Where the Stress Falls

Critical Thinking

It's been nearly two months since I last posted here, and in that time I've felt an increasing need to catch up, not only with films and my own writing, but with those of you who read this blog regularly. I have some things on the horizon and hope sincerely that I can get to them soon: about mainstream studio films, about Arnaud Desplechin, about jazz and Miles and tradition and tributes. Just this week, though, I've discovered several items that I'd like to relay and respond to immediately. The first, via Girish, is an incisive take-down of Richard Brody's recent biography of Jean-Luc Godard, Everything Is Cinema (Metropolitan Books, 2008). I've read the book in parts, have considered it instructive in some ways and bizarre in others, and recently alluded to its rather untenable interpretation of Vivre Sa Vie. As Adrian Martin points out in his review, "Brody is a film critic for The New Yorker -- and Everything Is Cinema is definitely a New Yorker's view of Godard ... the book springs from a peculiarly American projection of French society and culture." In addition:

Godard is no longer a citizen of the world, no longer someone who interacted with fellow filmmakers such as Poland’s Jerzy Skolimowski, Italy’s Bernardo Bertolucci, Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Georgia’s Sergei Paradjanov. He mainly seems, in Brody’s account, to be on planes between France and the US – at least until he relocated to Switzerland, where he is based today. But the Switzerland of this book is just a picture postcard of lakes and restaurants, not a living, breathing, troubling society which Godard depicts in films including the magisterial Nouvelle Vague of 1990.

Yet the issue extends beyond critical interpretation of a filmmaker, his films, or the milieu in which he works. Brody, as Martin explains, makes dubious, unsubstantiaed claims for Godard's alleged anti-Semitism and seems fixated on the director's supposed perverse sexual interest in very young actresses. All in all, Martin's review is instructive not only for those interested in Godard but for anyone interested in the methods of film criticism, even those of biography. As a professionally trained historian, I've learned much about how vital evidence, verification, and methodology are, and how important balance and reasoning become in the writing of any account or life. I believe Martin's review is an important reminder of all that.

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Speaking of the practice of criticism, Walter at Quiet Bubble put up a nice piece on film critic Stanley Kauffmann, who has been writing for The New Republic since 1958. Walter is right; few cinephiles and critics seem to mention Kauffmann, much less read him, and I'm as guilty as anyone. Kauffmann's collection of reviews, Regarding Film, was one of the first books on film I purchased when I first began taking cinema seriously about six or seven years ago. In the long run, Kauffmann never figured as an extensive influence on my own writing; Susan Sontag would reign supreme in this regard, and in the years since my initial introduction to Kauffmann, I've shelved his book to look at those of others. Walter's post, though, reminds me that Kauffmann is a refreshing response to the prevailing emphasis on auterist criticism, which (incidentally) I happen to find valuable and which I engage in, but which, as Kauffmann suggests, is not the only way to think about movies. My own affinity with Kauffmann, however, lies in a different, albeit related, arena. I've not talked much on this blog about my own critical agenda, but I have one. In addition to the formalism and the auterism that I've adopted and which have aided me in understanding both the mechanics and meanings of films, I try to practice what might be called a humanist-centerd criticism; film, as the writer Wallace Stegner once said about fiction, "is people", is about experience, and I prefer criticism that is attuned to this. Or as Kauffmann himself wrote in a prefatory note in Regarding Film:

Graham Greene, who was a film critic from 1935 to 1941, wrote during his tenure, "Life as it is and life as it should be: let us take that as the only true subject for a film, and consider to what extent the cinema is fulfilling its proper funtion." This principle, wildly inappropriate though it may seem in numerous instances, is nonetheless insistent. Let's add only that "life as it should be" is less defined by the critic than it is envisioned by the artist. That vision, in whatever species of film, breezy or grave, is the critic's basic concern.

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Chris and Paul Weitz's About a Boy (2002), which I've revisited recently, has more than a hint of obviousness to it: as characters and voice-over narration observe repeatedly, no man is, or should be, an island; everybody needs community, friendship, "back-up", as the young Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) says; Will, the man-child played by Hugh Grant, will slowly learn the importance and value of responsibility and purpose. But the film is charming and has its moments and, like Stephen Frears' High Fidelity (also based on a Nick Hornby novel), makes telling suggestions about men who know much about inanimate things, such as the best records to buy, but not much about life. While watching the film this week, I noticed a shot I hadn't really noticed before. On a Christmas Eve, Will has gone shopping to purchase a copy of James Whale's Frankenstein on DVD, which he will watch, all alone, at home. On his way out of the store, Will rides up the escalator by himself, while the down escalator is crowded with shoppers. The shot is essentially a diptych that underscores Will's habitual detachment from people and illustrates the film's general visual coherence. I certainly wish the Weitz brothers would have expressed their ideas and the story's themes more through these visual means and less through dialogue and voice-over, but I thought this was a nice touch nonetheless.

I hope to return soon.

Reconsidering Godard

Jean-Luc Godard has been enjoying a minor renaissance. Since 2005, two new, thorough biographies have appeared; Colin McCabe's Godard (2005) evaluates the director's life and work through his seventieth birthday while Richard Brody, in Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (2008), examines the films individually and chronologically, chapter by chapter. In addition, a group of critics and scholars collaborated on a critical reassessment in the book For Ever Godard, published in 2007. Last year, a new 35 mm print of Godard's Vivre sa vie appeared, and Criterion released a remastered edition of Pierrot le fou. All of this suggests that critical interest in Godard is as sharp as ever, and I welcome the interest; Godard's work forms the foundation of my own experience of the cinema, and as the conversation about his work expands, that foundation only strengthens. I have to admit, though, to mixed feelings about the books, particularly the biographies, each of which seemed to promise more critical and aesthetic analysis than either offered, and yet I credit my reinvigorated interest in several of Godard's films to their appearance. Brody's commentary, for example, on Vivre sa vie had me revisiting the film for the first time in a while, and I realized, once again, how notable the film's achievements are: Godard's breaking of conventional rules of style and narrative, his use of literary and textual references, the film's inevitable course into philosophical dialogue, its thematically relevant but entirely self-conscious cinematic allusions, and cinematographer Raoul Coutard's adept use of natural light. The opening sequence still seems fresh; Godard reveals only the backs of Anna Karina's and Andre Labarthe's heads, even though they're central characters engaged in an important conversation. As Vivre sa vie nears its final acts, Karina and philosopher Brice Parain discuss the philosophy of language, and then, in a subsequent sequence, the film momentarily exchanges printed subtitles for characters' speech. But I was struck most by the film's sense of irony and its tragedy. Karina talks about responsibility, freedom, and individual action, and yet she is thrown by need and circumstance into a life of prostitution, becoming the victim of a capitalist culture that trades bodies as commodities and that forces people in need to fend for themselves, even if doing so entails forms of involuntary servitude.

Vivre sa vie is a portrait in tableaux, not a polemic, and Godard's efforts at explicit political commentary would really arrive only years later, beginning with Weekend (1967). Yet, while its suggestions about commodification and capitalism form only an undercurrent, they are nevertheless fairly insistent. This is why I'm mystified by Brody's statement that "the film is constructed as a cautionary tale of the wages of infidelity" (p. 139). At the movie's heart lies a montage of Karina meeting men in hotel rooms while her pimp, heard in voice-over, explains the rules of the profession; the film shifts into pseudo-documentary here, becomes almost clinical, as if to clarify both its intent and its underlying concern. While Karina's fortunes might have been different had she not abandoned her lover at the film's beginning, Godard's target, if he has one, is material culture, not a personal impulse.

In Praise of Love, which I revisited this week as well, bears more similarities with Vivre sa vie than the forty years between them might suggest: Godard's passion for Paris' landscape, his keen sense of visual composition, his mastery of the very medium of film (here, black-and-white film and color video), the characteristic literary and cinematic allusions, and Godard's sensitivity to tragedy, ranging in this case from love and suicide to war, genocide, and daily survival. But this Godard -- McCabe's seventy-year-old auteur -- is more blatantly polemical than his younger self; the film's anti-Americanism and repeated statements about the United States' lack of history come across loudly and clearly, particularly as the film shifts in its second half into a diatribe about a fictional Hollywood corporation's decision to purchase the story of former French Resistance fighters for a film to be directed by Stephen Spielberg. This act, Godard, implies, is nothing more than cultural and historical co-optation. He also makes the tenuous suggestion that modern capitalism, which drives Hollywood, "colonizes" (as Sight and Sound put it) the way Nazism once did and that capitalism, therefore, also demands fierce resistance. Some of Godard's claims, spoken by his characters, ring fairly hollow, and his anti-Americanism belies the passion he once had for American culture, Hollywood B-movies, and American genre films. But In Praise of Love, like Vivre sa vie, has something provocative to say about the commodifying nature of a purely capitalist culture, which has forced an aging couple to sell their story of the Resistance to save their property and has transformed Hollywood, an institution that once inspired Godard to revolutionary acts of movie-making, into an imperialist entity. And, to be honest, the film's aesthetics, and its humanism, make these ideas quite palatable. The beauty of Godard's black-and-white images, the long takes on people's faces, the melancholic musical refrain heard repeatedly throughout the film, the close-ups on personal objects, the observation of daily Parisian life, the shots of lone individuals, or lovers, on street benches suggest that anger is not the only underlying emotion in this film. In Praise of Love is a much warmer, more personal work than some of Godard's previous films and seems centered on a sincere concern about what impersonal economic systems can do to people, on the importance of history and personal memory, on the need for individuals and entire cultures to form and understand their own identities.

Playlist

Every three months or so, it goes something like this: a mountain of grading; exam prep and design; book orders; appointments and meetings; another mountain of grading; last-minute lecture tweaking; endless email; yet another mountain of grading. I often call all this the "deluge," that massive, unavoidable tidal wave that arrives at the end of an academic quarter. It partly explains the radio silence as of late, and it will definitely keep me from blogging in-depth, particularly about film, for about another week. But I'll return soon. In the meantime, I thought I'd resurrect my semi-regular playlist of recommend recent listening, joined this time around with several links to new material.

Playlist (all are 2009 recordings unless stated otherwise):

Bach, Violin Concertos. Julia Fischer, violin; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

Neko Case, Middle Cyclone.

Marilyn Crispell, Amaryllis (2001). A subtle work from one of jazz's leading avant-garde pianists. I think the recording is out-of-print, but it's available from various online vendors in an all-digital version.

Dave Holland Quintet, Points of View (2000)

Enrico Rava, New York Days.

M. Ward, Hold Time.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Is Is (2007). Though not a full-length album, perhaps my favorite effort by them -- or, at least, their most consistent work (perhaps not saying much, since Is Is contains only five songs). Looking back from 2009, I wonder if this was their swan song to their guitar-heavy, drum-pounding sound.

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Some worthwhile music online:

Chromewaves is streaming the entirety of Metric's new album (official U.S. release is April 7).

The National have a new single; Chromewaves provides the link (scroll to the bottom of the post).

Yeah Yeah Yeahs also have a new single: "Zero", from their forthcoming (March 31) album, It's Blitz. They've abandoned the loud guitars to go, well, disco, or at least in the direction of Giorgio Moroder. Either way, the new guise seems to suit them. "Zero" has quickly become one of my favorite tunes of this relatively young year. You can stream the tune at their site. Here's the official video (via Chromewaves).

Finally, might this be the best new band of 2009? The prolific Jack White teams with members of The Raconeteurs, Queens of the Stone Age, and -- get this -- Alison Mosshart of The Kills for a new group called The Dead Weather. They have an album arriving in June and have already released a single, "Hang You From the Heavens". My Old Kentucky Blog has the tune.

For several years, Mosshart has been competing with Liela Moss of The Duke Spirit as my favorite rock frontwoman, and moving into a supergroup with Jack White helps her case. Here she is performing The Kills' "Goodnight Bad Morning" at Abbey Road with bandmate Jamie Hince. He's out-of-tune (it might be intentional), but Mosshart sounds great. I particularly like the way this video is shot: the roving camera, the shallow and shifting depth-of-field.

Appreciating Coraline

Henry Selick's Coraline certainly has some of the hallmarks of the American children's story: a child, feeling neglected by her parents, voluntarily gets lost in an alternate world; over time and through experience, she learns the virtues of resourcefulness and self-reliance; friendship is invaluable, as is one's imagination; and the list goes on. But Selick's film is far more than a run-of-the-mill children's story and, instead, is something in the realm of cinematic experiment and modern parable. Selick's resurrection of the painstaking process of stop-motion animation distances it from an industry dominated by CGI while it simultaneously wows anyone sensitive to the discipline and artistry of this old-fashioned form of animation. His groundbreaking use of 3D has a similar effect; the multiple dimensions here are immersive, not sensationalist, and so Selick's film transcends those earlier experiments in 3D that served up the occasional gotcha moments to audiences at suburban multiplexes in decades past. In the process, the film provides something fairly close to what 3D ideally should be. The stereoscopic 3D process transforms entire environments within the film, from the interiors of Coraline's new home, to the landscape of her imaginary, alternate world, so that the 3D is not an effect but a method. I went into the film with relatively modest expectations about its visuals; my references were films such as (ahem) Jaws 3-D and, most recently, Robert Zemekis' The Polar Express. Coraline flattens them completely. In purely visual terms, this film advances the medium, even as it borrows time-worn methods of motion and presentation (its stop-motion animation is more fluid than that in classics such as King Kong and Jason and the Argonauts or recent efforts such as Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit).  But the film's ultimate pull lies in its central fairy-tale ideas.  Coraline's drab home  (gray and brown, muted and flat) results from the lack of visceral and emotional color in the daily, routine life of her family, and in its place, she discovers an alternate world as initially enticing as any might be, one abounding in color, laughter, attention, sweets, friendships, circus acts, dancing mice (alternate worlds, whether dreamed up by children or adults, are almost always imaginary forms of wish fulfillment). But Selick complicates matters by maintaining the traditional fairy-tale elements of mystery and terror, stockpiling horrors within this alternate universe: odd creatures, buttons for eyes, insect robots, and other feats and fears of the imagination. Yet, as Coraline finds out, these terrors contain within them more challenging and lasting ones, including pain, separation, loss, and even mortality. Selick neither belabors nor passes on the life lessons here, and makes Coraline something akin to a parable about the impossibility of perfection or of a world that caters entirely to one's wishes and hopes. Happiness, it seems, is always conditional and tempered. These ideas, which might seem relatively simple, place this film in the vein of mythologies, fairy tales, Greek tragedies, science fiction, of books by L. Frank Baum or Lewis Carroll, and, though it might be too early to say, I wouldn't be surprised if Coraline eventually stood alongside all of these as a cultural, and not merely a visual, achievement.

Some related links:

Over at Daily Plastic, a consideration of the experience of the film's 3D environment.

An article from the Los Angeles Times about the film's stop-motion techniques.

David Bordwell writes about depth cues and perspective in Coraline.

Various Thoughts and Links

In lieu of a post dedicated to a single subject, here are some various thoughts, along with links to some interesting content.

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A recent conversation with some fellow film fans had me thinking about why I nearly always watch a film in its entirety, no matter how much I dislike it. I can't fully explain this impulse, only to say that some films shift in tone or have second acts that differ significantly from the first; I've certainly changed my mind about a film occasionally because of this. But I'm beginning to believe that I should exercise considerably more discretion over that little stop button on my DVD player's remote. Almost singlehandedly, Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted (2008) convinced me of the need to do this. I had been looking for some mindless entertainment after several long, overloaded weeks at work and thought this would fit the bill. Yet it contains such a streamlined, efficient core of rottenness that, feeling rotten after watching it, I wondered why I bothered to see it through. The film ratchets up the physical criteria for modern American action films, which, from a certain perspective, might mark it as an advancement, but in the process it angrily, and anarchically, throws itself against the establishment, the culture at large, and even the audience, and does so without irony or even self-consciousness. Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), enslaved to corporate America, learns how to fulfill his human potential by becoming an assassin, and then, once this is achieved, inquires emphatically what the audience has really done with their lives. Well, for one, I haven't gone around killing people, so that already puts me one step ahead (and, in all seriousness, even a Nietzschean would find the message in Wanted patently absurd). But the real issue is Bekmambetov's insistence on strongly emphasizing every ugly sentiment proceeding from his characters' lips, every exit wound produced by high-velocity ammunition, every exploding limb or face. The violent, careless abuse of bodies in this film is, I hate to say, nearly singular. Some horror films, including some I admire, are as graphic and yet not as spiritually enervating because they contain deeper implications about violence and the social order. I'd forget this film, except it stands as a watershed of sorts. From now on, I'll use that stop button more frequently.

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While I'm trying to enforce limitations on my film viewing, I'm hoping to do the opposite with my reading. In recent years I've had difficultly finishing novels I've started, and this year I've resolved to reverse this habit. To some degree, reading Thomas Pynchon's work for the first time has helped; I've enjoyed The Crying of Lot 49. Jeffrey Eugenides, who won the Pulitzer in 2003 for Middlesex, has helped even more. His The Virgin Suicides, on which Sofia Coppola based her first feature film (and more, I hope, on Coppola later), has aided me in getting beyond whatever barriers I've developed recently with novels. I couldn't set this thing down. While death lingers over it from the get-go (the very first page announces the suicides of the Lisbon girls), the humanism within the story and the brilliance of the novel's form overshadow its ostensible subject matter. The Virgin Suicides, in part, contains an implicit commentary on the strictures of suburban middle-class life, while it simultaneously evokes nostalgia for a bygone era and underscores the odd, symbiotic connections among siblings and families and between people and their environments. But I'm most impressed by Eugenides' decision to tell this tragic, bittersweet, and sometimes funny story through the retrospective vantage point of a collective narrator, a group of men who grew up in the same suburb, observing the Lisbon girls, and who now recount what happened to them. Eugenides' narrator is hardly omniscient; the men, whose identities as narrators coalesce almost as thoroughly as the girls' identities once did, years ago, provide no satisfactory explanation for events or complete answers to the questions raised in the process of reading. In all this, The Virgin Suicides underscores the limitations of memory, the challenges in organizing and making sense of the past, especially one filtered through literal distances: observations made from across the street, interviews conducted years later, disconnected pieces of evidence. The central tragedy exists not so much in the suicides of these girls (though they are part of it), but in the lives of the men who have been haunted by them, and who cannot exorcise their pasts because of these very limitations of memory and understanding. The book's final pages are particularly elegiac.

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Speaking of novels, it seems as if the posthumous epic of the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, 2666, is sort of the novel of the moment. It has received wide acclaim and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. At The Quarterly Conversation, Scott Esposito has a thorough review.

Novelist Zadie Smith has in my view become one of the foremost voices in literary criticism. Here she is on Kafka, on Forster, and on the contemporary novel (all published last year; I bookmarked them when they appeared and then got sidetracked with work).

I admit that I've never been much of a reader of John Updike's fiction, but I can't deny his place in American letters. Updike's passing from lung cancer last month has brought forth many remembrances, including a series by established writers on The New Yorker blog.  In addition, here are some by Lorrie Moore, Martin Amis, and Joseph O'Neill (all three via About Last Night), as well as one by Adam Gopnik.

Quiet Bubble selects his favorite comics of 2008.

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On to film: I've become very intrigued by Nicolas Klotz's Heartbeat Detector (La Question humaine, 2007), even though I haven't seen it. My interest is due in no small part to posts about the film at Long Pauses, Strictly Film School, and Film-Think.

Darren Hughes (of Long Pauses) has written about the 2008 Toronto Film Festival at Senses of Cinema. Rob Davis (of Daily Plastic and Paste Magazine) has written a wrap-up of the 2009 Sundance Festival.

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Finally, this is great: pianist Hélène Grimaud brings her characteristically broad, expansive sound to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G. The formidable Vladimir Jurowski (a great conductor) leads the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. You'll need to register to see the entire performance. I don't know how long the video will be available for free, which is why I've already watched it several times. I've seen Grimaud live twice in Los Angeles, once playing Schumann, once playing Brahms, and her Ravel here bears the same kind of intensity she brought to those performances.

Language and Silence

Next to The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels might be Preston Sturges's most widely known film; personally, I count it as my favorite among his work, in large part because it seamlessly unites several films, or threads, in one: a hilarious comedy about making movies, a satire about Hollywood's incessant emphasis on lowbrow entertainment, a critique of the bloated thought that would dismiss entertainment outright, and a commentary on hope amidst destitution. In the middle of the Great Depression and the Second World War, John Sullivan (Joel McCrea), a film director whose claim to fame includes such throwaway features as Ants in Your Pants of 1939, decides he wants to make films about "the suffering of humanity," and so he leaves his swanky upper-class settings to hit the road as a hobo and get in touch with the common man. Along the way, he meets Veronica Lake's sultry would-be actress, and the comedy ensues. As with other features, Sturges jammed Sullivan's Travels with extended sequences of witty, back-and-forth dialog, with vibrant, volleyed exchanges between McCrea and Lake and between the two and various minor characters. The film's first half focuses on Sullivan's antics, on his efforts to elude the studio lackeys who trail him, and on his hapless journeys across the country with Lake in tow. She's disguised as a young man, which obviously doesn't work; "you look about as much like a boy as Mae West", Sullivan tells her. Interestingly, though, just as Sullivan wants to make a film with social meaning, Sullivan's Travels becomes exactly that, a darker, less buoyant, more serious work, and the abrupt tonal shift evolves into a surprising, but effective, extended moment of verbal silence: a mournful, dialog-free montage of migrant workers sleeping in a shelter, attending a fire-and-brimstone sermon at a church, and eating in a soup kitchen. For a film structured so tightly around spoken dialog, Sturges's decision to abandon words altogether during the film's most earnest and socially significant moment is an exercise in real eloquence, as well as an act embodying Sullivan's belief in the redemptive and educational possibilities of cinema.  Silence is not so much a lack of language here, but a language in its own right.

Still, I have to hand it to Sturges; the dialog is the main treat:

A Year in Film

Looking back on 2008, I realize that the majority of my film viewing took place at home, with films on DVD. Due to certain circumstances, I made few trips to local theaters and was unable to attend the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, which offered new films by directors whose work I admire, including Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin, Lisandro Alonso, Jia Zhang-ke, Olivier Assayas, and, above all, Lucrecia Martel, my favorite contemporary filmmaker. I am now at the mercy of distributors. But any and all disappointments in 2008 were softened greatly by the number of excellent movies I discovered on DVD this past year, none of them more exciting or more impressive than Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert, which appeared, like a beacon, in October in a remastered edition on region 2 DVD from the British Film Institute. Antonioni's preceding major films (L'Avventura, La notte, and L'Eclisse) had a pivotal, transformative role in my cinematic education a handful of years ago, and Red Desert, even after an initial recent viewing, has had no less of an influence. The DVD's appearance therefore carried genuine personal resonance; but in addition to whatever effects it's had on my viewing experience (and I'd say they've been immense in certain respects), I also think the film is one of the great exponents of modernist art and the culmination of Antonioni's work in the early 60s.

I say that in part because, while Red Desert continues the earlier films' themes of alienation and of a society transitioning from an older to a newer, more unstable one, it is more localized and cohesive. The manufactured beauty of Italy's post-war boom contrasts starkly with the emotional dislocation of one woman (Monica Vitti's Guiliana), as opposed to several people; she, alone, cannot adapt to the industrial and environmental changes around her. Antonioni continued using landscape and architecture as the imposing visual expressions of existential trauma, but in Red Desert he added a new element, namely, color, which he muted, used in solid swaths, altered, or enhanced to represent both Italy's social and economic transitions and Giuliana's inner state (and, in the process, he gave his entire mise-en-scène a remarkable similarity with the mid-century color-field painters, such as Mark Rothko, whose work he admired). In addition, Antonioni altered his visual style by using telephoto lenses to compress foreground and background, to flatten his shots and make certain sequences appear two-dimensional or out-of-focus. All of these techniques resulted in something even more abstract, even more dependent on visual interpretation, than the films that preceded it. Perhaps the most significant evolution lies in Antonioni's suggestion that Giuliana, unlike her alienated counterparts in L'Avventura, La notte, and L'Eclisse, has gradually learned to adapt to her existential isolation, as evinced by a comment she makes to her son about birds that have learned to fly around the poisonous yellow gases billowing out of factory smokestacks, and by a look in her eyes that suggests she is thinking something through, figuring something out, about her dilemma. I don't think Antonioni offers any substantive answers about modern existence in this film (he was more of an observer, anyway), though he does seem to conclude his loose "tetralogy" of modern alienation on a note of hope. Red Desert is a glorious film, and my favorite of 2008 by a fairly wide margin.

But such a declaration does not mean that other notable releases, particularly the extended 172-minute cut of Terence Malick's The New World, are in any sense deficient. The New World is the only film that I've ever been able to count among my personal favorites two years in a row, and this is because Malick's lengthy cut, released on DVD in October, essentially remakes the film anew. His rearranging of scenery and dialogue and his inclusion of inter-titles and, especially, of new sequences, montages, and interior monologues allow the narrative to flow more fluidly and to cohere better than it had in previous versions, thereby enhancing both the inherently tragic nature of his story (if "story" is even the right word) and the film's momentum towards its beautiful final act. The extended cut of The New World offers a cumulative, immersive experience, unlike few I've found in cinema, although there are three films in particular that I saw in 2008 that come fairly close. The first is Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, which is a singular achievement purely on a visual level; the complex patterns of close-ups of shapes in the sand, umbrella spikes, wood slats, flowing water, insects, and human faces and bodies contribute to the film's abstract, radical style, adding a sense of wonder to the film's puzzling but stark metaphors of human work and existence.The second is Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, which I am still working to understand fully, although the immersive experience of watching it left me with strong memories of some of the most enigmatic images I've ever seen, from the slow tracking shot just after the title sequence, as Natalya (Margarita Terekhova) sits on a wood fence, to the long shot that closes the film, as the camera backs away, through the woods, while watching a mother and child from a distance.

The third is Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen. At first, the film seems to be largely an extended, skillful, almost exuberant, catalog of various cinematic and dramatic methods: jump cuts, long takes, chapter segmentations, multiple points of view, a rejection of establishing shots; the use of dream sequences, flashbacks, historical footage, melodrama, fast zooms, split screens, and ellipses. But lurking amidst all that is a fairly powerful human story that weaves together threads of marriage and motherhood, friendship and family, past and present. The film's cumulative impact arrives in a revelation so viscerally disturbing that I almost stopped the DVD and considered not continuing with the film; but the decision to stay with it through the end allowed me to appreciate both the film and Desplechin's gifts as a director that much more.

Finally, if I could sum up my year in film in 2008, I suppose variety characterized it more than anything else. Of the theatrical releases that I did see, I enjoyed most Wernor Herzog's documentary about life in Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, and Wong Kar-wai's colorful treatment of momentary connection, My Blueberry Nights. In the past year, I also discovered or revisited intelligent genre and mixed-genre films (Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Sunshine, and Redbelt), encountered moving character studies (Wings), caught powerful supernatural thrillers (The Orphanage, The Innocents), watched narratively inventive films (The Lovers), and delighted in the wit and the social commentary found in certain Hollywood classics (Sullivan's Travels in particular). Here, then, are my personal favorites among all the films I saw in 2008, most of which were made in previous years but which I discovered for the first time (Red Desert being foremost, followed by fifteen others in alphabetical order):

Red Desert (Il deserto rosso; Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964; released on R2 DVD, 2008)

Days of Heaven (Terence Malick, 1978)
Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, 2007; U.S. theatrical release, 2008)
The Fire Within (Le Feu follet; Louis Malle, 1963)
Kings and Queen (Rois et reine; Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
The Lovers (Les amants; Louis Malle, 1958)
Mirror (Zerkalo; Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-Wai, 2007; U.S. theatrical release, 2008)
The New World: Extended Cut (Terence Malick, 2005; extended cut, 2008)
The Orphanage (El Orfanato; Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007)
Redbelt (David Mamet, 2008)
Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007)
The Unfaithful Wife (La femme infidele; Claude Chabrol, 1969)
Wings (Krylya; Larissa Shepitko, 1966)
Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna; Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Some notable films I revisited on DVD (in alphabetical order):
Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott, 1982)
The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli; Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
Mad Max (George Miller, 1979)
Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004)
Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981)

A Year of Listening

Ten years ago, in a melancholic, spoken delivery in a song called "Magenta," singer Geike Arnaert observed simply, "seasons change, you know." How apt that statement now seems for at least part of my year in music. I hadn't been particularly enthused about the stylistic changes Arnaert's band, Hooverphonic, have made in recent years, but I've admired their earlier work, and there was a time in my life when it meant much; so the recent news that 2008 marks the end of Arnaert's tenure as the band's lead singer had a melancholic feel all of its own and fostered a bit of nostalgia. Their earlier, trip-hop, string-heavy sonics might seem part of a buried past, particularly now in an industry dominated by more analog styles, but in a song like "Magenta," they could prove how they were, once, among Europe's chief purveyors of an ambient, textured architecture, and of a patient approach that allowed a song to build, gradually.  "Magenta" is an awfully beautiful tune ("Magenta" MP3).  An even more melancholic note sounded when The Long Blondes, a talented alt-punk band from Sheffield, England, announced earlier this year that they were disbanding after their guitarist and principal songwriter, Dorian Cox, suffered a stroke that left his ability to play in doubt. The Long Blondes were raucous and crafty, and even though their tunes were sometimes too hook-centered for my own tastes, they embodied the spirited, quick-hitting punch of club-based rock 'n' roll, and their most recent album, Couples, released last April, displayed a significant evolution in their sound; the band largely departed from the rougher sonics of Someone to Drive You Home. That particular album sparked my interest in their music and convinced me of Cox's abilities as a guitar player. He produced a solid sound (despite the often semi-clean tones of his guitar), strung chords together well, and used feedback, overdubbing, muffled sounds, and quick riffs intelligently. "Lust in the Movies", from Someone to Drive You Home, is a prime example of the band's style, the structure of their vocal melodies and arrangements, and Cox's guitar playing ("Lust in the Movies" MP3). The Long Blondes will certainly be missed.

I felt a seasonal change in jazz, too, though of a different sort. The ninth edition of Richard Cook's and Brian Morton's The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, released only a few weeks ago, is the first edition without Cook's unwaveringly reliable judgment; he died last year from cancer, aged 50. I began reading the guide several years ago and could now hardly imagine listening to jazz without it, without siphoning its clear, honest views on recordings and styles, without arguing with it, without simply holding it (the ninth edition has more than 1,650 pages). Despite Cook's absence, though, I'm pleased to see a new edition and to know more are likely to come. Overall, my jazz listening shifted in 2008, particularly away from Miles Davis, whose recordings have dominated my listening for about as long as I can remember. I did spend some time at the extremes of Miles's career, with the live albums Dark Magus and We Want Miles from his 70s and early 80s electric period and Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants and Bags Groove from the mid 1950s. Miles had many strengths, and, as those two earlier albums show, foremost among them was a generous fluency in mid-tempo numbers. But, on the whole, my ears leaned towards other acts, particularly trios: Keith Jarrett's famed standards trio; a side project called Trio Beyond in which John Schofield, Larry Goldings, and Jack deJohnette paid homage to Tony Williams' Lifetime; Bill Evans' respected group, which included Paul Motian and Scott LaFaro; and guitarist John Abercrombie's Gateway, which features Dave Holland and deJohnette. I can't quite say what took me so long to get around to Evans' Complete Live at the Village Vanguard, but the wait was certainly rewarded by stellar playing ("All of You, Take 2" MP3). On Saudades, Trio Beyond perform at a consistently, almost intoxicatingly, high level and yet make the music awfully fun, not simply an exercise in musicianship. Two other jazz recordings marked this year's listening for me: Enrico Rava's The Pilgrim and the Stars, re-released this past September, highlights Rava's sparse, rhythmically inventive trumpet playing, and Joe Henderson's Inner Urge, which I received from my sister just a few days ago as a Christmas gift, is a particularly visceral set of performances and without a doubt one of my favorite discoveries of the year. (Enrivo Rava, "The Pilgrim and the Stars" MP3)

I'm not quite sure what to make of my rock music listening during 2008; I heard a lot of it, but in retrospect much of it seems fuzzy, with fewer standouts than there were in previous years. As much as I laud musical evolution, I felt lukewarm about The Kills' Midnight Boom, although I think "U.R.A. Fever", the first single, is a brilliant tune, and, as with the band's previous efforts, Midnight Boom contains no lack of energy. I listened to The Duke Spirit's Neptune repeatedly, and seeing them live and meeting the band was definitely thrilling, but the changes in song craft and production values from their debut, Cuts Across the Land, had me curious about where this band is heading. Versatility seemed to be the name of the game for the duo She & Him (they certainly know how to write catchy songs, with "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?" chief among them), as well as for Jenny Lewis' second solo album, Acid Tongue, which features a variety of styles and guest musicians. But I'd say, overall, among the most consistent efforts were The Hold Steady's Stay Positive and The Age of the Understatement from The Last Shadow Puppets, a retro side-project from the Artic Monkeys' Alex Turner and The Rascals' Miles Kane (MP3s: The Hold Steady, "Constructive Summer" and The Last Shadow Puppets, "The Age of the Understatement"). In the end, though, I think I was most taken by The Raveonettes' Lust Lust Lust. This band is genuinely, consistently committed to their sound, to white noise and flat, spare vocals, to a retro style mixed thoroughly with a modern cultural sensibility. Though profoundly different than a band like Hooverphonic, they nevertheless share a confident understanding of a song's architecture. "Hallucinations", for example, doesn't simply roll along; it builds ("Hallucinations" MP3).

Speaking of songs, let me conclude with this: for various reasons, some of which escape me entirely, I was never that fond of Bob Dylan, but when Darren posted "Boots of Spanish Leather" (from Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin') last June, I was so moved by the song that I went out the same day and bought the album. That is a great tune and has gone a long way in strengthening my appreciation of its singer ("Boots of Spanish Leather" MP3). And, finally, I had searched for quite a while to locate a copy of "Faults", a song by the Japanese industrial act Acid Android that features vocals by Curve's Toni Halliday. A vendor in Hong Kong had the original CD for sale, and through Ebay I managed, once and for all, to get a pristine, uncompressed copy. In many ways, "Faults" is profoundly different than all of the music mentioned above and might not seem to fit into my tastes here; but, for years now, I've held considerable appreciation for Curve's music and Halliday's singing. Perhaps in the new year I'll find time to write more about both ("Faults" MP3).

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Personal favorites from the past year, listed in alphabetical order by genre.  Some are older recordings (so I've included original release years) and the list contains some albums not mentioned above:

The Duke Spirit, Neptune (2008)
The Hold Steady, Stay Positive (2008)
The Last Shadow Puppets, The Age of the Understatement (2008)
Jenny Lewis, Acid Tongue (2008)
The Long Blondes, Couples (2008)
The Raveonettes, Lust Lust Lust (2008)
She & Him, Volume One (2008)

John Abercrombie, Gateway (1975)
Miles Davis, Bags Groove (1954), And the Modern Jazz Giants (1956), and We Want Miles (1981)
Bill Evans, The Complete Live at the Village Vanguard (1961)
Joe Henderson, Inner Urge (1964)
Keith Jarrett, The Out-of-Towners (2001)
Alan Pasqua, The Antisocial Club (2007)
Enrico Rava, The Pilgrim and the Stars (1975; reissued 2008)
Trio Beyond, Saudades (2006)

Bach, Violin Concertos, and Gubaidulina, In Tempus Praesens; Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin; Trondheim Soloists; London Symphony Orchestra; Valery Gergiev, conductor (2008). I bought this mainly for Gubaidulina's In Tempus Praesens -- an intensely dramatic piece of music, which receives an expressive performance by Mutter.
Chopin, Preludes; Alexandre Tharaud, piano (2008)
Prokofiev, Symphonies 1 & 5; St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra; Yuri Temirkanov, conductor (2004)
Schoenberg and Sibelius, Violin Concertos; Hilary Hahn, violin; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra; Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor (2008)

Twenty

I'm interrupting the usual end-of-the-quarter deluge of work for something that seems too tempting to pass up: the twenty favorite actresses meme, begun at The Film Experience, although I learned about it through Long Pauses. Selecting twenty personal favorites wasn't easy, and in time the roll call will likely change; but, for the moment, my choices are those shown above and mentioned below (see larger version of the mosaic).

Row 1 (from left to right).
Five of European cinema's greats: Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau, Stéphane Audran, Delphine Seyrig, and Monica Vitti.

Row 2.
Emmanuelle Riva, Bette Davis, Ingrid Thulin, Setsuko Hara, and Anouk Aimée.

Row 3.
Juliette Binoche, Emmanuelle Devos, Cate Blanchett, Belén Rueda, and Irene Jacob.

Row 4.
Julie Christie, Natalya Bondarchuk, Greta Garbo, Jean Seberg, and Franka Potente.

Mixtures

In September, I posted a note saying that I would return to blogging soon, and then before I knew it more than a month passed. It's now late November. In addition to the responsibilities that arrive with a new academic year, there have been new professional challenges, along with a seemingly innocuous foot injury that turned into a prolonged ordeal involving an infection, surgery, tissue removal, and a skin graft. In the long run, all will be well, but I've learned that walking around barefoot in the house can be dangerous, that physicians sometimes provide wrong and ultimately harmful treatments, and that universities, and the world in general, are simply not made to accommodate people who harbor any sort of physical impairment or disability. My sympathy for those who live with permanent disabilities has certainly increased.

Early into recovery, I had to remain in bed with my foot elevated. Netflix saved the day. I caught up with a handful of films, and here are my thoughts about three of them.

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In the real world, money might not be the root of all evil, but in David Mamet's Redbelt (2008), it festers as the source of nearly every instance of corruption and conflict. Swirling around the film's characters are unpaid bills, lawyers' fees, pensions, insurance problems, loan sharks, prize money for martial arts fights, advertising, promotions, and a host of other financial issues. Redbelt is largely a mixed genre exercise; Mamet's modern fight film borrows from the samurai epic, the Western, the Hollywood action film, and the studio melodrama, although its central tenet is anything but mixed or cloudy. "It's all about authenticity," as a critical character remarks, and the most authentic, and therefore the most challenged, individual is Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a jujitsu instructor who, like the Western gunman or the Japanese warrior, places his principles above all else and must stand alone in a hopelessly corrupt world. Ejiofor, in characteristic fashion, brings a powerful center of gravity to this role and gives Terry an admirable, if sometimes misguided, sense of conviction. His performance is certainly noteworthy, but the prize ultimately goes to Mamet; his dialogue has much of its usual rhythm, its repeated phrases, and its emphatic beats. His characters' story-lines, which initially seem unrelated, come crashing together on a fateful evening in Terry's dojo, and then the plot careens towards its inevitable conclusion, which, while unfinished and anti-climactic, does fulfill the film's basic generic elements.

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These days I'm primarily interested in international cinema, but when I was younger I watched a significant number of classic American movies, and I often did so at two or three in the morning when films from the 1930s and 1940s would appear on syndicated television. I had a strong affinity for director Josef von Sternberg's work with Marlene Dietrich. I hadn't seen von Sternberg's Morocco (1930), however, in over a decade, and revisiting it (gazing past my elevated foot at the screen) I was impressed by how placid the camera is but how visually alive the frames are. I'm not sure if "baroque" is the best term for von Sternberg's visuals, but he decorates many of his frames with a busy mix of human figures and everyday objects and uses static shots of corridors and aisle-ways to add perspective and depth. Von Sternberg and his cinematographers, Lee Garmes and Lucien Ballard, do pan and zoom occasionally, and when von Sternberg cuts, he sometimes breaks continuity rules. But the overall style is remarkably calm. The film's final image is probably its most striking; Dietrich begins crossing the Moroccan desert, barefoot, following Gary Cooper, who's departing with the French foreign legion. Here, von Sternberg strangely mixes, perhaps even confuses, the film's sexual politics. Dietrich's Amy Jolly is independent, unmarried, thoroughly distrustful of men, and, in one of the film's more famous night-club scenes, is androgynous, appearing in a man's tuxedo. Yet, she remains entirely beholden to Cooper's Tom Brown, willing to leave everything behind to follow him across the African landscape. I personally found the final act to be discontinuous with the rest of the film, but I can't fault von Sternberg for such a remarkable closing shot.

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Speaking of Africa, Sidney Pollack's elongated, quiet epic, Out of Africa (1985), contains a mixture of a different sort, that between the lives of indigenous Africans and the supposedly "civilizing" and opportunistic British imperialism that, in the years before and during the First World War, carved up the African continent in a rapacious, competitive bid for profit and prestige. Out of Africa is primarily a romance, with the Danish writer Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep), a.k.a. Isak Dinesen, negotiating her love for the adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton (Robert Redford, sans Finch-Hatton's British accent), who insists on his personal independence. The romance simmers at a painfully slow burn, which I suspect bothers some viewers, although I found the glacial pace at times to be very affecting, particularly when it culminates in Blixen's recitation of an A. E. Houseman poem in her final, parting words to Finch-Hatton.

But after watching this film, like Morocco, for the first time in years, I'm struck most of all by the film's treatment of colonialism. I suppose that, twenty years ago, Hollywood had a preference for stories of upper-class Europeans who believed in the beneficence of colonialism, or at least in the romanticism of living and adventuring abroad. Now that preference has turned into a form of "liberal guilt." Pollack does make some attempt, however slight, to address the impact of the British living in Kenya. Despite her own use of accosted land, Blixen tries to help the Kikuyu who work for her by educating them (albeit in an English manner) and by trying to ensure a future for them once she leaves; Finch-Hatton, being more conscientious, warns that such paternalism carries its own dangers. He also expresses his admiration for the Maasai, who, according to him, live only in the moment. "They're the only ones who don't care about us. And that will finish them." I suppose that his admission implies at least some recognition that even those wary of the dangers of colonialism are also a part of them, simply by being foreigners living off the land and resources of a country not their own. Still, Out of Africa doesn't explore this much at all (doesn't, as one writer put it, fully consider how Blixen's and Finch-Hatton's "presence might be part of the problem"), but as a cinematic experience I'm not entirely sure this is a drawback for the film. Blixen had a life, an affair, and written accounts of both, and as subject matter for a film, they're certainly legitimate sources, even if the treatment of colonialism isn't sophisticated enough to provide a more realistic picture. Out of Africa ultimately needs to stand or fall on its romance, which, though gradual and piecemeal, carries with it a sense of displacement and tragedy.

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More to come ...