An Alphabet of Cinema

Last week I was chatting on the phone with Christian Keathley, and about a half-dozen times I thought: “Hey, that’d make a cool blog post.” One of those times, we were discussing a cinephilic essay that’s one of my favorites, Peter Wollen’s “An Alphabet of Cinema.” If you haven’t read it, please think of this post as an inducement, an urging, to do so: it’s great fun.

Wollen delivered “An Alphabet of Cinema” as the Serge Daney memorial lecture at the Rotterdam film festival in 1998. It was then published in the New Left Review in 2001, and also appears in Wollen’s essay collection, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (2002).

For each letter of the alphabet, Wollen chooses a cinema-related word that is important to him, and devotes an entry of a few paragraphs to it. There are two reasons why I particularly love this essay: its loose, ‘bloggy’ format; and its conversational clarity. Wollen was aiming the lecture at a general festival audience rather than a roomful of fellow academics.

Here is the alphabet, along with Wollen’s chosen subjects.

“A is for Aristotle … the first theorist of film”; “B is not for Brecht, although of course it could be. Or even for B-movies, much as I always loved them. It is for Bambi”; C for Cinephilia; “D must certainly be for Daney, but it is also for Dance—Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly”; E for Eisenstein, a “ruined filmmaker, an image-maker ‘haunted by writing’ (Daney’s phrase), by the shot as ideogram, obsessed with the synchronization of sound, movement and image”; F for film festival; G for Godard, “for anti-tradition”; “H is for Hitchcocko-Hawksianism—and a pathway towards avant-garde film”; I for Industry and Ince; J for Japan; “K is for Kane, the film maudit par excellence”; L for Lumière; M for Méliès; N for Narrative; O for Online; “P is personal—for The Passenger, a film directed by Antonioni, which I wrote with my script-writing partner Mark Peploe”; Q for Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?; R for Rossellini, Rome Open City, Renoir, and Rules of the Game; S for Sternberg, Shanghai Gesture, and Surrealism; T for Telecinema, Third Dimension (3D), and Television; U for Underground Film; V for Voyeurism; W for Snow’s Wavelength; “X stands for an unknown quantity—for the strange fascination that makes us remember a particular shot or a particular camera movement”; Y for Les Yeux sans Visage, Franju’s Eyes without a Face; Z for the final frame of the zoom shot, Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma, and for Zero.

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Here are some excerpts from the lecture-essay:

Paradoxically, I began to read Aristotle in order to understand the writings of his great antagonist, Bertolt Brecht. Brecht himself directly attacked the idea of an Aristotelian theatre, seeking to replace it with what he called ‘epic theatre’, but now I think his polemic was based on a common misunderstanding. Aristotle’s idea of tragedy was very far from the kind of psychologically involving theatre that Brecht attacked. Like his fiercest critic, Aristotle saw tragedy as essentially dialectic and political. Brecht’s tragic vision of history, a vision shaped by world war, by successful and failed revolution, by the civil strife of the Weimar period and the rise to power of Hitler, was not so very distant from that of Aristotle, shaped by Alexander of Macedon and the crisis of the Athenian polis. For Daney, cinema—true cinema—began with Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a film about our personal response to an immense historic tragedy. Resnais’s film became the measure against which all others were judged. It was in their relation to Hiroshima, Mon Amour that Daney came to see Rossellini and Godard as the great moral film-directors of our time [...]

By ‘cinephilia’ I mean an obsessive infatuation with film, to the point of letting it dominate your life. To Serge Daney, looking back, cinephilia seemed a ‘sickness’, a malady which became a duty, almost a religious duty, a form of clandestine self-immolation in the darkness, a voluntary exclusion from social life. At the same time, a sickness that brought immense pleasure, moments which, much later, you recognized had changed your life. I see it differently, not as a sickness, but as a symptom of the desire to remain within the child’s view of the world, always outside, always fascinated by a mysterious parental drama, always seeking to master one’s anxiety by compulsive repetition. Much more than just another leisure activity. [...]

[Vincente] Minnelli saw himself as part of the fashionable art world—he was influenced by Surrealism and brought a dream-like delirium to the musical. [Gene] Kelly was part of the down-market dance world: brought up in the world of tap-dancing and working men’s clubs, the world of vaudeville, but aspiring to the world of ballet, to the world of high art. For me, Kelly was one of the few great geniuses of Hollywood. With On the Town, he took the musical out of the studio, onto the streets of New York, into everyday life. With Singin’ in the Rain, he perfected his invention of what we might call ‘cine-choreography’, his combination into one person of dancer, choreographer and film-maker, so that each dance was conceived and executed together with camera-angle and movement. Dance was no longer ‘filmed’ from outside. It merged with the film. Kelly broke down the distinction between offstage and on-stage, between narrative and spectacle. He dramatized dance, choreographed action. [...]

Godard was the most extraordinary artist to emerge from within the original French New Wave. I was in Paris when A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) first came out and I saw it every day for a week. At the time, people commented on the way it broke the traditional rules of film-making—its use of jump-cuts, its interpolation of cinema-vérité techniques into narrative film. Recently, when I saw it again, in a beautiful new 35mm print, it seemed almost classical. Its strangeness had been eroded by time. Godard himself never fitted into the festival genre. By the end of the sixties he had moved decisively into the avant-garde. For him, the ‘New Wave’ was more like an escape-hatch from the grip of Hitchcocko-Hawksianism. [...]

Thomas Ince was the director and producer who should get the main credit, if that’s the word, rather than D.W. Griffith, for creating the institution of Hollywood, for laying the foundations of the industry. It was Ince, at his own studio, who realized that the script was not just a dramatic story told in dialogue, but the template of the entire film, which could be broken down, scene by scene, to determine the estimated cost of production, the shooting schedule, the requirements that would be made of each department (sets, costumes, effects) and so on. Even today, the costume designer and the cinematographer and the props person carry annotated versions of the script, setting out what will be needed from them in each successive scene. Viewed in this light, the script is not so much an artistic product as an organizational tool, the fundamental prerequisite for the creation of Hollywood as an industry. It is the conceptual assembly line on which industrial production is based. It is also the opposite of Improvisation, the opposite of Godard. Blame or credit should go to Thomas Ince. [...]

And finally, Z is for Zero—Zero for Conduct, zero visibility, and Godard’s slogan, ‘Back to Zero’. As we enter the age of new media, the cinema is reinventing itself. We need to see that reinvention in radical as well as mainstream terms, to try and reimagine the cinema as it might have been and as, potentially, it still could be—an experimental art, constantly renewing itself, as a counter-cinema, as ‘cinema haunted by writing’. Back to zero. Begin again. A is for Avant-Garde.

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A couple of links:

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum's website launched last week with an entry on two neglected filmmakers, Eduardo de Gregorio and Sara Driver. And his archives go all the way back to the mid-80s.

-- From last week: Mubarak Ali has a post on Renoir, Garrel and close-ups. Also: lots of great links to international film blogs and sites in his blogroll.

-- The Siren on Thomas Doherty's biography of Joseph Breen, Hollywood's Censor.

-- At Artforum, P. Adams Sitney on Peter Hutton.

DVDs

I’m in the final week of classes this semester. Soon, summer will be here and along with it the chance to step up the pace of cinema-related activities—watching, reading, writing.

I’m generally a DVD renter rather than buyer, but I just purchased a big batch from Europe to fire up as soon as the semester ends:

-- Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema. I saw one of the earliest North American screenings that were part of the comprehensive JLG retro assembled by James Quandt about 6 years ago. But they are now a blur in my head, and more than any other movies I can think of, these demand repeated re-viewings.

-- Godard/Mieville shorts: De l'origine du XXIe siècle, The Old Place, Liberté et patrie, Je vous salue, Sarajevo, plus a hardcover book.

-- Bresson’s The Devil, Probably, finally on DVD. I've seen this once, on videotape.

-- Satyajit Ray’s Abhijan. Upon graduation from college, I joined a computer company in Calcutta. Right across the street from my office building in Ballygunge, I saw my first-ever retrospective, the complete films of S. Ray. I haven’t seen Abhijan since.

-- Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma. Also, great news: Criterion is releasing some of his made-for-TV history films in the fall.

-- Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives. I've seen just two Davies films: The House of Mirth and The Long Day Closes. Home Film Festival used to carry a videotape of his shorts that I'm sorry I never got around to renting.

-- Jean Vigo collection: L’Atalante, Zero for Conduct, A propos de Nice, Taris. I’ve been waiting years to see the latter two films.

-- Renoir’s Toni. Renoir is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers but I've never immersed myself in his films intensely over a limited time period. I'd like to do that this summer. And alongside, I look forward to reading the critical writings on his films by Andre Bazin, Raymond Durgnat, Christoper Faulkner, Leo Braudy, etc.

-- Mizoguchi’s Crucified Lovers and The Woman of Rumour. I haven’t seen the former but I loved the latter. Here's David Bordwell's entry on the film, and mine.

-- Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) a.k.a. Slow Motion.

I'm wondering: any recent or future DVD releases you're excited about or would like to recommend? To jog your memory, here's the release calendar page at DVD Beaver.

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Links:

-- Best wishes to the indefatigable Matt Zoller Seitz, who is moving from print journalism to filmmaking.

-- Craig Keller on João César Monteiro. Also, Craig has an amazing DVD wish list at Glenn Kenny's place. Many others chime in with their suggestions as well.

-- New issue of Reverse Shot.

-- Adrian Martin's monthly column at Filmkrant begins thus: "With Cahiers du Cinéma - both in its printed magazine and internet (www.cahiersducinema.com) versions - now in crisis because of being dropped by its Le Monde publisher, it seems as if the book 'Gilles Deleuze et les Images' (edited by François Dosse and Jean-Michel Frodon) may well be, alongside the updated French edition of Nicole Brenez's 'Abel Ferrara', among the last books to appear under the famous Cahiers banner. And, ironically enough, it is in the Deleuze book that we find a striking reflection by the American film scholar Dudley Andrew about how the globe of film culture is changing."

-- Robert Koehler at Film Journey: "Thierry's Cannes, Olivier's Quinzaine."

pic, courtesy DVD Beaver: Bresson's The Devil, Probably (1977).

On Blogging

There’s a question I’ve been pondering all week, so allow me to pose it to you—and to myself: What personal functions does blogging perform for you? In other words: Why do you blog?

To answer this for myself, I need to reach back briefly into my autobiography. Not long after I graduated from engineering school, I entered a PhD program. I was in my early 20s, but to be completely honest, I hadn’t yet been ‘turned on’ by my education. I was going through the motions, not disliking school but not loving it either. And the first couple of years of grad school didn’t ‘light my fire’.

The event that changed my life was my first teaching assignment, a senior-level course on information systems. Suddenly I discovered a fortuitous intersection of my desire and my aptitude. Also, it gave me a way to tie two important things together—scholarship and pedagogy—thus firing up, for the first time, my scholarly interests. I had found the center around which I could see my life’s work revolving: teaching and learning.

I relate this story because I find blogging deeply satisfying for the same reason. More than anything else, the film-blogosphere, to me, is a learning community, a giant, dynamically changing group of film-lovers teaching and learning from each other, 24/7.

Another reason why I value the blogosphere is the way it affects the relationship between specialism and generalism. The capitalistic economy puts in place strong incentives for all individuals to develop and sustain specializations. Division of labor is built into the cost-minimization objectives of our economic model. In the pre-blog past, we had a relatively small number of specialist writers and a large number of readers. The blogosphere overturns this, permitting large numbers of passionate generalists to enter the cinema discourse in a serious and engaged fashion. Film-thought need not be left solely to specialists. Cultural works like films ‘belong’ to the community at large and blogs allow that community, via a cost-unconstrained mechanism, to generate and disseminate discussion about cinema. There aren’t that many pockets in our economy where the possibilities for pluralistic expression and communication are relatively unaffected by monetary considerations, but the blogosphere is one of them. I find great promise in this flowering of generalism and its empowerment of non-professionals. My hope is that more professionals will find time (and reasons) to blog, thus further enriching this growing mutual-pedagogical project.

Your thoughts on this large subject of blogging? I'd love to hear them.

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Some of the juiciest chord progressions in pop music were written by Stevie Wonder in the 1970s. Here’s one, on “I Can’t Help It,” [mp3] that he composed for Michael Jackson’s wonderful record, Off The Wall (1979).

Stevie has a way of highlighting the complexity of his chords and their changes by writing little synth bass figures featuring some of the interesting, unusual notes in the chord, thus pulling the strangeness of the chord into the foreground. You can hear that right off the bat in the opening seconds of this song. The rhythm track arrangement is by Stevie and Greg Phillinganes, who plays all the electric piano and synth parts. (He’s also memorable on Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, among dozens of other session dates.)

There are hundreds of ‘perfect’ pop songs, and this, to me, is one of them. Every bar of it is branded on my memory, but there’s one fleeting moment that’s my favorite: when Michael Jackson abandons his high tenor for a second and plunges into the low register (very unusual for him) as he growls “Yeah…,” twice, at 2:00 and 3:07. Goosebumps…

pic: From the nine-minute dream sequence in Raj Kapoor's Awara (1951), one of the most admired scenes in all of Indian popular cinema.

Film of the Month Club

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Chris Cagle, who runs the blog Category D. He had an idea to start a movie club in the blogosphere, one that would, as he put it, “open up our own slice of film culture to a broader dialogue: between academic and cinephile, political and aesthetic, popular and avant-gardist, etc.”

This sounded like a brainwave to me, and I wrote back, offering my encouragement and support. Here is Chris’ introductory post at the new group blog he has created, Film of the Month Club. Do check it out: the more, the merrier. And the more interesting the conversation.

Chris asked if I wanted to kick us off by selecting the first film, and I’ve chosen Kazuo Hara’s documentary, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987). I’ll put up a brief post at the Film of the Month blog on Monday, May 19. I eagerly look forward to the discussion that ensues.

Four of Hara’s movies were released to region 1 DVD about a year ago: in addition to The Emperor’s Naked Army, Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 (1974), Goodbye CP (1972), and A Dedicated Life (1994). I've been hearing and reading about his films for years but I’ve seen none of them.

I like it that once a month the film club will force me to renounce a little control over my viewing and perhaps expose me to films I might not otherwise see, with the added bonus of a meaty post-film conversation.

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A couple of links:

-- Dan Sallitt has a thoughtful post called "Dramaturgy and Two-Ness": "[I]t occurred to me that classical dramaturgy could be seen as a way of creating a relationship between internal and external views of a work of art."

-- Matt Zoller Seitz, who comes from a family of jazz musicians, has a piece in the NYT on jazz and cinema.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum at DVDBeaver: "Ten Underappreciated John Ford Films."

-- Pacze Moj at Critical Culture posts a Glauber Rocha essay from 1970 called "Beginning at Zero: Notes on Cinema and Society."

pic: Dinah Washington in Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960).

A Cinema of Sensations

This week I drove up to George Eastman House to catch Jean Eustache’s Mes Petites Amoureuses (1974), which turned out to be one of the greatest coming-of-age films I’ve ever seen. This generally obscure movie deserves to be universally known.

The narrative events in the film are extremely small-scale and modest, but Eustache gives them great weight by using them as vehicles for vivid sensations and impressions: movement (a pack of boys riding their bicycles downhill on a country road, their wheels humming like music); light (the brilliant country sun followed by long hours in a dingy workshop in the city); sound (a first kiss stolen from behind in a dark movie theater during Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman while French-dubbed voices boom from the screen, substituting for Ava Gardner and James Mason); and texture (the endlessly arresting faces and bodies of a parade of nonprofessional players in schools, bars, boulevards, markets).

There is a poignant and ironic contrast at work here: on the one hand, the surfeit of sensations that the artwork gives generously to the viewer; and on the other, the silent, aching, ever-present physical longing the boy-protagonist feels in the film, a longing for sensations that are almost always out of his reach.

I also happened to revisit Bresson’s L’Argent and read Kent Jones’ excellent BFI monograph on the film. He quotes Bresson speaking to Michel Ciment in a 1983 Positif interview:

I’ve been called a Jansenist, which is madness. I’m the opposite. I’m interested in impressions. I’ll give you an example, taken from L’Argent. When I’m on the Grands Boulevards, the first thing I think is How do they impress me? And the answer is that they impress me as a mass of legs and a sound of feet on the pavements. I tried to communicate this impression by picture and by sound … There has to be a shock at the moment of doing, there has to be a feeling that the humans and things to be filmed are new, you have to throw surprises on film. […] That’s the Grands Boulevards, as far as I’m concerned, all the motion. Otherwise, I might as well have used a picture postcard. The thing that struck me when I used to go to the cinema is that everything had been wanted in advance, down to the last detail … Painters do not know in advance how their picture is going to turn out, a sculptor cannot tell what his sculpture will be, a poet does not plan a poem in advance …

You will have noticed that in L’Argent there are a series of close-ups whose only function is to add sensation. When the father, a piano-player, drops a glass, his daughter is in the kitchen. Her dustpan and sponge are ready. I do not then enter the room, but cut immediately to a close shot which I like very much, the wet floor with the sound of the sponge. That is music, rhythm, sensation … Increasingly, what I am after — and with L’Argent it became almost a working method — is to communicate the impressions I feel.

Jones writes:

The type of ‘sensation’ that Bresson is describing is felt only fitfully in the work of most other film-makers. The many shots from the inside of moving cars in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951), for instance, or the episode with the broken-down boxer arriving at his hotel room in John Huston’s Fat City (1972), are powerful sensory experiences, in which film-makers have clearly sought and achieved human (i.e. personal, subjective) sense of duration, space, rhythm, the texture of reality as they perceive it. However these are isolated instances in films that, like most other works, leave behind the purely sensory to make way for the rhetorical, the poetic, the point of view of the protagonist or the purely functional. [Manny] Farber’s comments about Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) could apply just as well to a Bresson film: ‘Two exquisite cinematic moments: the safe-cracker, one hand already engaged, removing the cork from the nitro bottle with his teeth; the sharp, clean thrust of a chisel as it slices through the wooden strut.’ The very feel of the world, in which there is no hierarchy of attention and even the most apparently meaningless event has its own integrity and its own special thrill, has been central to Farber since his beginnings as a critic — he is not indulging in idle appreciation here. It’s also central to Bresson, and it informs every moment of his cinema (it’s worth noting here that Bresson began as a painter, and that Farber remains one). […]

Visually, on a shot-by-shot basis, Bresson likes to imprint a singularized action on a given space, like a charcoal line on a blank sheet of paper. The body is either traced in its stillness, or draws itself across the screen in a quick, decisive movement. When one discusses ‘rhythm’ in Bresson, it’s closer to the idea of rhythm in painting, much more than a question of ‘pace’, the actual rhythm of action, as in a film by Scorsese or Coppola, or of shot length, as in Antonioni. In Bresson, and this is a trait that he shares with Hitchcock, the length of a shot has less to do with tempo than it does with sensorial emphasis: it’s never a question of a character simply living a moment of time, as it is in most films, but the way one (i.e. Bresson) would experience the feeling of living such a moment. The shot of Yvon’s hand as it releases the waiter’s arm during the scuffle in the café has a family resemblance to the shot of Martin Balsam ‘falling’ down the stairs in Psycho — both are a-temporal, disjointed from any reasonable space-time continuum, and oriented around a particular sensation.

To me, it’s particularly important that although both the Bresson and Eustache films make striking use of place and nonprofessional actors, their conveying of sensations and impressions is not done in a documentary-like manner. Instead, the filmmakers present certain details (of gesture, movement, color, light, sound, texture) while also guiding our attentions in a controlled and highly selective manner.

Once Upon A Time in America, Dead Man, L’Argent, Ivan the Terrible, Crash—these are some of my favorites in the BFI series of monographs. Are there others in the series you particularly like and would recommend?

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Links:

-- The new issue of Cinema Scope includes Jonathan Rosenbaum's DVD column on "critical editions".

-- Michael Sicinski's top 17 films of 2007 along with an introductory essay; and his reviews page for March, which covers about 20 films.

-- The new issue of Film Quarterly.

-- Especially for fellow Stones fans: There's a humorous interview with Keith Richards at Entertainment Weekly.

pic: The wine glass begins to quiver, just before toppling, in L'Argent (1983).

On Auteurism

I've had a couple of different trains of thought running through my head lately; let me draw them together in this post under the broad, common theme of auteurism.

The subject of Adrian's new column at Filmkrant is the screenwriter/auteur debate. He recounts an exchange between Josh Olson and Brad Stevens. Olson wants to remind everyone that even though Cronenberg might get the credit for the two much-talked-about sex scenes in A History of Violence, he (Olson) is the one who scripted them word by word. Adrian writes:

Stevens fires back with an impeccable cinephilic example. The opening scene of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumière (2003) is so rich and complex on the level of its sounds and images, gestures and spaces, light-values and rhythms, that it could never have been entirely 'foreseen' or described in a script. Stevens does not mention Hou's close longtime script collaborator, celebrated Taiwanese novelist Chu Tien-wen, but his point is solid. However, it sends Olson and his LA-based comrades into apoplectic fits: it's a critic's fantasy! Auteurist nonsense that can only believed by eggheads who have never made a film! Give the greatest directors in the world a blank page, and see if they are so great then!

As Steven Maras argues in his forthcoming Wallflower Press book on screenwriting, this rage rests on the metaphor-idea that, while the writer is the true creator, and the script functions as an architectural blueprint, the director is merely the person who 'executes' the script, or builds the house to prior specifications. What auteurism - in its most enlightened form - is about is not the god-like primacy of the director on set, but the 'holistic', integrated, organic conception of a film, from first idea to final post-production. Hou guides this process from the start; while Cronenberg imposes his vision on projects that he does not always initiate. But cinema is the weaving of many different 'writings', from the written to the filmic - not the primacy of any one over all the others.

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The above piece sparked an interesting discussion in the comments to the previous post (scroll down about three-quarters of the way). I thought we might continue and extend it, either here or in the previous thread. Let me offer a few remarks in response to that discussion.

In my view, auteurism is not an account of how films are made. It is instead one among many ways we, as viewers, choose to read a film. In other words, it is one particular lens through which films can be viewed: by foregrounding the 'marks' of expression belonging to one person, the auteur, most frequently the director.

The first widespread use of the term in France in the '50s occurred in a very specific historical and political context. Cahiers du Cinema critics used their politique des auteurs to champion those filmmakers working in the Hollywood system who managed to imprint their signatures on films being made within a factory-like system of production. Thus, the CdC critics chose to read Hollywood films—and this was a political choice they were making—in a way that focused on the 'identifying marks of expression' made by an auteur like Nicholas Ray or Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks.

Since then, the term 'auteur' has found use in a looser, broader fashion, but I don't see it as objectively claiming (as a 'theory' might) that the contributions of the director trump those of the screenwriter, the stars, the cinematographer, etc. In fact, the term 'auteur theory'—first used by Andrew Sarris when the politique made its trans-Atlantic crossing in the early '60s—is misleading since auteurism is not a theory at all, but instead a certain mode and manner of reading films.

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Dana Polan has a fascinating essay called "Auteur Desire" which was published at Screening the Past in 2001. He explains the double meaning of the essay's title:

On the one hand, in auteur theory, there is a drive to outline the desire of the director, his or her (but usually his) recourse to filmmaking as a way to express personal vision. The concern in auteur studies to pinpoint the primary obsessions and thematic preoccupations of this or that creator is thus an attempt to outline the director's desire. On the other hand, there is also desire for the director - the obsession of the cinephile or the film scholar to understand films as having an originary instance in the person who signs them. Here, it is important to look less at what the director wants than what the analyzing auteurist wants - namely, to classify and give distinction to films according to their directors and to master their corpuses. [...]

[There is a] belief in conventional auteurism that it is precisely because the pressures of the system so weigh down on the auteur that he/she (but usually he in the canons of such criticism) is forced to creativity as a veritable survival tactic.

Polan makes a distinction between 'classic', Cahiers/Sarris auteurism and contemporary auteurism. The former was frequently mystificatory, believing that "personal artistic expression emerged in mysterious ways from ineffable deep wells of creativity," while the latter involves closer attention to the encounter between the auteur and the resources of filmmaking, and

a greater concreteness and detail in the examination of just what the work of the director involves. Gunning, for example, is explicit in his understanding of Lang not as a romantic genius drawing inspiration intuitively from hidden depths of insight but as a veritable pragmatist who directly labors on the materials of the world.

Likewise, the historical poetics of David Bordwell focuses attention on the immediate craft of the filmmaker - how he/she works in precise material ways with the tools and materials of his/her trade.

There are precursors to these contemporary approaches: for example, the mise-en-scène criticism of Movie magazine and V.F. Perkins, and Manny Farber's close attention to the myriad 'surface' details of a film—what Polan calls "an auteurism of energetics rather than metaphysics or thematics."

He also proposes this interesting idea:

[I]t might not be too extreme to suggest that in the auteur theory, the real auteurs turn out to be the auteurists rather than the directors they study. Faced with the vast anonymity and ordinariness of the mass of films that have ever been made - and in contrast to the anonymous, ordinary manner in which many people see films (the LA times reports that many average spectators go to the multiplex not having a specific film title in mind and choose once they confront the array of offerings) - the auteurist quests to have his personal vision of cinema emerge from obscurity. He struggles to impose his vision on a system of indifference...

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This brings me to a notion that I have long wondered about: why is it that seasoned, intelligent auteurists don't always agree on the value of a particular film or filmmaker? In the light of "auteur desire," the answer is not difficult to see. If each auteurist brings to and imposes his/her desire upon a film or filmmaker, and no two people share the exact same configuration of desires (assuming that the desires of a person are influenced by his/her 'subjectivity', which is historically shaped by the accumulated set of cultural experiences that person, or 'subject', has had), each person would, naturally, have a different and unique encounter with a particular artwork. This makes disagreements both a matter of course and perfectly understandable.

Dan Sallitt, in a thread from the a_film_by archives, offers interesting insights on disagreements about the value of artworks:

When we disagree about the value of an artist or a work of art, we wonder how intelligent observers can be so far apart, not only in their opinions, but also in their perceptions. One possible model for disagreement is that one person has a wiser perspective on the topic at hand, and that the other person simply has grabbed hold of the wrong end of it. In most cases, this model is deeply inadequate from any objective perspective: it doesn't account at all for the great coherence and thoughtfulness that we often see on both sides, even when the positions are plainly mutually exclusive. But, in our hearts of hearts, this is the theory that we usually hold when we are one of the parties to the disagreement: our own position seems so coherent that we suspect the wisdom or the motives of the other party. Once in a while life presents us with an example of a disagreement where one side is clearly better supported than the other, and these occasional instances give us hope that maybe all of our opponents are similarly misled.

What occurred to me this morning is that maybe we underestimate: a) the incredible amount of data available in even the simplest work of art; and b) the mind's ability to find strong, coherent patterns in even a small collection of data. So, for instance, I come to Kubrick with a particular heightened aversion to a certain acting style which is connected to a certain personality trait. I identify this element, am ticked off by it, and calibrate my perceptive apparatus so that I start picking up any other element with some aspect in common. Because there is so much data in a movie, I have no trouble finding lots of support for my initial aversion, and in discarding the occasional data point that doesn't fit what I'm looking for. Within minutes, voila! I have constructed a coherent Kubrick-pattern that I call a sensibility. Meanwhile, other observers, without the same baseline aversion that I have, not only construct a different Kubrick-pattern, but also lack a slot in their Kubrick-pattern to help them identify the traits that look obvious to me.

pic: The train animations from Hou's Café Lumière.

Cinephile Accounting: Old vs. New

As a cinephile, I experience a certain tension between the desire/need to see older films versus new films.

Here’s a sample of a dozen older films I’ve seen within the last month: The Doll (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919); Dil Se (Mani Ratnam, 1998); Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985); Shri 420 (Raj Kapoor, 1955); Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan, 1979); Rajnigandha (Basu Chatterjee, 1974); Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1954); Passing Fancy (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933); Komal Gandhar (Ritwik Ghatak, 1961); Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978); J’entends plus la guitare (Philippe Garrel, 1991); and Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth, 1959).

In terms of quality, every one of these films is comfortably the equal of—sometimes better than—the best new films I saw last year. And yet, in terms of proportion, the number of new films I see each year is large, perhaps disproportionately so.

I see about 350 feature-length films a year (plus shorts), and of these, about 50-60 are new films. The majority of these new films (about 35-40) are seen in a ten-day period in Toronto in September. Thus, almost a full sixth of the films I watch each year are new. Given the century-plus span of film history, this strikes me as an extremely healthy, even overly generous, proportion.

Being part of the film-blogosphere often exerts a certain pressure on us to see recent films promptly. One wants to be part of—or at least comprehend—the conversation that these films spark. We feel left out of the loop—not allowed to play—if we haven’t seen the films that are being buzzed about (or reviled). Sometimes guilt follows, and occasionally, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, the act of putting off seeing a film just because it seems so required.

But these are the high-visibility examples, and I end up seeing most of them. Trickier are the scores of recent films that might play film festivals, receive decent reviews, show up occasionally on lists, and become easily available at theaters or on DVD. On a given evening, does one opt for Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding or Valerio Zurlini’s Family Diary? Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or Yasuzo Masumura’s Red Angel? George Ratliff’s Joshua or Johan van der Keuken’s I ♥ $? Sean Penn’s Into The Wild or Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya? I voted for the latter in all these cases, and they turned out to be excellent films, although I still haven’t seen the former films yet.

Of course, in theory, we don’t have to choose between these films with any finality since they are all available to us, but practically speaking, we are forced to make such choices on a daily basis in an environment that is deluging us with movies to see, both old and new, in all formats (theatrical, DVD, cable).

Physical location is a factor as well. For a cinephile in, say, New York or San Francisco, certain ‘gaps’ of key films or filmmakers may be attributed to foregoing the option of DVD and choosing to waiting for a retrospective or theatrical screening which may be imminent (or not). In my case, living where I do, it is unfortunate that I see the vast majority of older films on DVD; the only small upside is that I don’t feel compelled to put off watching a film in anticipation of a possible future theatrical screening.

Finally, what underlying personal objectives might dictate these viewing decisions? To answer this for myself, I'll invoke a fantasy. I still hold the naïve belief that cinema is a young art, and a century of it isn’t impossible to put one’s arms around. By this I don’t mean being able to see all films ever made (which is preposterous) but see a wide enough range of films to acquire a certain level of working knowledge about world cinema (both narrative and avant-garde) that will give one the facility to begin making associations and building networks in one’s head across decades, filmmakers, countries, and genres on dimensions like themes, formal strategies, stylistic characteristics, and performance. And to begin working toward this objective means building a personal foundation—amassing a repertoire—of film viewing from all periods of film history, rather than over-privileging the current moment.

The result is that while continuing to see about 50 new films each year, I find myself, on a daily basis, opting to see an older film much more frequently than a new film.

If you’ll allow me to toss out a few questions: Do you feel a similar tug-of-war between the desire or need to see older films versus new films? What guides your decision-making on what to see from day to day? What are the personal objectives that might underpin your decision-making on these matters? I’d love to hear your thoughts on these or any other related issues.

pic: Vidya Sinha, with the soon-to-wilt flowers of the film's title, in Basu Chatterjee's Rajnigandha (1974).

NYC/NYU

I made an eventful weekend trip to New York for the “Responsibilities of Criticism” seminar/conference at NYU featuring Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin. The indefatigable Kevin Lee has documented the sessions at his blog.

I own—and have read—more books by Jonathan than by any other film critic, and given the regularity with which I draw from Adrian’s writings for material on this blog, I should be mailing monthly tuition checks to Melbourne. So it was a rare pleasure to meet and hang out with them both at the conference and off-event, talking cinema non-stop for hours at lunch, dinner, and late-night outings in the Village.

All over, a generous, infectious enthusiasm was circulating this weekend and I’ll remember one funny, touching moment that crystallized it: at the screening of Doomed Love, Adrian slowly and silently raised his fist and punched the air when the opening credits unrolled “Um Filme de Manoel de Oliveira”…

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Living more or less in isolation in cinema-indifferent Buffalo, I constantly yearn for trips to large cities to socialize with cinephile friends. And so it was deeply satisfying to see and spend time with Zach Campbell, Dan Sallitt, Kevin & Cindi, Andrew Grant, Danny Kasman, Steve Erickson. And I was fortunate to make new friends: Paul Fileri, Elena Gorfinkel, Liz Helfgott, Amresh Sinha, Fred Veith. I wish I’d been able to spend more time with Paul Grant and Martin Johnson (organizers of the NYU event), Gabe Klinger, David Pratt-Robson, Dave McDougall, and Drake Stutesman.

I warmly record an inventory of these names here because this is one of those few times when, in a reckless moment, I feel like uprooting myself from my comfortable, tenured life and migrating to some giant metropolis with a teeming cinephile-social life (all the while knowing that I probably never will).

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Links:

-- You must read this fabulously epic double post on Renoir's Elena et les hommes by Craig Keller and Andy Rector.

-- Dave Kehr on Georges Méliès in the NYT; and at his blog, remarking on issues raised at the NYU conference. Also: Zach on the conference.

-- New issue of Senses of Cinema.

-- The Auteurs' Notebook is a new site put together by Danny Kasman. In addition to pieces by him, it also features Dan Sallitt, Acquarello, David Pratt-Robson, Dave McDougall, Matthew Swiezynski, and others to come.

-- via Jen: Stan Brakhage's last interview, recorded two months before his death, in The Brooklyn Rail.

-- Two blogs I've been checking recently for upcoming DVD release info: Fin de Cinema and Filmbo's Chick Magnet.

-- At 12th Street Books in the Village, they were selling a trove of books that belonged to Annette Michelson. It was pretty picked over when I got there but I scored a copy of Eisenstein's writings (1922-1934) and Joel Magny's French-language book on Chabrol.

pic: Philippe Garrel’s wonderful J’Entends Plus La Guitare (1991).

Nicole Brenez on Experimental Cinema

Fergus Daly's documentary on avant-garde cinema, Experimental Conversations (2006), prominently features Nicole Brenez. I have transcribed all her comments, and am presenting them below in the order in which they appear in the documentary. Let me add that Brenez's fiery, polemical text is enhanced by seeing/hearing her speak--she is clear and incisive, and her manner patient, assured, even playful. She seems a model of a good teacher; I wish I could attend one of her classes. The above YouTube clip from the movie features her and Philippe Grandrieux. I first learned about Experimental Conversations through Mubarak's post from a few months ago; the post features yet another clip from the video. -- Girish.

An experimental cinema considers cinema not in terms of its uses or conventions but rather its powers.

Experimental cinema involves the entire field of the passions. The so-called standard cinema standardizes the emotions, sensation, perception, and belief. In that cinema you don’t find anything except what you’ve known and felt already. Of course you can love this in the same way you love the same stories, read every evening, read by the same voice, your mother’s. Faced with this considerable restriction of sensible and emotional experience, experimental cinema re-opens the entire field of experience.

An image in avant-garde cinema is something irreducible to one conception. It’s the exploration of all possible conceptions which don’t pre-exist the exploration itself. For example, the industrial cinema falls within Hegel’s formula ‘art is what decorates our internal and external environments’. This ‘impoverished’ conception of art is precisely what the dominant cinema insists on, that it be a psychic and social ornament, what’s called a ‘diversion’, a conception not reprehensible per se but which is a problem because it’s imperialistic because it occupies the entire field of images. Avant-garde cinema explores every other conception of the image.

An oeuvre can be called great if the artist invents his/her own conception of the image according great power, strong symbolic properties, to the image.

Experimental cinema implies the field, the site, of a critical questioning of the world in general, of experience in the political, ethnological, anthropological and metaphysical senses.

Experimental cinema is the field of investigation of the very modalities of our apprehension and in particular modes of vision. The horizon in which this research is inscribed was sketched out by a minor character in Godard’s La Chinoise who posed this very beautiful question: ‘what if reality hasn’t yet been seen by anyone?’

The fundamental problem at stake in experimental cinema and all the practices it implies is to ceaselessly pose the question: What use is it to make an image or not make one? And an inevitable question follows: ‘What is art?’

Experimental cinema stands against the history of dominant images; we can cite Jonas Mekas’ sublime formula: ‘Hollywood cinema is merely a reservoir of material for artists to use later.’ Therefore experimental cinema is a major speculative initiative since its task is also to criticize, change, parody and destroy the dominant images, or to complete them, to reveal what they hide and falsify. This is one of the great undertakings of what’s known as the cinema of ‘found footage’.

What defines experimental cinema, whether it has political, scientific or aesthetic concerns, are a certain number of values: freedom of thought, critical awareness, therefore intellectual, economic, political independence, and an independent mode of existence.

Bresson said it 40 years ago: ‘a great film gives us an elevated notion of cinematography’, an elevated idea of forms is inseparable from the idea that cinema leaves a trace in the world, whether it’s a faithful trace or a contradictory one matters little, it’s a trace which alters our grasp of the world. An example from French cinema is Philippe Grandrieux, who in Sombre and La Vie Nouvelle, works in a significant way with colour and light to a degree that brings him into conflict with his technicians because they’re obliged to make camera movements or lighting set-ups which seem unimaginable to them technically, but which, when realized by Grandrieux, doing his own framing and camera movements, are shown to be extraordinary enrichments of the palette of optical possibilities. They didn’t know what the cinema could do until Grandrieux did it. For example, in terms of texture, he invents new possibilities for haze and blur in Sombre, furthered in La Vie Nouvelle, as well as his work with black in La Vie Nouvelle. It’s one of the greatest films of the present, because it’s about the responsibility of images as images, not bearing themes but as images themselves in a catastrophic world. An image can save the world and not merely diagnose it, you have to see La Vie Nouvelle to appreciate what’s at stake.

In the middle of the 20th century, around 1951, it became clear that the film industry had reduced a potentially limitless apparatus to a single standardized practice and therefore that it was urgent to rediscover other practices, other movements, other logics than that which was producing images for commercial consumption. Therefore for example you see the reintegration of the idea of artisanship in the cinema, bypassing the integrated industrial chain in favor of directly intervening with the hands, the filmmaker’s hands, giving rise to all the practices of painting on film, scratching, direct intervention, etc.

There have been three great decades: the 1890s when all films were beautiful, the 1920s for the unsurpassed invention of montage, the 1970s because of the formal beauty that triumphed.

One of the most precious to me because least recognized paths taken by experimental film is the demand for pure and radical mimesis, descriptive investigation, simple description, the violence of pure analogy, of a pure recording. There are many versions of this, for example the field of scientific film, supreme from a figural viewpoint, Marey’s films, or those of Lucien Bull, continued today by Alexis Martinet, Professor Berthier and many others.

The idea that art will redeem, I find this idea very beautiful, very problematic, you find it in all the sublime thinkers who are references for us on a day-to-day basis, Benjamin, Deleuze, and Godard, who revives them in cinema. Bizarrely, I prefer Adorno’s totally despairing belief [laughs] that art has no mission. Because, for whatever reason that makes us hold on to this idea of mission — it can be a sublime reason like Schiller’s belief that art can, in certain ways, teach us to emancipate ourselves — I prefer to think that an oeuvre doesn’t fix a mission for itself, but that it exists, breaks things open, introduces disorder into what was believed to be an ineluctable political and in particular ideological order, art as catastrophe in fact. [laughs]

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Links:

-- From the archives: I collected several Nicole Brenez links in this post from a year ago. Also, I just noticed that Steven Shaviro twittered: "Nicole Brenez's ABEL FERRARA is the most beautiful book ever written on a single filmmaker. It gives Ferrara the respect & love he deserves." (Steve--I'd love to read a post by you about this book!)

-- Fergus Daly on Experimental Conversations, from the programme notes of the 2006 Cork film festival.

-- David Hudson's terrific, detailed Berlinale post.

-- A series of Robert Bresson posts continues at The Art of Memory.

-- At Film Journey, Robert Koehler reports from the Guadalajara film festival.

-- At Contrechamp, Sandrine Marques's top 10 films of 2007.

-- Film blog discovery of the week: A.P. at the Movies. Check out this detailed post on D.W. Griffith's staging practices at Biograph.

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Dennis Lim on Manoel de Oliveira in the NYT:

The cultural critic Edward Said, in his writings on “late style,” identified two versions of “artistic lateness.” One produces crowning glories, models of “harmony and resolution” in which a lifetime of knowledge and mastery are serenely evident. The other is an altogether more restless sensibility, the province of artists who go anything but gently into that good night, turning out works of “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”

Mr. Oliveira, force of nature that he is, represents both kinds of lateness, often in a single film. In this, as in so many other respects, he is his own special case. What are we to make of an artist who hit his stride in his 70s, and for whom “late style” is in effect the primary style? [...]

“I think of film as a synthesis of all art forms,” Mr. Oliveira wrote. “And I try to balance the four fundamental pillars of film: image, word, sound and music.” [...]

But he would be the first to caution against making too much of his longevity. “Nature is very capricious and gives to some what it takes from others,” he said. “I see myself being more admired for my age than for my films, which, being good or bad, will always be my responsibility. But I am not responsible for my age.”

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A week of criss-crossing travel. I've just arrived in Cocoa Beach, Florida, to present a paper at an engineering systems conference. I'll return home to Buffalo for a day to teach my classes mid-week, then fly down to New York City for the "Responsibilities of Criticism" seminar/conference featuring Nicole Brenez, Adrian Martin and Jonathan Rosenbaum. If I can manage to take some notes, I will try to post them here.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's “Making Waves”

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is a British film scholar who has written books on Luchino Visconti (1968) and Antonioni's L'Avventura (1997), and is the editor of The Oxford History of World Cinema (1999). His new book Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s is an overview primer and a breezy, easy read. Quite a bit of the ground covered here might be familiar to the serious cinephile, but I nevertheless found many details and observations that were new to me and helpful. Let me reproduce a few interesting passages.

On Pasolini:

All his films represent a turning away from modernity into the past, from technology to nature, from the industrial west to the Third World, from the bourgeoisie to the peasantry and subproletariat, from the patriarchal to the maternal, from repression and heterosexism to the polymorphous sexuality of childhood — in short, to a world before the Fall. This prelapsarian world, of course, does not exist, but it is evoked as the negation, piece by piece, of a world which all too emphatically does exist, and which Pasolini hated. There is no coherence to the universe the films portray except in the form of this negation. And the only recoverable part of the lost world would appear to lie in sexual revolution, which might — just — restore to the modern world some sense of the freedom it had foregone. Such, at least, would appear to be the lesson of Theorem (1968) […]

How the world lost its innocence is explored in the films set in mythic prehistory (Oedipus Rex, Medea, and half of Pigsty) and in their present-day counterparts (Theorem and the modern sections of Pigsty). The so-called ‘trilogy of life’ which follows [The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, The Arabian Nights] can be seen as an enactment of how the lost innocence might be recreated. But by the time Pasolini came to the end of the trilogy he had ceased to believe even in the liberatory potential of sex. The sexual ‘revolution’ of the 1960s was no such thing but just a new form of embourgeoisement which normalized adolescent heterosexuality, while the gay movement (or what little he saw of it, which was not much) was just a way of channeling homosexuality into another bourgeois ghetto.

On Italian cinema and its relationship to the Italian left:

This observational vein [in his early films, Time Stood Still, Il Posto and I Fidanzati] was the one in which Olmi was most at home, but he had also grander ambitions to challenge the hegemony of the left in Italian cinema. In 1965 he made a film about the life of Pope John XXIII, E venne un uomo, starring Rod Steiger, which seemed purposely designed to rebut the eccentric portrayal of Christianity by Pasolini in his 1964 film The Gospel According to Matthew. Some years later, the film for which he is most famous, The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (1978), was an explicit response to the leftist interpretation of Italian history in Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic 1900 which had been released two years earlier and had become instantly canonical.

Olmi was certainly right in noticing the way the Italian film scene in the early 1960s, even more than at the height of neo-realism just after the war, seemed to be dominated by the left. The left’s cultural hegemony, originally constructed by and around the Italian Communist Party under its brilliant leader Palmiro Togliatti in the 1940s, had been fiercely contested by a resurgent right in the 1950s but was now reasserting itself in a new form, altogether more eclectic and diverse […]

One part of the old left strategy had been the perpetuation of the neo-realist aesthetic well past the time when it had any grip on contemporary reality. The result of this had been that the aesthetic innovators of the 1950s — principally, in their different ways, Antonioni, Fellini, and Rossellini — had been excluded from the orthodox left-wing ‘church’. […]

The leftward swing in the cinema of the early 1960s was a mixture of old and new and its first symptom was a revived interest in the ‘Southern Question’, that is to say the much debated issue of the deep-seated inequality between the industrial north of the country and the mainly agrarian south. For the old, Visconti returned in 1960 to the social concerns of his neo-realist period, forging the grandiose melodrama Rocco and His Brothers out of the problem of south to north migration. In between old and new, Francesco Rosi, who had been Visconti’s assistant on La Terra Trema in 1948, investigated the Mafioso character of Sicily in Salvatore Guiliano (1962) and the endemic corruption of his native city of Naples in Hands over the City (1963). And among the new, Vittorio De Seta set his debut feature Banditi a Orgosolo (1961) in what was probably the most backward part of Italy, the mountainous interior of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.

On the Nouvelle Vague and actors:

[Resnais] tended to use theatrically trained actors, rehearse them thoroughly, and encourage the use of theatrical gesture and delivery, though never to the point when it looked false on screen. (Delphine Seyrig in Last Year in Marienbad and Muriel is a perfect example: poised, seeming to wear a mask, but always a mask that fits her naturally.) By contrast the Cahiers group were more inclined to improvise on set and hated working with actors in the French theatrical tradition, much preferring the more natural style that they found in their favourite American films. […] If actors coming from theatre, such as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Michel Piccoli, were used they were expected to be flexible and adapt to the prevailing naturalistic style.

On homosexuality and film narrative:

For the first time since the 1920s, homosexual relationships were allowed to take place between characters and be shown on screen in a moderately matter-of-fact way, even if not always with complete explicitness. Restrictions on explicitness had their compensations, since the less explicit a film the more it can engage the play of spectatorial fantasy in the face of uncertain events and, behind the events, uncertain desires. Some of the best films in this vein are those (Chabrol’s 1968 lesbian romance Les Biches would be an example) in which characters are shown as hesitating in face of a newly discovered or half-discovered desire and the spectator is invited to share this hesitancy — and with it a slight oscillation of gender identity.

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Links:

-- Adrian's new column at De Filmkrant is on "the eternal debate between 'enthusiasts' and 'contrarians'. Certain magazines at particular times - such as 'Cahiers du cinéma' in the 1950s - have adopted the enthusiast's principle: you should only write at length about films you love. But, in the day-to-day practice of film criticism, that is an impossible ideal. At other moments, the need for heated polemics - speaking up against some overrated film or director - overrides the enthusiasm principle. That is when contrarianism - going against the consensus opinion - asserts itself in all its violent glory..."

The piece goes on to use as examples French-language blogger Charles de Zohiloff, Kimberly Lindbergs, and Miguel Marías (in Dan's comment section).

-- Keith Uhlich's "Links of the Day" post at The House Next Door points to: Paul Schrader's site with his writings; news about Ray Carney's site being temporarily suspended due to a dispute with Boston University; and two clips of Jonathan Rosenbaum speaking, among other things, about his retirement.

-- An 80th birthday tribute to Jacques Rivette by David Pratt-Robson at Videoarcadia.

-- At YouTube: A Star Wars trailer as it might have been designed by Saul Bass.

-- At My Gleanings: "Cahiers, the 'young turks' and William Wyler".

-- Recent film blog discovery: Andrew Schenker's The Cine File.

pics: Jacques Rivette's L'Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003).

Lang, Links

First, a word of thanks to Kevin Lee for inviting me to do the audio commentary for a 7-minute video essay on Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944). It was my first such experience and it was fun.

A few links:

-- Michael Sicinski's February page has a clutch of reviews including Import Export, The Sun Also Rises, Mad Detective, Alexandra, Atonement and The Counterfeiters. Also, a Bollywood movie that can bring Michael to tears (Pradeep Sarkar's Laaga Chunari Mein Daag: Journey of a Woman) is one that's going on my queue immediately.

-- Chris Fujiwara in the Boston Phoenix: "Separation is the myth and the reality of Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema. His work screams it, shouts it, sings it in image and sound. It’s not enough for a marriage to come to an end; that end also has to become an abstract principle: “Separation is essential,” says the hero’s wife near the beginning of Reason, Debate, and a Story (1974). In E-flat (1961), a theater director tells an actress, “Think it is 1947 and you have to leave your home,” at which she breaks down in tears."

-- Dave Kehr in the NYT on Joan Crawford: "[She] was an almost entirely artificial creation, from top (those painted-on eyebrows and wide-open eyes) to toe (a tiny woman who began as a dancer, she learned to carry herself effectively en pointe to create an illusion of height). [...] She is always trying too hard: enunciating her words too carefully in hopes of hiding her native twang; moving with a too-studied precision meant to show off her superlative legs; or fixing the camera with that unblinking stare, intended to suggest an alluring hauteur but just as expressive of borderline panic."

-- Kimberly Lindbergs's sumptuous "favorite DVD releases of 2007" post.

-- Filmblog discovery of the week, via Craig Keller: David Cairns's Shadowplay.

-- At Errata, Rob Davis and J. Robert Parks do a podcast on a dozen films, which sparks a discussion in the comments, especially around I'm Not There.

-- David Bordwell on His Girl Friday: "[I]n the 1963 Cahiers tribute Louis Marcorelles called it “the American film par excellence.” Praising Hawks, and HGF specifically, was part of a larger Cahiers strategy to validate the sound cinema as fulfilling the mission of film as an art. What traditional critics would have considered theatrical and uncinematic in HGF—confinement to a few rooms, constant talk, an unassertive camera style—exactly fit the style that Bazin and his younger colleagues championed."

-- Dan Sallitt on John Ford's Tobacco Road: "Because we tend to associate the Fordian tone of elegy with admiration and celebration, we might be surprised to see it crop up here. I briefly wondered whether the studio might not have concocted a Ford-like score of a mournful accordion playing "Shall We Gather at the River" and laid it over the resistant material. But music is only part of the integrated Fordian elegiac tone, which also draws on beautiful deep-space long-shot compositions, a slowing of rhythm, an emphatic isolation of individual shots, and the use of symbolic imagery. There's no mistaking that Ford is on the job."

-- Both Acquarello and Daniel Kasman have been filing reviews from the Film Comment Selects series. Also, here are Daniel's reports from Berlinale at The Auteurs' Notebook.

-- Thanks to Ryland Walker Knight at Vinyl is Heavy, some poetry selections from Nietzsche's The Gay Science.

-- The Siren has been reading Mary Astor's memoir, A Life on Film.

-- At The House Next Door, Fernando F. Croce on Maurice Pialat's A Nos Amours: "[Sandrine Bonnaire's] Suzanne is in every scene, and throughout the film one feels a transfixed Pialat steering the still-unformed talent, not so much molding Bonnaire as discovering in tandem with the actress the corporeality, force, and shifting emotional depths that would later mark her greatest performances (Vagabond (1985), La Cérémonie (1995), Secret Défense (1998))."

-- At In Media Res, Michael Z. Newman picks the Ying Yang Twins's "Wait (The Whisper Song)" as a guilty pleasure: "Owning up to a guilty pleasure is a performance of confession to cultural sin, but the sinner seeks benefits other than absolution. Calling the pleasure guilty validates participation in the ritual of taste; now liking something bad doesn’t indicate failure to recognize criteria of quality and social acceptability but affirms them. Advertising a guilty pleasure can be a way flaunting status, as only those already in possession of cultural capital can risk some on a guilty pleasure."

-- Alex Cox to Dennis Lim on his film Walker: "It was incredible, but since 1988 I have not had one offer of work from any of the Hollywood studios. I've existed entirely independent of the studios. You make one political film, and that's it -- blacklisted. But that's OK, it's a good film to be blacklisted for."

-- Owen Hatherley at The Measures Taken: "What would a world be like without art? And why did the most talented artists of the period immediately after the First World War end up advocating the abolition of art altogether? ‘Art is Dead! shouted the Dadaists, with their hatred of galleries and museums. ‘From the easel to the machine’, was a slogan of the Constructivists. The ten years after 1918 marked a total war on the category of ‘art’, its networks of patrons and consumers, and its unique objects. This is something which hasn’t exactly been forgotten by history, but tends to be treated rather patronisingly – an eccentric extremism that art grew out of, a failed utopia, or a juvenile biting of the hand that feeds."

-- Here's a big, meaty Hitchcock website: Ken Mogg's 'The MacGuffin'. Mogg is the author of The Alfred Hitchcock Story (1999).

Traces: Joan Bennett and the monogrammed pencil.

Uncanny Overlaps

This morning I received an e-mail from a cinephile friend, Christian Keathley, who teaches at Middlebury College and is the author of the book Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (2006). A while back, I did a post on his idea of the "cinephiliac moment." With Chris's permission, I'm excerpting from his e-mail below. -- Girish.

We've just started our spring term here, and the first week has been hectic as usual. I wanted to write again about something I'm interested in -- perhaps you might have some examples/ideas. (If I had a blog, this is probably the kind of thing I'd post.) For lack of a better way of putting it, I'm interested in the often uncanny ways in which one film's diegesis trespasses onto another's.

Here's an example: There's a scene early in Anthony Mann's The Far Country in which James Stewart, running from the law for having allegedly killed two men, is invited to hide in the steamboat stateroom of Ruth Roman. The crew comes in looking for him. "There's a killer on board, miss." "And you think he'd be in here?!" That sort of thing. When I watched the film with my senior seminar last term, I thought of how closely this scene resembles the one in North by Northwest in which Eva Marie Saint hides Cary Grant (another killer on the loose) in her train compartment. There, too, the authorities come in and question her and she plays dumb. In both scenes, the man hides in the woman's bed. This similarity can of course be explained by the simple fact that Hollywood routinely recycled scenes and situations, and not just in B grade features.

But watching it a second time I noticed two more similarities -- the first a coincidence, the second wildly uncanny. After the steamboat crew leaves, Ruth Roman pulls back the blanket and Stewart sits up. She remarks, "I imagine you look better with a shave." He replies, "My razor is in my saddlebag ... unless you've got one I can borrow." Of course, that's exactly what happens in N by NW -- Cary Grant borrows Eva Marie Saint's tiny razor, which leads to a comic scene in the Chicago train station men's room.

Here's the uncanny part. In The Far Country, just before the authorities begin to chase James Stewart, the steamboat captain calls out to the pilot, "Full ahead. Pull her north by northwest." Most curious here is the fact that there is no "north by northwest" on the compass: it's a cartographic impossibility (see Donald Spoto's book on Hitchcock, but others have commented on this as well).

So, are there other such moments? More importantly, what can we do with moments in which two films' diegeses suddenly and unexpectedly overlap like this? A fun puzzle to chew on over the weekend...

[from Chris's follow-up e-mail] Along similar lines -- the statue that appears in the first shot of Laura also shows up five years later in Whirlpool - same director, star, and studio. Apparently Fox's prop closet wasn't as big as we might have guessed. [A friend] tells me that there's a set of draperies that shows up somewhere in virtually every film Monogram Studios produced. These coincidences are explainable – or rather, they are easily explained away (which isn't much fun)...

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Any other examples/ideas of such overlaps or coincidences?

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Links:

-- Jim Emerson at Scanners: "A Journey to the End of Taste".

-- Steve Erickson at Gay City News on Film Comment Selects: "Much of this year's programming suggests an emerging "Europe Extreme" aesthetic, influenced by directors including Gaspar Noe and Michael Haneke."

-- Gerry Canavan at Culturemonkey with a post full of Philip K. Dick links.

-- David Bordwell: "Strategies of staging, like other principles shaping how films tell stories, lie behind each concrete creative decision the film artist makes. They run as undercurrents through film history, almost never discussed by critics. They form a body of tacit knowledge, flowing across our usual distinctions of period, genre, director, national cinema."

pic: "I imagine you look better with a shave."

Laleen Jayamanne/Short, Sharp Solos

When it comes to writing about a particular film, here’s one thing I sometimes wrestle with: angle of entry.

The Sri Lanka-born, Australia-based filmmaker, critic and scholar Laleen Jayamanne once wrote a few words about this problem that I’ve found useful. They appear in the introduction to her book of film criticism, Toward Cinema and Its Double (2001). In addition to addressing the ‘angle of entry’ problem, she simultaneously suggests a need to ground criticism in precise description of the ‘film object’:

If the description does not move, then criticism is no more than a dull copy or repetition of the object. The kind of descriptive act required cannot be determined before the encounter with a particular object, but certain guidelines (at least those that work for me) seem to emerge through this writing. One is to ride an impulsive move toward whatever draws one to something in the object—a color, a gesture, a phrase, an edit point, a glance, a rhythm, a whatever. Enter the film through this and describe exactly what is heard and seen, and then begin to describe the film in any order whatsoever rather than the order in which it unravels itself. Soon one’s own description begins not only to mimic the object, as a preliminary move, but also to redraw the object. This is not a betrayal of the object through an enthroning of the primacy of the subject’s narcissistic projection but rather the activation of an encounter, a means of entering the object, though not necessarily through the door marked “Enter.” An eccentric, impulsive, descriptive drive will cut the film up and link the fragments differently from the way the film is itself organized. It is through this montage of description that a reading might emerge.

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I’ve always been a bit undermotivated (okay, lazy) about taking a good set of notes after every film viewing. But since I read these words a few months ago, I’ve been trying to spend about 15 minutes most mornings setting down these details that “draw me to something in the object” from the film I saw the night before. Flipping through the pages of my notebook just now, I’m struck by how strongly affected I was by certain details in films I saw months ago, and yet these are details that had quietly slipped my memory until I was suddenly reminded of them through my notes.

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In the same essay, Jayamanne writes: "There are, according to Raul Ruiz, two kinds of film critics. One sees a lot of current films and is able to respond on the run; the other spends a year or two on a few films. I am, alas, the latter kind of critic; hence the criticism in this book has taken nearly twenty years to write."

The book has an unusual and varied composition. It includes essays on: Australian films (Tracey Moffatt, Dennis O’Rourke, Jane Campion); interviews with Jayamanne about her films conducted by Anna Rodrigo, who turns out to be Jayamanne herself, using her mother's name; Sinhalese cinema, often overshadowed in its own homeland by Indian cinema; and a group of pieces on Bazin, Akerman and Ruiz that apply tools and methods used by Gilles Deleuze.

From the recent Screening the Past survey of key contributions to the field of film study in the last ten years, here is the list of her choices. And finally, an interview with her at Senses of Cinema.

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Broadly speaking, a key difference between soloing in jazz and soloing in rock/pop is that the latter doesn't typically allow the soloist as much time to develop and build the solo in dramatic terms. Rock/pop soloists must compress their ideas into a small allotted duration and burn for this brief duration. Here are two contrasting instances of great solos that illustrate different approaches to this problem. Each solo lasts a little over 10 seconds.

Joni Mitchell's "In France They Kiss On Main Street" [mp3], off her album The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), features the blues guitarist Robben Ford. His elegant, extroverted solo begins at 1:55, ending with the flourish of a Charlie Parker-esque figure.

In the '80s, the Ambitious Lovers (Arto Lindsay and Peter Scherer) began work on an album cycle based on the seven deadly sins. They only got as far as three: Envy, Greed, and Lust. They're all strong records, but I think I favor Greed (1988); it goes furthest in melding sweet, pop-like choruses with avant-garde noise and funk verses. The song "Para Nao Contrariar Voce" [mp3] is one of the few songs on the album that is all candy, no noise. Bill Frisell's introspective solo comes in at 1:30, and despite its extreme brevity, it has a structure to it. The first half plays a single-note melody, and the second half outlines arpeggios (broken chords). The lead vocals in Portuguese are by Lindsay, who was raised in Brazil.

The secret connection between these two miniature solos is tone, which is an integral part of a musician's 'voice'. Ford's tonal quality is unlike that of a stereotypical blues player: it's less 'earthy', more refined and urbane. Frisell's signature ghostly tone can set up an atmosphere with just a couple of simple, strategically placed notes and chords. Which means that he often tends to play more minimally than 99% of jazz guitarists. For him, before music is chords, melodies and rhythms, it's 'pure sound', something that lends itself to abstract sonic sculpture. In recent years, in getting back to roots music, he's been less interested in the kinds of pedal- and loop-based guitar sounds we associate with him in the '80s and early '90s. I think I prefer his harsher, more visceral, effects-altered tone from those years to his relatively unadorned tone of today.

(In this interview, Ford talks about tone being something extremely personal, being not just in the instrument, but also something that emerges from the fingers and indeed the whole body.)

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Links:

-- Mubarak has a new post in which he mentions a Jonathan Rosenbaum interview at Quintín's and Flavia's La Lectora Provisoria, and this roundtable