new blog

Hey readers,

I've just launched a new movie blog: Habitué. I'm hoping it will be a co-authored taste maker of some sort.

I just posted the introduction and plan on posting a year in review piece in the next week.

Hope to see you there.

-Andrew

The Sleeping Beauty (Breillat)

Since my first viewing of Fat Girl I’ve been an enthusiastic admirer of Catherine Breillat. Her films are so single-minded in their pursuits and obsessive in their explorations as to create a body of work as simultaneously satisfying and challenging as few other filmmakers have. Cronenberg comes to mind as another personal favorite whose methodology has remained uninterrupted, even when his methods have transformed—both have made weak films but have never outright disappointed (though I’m dreading A Dangerous Method). Anatomy of Hell remains her most challenging work, I won’t say her masterpiece (I’m growing to loathe that word and everything it implies). It is her most concise marriage of style and theme: erasing the lines that exist between auteur cinema and pornography, for better or worse, and conflating the ideologies that underlie each demarcated Industry. Since The Last Mistress (still unavailable in the US and perhaps her weakest) Breillat has transitioned into a newer style, albeit with the same methods, and comparable to Rohmer’s migration from Claire to Perceval.

The Sleeping Beauty (just out on DVD from Strand) is her second straight-up adaptation of a fairy tale in said ‘new style’—which is essentially the inclusion of more explicit fantastic elements and no explicit sex. More drastic than her change in material is the shift in her reception, at least here in the states. I’ve noticed much warmer receptions from critics who either ignored or performed hatchet jobs on her previous work, namely Anatomy of Hell and Fat Girl. I wonder if this new found admiration (or tolerance) is in part due to an ability to fold these later works into the prevailing norms of auteur image-making: the formal play and nubile nudity of The Sleeping Beauty can be framed next to like-minded works by Rohmer, Bresson, and Malle (not even her investigations into the cultural construction of gender really differentiates The Sleeping Beauty as Black Moon could be labeled vaguely feminist or at least aware of gender production). Her previous work interrupted this narrative of masculine creator/feminine muse in a way that could not be circumvented—you had to reject the work entirely, which many did. While these themes are still present in The Sleeping Beauty—instead looking at the cultural production by way of stories told to little girls—something is lost in what strikes me as their homogeneity. But then again, entirely new things are gained.

Continuing in the vein of Blue Beard, Breillat struts her stuff as a phenomenal director of children, anchoring the film’s reality in the performance of Carla Besnaïnou, whose sense of play informs the contract made with the audience—play along or go home. Its the only thing holding the world together—a performance that isn’t polished to some bland universal childhood treacle—it’s as idiosyncratic and off the cuff as children are (hell, as people are). From this malleability to believe one’s own games for the sake of adventure comes the fantasy dream world that is both as familiar and unsettling as Windsor McCay’s Slumberland. Keeping within her own methods, Breillat films this world with an economy of shots, crafting images that are mesmerizing, preferring the strangeness of everyday settings and objects to inform the sense of unreality. In a time when most studio filmmakers rely on CGI tableaux’s out of laziness (rather than make something of it like Tim Burton or Takashi Miike) Breillat is able to make a more enveloping landscape with a greater sense of wonder and magic than anything to come out of Harry Potter, but really, what is the point in comparing them? Still, it’s worth repeating that childhood is treated with more tenderness and sincerity in a Breillat film than any ersatz merchandise commercial, yet Breillat is the artsy-fartsy provocateur. Perhaps it’s because she is expressing young girlhood, and not universal boy journeys. Fucking bitch, who does she think she is anyway?

Traumatizing violence is still present, though expressed quite differently. When the Sleeping Beauty awakens, suddenly aged sixteen (as foretold in the beginning), and courting a first sexual encounter, the fantasy withers. Transcending this barrier is quite an awful experience as Sleeping Beauty (and the viewer) is suddenly deprived of this world that was such a joy, even when the threat of death lingered. As it turns out, this elaborate story-book fantasy that we’ve been so ready to indulge in is just another gendered morality tale of the cult of virginity. The real world, for Breillat, is harsh and exploitative, not because of any cool cynicism or sexy nihilism, but because it has to be compared to such elaborate and all-encompassing dream worlds. The malleability of gender is calcified. In more ways than one it parallels the ending of Fat Girl: a young girl navigates her own construction of reality that concludes with a wish granted—as if an off-screen fairy godmother wills it to happen. No mustardy fairy tale lined with lurid adolescent desires can ever accommodate sex, especially within the world of male privilege and naiveté that grants modes of escape and individuality that are denied to a heartbroken, violated, pregnant girl—even if she was a princess and even if it was true love.

Melancholia

I sincerely wish I could just talk about the film—any film—on its own. But I can’t. And that has nothing to do with Lars von Trier or any of the silly titles bestowed upon him as cinema’s whatever-you-want. I don’t mean that I was preoccupied with von Trier or what I think about him while I watched Melancholia; I was preoccupied with Antichrist and how typical and pedantic and cowardly I think it is. I came to Melancholia begrudgingly, as a task. People on the web wouldn’t shut up about it and it keeps cropping up in top tens (I know the year isn’t over but that doesn’t stop cinephiles from beginning their lists in January. Fucking January*.) Fact is, the 2-hour-plus running time and the thought of another Antichrist literally turned my stomach. Needless to say, I’m still not sure how I feel about Melancholia, but I can’t stop thinking about it. And that’s more than I can say about Tree of Life or Drive.

This is either the most grotesque criticism of High Art or the most un-ironic embracement of it. I’m not even sure if the two are mutually exclusive. Trier has made High Artifice—niggling his way through Art House as an easily codified genre and commanding his universe with effortless grace and imperceptible pretension. It is difficult to blame the film's triteness on von Trier and not the culture industry itself, his new home of late. His grand Metaphors! fall apart with each new sequence, constantly diminishing whatever on-the-nose readings we’ve inscribed on them. I applaud the film’s opening overture that discloses the entire film in chapter heading imagery and a clear evocation of the film’s ending: the planet Melancholia collides with Earth. Oddly enough, I found this sequence tedious as it first occurred. But now I think I love it.

Nothing the characters did at the wedding was shocking. This is a crucial element. The garden party melodrama was so contrived that it must have been a joke, and I mean this as a compliment. Von Trier has taken this type of art film to its logical conclusions, one that he didn’t even reach; expressing a new sense of boredom not only with the manner with which these stories are told and retold, but the very fabric of the story itself bores him. Consider the confrontation between Justine and her boss: the telling off moment was so by-the-numbers and unsatisfying—not because it wasn’t conceived of well, but because it mirrors so many of these routine narrative pleasures that it becomes rote. Von Trier also gives us a Rosetta stone in Udo Kier's wedding planner, a key to the cosmic joke of human tragedy. But by that same token, it can only subvert so much from within—my main complaint of Antichrist—at what point is it just a refreshing take on the same old shit? This contradicts my reading of the film as resultant of boredom with forms: von Trier hasn't tried any other kind of filmmaking.

Amid all of this perfunctory profundity is a sly von Trier throwing up rare moments of unsettling subversion. His wholesale invasion of modern film production as a series of digitally manipulated and digitally conceived tableaus is given better expression here than Antichrist, with his pseudo-Dogma camera given over to rapid zooms that quickly establish depth within the frame and locations expertly lit to display multiple planes of shadow. This looks like a digital diorama and the effect is unnervingly subtle. Melancholia is the interplay between these subtle brushstrokes amid the hammiest, sloppiest, biggest canvass in the cosmos. It doesn’t always achieve this effect, and sometimes it stills falls flat to the point of asking, well, what is the point? And that frustrating contradiction is the most effective special effect in the film. Abstract and social readings are as fluid and paradoxical as the notions of sincerity and sardonic contempt. Melancholia works because it is a mood piece, we are meant to feel our way through it, from cold boredom in Part I to overwhelming—I don’t know what, sadness perhaps? catharsis? –in Part II. I can't conceive of sitting through it again, but maybe that's how these things work.

*Yes, January began a thread that has been periodically updated as new films were seen. (Link)

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Would you like to know more?

Richard Portan's pan for Cinemascope. (NOTE: I also agree with this take more than the praise)

First Installment of Critical Consensus by Eric Kohn for Indiewire featuring J. Hoberman and Amy Taubin on Melancholia and J Edgar. Includes more links.

David Hudson's roundup of Melancholia for The Daily on the Notebook @ Mubi.

Questionable Endings (3 FIlms)

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed these films, having low or indifferent expectations, but also how problematic I found each of their endings.

Source Code (Duncan Jones / 2011): Tight, unpretentious display of zany ideas that is just smart enough to get the job done. It’s fun without being offensive—we actually have to take notice of entertainment that isn’t oozing with smutty misogyny and thinly veiled racism. The ending came to a perfect halt, and then kept going into absurdity. It should have stopped on the freeze-frame within the source code—the old fashioned Hollywood kiss, turned sour because we know its bullshit. Instead it tries to rationalize a new lease on life for the beleaguered hero along with some alternate reality nonsense. It would have been more poignant had it left us with our mouths filled with the hunks of dead G.I.'s and America’s insensitivity toward its veterans, a kind of commentary that is never too on-the-nose, but hey, many great films have godawful endings: The Last Laugh, even though we know it’s pure fantasy…it kinda amplifies the tragedy in a way (unlike this), Metropolis likewise hams out some disingenuous denouement. It’s understandable that Source Code has such a weak conclusion; a film running at this speed with such momentum could never come to a graceful halt. It’s not a train wreck by any means, but the ride is better than the arrival.

 

The Ward (John Carpenter / 2011): I might sound reactionary but I like classic John Carpenter almost exclusively. His fascination with horror as a matter of consciousness is best explored in his drawn out, plodding, meandering films that take their time and effectively absorb us. The Thing, The Fog, They Live, Assault on Precinct 13, and Escape from New York lull you into their worlds in a way that Hitchcock did. It made for grab bag anything-goes pictures that were cool, funny, unnerving, and romantic. It’s not that Carpenter didn’t adjust well to the 90s and 00s—In the Mouth of Madness has its own thing going on—but the quick cuts jumble the sense of space and time that is so integral to the atmosphere of his earlier works. It also makes his acting styles look stilted and hokey compared to the new forms of editing and pacing. It’s been ages since I’ve seen Vampires and I skipped Ghosts of Mars and I almost steered clear of The Ward (if it weren’t for the repeat cries of return to form). This one takes its time, but is almost unbearably familiar. By the final ten minutes I realized that this might have been a ploy on Carpenter’s part: unable or uninterested in repeating the long-takes and steady drive of his earlier work, he strings us along with 70 minutes of by-the-numbers genre exercises hitting all the hallmarks of a ‘psych ward’ film: here’s the common area featuring our eccentric cast of crazies! Then he hits us with a foreseeable twist (it’s been done before) that works in the way that it shifts the direction of the film toward a classic Carpenter world of consciousness and perception and away from a monster movie. But then again, it could just be a somewhat entertaining take on a tired convention that suddenly got interesting and alleviated my boredom-cum-contempt for having wasted my time. All in all, I prefer The Thing, however obvious that sounds.

Rejoice and Shout (Don McGlynn / 2011): It’s easy to like a documentary about something you find fascinating but know next-to-nothing about. I grew up with Blues and Jazz and frankly, I’m shocked to have never even crossed paths with the musicians spotlighted here. The form goes against the grain of so many music history docs in that it places gospel in the current moment, rejecting the cinematic embalming process of looking backwards over a century of moments painted in various shades of video quality. It brings gospel right up to the now, intermingling professionals with amateurs, historians with preachers, icons with obscure figures. It doesn’t shy away from the religion either—hell, the film is practically a sermon about music with some history thrown in. Not that I’m a man of faith, as they say, but it’s nice to see a culture not run through the secular meat-grinder in order to appeal to us godless audiophiles. The footage of Mahalia Jackson, The Swan Silvertones, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the Staples Singers had me on the edge of my seat or the on the verge tears. A scandal that these artists have fallen from popular consciousness! It's also of note how Smoky Robinson is the worst talking head ever. He grins with a smugness as if to say you’re welcome after every platitude he drops about black music heritage. Everyone else is far more interesting. The ending came as quite a shock: that Gospel was born of hard times and even though the traditions and culture live on, racism is pretty much over. The film ends on two of the most vapid of modern arguments: footage of Obama's inauguration and MLK's I have a dream soundbites. Like always, MLK's socialism is conveniently absent, along with his criticisms of economic inequality in America that sound as if they were spoken today. The lineage of slavery, lynching, and Civil Rights stops short of the modern day Criminal Legal System, the Prison Industrial Complex, and the War on Drugs that disproportionally target blacks. Nor does the film even give a hint of the systemic racism that pervades American economics and politics nor does it touch on the sexual violence against black women perpetrated by the State. Obviously the film can't cover everything, but the hypocrisy of the End of Racism boondoggle really soured the experience of this otherwise moving film.

Another side note: I find it interesting that high profile documentaries on black culture are almost exclusively directed by white men: Ken Burn's Jazz (2001), Martin Scorsese's The Blues (2003), Paul Justman's Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002), Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's Soul Power (2008) and two more from 2011: Michael Rapaport's Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest and Göran Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape.

15 Films that Haunt Me

For Halloween, the most cinematic of American holidays, I thought I'd showcase 15 films that really haunt me. Not scared me, mind you, but whose consciousness infected me like a contagion and lingers in my thoughts to this day. A cinema of horror (as opposed to a genre) is about consciousness and these films range from the wholly immersive to the barely-held-together. I can't even say I like all of these films, and most of them I despised after my first viewing. But they stayed with me, monopolized my thoughts over films I hailed as masterpieces, gave new architecture to my perceptions and nightmares and confounded my ideas of what constitutes a good movie or even a frightening one.

 

Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold /  1998)

 

Blood Simple (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen / 1984)

 

Come and See (Elem Klimov / 1985)

 

The Cremator (Juraj Herz / 1968)

 

Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg / 1973)

 

Elephant (Alan Clarke / 1989)

 

Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat / 2001)

 

Germany, Pale Mother (Helma Sanders-Brahms / 1980)

 

Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson / 1974)

 

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog / 1979)

 

Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske / 1940)

 

Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa / 2001)

 

Salo (Pier Paolo Pasolini / 1975)

 

The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino / 1953)

 

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jireš / 1970)

What films haunt you?

2 Screenings: Ne change rien & Pina

The other day I watched my first Pedro Costa film, a 35mm print of Ne change rien presented by The Nightingale at Cinema Borealis in Chicago. It was hosted by Gabe Klinger and Jonathan Rosenbaum, who facilitated a conversation after the screening. The venue was small, comfortable, and cool, like somebody had a private theater in their home.

The conversation was equal parts indifference and rebellion, mostly taken up by questions of what constitutes avant garde (both in film and music). Gabe introduced the film and music as such, and the audience couldn't get past their disagreement with that description. To be honest, I've never felt comfortable with defining avant garde, and no one has provided me with a workable definition. I don't consider the film that radical, but rather more traditional than expected, but because of the homogenous nature of the types of narratives we are saturated with, almost anything looks experimental or avant garde by comparison. Even when it's themes and subjects are as conservatively traditional as this!

The film can be tedious. As a labor of love on Costa's part we are not invited to share his adoration of Jeanne Balibar, but I'm not sure if that is the point. Like several contemporary global filmmakers I got the sense that this was more in tune with Kiarostami, Jia Zhang-ke, or Weerasethakul and their disinterest with the documentary / fiction dichotomy. I was absorbed by the passage of time in Ne change rien and lost in its sense of space, but others did raise significant doubts. If we say that these filmmakers are documenting what they find interesting, then wont we justify anything they produce? The fear seemed to be that these artists could just push play on the recorder and make an art-film-documentary. That's a reasonable doubt, but the anxiety seems to stem more from a sense of loss of fundamental formal truths. Personally, I don't have much use for the cannon of forms as a rubric for what constitutes a valuable experience. Ne change rien didn't blow me away, but I certainly didn't despise it. Simply put, I think it's time for me to invest in Pedro Costa.

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I attended the Chicago International Film Festival's screening of Wim Wender's Pina. The screening itself, along with everything about the Chicago Festival, was a fucking debacle. Between the uninformed, feckless staff and a lynch mob of indignant film goers I almost regretted the experience. Wenders was in attendance (they shut the lights off on him mid-introduction) and both his responses and the audience questions were fairly excellent.

He said he would never return to 2D filmmaking and that 3D has untapped possibilities that he is interested in exploring. His thoughts on a 3D documentary sound interesting, but even Wenders was skeptical of comparing the leapt to 3D as profound as the transitions from silent to sound.

Watching the 3D sequences of the Pina Bausch pieces was mesmerizing, a visceral experience that was constantly interrupted by traditional documentary segments. I was constantly distracted by my desire to see the pieces uninterrupted. Wenders explained that he worried that an audience needed context. His documentary choices forced me to grapple with the construction of the piece, a constant reminder that this is the work of someone else. Pina is obviously a tribute from one artist to another, but I can't help but feel robbed of the chance to get lost in the multidimensional world of the four dance pieces. These moments are so brilliant (for both Pina's work and Wenders' in capturing it) that this film may be great just for this opportunity. I recommend it highly if a 3D presentation comes your way.

On a forum I frequent a user pleaded with members to watch Bausch's own film Die Klage der Kaiserin instead of "this bland poop". I'll certainly be checking it out. Wenders claimed that Bausch's work understood more about the realities of men and women than the whole history of cinema. If this is true (and I gather it is from the segments of her work on display) then I think it's a safe bet that her 2D television film may be of more interest than Wenders'.

Jaggar & Melville

Not Mick and Herman, rather Alison and Jean-Pierre.

Reading Alison Jaggar’s Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology (1989) I was struck by how most of her observations and generalizations on gender could have been gleaned through close scrutiny of masculinsit cinema. Particularly that of Jean-Pierre Melville, whose particular brand of cool echoes the distanced social reflections of Feuillade (although Feuillade often permits a certain amount of emoting to his heroes, it is better to align Melville with American Westerns). When it comes to gender there exists in these films a fine line between biological determinism of genders and gender as construction. While neither filmmaker ever draws obvious conclusions from this dichotomy, they do tend to enjoy their freedom without ever having to dig deeper in their work. Melville is a master of surfaces, even if his audiences supply their beliefs in determinism, which I can't say he'd contradict (or endorse my readings of his work).

Feminist theorists have pointed out that the western tradition has not seen everyone as equally emotional. Instead, reason has been associated with members of dominant political, social, and cultural groups and emotion with members of subordinate groups. Prominent among those subordinate groups in our society are people of color, except for supposedly “inscrutable orientals”, and women.

Although the emotionality of women is a familiar cultural stereotype, its grounding is quite shaky. Women appear more emotional than men because they, along with some groups of people of color, are permitted and even required to express emotion more openly. In contemporary western culture, emotionally inexpressive women are suspect as not being real women, whereas men who express their emotions freely are suspected of being homosexual or in some other way deviant from the masculine ideal. Modern western men, in contrast with Shakespeare’s heroes, for instance, are required to present a façade of coolness, lack of excitement, even boredom, to express emotion only rarely and then for relatively trivial events, such as sporting occasions, where expressed emotions are acknowledged to be dramatized and so are not taken entirely seriously. Thus, women in our society form the main group allowed or even expected to feel emotion. A woman may cry in the face of disaster, and a man of color may gesticulate, but a white man merely sets his jaw.

White men’s control of their emotional expression may go to the extremes of repressing their emotions, failing to develop emotionally, or even losing the capacity to experience many emotions. Not uncommonly these men are unable to identify what they are feeling, and even they may be surprised, on occasion, by their own apparent lack of emotional response to a situation, such as death, where emotional reaction is perceived appropriate. In some married couples, the wife implicitly is assigned the job of feeling emotion for both of them. White, college-educated men increasingly enter therapy in order to learn how to “get in touch with” their emotions, a project other men may ridicule as weakness. In therapeutic situations, men may learn that they are just as emotional as women but less adept at identifying their own or others’ emotions. In consequence, their emotional development may be relatively rudimentary; this may lead to moral rigidity or insensitivity. Paradoxically, men’s lacking awareness of their own emotional responses frequently results in their being more influenced by emotion rather than less.

I'd like to add a few thoughts on Melville's Un Flic, which I recently watched for the first time, and which could be summed up by the above excerpts.

 

Melville's film, which is comparably loose in parts compared to his other late period work, is an inversion of Feuillade's serial format. In Feuillade's pulpy worlds of cops and arch-villains, it is the villains that are most fascinating. Not only does he name his best films after them (Les Vampirs, Fantomas) he seems at times rather bored with his detectives and flatfoots. Lang does the same with Spione, making his villains dynamic and compelling, while his unnamed hero merely moves the plot along. Even though we are fascinated by these super-crooks they remain irredeemably evil, committing atrocious acts within a pseudo-documentary 'objective' frame.

Un Flic is also about its villains, a gang of robbers, but it moralizes and romanticizes them with unspoken codes of honor and loyalty. This is as comfortable as Melville gets with masculine emotions: codes. On the other hand, his hero the cop is a bastard. Though it could be argued that this is keeping with the serial tradition in that Un Flic means 'a cop', thus naming the film for its villain, but I have to admit I find the robbers more interesting still, even if the cop's scenes are more unpredictable.

It is interesting how Melville depicts gender. The cop seems incapable of feeling, yet is prone to sudden bursts of aggression and has a bizarre relationship with a beautiful informant that we later discover is a transvestite (she could also be transgender, it is never clarified). The cop uses masculine pronouns to demean her when her information fails to provide him what he wants. Like most Melville films his narrow depiction of the world is entirely masculine, with only a single woman caught between the conflicting poles, excluded from their world no matter how well she conforms (she never emotes, in fact only the informant and one of the robber's wives express any concern for anything). Melville likes to keep his women in the dance halls run by men and frequented by both his masculine heroes and villains. The trouble for me has always been that these highly enjoyable films are not disingenuous in their depictions of how people have been groomed to act, rather that they tend to romanticize the notion that this world is correct or eternal and to question it (not dismiss it, mind you) is to miss the point, a point that is never really clarified by its apostles. Melville's cool distance accommodates the application of biological determinism which I, like most feminist, post-modernist, and post-structuralist thinkers, find highly suspect.

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unrelated miscellanea

My good friend Joe has started up a blog featuring his experimental video work, poetry, and criticisms with the ambitious aim of posting something everyday for the rest of 2011. Already posted is one his best videos and hopefully we'll get to see some of the work he did for How to Dress Well. Check it out here at She / Color (it's also on the blog roll on the right).