of individuals, who occasionally demonstrate their individuality even in an amassed context like this.

The next three shots depict another breakdown in the scene's steadily disintegrating order. The one holdout from the beauty contest, the one girl who went up on stage — and also one of the few characters who is even given a name in this thoroughly homogenized society — finally decides to flee the stage. Earlier in the scene, her terrified, deer-in-the-headlights gaze was ambiguous, possibly caused by either the stage fright of being involved in the beauty contest to begin with, or by the confusion of the escalating riot heating up beneath the stage she's standing on. At this point, it becomes clear that her primary fear is the beauty contest itself, which places her in the public eye, probably for the first time in a culture built on crowds and groups.

Forman frames her flight with two male reactions to it. First, there's a shot of her father, who bullied her into the contest and begged the reticent firemen to include her, despite her rather obvious homeliness. His stunned, horrified reaction appears before we're quite sure what it refers to, and then in the second shot Forman traces the girl's mad dash to freedom in a stunning, rapid right-to-left tracking shot. She starts at the extreme right edge of the frame, running frantically across it as Forman's camera races to keep up with her, turning the background into a blurry smear behind her. In fleeing the spotlight, she makes herself the center of attention for a little longer, briefly the only individual singled out from the bleary crowd image. Forman follows this bravura pan with another static reaction shot, this one of the whole group of firemen, who share her father's chagrin.

This is followed by a sequence that leaves the main ballroom behind in order to trace the explosion of anarchy beyond the confines of the main room, as crowds flood out into ancillary areas and outside the meeting hall altogether. The cheerfully fleeing girls running upstairs to the ladies' room are confronted by one stern representative of the patriarchal order, in the form of the bald fireman who resolutely but vainly attempts to block the girls from running any further. The direct confrontation of the rioters with the forces of order results in victory for the forces of chaos, as they push past the fireman to get to safety. It's probably relevant, in the context of this film's theme of female sexuality, that the refuge they're seeking is an exclusively "women's only" area, one seemingly so sacred that the firemen never even think to violate it — their only recourse is to try to prevent the girls from entering the bathroom, not to enter it themselves and bring them out. This is also resonant with the obliviousness these men display about female sexuality, a cluelessness and hesitancy that borders on fear.

Forman then cuts back to the main ballroom, for one of my favorite shots of the film, and one that is perhaps most resonant with the subtle undercurrents of sexuality and individuality that flow through this scene. In her comments on the first part of this article, Marilyn Ferdinand mentions this later shot, saying: "Forman's peep show returns part of a woman's sexuality to her (I was particularly taken with the woman whose skirt rides up, revealing her stocking garters), but defines it in terms of the male gaze, particularly since the men are pushing the women around." This astute analysis of the forces at work here goes a long way towards clarifying what Forman is getting at in regards to Communism and the treatment of women. I think it's correct to say that Forman's sexualization of women is an attempt to free these women from the dehumanizing conformity of the mob, and that nevertheless this step towards liberation is compromised by the ogling male gaze of the firemen who judge these women by attempting to break them down. The firemen view women as assemblages of sexual characteristics, not as people, and Forman's camera frequently reflects this, commenting upon the lack of sexual and human imagination in these men. Even so, flashes of messy individuality and sexual liberation shine through: in the laughing girl carried aloft through the crowd, in the old woman who is, later in the scene, crowned beauty queen by the rioters, and in the garters that set this girl off from the anonymous crowd around her, even as she's unwillingly dragged into the mess along with them. Forman's mise en scène and framing generally confirm the prevailing anti-individualism of this culture, in order to better satirize it, but his sense for telling details continually undercuts and interrogates the assumptions of the firemen and the culture they represent.

There follows two more shots in which Forman once again drives home the profound loss of patriarchal authority in this scene. The first is a cut back to the stage which simply reveals that the announcers have departed since the last time Forman showed them, sweating and despairing. They've left the crown on the floor, amidst the wreckage of the celebration, and Forman's tight closeup on the crown is a reminder of the origination for this chaos, as well as a stand-in for the absent male presence on the stage. The second shot is another visit to the area outside the women's bathroom upstairs, where all the gathering forces of the firemen prove insufficient to coax any of the women back outside. The result is a pile-up of would-be authoritative figures outside the door, helpless to do anything other than amass themselves in an ultimately meaningless array. It's here that the firemen will, during a gap in the din, soon hear the telltale whining of a siren that calls them to action in order to fight a fire — which is, ostensibly, their whole reason for being in the first place, and at which they prove to be as inept as they are at staging a beauty contest or planning a party.

The final two shots highlighted here economically convey the essence of the scene, and of Forman's approach to this material. The shot of the crowd gathering together resolves the chaos of the preceding scene into a new sense of community, one forged from anarchic fun and destruction. Forman's wide view de-emphasizes the individual more than ever, melding each person into a whole crowd that fills almost every available inch of the screen. Just as the fleeing beauty contestants signaled the end of order as defined by the patriarchal, Communist firemen, the scene ends with the rioters crowning their own beauty queen instead, one selected from the mess of the crowd. The connotations of this moment are, in keeping with Forman's overall satirical viewpoint, somewhat ambiguous — are the rioters coming together in a meaningful way, or simply replacing the old communal order with one of their own, that merely eliminates the role of the individual in different ways?

Solidarity in character

2008-08-05T09:02:00.000-07:00

This is my first actual post on the blog for a few reasons. I wasn't able to get the last film between Netflix and the Virginia Tech library (which does have a pretty good selection) but also because the first film brought some pretty intimidating posts. I studied film as my concentration in undergrad and have done some research on film as a grad student thus far, but it seemed like most of the contributors for The Emperor's Naked Army were very well versed in the filmmaker and much of the history behind the film. That said, I decided to no longer worry about that. The idea behind this blog is great and I'm just going to contribute as much as I can with my limited experience.

Enough of that. I watched The Fireman's Ball last night and laughed my ass off the entire time. Simply as a comedy, Forman did an incredible job. The facial expressions on the bald fireman alone (especially while dancing in the circle of marching beauties) were worth the price of admission.

Besides enjoying it purely as a comedy I was impressed by the use of comedy so well as a tool for political expression. Ed's post is great at showing how much of this there is only in one scene. The thing that struck me last night was also the lack of individual identities throughout the film. Some of this might be because I was relying on subtitles, but I don't think it's all that.

There were some individuals which stood out. The 86 year-old former chairman is one, as well as the victim of the fire and Ruzena's father. Other than that, it seemed that the more important identity of most of the characters was the group they were a part of. Some firemen were more recognizable and more important, but they were most importantly part of the fire brigade. This is accentuated more when one of them chastises another for returning a stolen lottery prize by saying that the reputation of the brigade is more important than any honesty.

Similarly, most of the party goers seem to be more important as members of the crowd than individuals. The symbolism of the groups is fairly clear. The firemen are the authority trying to maintain control and run the system (however poorly) and the crowd as the people -- who steal and end up in a state of chaos. When the fire breaks out and everyone rushes out to go watch, workers at the ball attempt to collect on bills, but because of the disorganization of the system and the force of the mob this is almost impossible. Once outside, the manager of sorts continues to go around to people, but it's clear that the system has failed in the goal of collecting on all the bills.

A trip to IMDB confirmed this sense of collective identity as the primary one (at least as one of Forman's tools) as most of the cast members listed are named only as "committee member" or "'Miss' contestant." This most reminds me, of course, of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. I haven't seen many films from Russia or the (now former) USSR made before 2007's Night Watch, so this was the biggest connection I could make.

The use of collective characters, whether purely a result of soviet montage's influence or only influenced by it, not only makes the symbolism of each group stronger. It also makes the comedy stronger. Because I don't have to remember faces for names mentioned in the dialogue I'm able to concentrate on, and better appreciate, the wonderful action and interaction of each group involved in the beautiful chaos that Ed described so well.

Watching Fireman's Ball definitely makes me want to seek out Forman's other films, particularly The Loves of a Blonde, to see what his overall style is like. Great choice, Marilyn, and I hope to keep active in this community.

Slow Summer Posting

2008-07-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Marilyn for agreeing at the last minute to moderate this month's selection. I've been swamped with deadlines, so have the DVD sitting on top of my TV, but I plan to get around to writing a post. In the meanwhile, I'm extending this month's discussion into August to take into account the summer doldrums the groups seems to have navigated its way into.

We've had a rush of folks joining the group, and that's great, but hopefully ongoing we can get more active participation. I've been busy, myself, but I've also enjoyed the discussion here so far and want to see it grow. As always, suggestions for the group are welcome. Consider this a comments thread.

Chaotic Bodies: The Firemen's Ball Beauty Pageant (part 1)

2008-07-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

In The Firemen's Ball, Miloš Forman makes extensive use of a very crowded mise en scène in order to make his points about the absurdity and chaos of collective action in socialist societies. His frames are frequently packed with people, often moving rapidly and creating chaotic compositions that reveal isolated body parts and motion-blurred imagery. And yet, although Forman is attempting to capture the sense of chaos, his compositions still have a certain formal logic to them that defies their snatched-on-the-fly quality. This is especially true in the film's sublime beauty pageant sequence, a hilarious set-up in which the contestants all flee while the men in the audience attempt to capture them and, eventually, begin dragging entirely unrelated women on stage as well. This scene is particularly well structured despite its chaotic appearance, and Forman's formal and thematic concerns show through even in the most seemingly tossed-off visuals from this sequence.

For this reason, I wanted to do a close analysis of the beauty pageant scene, breaking it down shot by shot in order to discuss what Forman is doing here. My starting and ending points within the scene are fairly arbitrary: I start after the first contestant runs off, sparking the riot, and cut off slightly before the sequence's true end when the firemen hear the siren going off in the midst of the disorder. In between is one of the film's most rapidly edited and frantically paced sections, a masterpiece of madcap comedy where everyone looks like they're having a blast just filming it. I've broken this down by taking a single screen capture from each shot in this segment, in order to illustrate the ways in which Forman's seemingly unhinged depiction of the chaos at this party is actually built up from a meticulous sense of editing rhythms and an eye for striking compositions even within a frenzied environment.

The first shot of this sequence is a cut back to the main room after a (very funny) brief scene upstairs, where one of the committee members was attempting, in vain, to catch two of the contestants as they fled into the ladies' room. This shot introduces the more frenzied section of the scene, as the main ballroom degenerates into total chaos and the guys attempt to drag girls kicking and screaming onto the stage for the beauty contest. I've only selected one screen capture per shot here to keep this from being too long a post, but each of these individual shots changes quite a lot from one frame to the next, with the camera frequently swinging along to follow the actors in their rapid motion. These shots seldom settle into static compositions, but I think even these single frame grabs provide a sense of the movement and energy of this scene.

In contrast to the chaos of the party itself, the periodic shots of the announcers on stage are very static and stylized. Throughout the film, Forman maintains a rigid distinction between the way he films the brigade leadership (who represent the Politburo) and the people at the party (the proletariat). As in this shot, the committee members are inevitably presented with a somewhat distanced, formal quality that makes them seem especially absurd in the context of all the disorder surrounding them. Throughout this scene, in particular, the periodic shots of the announcers are islands of stability in a shifting sea. But this stasis does not have a positive connotation in any way. They are static, not because they are stable, but because they are helpless, paralyzed by the complete loss of control over what's happening. Forman is much more sympathetic to the wild partygoers who embrace anarchy as a response to their inept leaders; even if he sees this chaos as another symptom of a system out of control, Forman understands the urge to disorder when faced with such incompetently managed order.

One of the characteristic features of this sequence, and the film as a whole, is the way that Forman frequently breaks down the body in shots that emphasize human movement and the awkward, messy exigencies of body-on-body contact in tight spaces. In this case, of course, the tight space is mainly the constriction of Forman's own frames, which are usually surrounding quite a few people. The next four shots are briskly edited together with lots of camera movement, as well as people moving very quickly within the shot. These shots are also mostly focused below the waist, with legs figuring in very heavily. Forman seems to have a fascination with women's legs that goes beyond mere sexualization. The focus on legs here is linked with the sequence's locomotive sensation, honing in on straining leg muscles and legs in various positions of flight and maneuvering. The scene might even be read, with some admitted stretching, in proto-feminist terms, whereby the legs that men viewed as sexual objects (the committee members got down to ground level in an earlier scene to check out the gams of prospective contestants) now become the means of flight from a demeaning beauty contest.

The next shot cuts back to the face of the one contestant who is actually standing on stage at this point, the first girl to go up, not because she was particularly bold or untroubled by the process, but because her father literally pushed her into it. These periodic cuts to the stage throughout this scene are moments of stasis, providing a contrast against the rowdiness of the crowd. This stasis is fleeting, though. As the scene goes by, the stage becomes less and less reliable as a source of safety from the rioting masses: the one contestant on stage makes her own flight from the pageant, the announcers finally give up and sit down, leaving the crown on the ground, and finally the rioters themselves take the stage, crowning one of their own in a triumphant end to the festivities.

Forman next cuts back to the crowd, with a long shot of a group of guys lifting a laughing girl up onto a chair, followed by another close shot that emphasizes a woman's legs as she's carried around somewhat awkwardly.

The camera cuts back to the increasingly frustrated announcers, who by now are getting tired of holding the crown aloft awaiting its recipients, and who are on the verge of giving up for good. The slightly low angle of these shots, and the grandiose decorations on the stage behind them, sets up these figures as sources of authority, clearly placed on a higher plane than the audience. The joke is that their supposed authority turns out to be empty flourishes, as the contestants refuse to obey them in coming up on stage, and they can't even get the band behind them to keep playing without taking a break for beer — an unfortunate pause in the music that unfortunately gave the contestants just the excuse they needed to break loose in the first place. This brief shot of authority collapsing into acquiescence is followed by another of the scene's characteristic shots of men and women scuffling in the crowd. These shots are taken from ground level, keeping them at the level of the rioters' legs, thus signaling the disparity between the higher authorities and the common people below them. In this particular shot, the two people in the foreground briefly clench, then come apart as the woman pushes the man to the floor, the camera shaking slightly downward, cutting off her head and focusing more on her legs as the man's fall is completed.

Forman's attention to legs is at times matched by the impression he gives of a sea of anonymous heads forming a monolithic crowd. Part of the film's critique of collective action is the way it captures the loss of individual identity in large masses, and the crowd scenes frequently point out and comment on this anti-individualist aspect of groups. It's easy to see this de-individualization in the many shots of legs, feet, and torsos, disconnected from their owners, but Forman's critique is every bit as implicit in the shots that show heads and faces. Even in these shots, individual people are given only fleeting representation, their faces glimpsed momentarily and then lost in the sea of undifferentiated bodies around them. Forman's frame is frequently obscured here by cloudbursts of frizzy hair and blurry, indistinct outlines of the revellers' heads. The occasional recognizable individual, like the laughing girl in the second shot below, seem to be peering out at the camera from a great distance, lost in the swirling, non-stop motion of her surrounding comrades.

Another subtextual undercurrent in this scene is the way in which Forman treats parts of the female body usually associated with sexualized depictions, especially when they're emphasized as much as they are here. In another film, it would be hard to view an extreme closeup of a woman's butt as anything other than the most blatant of sexual exploitation on the part of the director. Forman's perspective seems to be quite distinct from this crudely sexual viewpoint. Throughout the film he points out the sexualization of women's bodies in wry, ironical ways, not at all sympathizing with the leering gazes of the firemen but instead pointing out their objectification. During the scenes where the committee members are picking their contestants, Forman continually mocks the ways in which these ridiculous men size up the women like cattle. There's a hilarious scene where the men can't decide which part of the women's bodies to look at, so they first circle the ballroom ostentatiously staring at the girls' faces, then they go up on a balcony to check out bust sizes and cleavage, and finally they're crawling around on all fours at leg level. This tendency to ridicule the men for their libidinous gaze is carried over into the scene where they make the women line up in formation, barking orders at them, and finally make them march in circles. During this drill-like pageant preparation, Forman's camera drifts down to chest level, focusing on the breasts of the women as they circle in front of the camera's stationary position. This camera placement isn't meant to give the audience any gratification, but to draw attention to the perspective of the men who are watching this spectacle; Forman simply shows us what they're seeing.

The similar shots in the context of the riot scene are not as obviously satirical — there is no observing male viewpoint for Forman to mock in this case — but they nevertheless serve a similar purpose by drawing attention to the way that the men attempt to violently, forcefully round up the women for the pageant, as though they're herding animals rather than recruiting contestants. The focus on the women's physicality, as they gleefully avoid capture, thus emphasizes the parts of their bodies that invite male attention, while simultaneously subverting this attention with the overall thrust of the scene.

Continue reading this article with Part 2.

The Firemen's Ball: Two Visions of Collective Action

2008-07-14T18:28:00.000-07:00

[This is cross-posted at my blog Only The Cinema. This is my general review of the film, an overview of its themes and visual strategies. I plan to write more in-depth about a few specific scenes later in the month.]

Made just before he left Czechoslovakia for the US, The Firemen's Ball was director Miloš Forman's first color film, his final film in his native country, and also the reason he had to leave his country in order to continue making films. It's easy to see why. The film is, quite obviously to both modern audiences and, apparently, Czech censors, a thinly veiled critique of the Czech Communist Party and, more audaciously, of the very idea of collective action that underpins socialism. This is a deadpan, hilarious satire, documenting a single night at a small-town party organized by the local fire brigade, honoring their retiring chairman on his eighty-sixth birthday (they missed honoring him on the more meaningful eighty-fifth, a year earlier, in the first of many fumbles committed by this incompetent assemblage). From the very beginning, even before the credits, Forman sets the scene for the idiocy to come, as the firemen accuse each other of stealing the prizes from the night's lottery fund, and set fire to the banner that was to hang above the hall during the ball. The fact that they're unable to even operate the equipment to put out this small-scale blaze is both the first comment on the extent of their incompetence and a bit of foreshadowing for the film's surprisingly poignant climax.

Of course, things only get worse from here. These are men who can manage to screw up the process of selecting beauty contest participants in what seems to be a ballroom positively crammed with attractive young women. Their chosen finalists are either aggressively plain or exaggeratedly awkward, like the girl who pads her bra to such an extent that her dress seems to be held away from her body on tent posts. Forman simply lets absurd scenarios like this play out in natural ways, sticking with this anonymous and ridiculous committee as they bungle their way through every aspect of the party's planning. Over the course of the evening, the table piled high with lottery gifts is slowly emptied by multiple (and unseen) thieveries, young couples copulate under tables, the chairman seems senile and lost, and keeps executing a slow, stately walk towards the stage at completely inappropriate moments, and the beauty contest itself falls apart, in one of the film's most hysterical scenes, when the contestants all get cold feet and begin fleeing.

Forman stages all this in an atmosphere of rapidly escalating chaos, as the party spirals completely out of control. His camera is intimate, casual, and perfectly attuned to the spirit of anarchic insanity running throughout this room. Indeed, Forman often seems to be taking gleeful pleasure in the lunacy going on everywhere. His mise en scène encompasses, essentially, two different visions of collectivity: the ordered committee action of the party organizers, and the wild, unfettered anarchy of the party itself. For Forman, both of these possible outcomes are equally absurd, and both are clearly tied to aspects of Communist society — just as the fire brigade stand in for the Communist Politburo, the partygoers are the proletariat, trapped within an absurd situation with absurd leaders, and forced by these circumstances to act in dishonest and despicable ways. This is a system that privileges dishonesty. Confronted with the fact that all the lottery prizes have been stolen, the fire committee decides that the people who didn't steal will just have to think of it as if there was a lottery and they didn't win. After all, everyone bought tickets; those who stole the prizes were simply the winners. When one of the committee members has an unusual attack of guilt and is caught attempting to return a stolen prize, his comrades are angry at him, not for stealing (that's expected), but for trying to return the prize, thus damaging the reputation of the fire brigade.

Forman's framing of the fire brigade inevitably enforces the point that they are nominally in charge but crippled by their indecisiveness, incompetence, and corruption. The group is almost always photographed together, seldom with the members isolated from one another for any length of time — the exception is when the one member has his moment of repentance. Most of them are not even given names. They are anonymous figureheads, an idealized group that acts together with no trace of individuality. Or so goes the Communist theory, Forman seems to be saying wryly. In practice, his head-on depictions of these men, massed into groups, projects an image exactly the opposite of the unity and collective action that is the ideal of socialist politics. As they cluster into tight formations, staring tentatively and fearfully at the camera, they look lost, like scared individuals trying to hide within the safety of a larger group. Forman's perspective, his deadpan camera angles and his objective distance from the assembled old men, gives them a pathetic quality that's heightened, not lessened, by their collectivity. It's this subversive questioning of collective action that is most radical in Forman's film, and is probably what the Czech censors responded to the most ferociously, even if it only registered with them subconsciously.

Not that "the people" make out any better here. The leadership may be idiotic, but the people they're leading are stubborn, unwilling to be led, and forthrightly dishonest. If Forman's vision of committee leadership is marked by its static angles and clustered compositions, his party scenes have a wildness and spontaneity that presents the reverse of this rigidly absurd group leadership. These scenes are chaotic accumulations of bodies whirling and flying past, often broken down so that only body parts can be seen. Individual shots focus on the legs of the dancers, or their arms and torsos in the midst of a frenetic riot, or their amassed heads in a sea as they listen to a speaker on stage. Best of all is the complete breakdown of order that accompanies the beauty contest, as the contestants run away and the crowd quickly degenerates into chaos, with crowds of guys attempting to corner the women and drag them on stage, throwing girls over their shoulders, even roping in girls who hadn't been in the contest to begin with. It's a masterpiece of completely unrestrained society, "the people" breaking loose of their inept masters and having fun watching the destruction of their social order. But Forman's editing in this scene is also surprisingly crisp, his images maintaining the perfect economy of his more structured compositions even when the stampeding revelers seem to be disrupting any semblance of order. Forman's portrait of disorder is perfectly conceived, achieved with a natural sense for visual rhythms and purely visual humor.

The Firemen's Ball is a delightful film, but also a film with a very serious heart beating beneath its surface humor. As the film's climax reveals, the incompetence of the fire brigade, which seems so comical in the context of a disastrous party, can also have serious consequences when applied to real world matters. When these bumblers are placed in charge of not a beauty contest but of public safety, the true extent of their bumbling, and its horrifying results, becomes readily apparent. This is why the sequence of the old man's house burning, placed where it is within the film, is so heartrending. As Forman cuts precisely back and forth between shots of the consuming, brilliant fire and the emotional faces of the observing crowd, the hopeless non-efforts of the firemen to extinguish this blaze are not funny, but incredibly depressing. The same could be said of the later scene where the committee members even bungle the presentation of an award to their former chairman, who is now dying of cancer. This old man's quiet dignity and patience in the face of the evening's many disasters make a mockery of the committee's ham-fisted attempts to honor him. A decent man in a corrupt system, he is entirely out of place here, and he becomes a victim as a result. This is a hilarious film, but its humor is cut with bitter satire, with a deep disgust for the absurdities of the political system of Czechoslovakia at the time.

I Laugh at Danger! Milos Forman and The Firemen's Ball

2008-07-13T10:48:00.001-07:00

by Marilyn Ferdinand

I went to my dentist's yesterday. I’ve been seeing Dr. Hamilton for more than 25 years and always assumed from his accent and attire that he was German. I got a real surprise when he revealed that he was Czech and had grown up in Prague, a couple of blocks from the old city square, just around the corner from where Franz Kafka grew up. Naturally, I couldn’t believe the serendipity of learning my long-time dentist was Czech on the same day I planned to write my FOTM Club post on The Firemen’s Ball. We talked about Miloš Forman, and Dr. Hamilton related some fascinating film and moviegoing experiences he had had in Czechoslovakia. He said he had a great story for me:

There used to be a tank on a pedestal in Prague that was supposed to have been the first Soviet tank to move into the city to liberate it from the Nazis. “Naturally,” Dr. Hamilton said, “It was a propaganda lie. The Czechs rose up against the occupying Germans as Berlin was falling and drove them out themselves.” When he went back to Prague after a 25-year absence, he asked his cab driver if the tank was still there. “Oh no, that’s long gone,” the cabbie said. When the Communists were falling, the Czech citizens stole into the night and painted the tank pink. The Russians were so embarrassed, they took it down—pedestal and all!

I couldn’t have had a better picture of the Czech spirit, as explicitly captured in The Firemen’s Ball, if I painted it myself.

The Firemen’s Ball was the last film—and the only color film—Forman made in Czechoslovakia. The warm reception of his second full-length feature, The Loves of a Blonde, helped convince producer Carlo Ponti to provide the financing that made color shooting possible. Forman and his creative partners, Ivan Passer and Jaroslav Papousek, holed up in a small Czech town to concentrate on writing the screenplay. After days of producing one bad scenario after another, the men decided to relax their minds at a firemen’s ball being held in the town that weekend. Afterwards, the ball was all they could talk about. Thus, The Firemen’s Ball was inevitable, and they were able to enlist many of the actual firemen and people in the town to appear in the movie.

When Ponti saw the film, he hated it so much that he exercised his right under his contract with the Czechoslovakian government to have his $65,000 returned. Forman faced 10 years in prison if he could not pay the government back; fortunately, he was able to show the film to Claude Berri and Francois Truffaut, and they paid his debt. Nonetheless, the government banned the film; it was unbanned for a few months in 1968 when Alexander Dubček came to power and then rebanned forever from its native screens—how absurdly Czech!

What was it about this film that Ponti and even the more relaxed Communist government of the 1960s so despised? It made fun of the proletariat! While there’s no question that the Czech people come in for some ribbing—donating raffle tickets for odd prizes that are slowly disappearing from a “guarded” table to a man who has just lost his home in a fire—the disorganized system of committee rule and the obedient functionaries of Communism are the main targets.

It’s not hard to see how the board of the firemen’s association is a stand-in for the Politburo that can’t bring order to chaos or basic goods and services to the people. Along with the party goers, we watch “Granddad’s” home blacken and burn because the fire truck is stuck in the snow; meanwhile, the capitalist ballroom owner walks through the crowd collecting on bar tabs and sets up a table from which to continue to sell drinks.

I am perhaps most intrigued by the 86-year-old former chairman of the firemen’s association who is to receive an award—a miniature, engraved axe—for his dedicated service over the years. It is to be presented by the winner of an impromptu beauty contest that, due to its runaway contestants, never takes place. The old man starts a straight, dignified walk toward the stage as the first contestant is called. He must be called back. He sits. He waits patiently as one disaster after another befalls the committee and the ball. At the very end, he alone remains in the trash-strewn ballroom. The committee hastily retrieves the box containing the award and decides to present it themselves. The old man moves forward, takes the box, and recites his carefully prepared and somewhat lengthy speech. When he opens the box, he finds the axe has been pilfered, too.

This old man is something of an enigma to me. He’s certainly the loyal Communist who comes up empty-handed in the end because of the of the system’s misshapen supply-demand curve. He’s also a leader blind to everything but his own role, the perfect bureaucrat in a broken chain, as well as a man (system) who is dying of cancer who has not been told he is ill. Finally, of course, he is an ordinary citizen who is degraded by the petty thievery of an item that can mean nothing to anyone else. This theft is both humorous—a raspberry in the face of the leadership—and a sad way for a fellow human being to be treated. Despite its high comedy, it’s no wonder the film has been called highly pessimistic.

The contemporary film movements from former Soviet Bloc countries—particularly Romania and Bosnia—identify with their traumas and open their veins. The Firemen’s Ball, though pessimistic, reflects the Czech sensibility characterized by an appreciation for the absurd, a howl of laughter in the face of danger. Forman, the only member of the Czech New Wave to have a highly successful career outside of his home country, has focused on some of his early concerns in other films (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ragtime, The People vs. Larry Flynt) but without the giggles. I hope Forman finds a tank in the near future that needs a new coat of paint.

July's Film of the Month

2008-07-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

Hello, FOTM club members and interested readers. Marilyn from Ferdy on Films, etc. here. The club has been a bit sparse for participation this summer—yes, we’d all rather be enjoying the summer (at outdoor film venues, perhaps?)—but the club meetings march on. Chris has asked me to pick the film for this later-than-usual start for the film of the month. I’ve chosen a film I haven’t seen but that will help with the survey I’m currently doing of the works of Milos Forman, namely, The Firemen’s Ball. My interest stems from a retro Facets Multimedia had of Forman’s Czech films and my own continuing interest in films from the Balkan/Soviet Bloc region. I’m not well versed in films of the Czech New Wave, so I hope to broaden my knowledge of this movement. I hope club members with knowledge in this area will step up with what they know. For a good overview of the Czech New Wave, read Andrew James Horton’s primer at GreenCine.

Because we’re getting a late start, I’m going to post on the film by July 13. As always, feel free to post before I do.

The Firemen’s Ball is available for rent or purchase (Criterion Collection) on Region-1 DVD through all the usual sources.

Is This Utake Abe?

2008-06-29T23:59:00.000-07:00

One of the more intriguing minor characters in the Golden Chance is pictured to the right. He's a servant to Wallace Reid's fabulously wealthy Roger Manning. He may be Manning's valet. (Though Lucien Littlefield also makes an uncredited appearance early in the film performing a valet's duties.) He arrives late in the film, seeming to perform more of a porter's function. In the final sequence he functions as the "hero's sidekick" when he's charged with fetching the police to rescue Manning from a sticky situation in a rough part of town.

The same actor appears in the Cheat. He has a small role in both of these two films that DeMille shot at the same time toward the end of 1915. In this one, he plays a servant to a fabulously wealthy ivory merchant named Tori played by Sessue Hayakawa- the future Oscar-nominee's star-making role. Gene Ringgold and DeWitt Bodeen's 1969 book the Films of Cecil B. Demille identifies the actor as Utake Abe. Abe's imdb profile lists many variant spellings and alternate names for the Kyoto-born actor who acted in a number of Hollywood pictures in the teens and early twenties, before returning to Japan to become a notable film director. Joseph L. Anderon and Donald Ritchie's 1982 expanded edition of the Japanese Film: Art and Industry describe the beginnings of (as they spell it) Yutake Abe's directorial career:

Comedy, long neglected in pre-1920 Japanese films, was now coming into its own, the form receiving yet further impetus when both Yutake Abe and Frank Tokunaga returned to Japan. The former had been working in Hollywood - as a butler duting long periods of "at liberty" as an actor - and came home just in time to see what [director Yasujiro] Shimazu was doing in the way of comedy. Abe's long American training had given him a profound dislike for the Shimpa style, and shortly after his return he began creating films which brought to the new comedy speed, sharpness in editing, and sophistication.

Abe would make the first film to top the annual critics' poll held by the film magazine Kinema Junpo, with his 1926 comedy the Woman Who Touched Legs, which was remade by Kon Ichikawa in 1952 and by Yasuzo Masamura in 1960. Another film Abe directed that year, Mermaid of the Land, came third in the same poll, just edging out Teinosuke Kinugasa's a Page of Madness (Minoru Murata's the Sun, not to be confused with the Kinugasa film bearing that name, came second). Abe would continue a long career as a director, making what Anderson/Ritchie call "ultra-nationalistic" war films in the early 1940s, but continuing to work through the U.S. post-war occupation period and into the 1960s.

Interesting stuff, but perhaps a major sidetrack, as no other source I've seen confirms that Abe is the same actor who appears in both the Cheat and the Golden Chance. Many sources, including Robert S. Birchard's Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood, identify him as playing Tori's valet in the Cheat. However, there are two distinct actors whose characters performed as servants to the ivory king. Either might be considered a valet, and the one pictured to the left is the one with a title card of dialogue in the film (the closest thing silent films had to "speaking parts" I suppose). The question becomes, how reliable is Ringgold and Bodeen's information? As a researcher I've grown to become wary of the accuracy of data found only in a single secondary source and not corroborated. I'd love to be pointed to another source with a picture of Abe, whether in the Hollywood or Japanese phase of his career. I'm on the list to receive Daisuke Miyao's book Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom when a copy arrives at my local library, in the hopes that Abe is discussed or pictured. Anyone else have any guesses on leads?

Whether it's Abe or another man, I remain curious about the actor who played an on-screen servant to both the heroic Wallace Reid and the villainous Sessue Hayakawa at precisely the same moment in film history. What stories could he tell of the film industry attitude toward Asian-born actors in Hollywood at the time? What would he say about Hayakawa? About DeMille? I'd love to know.