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.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
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.”
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.”
Monday, September 7, 2009
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.
…..
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.
…..
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.
…..
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?
…..
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 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.
…..
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.
…..
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?
…..
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.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
A Night at the Movies
Where do you go to see art films? Is it basically Chicago, Boston, NYC and San Francisco plus the odd art museum? Hell, I'm just taking Frisco and Chicago for granted. I have never seen an art film in either of those places myself; I just imagine they are cosmopolitan enough to support art house movie theaters. At any rate I do not expect to see them where I live, but once a year, during the week long film festival at the end of April. I must add, however, that in recent years the pickings at the festival have been rather slim and as the market shrinks up and even festival films will need to be selected more and more as money makers and not as works of art, the pickings will only get slimmer. I do not have great expectations from this year's festival. So imagine my surprise when I take my weekly peak at the local theater's website and find they will be showing Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath and Tarkovsky's Solaris all week. If I go Sunday, I can even catch both on the same day. This was a rare opportunity indeed, so I headed off to the theater for a night of cinema the likes of which I had not known since my days in Boston.
It did not go according to plan, not exactly anyway. First I found out that there was an error in the screening times posted on the website. Day of Wrath played earlier than it was scheduled and the only option I had at the time I arrived was Fritz Lang's M. Well I could have watched Two Lovers or some movie about a cake, but mainstream, quasi-art, Oscar-fodder was not exactly what got me out of the house that afternoon, so I went to see M – me and four other people, one of whom had no idea what he was there to see; I overheard him asking the cashier which movie they were showing was about WWII “or something” because he had to watch it for a class. So I watched M. I should mention that I watched a DVD of M in an effort to get back to my original question. I certainly do not fault the theater here, 35mm or even 16mm prints are very expensive and these days you would have to hire a person separate from your regular “projectionist” to run the machines. But I will say that it was a bit of a surprise to go to the movie theater to watch a pair of classic films only to find out that I would be watching DVDs that I own. The projection was okay though. It was crisp and sharp. The sound was not so good. M and Solaris are especially quiet films, and for much of the time I was hearing Two Lovers and/or the cake movie from the theaters below.
The conditions were not ideal. The financial situation is not good. The films are not films. Nobody is coming out to see them (there were four people in the theater to see Solaris). At least the films will always be the films. M is not an altogether bad movie. Certainly overrated by a great many film historians and theorists, but smarter than its later counterparts – junk like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. It is a good study of mob mentality and moral ambiguity. Not a bad movie to show high school kids if you can get them past the fact that it is in black and white and in German.
And then I watched Solaris again. What a testament to Tarkovsky as an artist that even his least successful works are still full of surprises and nuance. Perhaps I had not noticed it before or I had simply forgotten how physical this movie is. Tarkovsky has a reputation for being quite heady and cold, and I was quite struck by the amount of physical contact in this film. There Snaut's frequent pats on the back and grasping of arms and shoulders – at one point he walks arm in arm with Kelvin and Hari while Kelvin wheres an open robe and quite explicit underpants. Kelvin's physicality often underpins the close contact of a given scene. He wears a variety of mesh shirts and often has the very short briefs. The contact between Hari and Kelvin is also quite more explicit than is typical of Tarkovsky. They kiss arms, hands; Hari puts Kris' fingers in her mouth. Kelvin buries his head into her lap repeatedly, an especially humiliating gesture if one is at all familiar with the generally held notion about Tarkovsky's misogyny. So significant is Kelvin's gesture of submission to Hari that it sparks the ire of Sartorius in the library scene. Is his fury just the result that Kris would lower himself to a non-human, or that Hari is a female, and moreover that Kris would not think twice about submitting himself to her in front of other people?
Also in this scene are the beginnings of what Robert Bird has dubbed the crucible of ideology. To argue multiple points of view is one of Tarkovsky's most important narrative devices. Contrary to what many critics may believe, Tarkovsky's films do not espouse positions about gender, religion, politics, or the nature of truth. His mature works pit several positions on these matters against one another, and in the end no one emerges victorious, nor does the narrative itself achieve any synthesis. Kris, Snaut, Sartorius and Hari each have a distinct point of view. None of them are right. None of them are wrong. This is a quite remarkable narrative achievement considering the rather clear-cut ideology of Andrei Rublyov. In many ways Rublyov is a better film than Solaris, but it remains less of a Tarkovsky film. One need only compare the trio of Snaut, Kelvin and Sartorius with Daniil, Andrei and Kiril. Andrei is clearly the “right” while Kiril is “wrong” and Daniil mediates between the two leaning toward Andrei spiritually and intellectually, but feeling a bit like Kiril emotionally. Who is “right” among the other three? Who wins in the end? The Solaris trio is much more like the Stalker trio, even going so far as to add a fourth – a woman who undercuts the very ontology of the subject the three men argue about.
It is quite advanced in many ways, but still probably Tarkovsky's weakest film. I would love to see a directors cut of it, one that didn't include all the sci-fi nonsense he was obligated to put in by the cultural authorities. All the shots of Solaris itself are so dated and distracting. And Donatas Banionis' acting job on Kris Kelvin. It is easy to see why Tarkovsky disliked working with Banionis and was apt to mention him when enumerating the reasons why he thought of Solaris as his worst film. But then most directors in the history of this medium should be happy to make a movie that equals Tarkovsky's worst.
It did not go according to plan, not exactly anyway. First I found out that there was an error in the screening times posted on the website. Day of Wrath played earlier than it was scheduled and the only option I had at the time I arrived was Fritz Lang's M. Well I could have watched Two Lovers or some movie about a cake, but mainstream, quasi-art, Oscar-fodder was not exactly what got me out of the house that afternoon, so I went to see M – me and four other people, one of whom had no idea what he was there to see; I overheard him asking the cashier which movie they were showing was about WWII “or something” because he had to watch it for a class. So I watched M. I should mention that I watched a DVD of M in an effort to get back to my original question. I certainly do not fault the theater here, 35mm or even 16mm prints are very expensive and these days you would have to hire a person separate from your regular “projectionist” to run the machines. But I will say that it was a bit of a surprise to go to the movie theater to watch a pair of classic films only to find out that I would be watching DVDs that I own. The projection was okay though. It was crisp and sharp. The sound was not so good. M and Solaris are especially quiet films, and for much of the time I was hearing Two Lovers and/or the cake movie from the theaters below.
The conditions were not ideal. The financial situation is not good. The films are not films. Nobody is coming out to see them (there were four people in the theater to see Solaris). At least the films will always be the films. M is not an altogether bad movie. Certainly overrated by a great many film historians and theorists, but smarter than its later counterparts – junk like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. It is a good study of mob mentality and moral ambiguity. Not a bad movie to show high school kids if you can get them past the fact that it is in black and white and in German.
And then I watched Solaris again. What a testament to Tarkovsky as an artist that even his least successful works are still full of surprises and nuance. Perhaps I had not noticed it before or I had simply forgotten how physical this movie is. Tarkovsky has a reputation for being quite heady and cold, and I was quite struck by the amount of physical contact in this film. There Snaut's frequent pats on the back and grasping of arms and shoulders – at one point he walks arm in arm with Kelvin and Hari while Kelvin wheres an open robe and quite explicit underpants. Kelvin's physicality often underpins the close contact of a given scene. He wears a variety of mesh shirts and often has the very short briefs. The contact between Hari and Kelvin is also quite more explicit than is typical of Tarkovsky. They kiss arms, hands; Hari puts Kris' fingers in her mouth. Kelvin buries his head into her lap repeatedly, an especially humiliating gesture if one is at all familiar with the generally held notion about Tarkovsky's misogyny. So significant is Kelvin's gesture of submission to Hari that it sparks the ire of Sartorius in the library scene. Is his fury just the result that Kris would lower himself to a non-human, or that Hari is a female, and moreover that Kris would not think twice about submitting himself to her in front of other people?
Also in this scene are the beginnings of what Robert Bird has dubbed the crucible of ideology. To argue multiple points of view is one of Tarkovsky's most important narrative devices. Contrary to what many critics may believe, Tarkovsky's films do not espouse positions about gender, religion, politics, or the nature of truth. His mature works pit several positions on these matters against one another, and in the end no one emerges victorious, nor does the narrative itself achieve any synthesis. Kris, Snaut, Sartorius and Hari each have a distinct point of view. None of them are right. None of them are wrong. This is a quite remarkable narrative achievement considering the rather clear-cut ideology of Andrei Rublyov. In many ways Rublyov is a better film than Solaris, but it remains less of a Tarkovsky film. One need only compare the trio of Snaut, Kelvin and Sartorius with Daniil, Andrei and Kiril. Andrei is clearly the “right” while Kiril is “wrong” and Daniil mediates between the two leaning toward Andrei spiritually and intellectually, but feeling a bit like Kiril emotionally. Who is “right” among the other three? Who wins in the end? The Solaris trio is much more like the Stalker trio, even going so far as to add a fourth – a woman who undercuts the very ontology of the subject the three men argue about.
It is quite advanced in many ways, but still probably Tarkovsky's weakest film. I would love to see a directors cut of it, one that didn't include all the sci-fi nonsense he was obligated to put in by the cultural authorities. All the shots of Solaris itself are so dated and distracting. And Donatas Banionis' acting job on Kris Kelvin. It is easy to see why Tarkovsky disliked working with Banionis and was apt to mention him when enumerating the reasons why he thought of Solaris as his worst film. But then most directors in the history of this medium should be happy to make a movie that equals Tarkovsky's worst.
Tokyo Story, the Limits of Ideology and Some More Biography
“Plato makes the perfect ideal being tremble in me. But that's only a bit of me. Perfection is only a bit, in the strange make-up of man alive. The Sermon on the Mount makes the selfless spirit of me quiver. But that, too, is only a bit of me. The Ten Commandments set the old Adam shivering in me, warning me that I am a thief and a murderer, unless I watch it. But even the old Adam is only a bit of me. I very much like all these bits of me to be set trembling with life and the wisdom of life. But I do ask that the whole of me shall tremble in its wholeness, some time or other.” D. H. Lawrence
It is no secret that I am student of Ray Carney's. I just finished an essay of his entitled “Two Forms of Cinematic Modernism: Visionary and Pragmatic.” It is described on his website as “the longest and most ambitious essay he has ever written about film and philosophy.” I have not spoken to Ray about when he wrote the essay, I know that a lot of the ideas and examples came up in a course I took with him in 1997, but my concern is that the essay was first publish in a book called A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States that came out in 2000. That means that Carney waited an awfully long time to set down some tenets for an aesthetics. He had already published books about Cassavetes, Dreyer and Capra in addition to numerous essays and interviews. This suggests to me that I need to get back on track writing about films instead of always letting myself be drawn into debates about the nature of cinema. It is hard not to get side-tracked by these arguments, because I have always been on the defensive. It seems every time I say one movie is bad and another is good, I am asked, by teachers, by would-be publishers, to insert a detailed aesthetic breakdown that makes clear how I reached such a conclusion. Over the past ten years this has become practically instinctual. I have published two essays in cinema journals, one about why it is wrong to understand Tarkovsky's Nostalghia as an anti-feminist harangue and the other about why Kiarostami's Taste of Cherries is a cinematic masterpiece while a movie ostensibly interested in many of the same questions, Mendes' American Beauty is kitsch. Then there is the content of this blog! Where are the movies for people who hate movies?
So I want to thank 13 Kangs for getting us back on track even if he chose a particularly silly idiom. I would ask readers not to judge him by his appropriation of techniques invented by sports hackery, but by the content of his criticism. 13 Kangs is a great student of Bergman, and I know that he did not get that from his screen writing teacher; he learned painstakingly over time. In any event his recent post is a damn sight better than my discussions of run of the mil documentaries about great thinkers and abstract speculation about the nature of Cinema or the makeup of the canon. There has been too much abstract discussion about the nature of art and the particular potential of cinema lately, and it is distracting me from writing about works. Not that this discussion is unimportant, just that I need to make sure I am still writing about works and artists. The films are the real teachers.
I was reminded of this by a recent viewing of Ozu's masterpiece, Tokyo Story. I actually watched it before writing the second blog about Žižek! and the one about Derrida. I must admit it was extremely difficult to bear down and finish those, because Ozu will take the wind out of those intellectual sails. It made me think about how I treat people, particularly how I treat my parents and my grandparents and how disrespectful and ungrateful to them I am. It showed me what generosity looks like. It showed me selflessness and forgiveness. It made me think about how people deal with profound loss. Tokyo Story is about getting old and dying and trying your whole life to do right by people and knowing that in many instances you failed. And when I say that art is about life and not about ideas about life, that's what I mean. Tokyo Story is not ideas; it is not so much in the mind. Ozu's films are always behavior and human experience. His work is also camera angles, empty spaces, pacing and other important aspects of visual and narrative style, but I want to focus just on the matter of ideological consent for the moment. Tokyo Story is daily life; more specifically, it it the daily life you and I ignore because we are too busy thinking about big ideas. When my father looks up from his lunch and tells me, with my mother siting next to him and my wife sitting next to me, that he figures the family name will die with him because his one male cousin only had daughters and it doesn't look like I'm going to have any kids, there is no philosophy to help me make sense of that.
But there is Ozu. I could have forgotten what art was for if not for watching that movie. I came up with the name for this site thinking about a former English professor who absolutely hated movies because he thought the medium was inherently pornographic. I convinced him to take part in programming a film series with me, and I consider it one of my happiest achievements to have won him over to Mother and Son, Stalker, Late Spring and Sans Soleil. I forgot about him. I forgot about that impetus. From now on I hope to fill this page with more criticism and commentary of movies that the average web wanderer my have never heard of.
It is no secret that I am student of Ray Carney's. I just finished an essay of his entitled “Two Forms of Cinematic Modernism: Visionary and Pragmatic.” It is described on his website as “the longest and most ambitious essay he has ever written about film and philosophy.” I have not spoken to Ray about when he wrote the essay, I know that a lot of the ideas and examples came up in a course I took with him in 1997, but my concern is that the essay was first publish in a book called A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States that came out in 2000. That means that Carney waited an awfully long time to set down some tenets for an aesthetics. He had already published books about Cassavetes, Dreyer and Capra in addition to numerous essays and interviews. This suggests to me that I need to get back on track writing about films instead of always letting myself be drawn into debates about the nature of cinema. It is hard not to get side-tracked by these arguments, because I have always been on the defensive. It seems every time I say one movie is bad and another is good, I am asked, by teachers, by would-be publishers, to insert a detailed aesthetic breakdown that makes clear how I reached such a conclusion. Over the past ten years this has become practically instinctual. I have published two essays in cinema journals, one about why it is wrong to understand Tarkovsky's Nostalghia as an anti-feminist harangue and the other about why Kiarostami's Taste of Cherries is a cinematic masterpiece while a movie ostensibly interested in many of the same questions, Mendes' American Beauty is kitsch. Then there is the content of this blog! Where are the movies for people who hate movies?
So I want to thank 13 Kangs for getting us back on track even if he chose a particularly silly idiom. I would ask readers not to judge him by his appropriation of techniques invented by sports hackery, but by the content of his criticism. 13 Kangs is a great student of Bergman, and I know that he did not get that from his screen writing teacher; he learned painstakingly over time. In any event his recent post is a damn sight better than my discussions of run of the mil documentaries about great thinkers and abstract speculation about the nature of Cinema or the makeup of the canon. There has been too much abstract discussion about the nature of art and the particular potential of cinema lately, and it is distracting me from writing about works. Not that this discussion is unimportant, just that I need to make sure I am still writing about works and artists. The films are the real teachers.
I was reminded of this by a recent viewing of Ozu's masterpiece, Tokyo Story. I actually watched it before writing the second blog about Žižek! and the one about Derrida. I must admit it was extremely difficult to bear down and finish those, because Ozu will take the wind out of those intellectual sails. It made me think about how I treat people, particularly how I treat my parents and my grandparents and how disrespectful and ungrateful to them I am. It showed me what generosity looks like. It showed me selflessness and forgiveness. It made me think about how people deal with profound loss. Tokyo Story is about getting old and dying and trying your whole life to do right by people and knowing that in many instances you failed. And when I say that art is about life and not about ideas about life, that's what I mean. Tokyo Story is not ideas; it is not so much in the mind. Ozu's films are always behavior and human experience. His work is also camera angles, empty spaces, pacing and other important aspects of visual and narrative style, but I want to focus just on the matter of ideological consent for the moment. Tokyo Story is daily life; more specifically, it it the daily life you and I ignore because we are too busy thinking about big ideas. When my father looks up from his lunch and tells me, with my mother siting next to him and my wife sitting next to me, that he figures the family name will die with him because his one male cousin only had daughters and it doesn't look like I'm going to have any kids, there is no philosophy to help me make sense of that.
But there is Ozu. I could have forgotten what art was for if not for watching that movie. I came up with the name for this site thinking about a former English professor who absolutely hated movies because he thought the medium was inherently pornographic. I convinced him to take part in programming a film series with me, and I consider it one of my happiest achievements to have won him over to Mother and Son, Stalker, Late Spring and Sans Soleil. I forgot about him. I forgot about that impetus. From now on I hope to fill this page with more criticism and commentary of movies that the average web wanderer my have never heard of.
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