It has come to this

I keep getting Asian porn spam in my comments so until further notice comments are turned off to all but other members of the blog. Not that this really inconveniences anyone....

Notes on Reverence

I'm working on a piece about Silent Light, Carlos Reygadas' revisitation of Dreyer's Ordet. Here are some excerpts:

With the arts in general in their current state in America and particularly with the state of our film culture, I often wonder how enough audience exists to get art films made a distributed. I am often astonished by the titles put out by Criterion and Kino, because I have spent a lot of time in graduate programs in the humanities and the fine arts, and even among those corridors the viewership for art cinema is quite small. I recall a near revolt when professor showed Jeanne Dielman to a class of graduate film students at a major east coast research institution, and Criterion just put that one out a few months ago. I've also worked in video stores, and it has not been my experience that the public is responsible for this demand. Perhaps I shouldn't think about it so much. I certainly don't want to get into reception theory or perspectivism or whatever else the theory heads in film studies are up to these days. I hope it does not adversely color my appreciation and mislead my interpretation, but I cannot help but wonder who watches a film like Silent Light. It won awards and its available on Netflix, so someone must be watching it. I simply cannot imagine a film more out of step with our zeitgeist. (And then there is the gender mythology. I wonder if women hate this film the way they hate Lars von Trier movies.)

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Of course these are not the concerns of Silent Light so forgive me if I have erected the straw man. The film is not so much about the possibility of miracles as it is about forgiveness, generosity and humility. The miracle is a narrative device – a metaphor; it is the embodiment of these qualities. In art we are allowed the communication of ideas through otherwise “unrealistic” means.

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Mostly, though, Silent Light is about patience. The patience of the characters and the patience of the viewers. The first shot welcomes the viewer to the rhythm of the film before subject matter comes up. Before the infidelity, the drama, the death or the miracle, in short, before story comes the pacing. Reygadas treats the pacing as a foundation to build a story upon, a quite different approach than the traditional methods of establishing a setting and backstory. The film begins with a long take of a sunrise over a field. Only it begins in pitch black night, so it is not immediately apparent that one is watching a field. Trees in the foreground also obscure the view, but as the sun rises the image becomes clear. The sounds provide their own narrative, telling the story of night turning into day. Chirping crickets give way to singing birds which are in turn joined by mooing cows.

This measured slowness walks hand in hand with quiet. Cut from the field to the farmhouse interior. Only the tick-talk of the clock is heard while the family prays at the breakfast table. This is a silent prayer, with separate shot of the children, the mother, Esther, and finally the father, Johan, who breaks the silence with an “Amen” after a few beats, long enough, in fact for Esther to have stopped praying and start watching him intently. Now they eat milk over flakes. Clanking of bowls and slurping of milk dominate the soundtrack with occasional interjections of the children teasing one another. Some of the older children help the younger ones to eat, spooning the food into their mouths and wiping their chins.

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It will be a while before the conflict in this drama is revealed. First, Esther takes the children out. Johan tells her he loves her. They depart and he is left alone. He retrieves something, a letter probably, from a container on a shelf above the front door, sits back down at the table, and begins crying. Here he is not quiet or reserved; he is really sobbing. This weeping is in stark contrast to the next scene, in which he goes to talk to his friend, Zacarias, about the affair. They talk seriously for a few moments, relating the nature of marriage and romantic relationships to the meaning of life. Suddenly, Johan is overcome by glee upon hearing a song on the radio. He hops in his pickup, turns up the volume and proceeds to drive around his friend in circles singing out the song to him and laughing, until he finally breaks out of the circle and drives away. This is surprising behavior in every context, unusual regarding what most viewers probably think of Mennonites, and it is a shocking contrast to both the reserved quietude of the morning and the outpouring of misery in the previous scene.

In a close-up of their two faces, we see the illicit lovers gaze upon one another for a few beats before they finally begin to kiss. A long kiss is followed by an embrace. No words are spoken. The introduction of the other woman, Marianne, is kept not just above the waist, but above the shoulders. Is love not so quiet? Certainly movies give us the impression that it is not. In most movies, the woman falls into the arms of the man, they kiss, she professes her love, he returns the favor, then depending on the era in which the movie was made they get down to business ranging from fade to black to a full blown sex scene with penetration and a cumshot. That two people who are engaged in such a sinful, dirty business would be shown simply hugging changes the way the viewer judges them. Moreover, by avoiding a salacious sex scene the narrative suggests the legitimacy of Johan's explanation to Zacarias that he has found his soul-mate. He's not a Mennonite looking for kicks, but a man in the throes of an existential crisis; he has married the wrong woman.

This scene is followed by an entirely different display of intimacy. Attention shifts to the wife and children. They are swimming, but it comes across as reverent as prayer. The children play, but play quietly. They play tenderly; very physical with one another but very gentle. That it all takes place in and around water makes it more intimate. One must be in at least a moderate state of undress to swim (and for the girls it is very moderate indeed; they where long, white dresses, perhaps it is an undergarment). Also the distance between people seems to shrink in water, because water is quite more tactile than air. Suddenly Johan is there. He has been there all along, but it seems sudden to the viewer, because we just saw him with Marianne, and the fact that his face has been withheld so far would lead one to believe he is still with her. Johan washes the hair of his children. This too is basic, elemental. Like the morning prayer and the eating of breakfast. Matter-of-fact intimacy, dispassionate tenderness. It is shot in sharp focus so the details of his fingers, the clumps of soapy hair, the soap bubbles, beads of water are clear and the background is lush, green out of focus. Esther is crying. The focus is pulled to her face, then the camera pans away to the green, blurry beyond. Slowly the focus is pulled, and the details of the forest vegetation become clearer, until finally there is a brightly colored flower in the center of the frame.

More details of the daily unforgiving, routine: the milking the cows sequence. The cows file into the barn and make their way to individual stalls. There are closeups of hands close-pinning tails up and out of the way. Then the milking machines are attached to the utters. This takes a few minutes before we see Johan who says, “Dad I need to talk to you.” The cows aren't symbolic; they have no bearing on the narrative other than that they are a part of the daily lives of the characters. Narrative moves slowly, quietly, and the characters likewise. Johan's father maintains a tranquil smile upon hearing his son's confession. His tone remains even as he recalls his own past temptation. His inner peace never breaks as he tells his son that he cannot make this decision for him, and that he will stand by him whatever he decides. The crunch of the snow takes the place of the gurgling water of the swimming/bathing scene.

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(It occurs to me Reygadas may be thinking of Tarkovsky as much as Dreyer, certainly the would be two of a small number of filmmakers that would constitute a filmmaking tradition that is quiet, reserved, slow-paced, elemental.)

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Marianne actually drives out to where they are working and Johan leaves with her. Esther makes him take the children. Does she think this will stop him from cheating or does he just want him to feel the guilt of having the children along on his tryst? There is a sex scene which is basically a single shot of Marianne's face and the back of Johan's head and shoulders. Like everything else it comes across earthy, matter-of-fact but no less intense and tender for its lack of histrionic demonstration or gratuitous nudity.

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Esther dies of a heart attack. Dangerously close to a “broken heart,” but I'm willing to trust the narrative. The film has earned it at this point.

A Two-Part Project

I get the same basic complaint about my writing from two different kinds of people. Regular folks and academics alike want to know why I spend so much time “complaining” about movies that “don't like.” I have been talking to some friends at work (I have a blue collar job) about composing my list of the decade's worst films, to be based largely on the various lists of the best films of the decade I have come across. I have a friend there who is really into movies, and he is immediately skeptical of the project. “Okay,” he says, “but can you talk about the ones you think are good too, and maybe explain what makes them good.” My scholarly friends and a lot of my professors over the years have said the same thing: “Do you have to spend so much time knocking down other filmmakers in an essay that is ostensibly about a great filmmaker. Aren't you setting up a straw man?”

I admit there's some truth to the observation, some validity to the request for more positive and less negative analysis. Yet, I would say that both parties may be missing the point. Would you ask Noam Chomsky to shut up already about what's wrong with the current power structure and get to describing his utopia? To do so would betray that you misunderstand his project, yes? Would you suggest to Karl Marx that he desist going on and on about the evils of capitalism and spend a bit more time describing what is so great about communism? I do not mean to inflate the importance my project by making these comparisons. But I do suggest that it is more accurate to look at it in terms of hard analysis instead of in terms of taste. I often write about good movies, but my project has two distinct parts: analysis of high culture/good art and analysis of mainstream culture/mediocre art.

I do not complain, and I do not discuss taste. I analyze the artistic and ideological limitations of mainstream culture. The other component of the project (not the second, because neither is more important than the other; they are both crucial) is to investigate the complexities of great art. Why must I discuss both at once? They are intertwined. Because I only know the good in contrast to the bad, to put it in rudimentary language. I believe that many of my friends in academia find a work of art that addresses most of their ideological concerns and then extrapolate from it an aesthetics. All subsequent works are judged according to the degree to which the measure up to the penultimate work. I hope it is clear that my aesthetics do not work this way. At least in part, my aesthetics moves from the opposite end of the spectrum. For me, I filmmaker is less interesting the closer his films are to the mainstream. I cannot tell you what makes a good film. Tarkovsky is not a paragon of excellence. He is unique. I can describe the attributes of a good film and these attributes will differ from Ozu to Dreyer, Tarkovsky to Kiarostami, Brakhage to Akerman. I can produce a grocery list of what makes a mainstream film and I can check items off one by one as I watch James Cameron or Lynch, Michael Bay or Hitchcock, Jurassic Park Spielberg or Schindler's List Spielberg.

My critique of Hollywood film does not stand or fall based on comparison to art cinema. It is an independent assessment. Mediocre movies are not mediocre because there are good movies in the world; the are mediocre because the espouse mediocre values and operate within mediocre ideologies. I understand the demand to show me something better. I sympathize with where that comes from. But it is equally important to understand the analysis of mediocrity. I am tempted to say that it is necessary to understand that first, because I know from experience with students that I can show someone all the art films I can think of, but he or she will never get it, because they have not yet internalized the need for them in the first place. It is quite easy to reject examples of high art, even after their qualities have been explained, when one fails to understand the critique of mediocrity.

Two Aphorisms

Perception is myriad and manifold. If you think a choice between two different colored pills is a good metaphor for how one comes to see clearly vs. how one chooses to remain indoctrinated, then you must have taken the wrong pill.

Experience is myriad and manifold. Intellectuals make excuses for bad art. They say there is no mediocre art (which they call a "text") just mediocre ways of thinking about it. I say that is a mediocre way to think about it.

Some Thoughts on Angelopoulos

I once showed Theo Angelopolous' seminal work, Landscape in the Mist, to a dear friend of mind who had not seen many art films. I think his favorite film at the time was Pi or some such thing. There were times during the screening at which, to my dismay and confusion, he chuckled to himself. After the film was over his review was this: “At least the director acknowledged his heavy hand (referring to the scene in which the hand is lifted from the water).” It is unfortunate. Academics and movie buffs alike have an arbitrary border between good art and pretentious art. The ideology of the day seems to entail that good art is art that can be readily disseminated to and digested by a populace that the individual deems equal to or slightly less sharp than himself. Anything above that line is heavy-handed.

Angelopoulos is not light. He is grave and grand. His films have the weight of the world in them. This weight is perhaps emphasized by script writer Tonino Guerra who co-wrote Tarkovsky's Nostalghia another film and filmmaker widely considered to be “heavy.” These films are serious. They are not larks to be certain. But heaviness is not the whole story for Tarkovsky, for Guerra, for Angelopoulos in general or specifically for Landscape in the Mist. It is in fact about the contrast between heaviness and weightlessness, between light and dark. Consider that the heavy hand rises up out of the water and floats. Remember that the film begins in total darkness, and ends in light. More specifically it ends in mist which is a brightness that has some of the obscuring visual effects of darkness.

Tension between opposites is an important principle for Angelopoulos. The world in Landscape is at once dreamy/absurd/surreal and dirty, gritty banal. The scene in which the young Alexandros confronts the dying horse in the street could have come from Bunuel or De Sica. The same could be said for what I will call “random moments” - the fiddler palying for Alexandros in the cafe, the long shot of the people in the yellow raincoats sliding across the film frame on a hand-propelled rail cart or the scene where the man sneaks up on the chicken. All these events are perfectly normal because random really happens in everyday life. Even “staged” shots like “The first snow,” as dreamlike as it is because all the adults have stopped in a pose but the children move among them, has the feel of authenticity to it. Is not memory always more photograph than a movie?

Symbols also embody a tension of opposites in Angelopoulos. Landscape uses symbols in two ways. The first kind of symbol and requires no special knowledge of anything outside the film, in other words it requires no academic training. Recognition of Orestis' motorcycle as a symbol of freedom for example is made possible within the narrative structure of the film. The children have traveled by train, which is slow and increases their risk of being caught by the authorities; by a truck, which turned out to be driven by a rapist; and on foot, which has consisted largely of trudging through the rain. Orestis' motorcycle is, quite practically, the best way to travel. What's more Orestis and his motorcycle are responsible for all the happiness that the children experience along their journey. The three are tied together through the motorcycle. It is their freedom from the mechanized and littered landscape. The motorcycle as a symbol of freedom lives in the experience. It is not merely evoked, but seen on screen.

Though it is a machine, it is through the motorcycle that they experience a closeness to nature; riding through the dunes with the wind rushing over them. In the company of other bikes, Alexander’s motorcycle becomes another machine polluting the world, and the free spirit it brought out vanishes. We can see that Alexander has an understanding of this as we watch him part with his bike. He is pained to sell it because it symbolizes his freedom, not to the viewer, but to his character. The motorcycle is freedom. When surrounded by other bikes, however, that freedom is limited. With impending loss hanging over Alexander the motorcycle is transformed into something ugly. The connection with the children, with nature, with the eternal is gone.

There is another kind of symbol in Landscape. It is the kind that my friend found pretentious. This is the kind that makes reference to a cultural tradition outside of the specific narrative framework of the film. Though “The hand in the water” episode and “The tree in the fog” episode reach out to other works, I would maintain that they do so not to turn the film into an allegory through, but to enrich the world of the film. Is this necessarily pretentious? In Bergman’s Seventh Seal, Felinni’s Satyricon or Godard’s Hail Mary; knowing the reference points is not essential to understanding the film (for it should have its own internal logic and cohesion), but it usually does grant more meaning to a specific moment.

The obvious reference point for the hand that rises up from the water to point at Orestis is the hand of God in in Michelangelo’s Creation from the Cistine ceiling. What makes the shot interesting are all the ways in which the would-be symbols breaks down almost immediately upon recognition. The index finger, the link between God and Adam, is broken off. As the helicopter flies away, carrying the hand beneath it, Orestis calls out, “If I shout, who will hear me in the kingdom of angels?” From his statement, as well as from the context of the story as it has been discussed thus far, it is clear that Orestis feels a separation from the eternal. He is no Adam, and Orestis is threatened by the giant hand even in the absence of the accusatory finger. I suppose it depends on what you mean when you say “heavy-handed.”

Some Thoughts on Jeanne

Last month Criterion released Chantal Akerman's masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. To my knowledge this amounts to the first time that the film has been available on video in any format, and as such it constitutes an important cultural event. Forgive my tendency for proclamation, but it is one of the greatest films ever made.
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I wonder why it has taken so long for such an important masterpiece to become available on dvd. Is it that the film is purely cinematic and thus irreducible to the video image? Or is it too slowly paced and lugubrious for even Criterion's audience of cinephiles (I have mentioned this release to many friends who write about film professionally or semi-professionally, and none of them seem to think this constitute an event)? Jeanne makes very particular, very unique demands of its audience and it strikes me that one must have an unusually sophisticated understanding of cinema to appreciate it. Jeanne is a pure cinema, yet unremarkable to many people who would use such terms.
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I checked out the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, and was surprised... baffled actually, to find unanimous approval among the eleven critics who reviewed it, a group which includes Jonathan Rosenbaum and Vincent Canby (!?). My personal experience with the film suggests a more reaction would be the norm. For instance, I once attended a screening of Jeanne at the Harvard Film Archive. When the movie began the theater was about half full. By the end of the nearly four hours, the audience had dwindled to very low double digits, perhaps fifteen or twenty people remained, and at least one of them had only stayed long enough to blurt out “What the hell was that?!” to voice his disgust after the screen went black. More telling was the time I watched this film in a classroom during the first few weeks of graduate school. There was a minor revolt during the screening, and the subsequent discussion was so hostile and narrow-minded that our professor decided he would never show the film to a class again.
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Many viewers will see Jeanne as a response to Fassbinder's Herr R. This comparison is fair enough, but I would shy away from calling it a Feminist response. Akerman herself has resisted this categorization throughout her career, yet remains a very popular selection in college courses on Feminist film. I would be interested in the varieties of Feminist interpretation of Jeanne and what they bring to light as well as what they exclude. For instance, if we take the film's conclusion as symbolic - if we interpret it as a "message" what is the nature of that message. Is it merely a longer, slower-paced Thelma and Louise? How else might the ending be interpreted? What if we interpret it in terms of its tragic narrative structure?
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The importance of Jeanne has more to do with Akerman's observation of human behavior and attention to detail than whatever her ideological affiliations may or may not be. More than any other film in her oeuvre, Jeanne is the work in which nothing is not only something, it is the only thing. It is not mere observation, but revelation arrived at by spending time and looking hard. Making meatloaf has meaning. Drama is created by context rather than by plot. Missing a button on a housecoat becomes an event.

I Don't Get Very Excited About Eisenstein

The tradition called Russian Formalism is not bad filmmaking. I do not wish to disparage it or dwell on the shortcomings of its products. However, I cannot hear anyone talk about how great it is without thinking of how much better Dovzhenko is. I have a pronounced inability to grant a critic his premise, and it often causes problems. I would never say that Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Vertov are wrong or uninteresting, just that they are limited. I often suggest confronting all the art one can stomach. Often this is my tactic for leading people away from inferior works. The premise is that one needs to see everything in order to determine what is good. This is how museum's work. It may not be the stated intention of the curator, but the point of putting together, for instance, all the Dutch Masters is not to suggest that they are all equal, but to allow the viewer to come to the understanding that Rembrandt is better. One does not necessarily come to this perspective as if it where innate. You don't know what makes a masterpiece by staring at the masterpiece in a vacuum. This is a fundamental premise of art appreciation. I am not sure that it qualifies as “aesthetics” because it is probably to simplistic, too “nuts and bolts” and not enough speculation and conceptualization. I cannot imagine that it is any less valid as a consequence. Art appreciation is at least as much, if not more, a matter of training and honing of perception and instinct than it is a development of theory and methodology. I am sure it sounds foolish, but I know that Dovzhenko's Earth is better than Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, Pudovkin's End of St. Petersburg, or Eisenstein's Potyemkin. I can see it. I see it every time I watch them. I see it because Earth taught me to see it.

I would add that the Russian Formalists are sufficiently well-known, and further I would emphasize the relationship between fame and quality. There are very few exceptions to this rule and usually I can qualify those exceptions to show that they are not really exceptions at all. When we think of French Cinema we normally think of the New Wave. All of them are great directors to be certain, Godard, Rohmer and Rivette especially. Robert Bresson is better, and if you did not go to a graduate film studies program you probably never heard of him (maybe you never heard of him even if you did!). Everyone knows about Bergman's Persona, Wild Strawberries, Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring all of which a fine films, but it is Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage and the mammoth, complete cut of Fanny and Alexander that are his masterworks. (For what its worth I will mention that Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible is his most interesting film.)

Part of the problem of assessment is that we are drawn to things that we can readily understand. This is true for academics as well as lay people. In fact for teachers and scholars this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the easier to understand work is always easier to teach. And so what happens is that this ease becomes a standard of value. The dumb ideas that permeate pop culture take root in the so-called ivory tower. Where a music critic with a bachelor's degree in journalism will lament a band that sells out or outlive their usefulness like REM or U2 or who forget their roots and get self-absorbed and pretentious like Radiohead, the scholar with a PhD in film studies will hail Tarkovsky's early work at the expense of his later failures (see especially the works of Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie, Natasha Synessios and James Qaundt). There is something is the zeigeist that is fundamentally hostile to what I would call maturity. We want only the surface appearance of difference. The critics loved Tarkovsky when he was a new voice shouting from the wilderness of the Soviet Union – when he was potential. The minute he was able to finish a work without compromise, as soon as he managed to hit them full on in the face with something completely new (Stalker to a degree but more so with Nostalghia and Sacrifice), they were confused. Confusion can go two ways: One can work through it or resent it. Resentment is much easier.

I like to keep these posts short, and now I see a have bitten off a bit too much. No doubt that I will take this topic up again soon. To wrap up I will remind you that the solution to this problem is to watch. I am not a philosopher and I know that my language is often inelegant. Watch the films and figure it out for yourself.