Where the Stress Falls

Round Up

While I've been busy lately, I've managed to find time for films on DVD.  Here are my reactions to some of them (and, on a related note, it's nice to have a few spare moments in which to write).

No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007). I finally caught up with this, and, despite the considerable control the Coens yield here as directors and the film's relatively celebrated status, I ended up feeling I wouldn't have missed much had I never seen it. The adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel is no doubt smart, its portrayal of relentless, unflinching, seemingly omnipresent evil no doubt unequivocal, and yet I found it all fairly blasé. Part of this is due to my own experiences and biases; I've become saturated with stories that portray the world as hopelessly, nihilistically cruel and then pass it all off with the suggestion that human efforts against violence are futile, as if the authors or filmmakers have discovered something enlightening. Whether or not nihilism is an accurate and appropriate interpretation of the world, I honestly find it boring. In addition, for all the narrative and visual fluency the Coen brothers display, No Country for Old Men seems mechanical, like an assemblage of devices. Its lack of pathos left me neutral at best, which, given the film's central ideas, was likely quite far from the Coens' intent.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007). Schnabel, a painter by trade, builds his film from slightly blurred and compressed point-of-view images, slanted close-ups, and partial shots of rooms or landscapes -- the visual effect of seeing the world through the left eye of a paralyzed man. As a cinematic conceit the approach seemed, at first, like a gimmick that could potentially grow tiresome, and some of Schnabel's third-person montages felt slightly cluttered and hyperactive, as if he had taken them from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film. But The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on Jean-Dominic Bauby's memoir of his life "locked in" a body rendered useless by a massive stroke, is refreshingly affecting, no matter what the film's harsher critics might say about the inherent obviousness of the sentiments on display. Something as difficult and as tedious as communicating daily by blinking in response to spoken letters leads to the unimpeded exercise of Bauby's "imagination and memory." The film's central conceit, beautifully, becomes something else: the simultaneous experience of being tragically, severely bound (or submerged, as a recurring metaphor suggests) and, through recollection and care and faith in others, unlimited. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is only partially about Bauby; writ somewhat larger, it is also about one's need for others and about the existential significance, both in life and in death, of consciousness. 

Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008). I reacted to Eastwood's Gran Torino the way I reacted to his Million Dollar Baby; given my particular cinematic tastes, I'm surprised I liked it. Eastwood has historically leaned towards screenplays in which the characters are nearly types with situations, not necessarily fully-fledged individuals; he tends to explore the themes of his material in fairly straightforward, almost lock-step ways; his visual metaphors (such as the recurring use of shadows) seem a bit stock-in-trade. On the other hand, his best films recall the structures of classic American literature and theater: the characters might be types with situations, but they blend seamlessly into a larger thematic whole and become integral to a project meant to parse out the ways in which some people live their lives entrenched in the circumstances and the histories around them (or to put it another way: the fact that, in Million Dollar Baby, Maggie Fitzgerald's family members are types doesn't mean Eastwood doesn't have anything to say about class or the desire to transcend it). I suppose that for every Willy Loman, perhaps for every Nick Carraway, maybe for every Harry dreaming of the snows of Kilimanjaro, there's a Walt Kowalski or a Frankie Dunn. The finale to Gran Torino, which Eastwood presents with a classicist's sense of denouement, initially seems cheap, but on further reflection corresponds well with Eastwood's concern with personal attrition and the struggle his characters often have in maintaining their own sense of sufficiency and goodness.

Silent Light (Carols Reygadas, 2007). My first viewing of Reygadas' film since the screening I attended at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival had me thinking primarily of the film as a sensory experience. Reygadas rigorously explores religion, loss, betrayal, isolation, and community in Silent Light, and, whether he's fashioning his own ideas or making references to Dreyer's Ordet, he's doing so with a refreshing visual and aural ambiance: using natural light in an existential manner and amplifying the physical environment of rural Mexico with natural sounds, from cricket chirps, dripping water, and rain hitting windshields, to radio broadcasts and boots crunching grass and rustling against weeds. Reygadas also employs a color palette that shifts between blue, green, brown, and white. It made me wonder what the audiences who were introduced to the first color films would have made of this one; I suspect they would have been startled, as if witnessing a miracle.

Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2007). A strange and somewhat cold intellectual exercise, this; although that's not necessarily a criticism, and particular not entirely in this case given the powerful conceptual structure that lies at the heart of this film. On the surface, Klotz's implicit parallels between a German chemical company's decision to downsize and the Third Reich's elimination of "undesirables" seems very dangerous ground on which to tread. But in this mystery of a corporate psychologist's discovery of his CEO's Nazi past, Klotz avoids moral equivalencies by using the parallels only as a means to raise questions about human conscience.  When any entity, whether one as extreme as the Nazi regime or as seemingly mundane and everyday as a corporation, holds efficiency or "productivity" (whether commercial or racial) as paramount values, there are inevitable costs of varying, but nevertheless dehumanizing, degrees (as Scott Foundas put it in his review, "the often inhuman matters of balance sheets and profit reports"). Matters become more damaging when those responsible want to forget what they've done. For more, see this compelling discussion of the film's ideas and this thoughtful analysis of Klotz's formalism.

Cinema and Los Angeles

As the fall winds along, and the summer recedes into the past, the furor over the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's embattled film program gradually diminishes.  And, yet, the museum, which is the largest of its kind west of the Mississippi River, and which has had a vibrant film program for more than forty years, ignited a firestorm when Michael Govan, the museum's director, decided to cancel film screenings because of apparently declining attendance and an annual program deficit of approximately $100,000.  Film at LACMA (as the museum is called) had become a line item on a spread sheet, a number in the red, an unnecessary expenditure, nothing more.  This was unfortunate; cutting spending always seems to be the immediate purview and the reaction in dire times of directors, foundation boards, governors, deans of colleges, presidents, and CEOs, and yet there are many occasions in which the line item, the red number, mean more than just a problem to be solved.

Los Angeles, of course, is the center of the U.S. film industry, the locus of a nationally and globally dominant cultural machine, but it can be a fairly rich place for those of us who prefer international, art-house, and repertory cinema over the bulk of current mainstream films that the studios here generate.  We have venues such as the Nuart on Santa Monica Boulevard, the Landmark on Pico (thanks to Mark Cuban, no less), the American Cinematheque, the Red Cat, the Billy Wild Theater, New Beverley Cinema, Laemmle's various houses, and more. But the loss of LACMA's film program was a harmful, disturbing development.  The program, to a great degree, was the heart pumping all the celluloid blood: the museum is centrally located; its Bing Theater is spacious enough for large turnouts (600 seats); and the museum over the years has hosted career retrospectives of directors as diverse as Bergman, Bresson, Ozu, and Mizoguchi, of actors and actresses such as Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, and Humphrey Bogart.  In September, LACMA premiered an entirely new print of Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness, while, in October, it ran a retrospective of the films of Alain Resnais, including the mysterious Je T'aime, Je T'aime, which rarely, if ever, screens in the United States.  And last year, LACMA was the only venue in Los Angeles to show Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light.  The museum's importance to the cinematic life of its city is difficult to overstate; we need this program.

In the very least, this need arises from Los Angeles' undeserved reputation as a relatively hollow place, an apparent cultural also-ran slouching far behind New York and Chicago.  Los Angeles is certainly many things: an oasis in a desert, an endless freeway, a holiday, a headache, an excuse (as in, I can't make it because it's thirty miles in stop-and-go traffic).  The city is expansive and diverse; a trip from the east side, along the 60 and 10 freeways, to the west, beyond Fairfax, crosses entire social worlds. But the city is certainly no slouch.  Its celebrated philharmonic, led for nearly two decades by the accomplished Esa-Pekka Salonen, now has a trailblazing leader in the young Gustavo Dudamel.  The Mark Taper Forum, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Ahmanson Theater, and various venues in west L.A. provide theater and opera lovers with their cultural fixes.  Listeners can find jazz at the Catalina Bar & Grill or rock at historic clubs on Sunset.  We have two Getty Museums, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, the Museum of Contemporary Art, literary events and readings on a year-long basis, Shakespeare festivals, used book shops, and ethnic restaurants.  But, even for all that, the decline of an institution as central as LACMA's film program only feeds the stereotype of L.A.'s vast emptiness.

More than anything, though, the fate of LACMA's film program revealed just how much attitude and perspective matter in the treatment and survival of any cultural endeavor or institution.  As K.A. Westphal has pointed out in an incisive editorial on the crisis at LACMA, the museum has historically failed to promote its film program thoroughly, treating it is an afterthought and granting it only the tiniest portion of the museum's massive $75 million annual budget.  The director and staff of the museum can't honestly expect citizens and museum supporters to take the film program seriously if they don't.  Or, as director Martin Scorcese wrote in a stern letter published in the Los Angeles Times, "the film department is often held at arms' length at LACMA and other institutions, separate from the fine arts, and this simply should not be.  Film departments should be accorded the same respect, and the same amount of financial leeway, as any other department of fine arts."  The question about the future of cinema in Los Angeles was not, and is not, a question solely about what a museum is going to do with its movie theater or how many tickets it will sell for a film starring Audrey Hepburn, much less one starring Setsuko Hara.  The question, as Scorcese suggests, involves how we all think about cinema as participants in a larger conversation about the arts, as members of a larger culture in this city, this nation, and across the globe.  Scorcese's words reminded me of the late Susan Sontag, who spent a career battling colleagues and institutions who refused to take film seriously and who privileged the other arts over it; the belief that film is somehow a separate, and by extension inferior, form of expression was antithetical to her notions of artistry.  It should be antithetical to ours as well.  At the heart of it all, the debate about the future of a major film program is a debate about how we think about film, how we interpret its vitality as an art.

Keeping international, art-house, and repertory cinema alive in Los Angeles, and well beyond it, amidst all the challenges that face public institutions, among all the other activities that divide the public's attention, seems to be a greater priority now than it has in the past.  Due to the efforts and pressure of a grass-roots organization called Save Film at LACMA, the museum has agreed to maintain its film program at least through June 2010, although its plans beyond that involve grandiose financial visions more than they do a requisite adjustment of aesthetic and cultural attitudes.  The wrong approach could very well condemn film at LACMA, and in the city, to relative obscurity because of the precedents it could set; all the while, a renewed focus, some passion, and a seriousness about the importance of cinema are likely to keep film alive.  Following Scorcese's cue, if institutions here, and elsewhere, hold cinema closer than arm's length, perhaps everyone else will too.

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Cross-posted at Filmwell.

Catching Up

Well, here I am.  In the time since my last post, I've encountered much and would like to share my thoughts on some it, but at the outset let me say that I've had a fairly productive, interesting summer, one full of worries about the crisis that confronts both the state in which I live and the university at which I work yet also one that afforded time to catch up on research, writing, movie-going, and making new colleagues and friends or reconnecting with old ones. It was a summer of a massive L.A. fire, of a grass-roots challenge to the L.A. County Museum of Art's decision to suspend its inherently important film program, of screenings of compelling films, and screenings of questionable ones; it was also, for me at least, a summer in which I missed the Toronto International Film Festival yet discovered San Francisco, in which I spent considerable time in the reading room of the Huntington Library, and in which I was able to catch up with several things I had been meaning to see or hear.

One of these is the HBO television series The Wire. A friend whose opinions I greatly respect told me that The Wire works on the level of a Dostoevsky novel, replete with characters, intersecting storylines, and ideas. It creators structured the show with gradual expositions that span multiple episodes and that then lead and mount to compelling, intricate conclusions. Before The Wire, I didn't have too much faith in television. It's prone to formula; if consumed in large doses, it can limit people's lives in a particularly insidious way; like the romance novel or the mainstream pop song, the bulk of it can be forgettable, the gems sometimes difficult to find. But The Wire has awakened my belief in the potential of the medium. In addition to the show's novelistic structure, it examines with distinguishing, sensitive realism the cultures of Baltimore's inner-city drug trade, police department, and civil structure, and each season looks at a different side of Baltimore's underclass, from the projects and the docks, to the populated and abandoned neighborhoods, to the schools and street corners. Most of all, the series underscores in a particularly complex manner the influence that institutions have upon people at all levels of the social stratum, and how institutions, tragically, compromise individuals and the kinds of choices they make. While I'm hardly an expert on television history, I can say unreservedly that The Wire seems to be the best it has offered: deeply intricate, maddening in all sorts of ways, incisive, eye-opening, layered, heartbreaking, often funny, endearing, intelligent, definitely brilliant. I've got one season to go, and I can't wait to see how it all ends (Omar ... what will happen to Omar?  Don't tell me if you already know.)

As far as feature films go, I saw a number this summer. Michael Mann's Public Enemies seemed devoid of the dramatic, narrative arc inherent in John Dillinger's life, and I admit to feeling a bit underwhelmed when leaving the theater, but Mann, more than ever, appears to be moving closer towards visual impressionism than he does towards realism and drama. Few films in recent memory construct mood and experience through surface texture as effectively as this one does. Duncan Jones' science-fiction film, Moon, is small-scale in the best sense of the term, meaning it avoids excess, and while it deals intellectually with issues of identity and memory, it is surprisingly affecting (definitely a favorite of the year for me).  On DVD, I enjoyed David Mamet's directorial debut, House of Games, for its refreshing use of language; I wasn't quite as keen on the film's study of the art of the con, but that's only because this is a fairly common trope in Mamet's work. Chantal Akerman's acknowledged masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, impressed me more than anything, though. As a study of domesticity, repetition, ritual, and loneliness, it has both an academic and a nightmarish quality to it, and its lingering closing shot left me wide awake, when I otherwise would have been sleeping. But, even more, as a fellow fan remarked to me, the film is a primary exponent of spatial relationships, those between individuals and the familiar walls that surround them and the invisible ones they might not be conscious of.  Akerman's cinematographer, Babette Mangolte, enhanced these themes with a stationary camera, often placed at the end of hallways or on the opposite sides of doorways; her limiting of the depth of field when Dielman is outside nicely maintained thematic consistency.

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On to music. Over at The Existence Machine, Richard makes an interesting point about the consumption of new music:

I wonder if there isn't something unseemly about the attempt at remaining up-to-date well into serious adulthood. I wonder if it's not part of what keeps us not young but infantile, or rather, distracted. It becomes consumerist frenzy, this need that must be filled (something like a manufactured consent, of sorts). I also wonder if it isn't convenient for me to come around to such an idea only since I've abandoned my own serious efforts at keeping up. Do I need to know what every hip band of 20 year-olds, however inventive, is up to this and every year? Should I? Am I wrong to call the whole process into question? How many records need to exist? How many can you listen to?

I think there's something to this idea of a manufactured consent, and I plead wholly guilty to engaging in it, sometimes willingly, sometimes reflexively, like, well, a child. I do think music is important, its rewards worth the work of engaging it directly, but, like so much else these days, it requires choice, not so easy to exercise when there's so much out there (my unread RSS feeds any given week reach well into the hundreds in large part because of all the new music that bloggers are mentioning). Personally, I struggle with the very issues Richard raises, and so I'm not sure where my own indulgences will take me, but I'm trying to get better at focusing on fewer artists and albums on a monthly or annual basis, compared to my far more diffuse and wide-ranging consumption in recent times (depth, not breadth, as I so often preach as a teacher).

Having said all that, this is something I will likely repeat by year's end: 2009 has been a great year for music so far, as many of my favorite artists have released new albums: Neko Case (the highly musical Middle Cyclone), M. Ward (the consistently good Hold Time), Metric (the pulse-pounding Fantasies), Viva Voce (Rose City, on which Anita Robinson, yet again, convinces me why she's my favorite rock guitarist of the moment), and the supergroup The Dead Weather (the bluesy Horehound). Yet I think I'll remember 2009 for the year in which I really clicked with Wynton Marsalis and, particularly, Keith Jarrett. Marsalis' early records, especially his Live at Blues Alley (still available in a reprinted edition), evince a fiery personality that combined the targeted playing of post-bop Miles Davis with the inherent traditionalism of, say, Freddie Hubbard or Clark Terry. Jarrett has quickly become a personal favorite; he displays the intelligence of a master interpreter, the abandon of a truly free-wheeling improviser, and the precision of a classicist.  I've listened to a ridiculous amount of his output in recent months (the six-disc At the Blue Note foremost among them), but lately I've been returning to Bye Bye Blackbird (his homage to Miles), My Foolish Heart: Live at Montreaux, and Standards Live. He's always better live, in no small part due to the almost subconscious, extemporaneous interaction of his group.

And, finally, a word about Andras Schiff's new recording of Bach's partitas for the ECM label: it reminds me why I began listening to Schiff's recordings of Bach in the first place. Fluid and dignified, without a trace of artificiality, at least to these ears.

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At any rate, that's a lot.  But more to come, and I hope some of it will be about The Wire.

Joining the Twitter Generation

For those who might be interested -- I've begun Twittering ... or is it "Tweeting"?  Either way, I'll be posting about my usual interests, among other things, at my Twitter page. Feel free to follow (there's an RSS feed if you're not on Twitter).

Ken Burns, Jack Johnson, and Race in America

When I teach modern U.S. history, I find that students will wonder occasionally why American history courses invariably involve sustained discussions about race. The question is fair, actually, particularly when posed by international students who originate from places with entirely separate histories, where racial issues are sometimes different both in degree and kind. Race, as I usually explain, has been a peculiar problem in the United States; for generations, U.S. society in general and authorities from the local to the national level went to exceedingly great lengths, and with sustained malice, to deprive a significant portion of the U.S. population of their civil and political rights and to keep them physically separated from the majority. This deprivation, and all of the specious assumptions on which it was based, was particularly tragic because it betrayed the fundamental principles of American democracy and the centuries-old belief in natural rights and liberties. The young preacher-turned-activist who arrived in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956, in the aftermath of Rosa Parks' arrest, understood this betrayal; he declared it his aim to realize those democratic ideals, and when he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and addressed an audience of a quarter million, he talked not only about his dream for his children but about his admiration for the U.S. constitution, a beautiful document soiled only by his country's inability to keep its own basic promises.

The story of Jack Johnson, the first African-American boxer to win the heavyweight title, is in many respects a microcosm of this larger dilemma of race within a democratic society, and Ken Burns' documentary about Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness (which I recently watched for the first time), is a fairly illuminating look at the connection between the life and the history. Johnson was born in 1878, just one year after Reconstruction had ended and the Republican party, which previously rectified some of the lingering racial abuses in America, struck a deal that traded the South for the White House. As Burns makes clear, Johnson grew up when life for freed blacks drastically worsened: they were denied the vote in the south; incidents of lynching increased; the federal supreme court sanctioned segregation; the ideology of Jim Crow prevailed. The last thing white Americans wanted to see in this era was a black man asserting his physical power, beating up a white man, and then smiling about it, as Johnson often did; to them, this represented the world turned upside down. Any victories by Johnson in the ring would send the wrong signal, give unbridled hope to African-Americans; a writer in The New York Times feared that "if the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misrepresent his victory as justifying claims to much more than physical equality with their white neighbors."

Johnson's first major victory came in 1908 against Tommy Burns, a man whose mouth carried more power than his fists ever did. Burns taunted Johnson in the ring and hurled racial epithets at him. Johnson responded not only by beating Burns, literally, but by holding him up, prolonging the fight to punish him further, all the while smiling intently at the crowd and trading verbal jabs with them. The footage of the fight, which Ken Burns uses in his documentary, clearly displays Johnson's physical and social bravado and the audience's animosity towards him. Johnson was fighting Tommy Burns and the United States at the same time.

Burns makes no mistake about the powerful racial overtones of Johnson's career. Most whites hated the boxer because he had come to dominate a sport traditionally dominated by white fighters, and they were so taken aback by his success and fortune that they engaged in the most tiresome of racial clichés: Johnson was an "animal"; entire cross-sections of the country prayed for a "white hope" to rescue the title from the "beast" who had stolen it; when Johnson won, commentators often made excuses for his victories, instead of simply praising his superiority in the ring; a foreign reporter blatantly wrote that Johnson "displays all the gross and overbearing insolence which makes what we call the buck nigger insufferable." Burns identifies in Johnson a fierce independence of spirit, interprets it as the essence of the man. Johnson angered others, but didn't care. He dated, then married, white women and flaunted his wealth by wearing tailored suits and driving custom cars. Even some blacks saw him as a threat; he was either too profligate or, to Booker T. Washington, he undermined African-Americans' opportunities for economic advancement because he fed white prejudice instead of rising above it (or giving in to it). As a filmmaker, Burns understands the drama inherent in Johnson's life and in America's history. Combining images and text, he carefully and incrementally builds suspense towards the two turning points in Johnson's career, namely, his defeat in 1910 of "the great white hope," Jim Jeffries, the heavyweight champion who previously had retired undefeated, and Johnson's own defeat at the hands of Jess Willard, a fighter who stood over Johnson by at least six inches and who was ten years his junior. Johnson's victory over Jeffries had all the drama one can expect in sports but carried with it all the pains of American racism. Riots erupted across the country as white citizens and local authorities fought with blacks who had come out to the streets of numerous American cities to celebrate Johnson's victory. At least Jeffries, who had previously refused not only to fight Johnson, but any black fighter, finally displayed an ounce of modesty and decorum; Johnson, he admitted, was "better than I ever was."

Interesting parallels exist between Johnson and artists who similarly embodied his independence. In 1970, Miles Davis took the experiments he had already been making with electric music and acoustic jazz to an even greater fusion of the two genres with A Tribute to Jack Johnson, his progressive soundtrack to filmmaker William Cayton's documentary on the boxer. Miles did not want simply to alter jazz by filtering its improvisational qualities through the repetitious structures of rock 'n' roll; he wanted, as he put it, to make rock 'n' roll more "black." Jazz, a form of music that, like rock, had originated within black culture, could allow him to do this. Miles was inveterately forward-looking, his music, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, amorphous, maximal, simultaneously transgressive and transcendent. Even now, nearly forty years later, it sounds progressive, particularly when contrasted with Wynton Marsalis' heavily traditional soundtrack for Burns' documentary. I suppose Marsalis' soundtrack is fitting. As a filmmaker, Burns travels within a very traditional medium; he uses the requisite images, original footage, letters and sources read aloud by professional actors, interviews with writers and historians, the strictly chronological framework found in numerous documentaries. But for all of his proficiency, I can't help but wonder if Burns might have made the form of his story as free-form as his subject's life, as forward looking as Miles' music; I can't help but wonder what someone like Todd Haynes, whose biopic of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There, filtered the singer's life through varied, occasionally abstract enactments, could make of a subject like Jack Johnson. The traditions that have dominated the narrative structures of modern documentaries cast long, burdensome shadows. Miles certainly wanted to free himself of traditions when he cast his album; most of all, Johnson himself believed in refuting long-standing American conventions.

Those traditions of race relations deeply informed the responses of boxing audiences, the press, and the general public; they had very similar effects on the U.S. government. Until the giant Jess Willard appeared, no white man could defeat Jack Johnson. The U.S. government, fearing Johnson's notoriety, banned fight films to keep footage of his victories from the American public. Ultimately, the U.S. government found that Johnson's private life was the only way to contain him, to keep him "in place", as so many of his white contemporaries wanted. Some of Johnson's lovers had been prostitutes, and they traveled with him across state lines to his fights. The U.S. government, under the Mann Act, which prohibited the trafficking of "white slaves," retroactively charged Johnson and sentenced him to prison. But, like so much in Johnson's life, the imprisonment was on his own terms; he served only after having fled custody to live abroad in Europe and returning when he felt it was time to do so. Irene Pineau, Johnson's widow, aptly summarized the man's spirit upon his death, from an auto accident, in 1946. "I loved him because of his courage," she said. "He faced the world unafraid."

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Cross-posted at Filmwell.

Lucrecia Martel's Immersive Cinema

I didn't notice a single deep-focus shot in the entire eighty-seven minutes of Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza), which recently screened with Martel in attendance at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles. Virtually every frame, like the one above, contains a shallow depth-of-field, with the point of focus preserved almost exclusively for Veronica (Maria Onetta), an Argentinean woman who thinks she might have accidentally killed a boy while driving home from a rendezvous with her lover. During a car trip with family members, Veronica looks out the window, across a chasm, and into a canal, where firefighters and police are trying to pry a body out of the water; Martel's camera remains fixed on Veronica's hair and the back of her neck as the car turns slowly along the dirt road adjacent to the waterway. Later, in the scene pictured above, Veronica ponders the significance of a newspaper report confirming the discovery of a boy's body in that canal, while her gardener discovers a hidden pool or fountain underneath the yard. The man remains present in the frame but blends, as a fuzzy silhouette, into the background.

Martel used shallow depth-of-field, or compression, in her previous films to bring her central characters, members of Argentina's bourgeoisie, into relief against their surroundings and the huddled bodies that crowded around them. In The Headless Woman, her use of compression is even more purposeful.  It illustrates what interviewer Scott Foundas described after the screening as Veronica's "separation from reality", the collapse within her own mind as her imagination gets the best of her. Who, or what, did she really hit with her car? If she struck a young boy, is the body in the canal his or someone else's? Why does she become increasingly reticent and closed off as the hours and days pass? The plane of focus remains on her because that separation is part of the subject of the film. More importantly, the visual compression mirrors Veronica's wavering distance from other social classes, the ingrained, prevailing split between lighter-skinned, middle class citizens (like her), who can trace their ancestry back to Spain, and the darker-skinned, lower-class citizens who work for them, who live on the outskirts of the city, who hitch rides home from bourgeois employers who own cars and suburban homes. Veronica seems contained, detached from them, yet their blurred contours in the sides of the frames work very much like static interference on the radio: the continual reminder that there are others on the periphery. The boy she might have killed is a poor day laborer; Veronica's social isolation has been compromised, and her mental anxiety escalates.

Martel has always seemed exceptionally sensitive to class differences and experiences, and I think she's become as astute an observer of social class as Luis Bunuel, minus the persistent dark humor and surrealism. In The Headless Woman, Argentina's class bifurcation runs far deeper and is much older than the canal that bisects the town, race is inextricably tied to class, and the cars that Veronica and her family drive, as Martel explained during the Q&A session, are outward symbols of a wave of car buying that besieged the Argentinean middle and upper classes in the 1990s.  Martel certainly displays these concerns visually, but much of her innovation as a filmmaker lies equally in her use of another element. The Headless Woman begins, literally, in the dark, with white titles against a black background and the sound of crickets chirping and boys' feet running across gravel; from there, Martel's world becomes knowable through sound: rain falling on car windows, rumbling motorcycle engines, ringing cell phones, distant, repetitive thunder, the gears of a VCR fast-forwarding a video tape of Veronica's wedding, and (my favorite) the sound of metal key chains clanging against one another. Those keys are, forgive the pun, key; they hang on hooks behind the front counter of the motel where Veronica conducts an illicit affair, and they ring out whenever the breeze shoots down the hallway. Like the garden that conceals the pool (as Strictly Film School points out, the concealment parallels Veronica's own), the motel itself is a disguise meant to hide an affair that should not exist, to help Veronica extricate herself from the realities that she is so hesitant to confront. 

Much of the experience of the social world in Martel's films lies in the soundtrack, from the pinging showers that cool off the bourgeois family in La Cienaga during a characteristically hot South American summer and the Theremin's magical notes that ring in Amalia's religious interpretation of illicit sexuality in The Holy Girl, to the car engines that run those symbols of social status in The Headless Woman. Unlike the bloated and often excessively careful sound design of mainstream cinema, Martel's audio is ambient, and, combined with her visual choices, creates a refreshingly immersive, yet unencumbered, cinema.

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Cross-posted at Filmwell.

Thinking About Marienbad Again

Criterion's new edition of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad gave me the occasion to revisit the film, at a point in time when I was already hoping to do so. I've always seen Marienbad as one of the most unique of cinematic experiences; it makes viewers entirely conscious of the process of cinema while allowing them simultaneously to surrender to its larger mysteries, and, despite all the films since 1961 that imitate or parody it and the seemingly endless debates about it in print and online, the film still confounds and impresses. The final word on Last Year at Marienbad will certainly never exist. The couple might have met a year before, as the man, generically named X, insists; or they might not have, and each part of their history is a construct, a lie in an elaborate game of seduction. They might have had an affair the previous year, but, then, as Alain Robbe-Grillet's screenplay implies, he might have forced himself on her and raped her, and the woman, simply named A, could be repressing her memory of the trauma. "It was probably not by force," X says in recollection, "but only you know." Alternately, the figures who inhabit the film's baroque hotel might all be dead, caught in a way-station between this life and the next, "frozen, silent figures," as X says in voice-over," long dead no doubt." Or, referring to their previous encounter, X tells A, "I told you that you looked alive. Your response was simply to laugh."

Resnais' audience at the 1961 Venice Film Festival laughed out loud, actually, mocking the film, but that was because they initially misunderstood it. By the final shot, they all sat in what Resnais later called "religious silence." The film's opening act has always amused me too, although the reasons are entirely different. At about eleven minutes into the film, Resnais tried to sneak in Delphine Seyrig, placing her in the far right side of the frame. She stood perfectly still, making the opposite of the grand entrance:

Seyrig was one of the most enigmatic and alluring of European cinema's actresses of that generation; she could hardly be considered inconspicuous in any shot, including that one. The same might be said (well, the conspicuousness, not the allure) of Alfred Hitchock, whose figure appears roughly one minute later, hiding, apparently, on the right side of the frame in a wide shot down one of the hotel's corridors. Resnais meant that as an amusing visual reference to the man who had so deeply influenced both him and Robbe-Grillet. And, then, throughout the rest of the film, Resnais inserted numerous visual puzzles, some of which are quite complex and demanding, such as this one:

Here, X stands next to a doorway while a couple, seen in the mirror to the right, argues. The camera pans closer to the mirror and, when it pans back to the left, X is gone. The couple exit the room through the doorway, two other hotel guests enter, the camera tracks back into an adjacent room, and X appears, unexpectedly, next to a different mirror:

X then turns and walks towards the previous room and passes by the arguing couple, who originally had exited into the opposite room:

Perhaps the couple double-backed; perhaps the events here occur in some odd, reverse, asynchronous order; perhaps they occur simultaneously. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet make no apparent preference for any of these options. This is the experience of Marienbad: repeated sequences, long takes that begin with characters in one place and end with the same characters elsewhere, eyeline shots that don't match, ones that do, and no identifiable suggestion of the veracity of one sequence over the other.

As much as Last Year at Marienbad confounds the viewing experience, to a great degree it confounds conventional film criticism even more. Explaining the structure, the breaking of narrative conventions, the film's influence on European cinema across the last century, all seems a bit old-hat now. Why the film is challenging is a more interesting question. As Robert Kolker remarked some quarter of a century ago, perhaps Marienbad isn't inherently difficult but only seems so because "our expectations about narrative continuity are based only upon what movies have told us to expect." Resnais himself would have agreed. He states in an interview on Criterion's new DVD that the film is nothing more than "a simple love story" and, despite the lack of clear chronology, "we'd fully respected the laws of dramatic structure in force ever since the ancient Greeks." Of course, his approach gave critics all sorts of fits. "The fact that Resnais tells stories and experiments with form," Jonathan Rosenbaum once explained, "expels him from the avant-garde and mainstream alike." In other words, he's difficult to classify, as is this film. Contrary to Resnais' description (and to that of Mark Polizotti, who wrote an essay accompanying Criterion's edition), the plot is "simple" only at the most basic level; beyond that, the complexities accrue, like objects in a hoarder's room. M might be A's husband, but there is no proof of this. Perhaps she has a husband, perhaps a lover, or both. Perhaps she was in Marienbad, but maybe it was Frederiksbad. Who can say? Maybe A, concinved that X's story about their affair is true, leaves with him at the film's end, but didn't M already shoot her dead?

Chronology is a particular "problem" in Resnais' early films. For Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the streets of Nevers, where she grew up, become in her mind the streets of Hiroshima and vice versa. The past becomes the present; the "flashback" as a critical term loses all definition. In Last Year at Marienbad, X and A haunt hallways and rooms, view gardens and statues, play games, and talk in repetitious, maddening fashion because time has the same abstract, amorphous quality. The seduction could be happening right now or a year before, shown in the film not as flashbacks but as representations of what these characters see in their own minds' eyes. When X enters A's room and walks towards the bed, while A, in her white gown, retreats, the question arises: is this happening, is it a memory, or is it imagined? Whichever it might be, Last Year at Marienbad breaks down the typical distinctions critics and viewers make between past and present, beginning and end, the structure of a story and our "objective" understanding of it; it renders these distinctions insufficient, even obsolete. It becomes a film not about events across time, but about the subjective experience of them, the individual point-of-view, the subconscious, and it therefore requires new terminology, new ways of thinking about film.

This subjectivity makes Marienbad confounding in another dimension: it undermines the old charge that the film is a cold intellectual exercise, impenetrable, devoid of emotion. In reality, the film surveys, to borrow a phrase from the author of The Wasteland, "memory and desire", illustrating the experience of the former failing while the latter overwhelms. For all of its amusing parlor tricks, its oddly varied repetitions, Last Year at Marienbad is a nightmare of a film, not about remembering a possible past, but about the terrors of forgetting. Seyrig's A struggles to recall her previous rendezvous with X, realizing she has no recollection of it. X seems certain, but even then his memory begins to fail. Troubled, he proclaims, "no, no ... it wasn't by force," as if the proclamation itself would negate a possible transgression, eliminate the past altogether, make their affair in the present real (or make the present livable). X and A fear losing the ability to tell the difference between the present and the past, to place themselves within the passage of time. That, and not the question of the reality of their previous encounter, is the central subject of Last Year at Marienbad, and Resnais' great ingenuity lay most in fashioning a form of cinema that forced his audience to fear losing their ability as well.

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Note: I've recently joined the group at Filmwell, a film-based web site, and I've cross-posted this essay there. I'll be writing for Filmwell from time to time, and will either cross-post things here or, in the least, will announce any new posts that appear there.

Sources:
Robert Philip Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (Oxford, 1983), p. 156.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Alain Renais and MELO" in Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley, 1995), p. 192.

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.