Shooting Down Pictures

Photo taken last Sunday at the Brooklyn Marriott, following our interview of Manoel de Oliveira for the Belle Toujours DVD coming soon from New Yorker Video.  I can’t elaborate too much on the details of the interview, since it wasn’t conducted in English.  We had Emilio (center left) and Dave (center right), both Portugese speakers, on hand, but at the last minute de Oliveira insisted on speaking French.  At 99 (turning 100 in December), his wit and energy are nothing short of miraculous. He’s in better shape than my 85 year old grandfather.

 ”The Explosion of Cinema and the Responsibilities of Criticism”

Adrian Martin presented on behalf of Nicole Brenez, who was unable to attend.

Brenez’s article begins by citing several statements made by early 20th century French social theorist Georg Simmel, whose aim was to disrupt conventional notions concerning society’s acts of charity and welfare towards the lumpenproletariat.  These statements include:
1. The act of charity concerns the giver, not the poor. It amounts to a narcissistic act of reassurance on the part of the giver.

2. Social aid concerns society, but not the poor. Same issue as #1, except broadened to the level of society at large.

3. The lawful eviction of the poor. The state has the right to assist the poor, but this means the poor only have the right to be assisted. There is a schizophrenia between false and true ends – between individual losses and gains and the preservation of the social order. Ultimately society reveals its merciless order.

4. The poor reveal the negativity of collective behavior.  Aid to the poor makes the poor person into a thing.  Social aid preserves the physical survival of the poor person but fixes them in their poverty.

5. Society needs poverty. It is the welfare that determines the status of the poor person. One is poor because one is aided.

6. Good conscience matched with bad visibility. Normal daily life cannot bear the sight of poverty. Society is more and more obliged to hide the poor from view.

7. Bad visibility and the weakening of the poor. This tendency to isolate the poor from each other keeps them in their own social strata. The class of the poor, particularly in modern society is a peculiar synthesis. Their essential position in society is easily labeled, yet their individual conditions are unique. They are a  people of diverse and extraordinary experiences but they are leveled into the same invisibility in the view of society. They are the sediment of society.

What does this have to do with cinema?

Avant garde cinema refuses this blindness to the lumpenproletariat. It tries to find a frontal, body-to-body view of the poor.

The avant garde, faced with the challenge of representing the “invisible poor” has adopted four approaches. The first is criticism; the second, to identify and to differentiate; the third, interrogation; the fourth, transformation – to change itself to no longer be positioned as a social intermediary for discourse on poverty.

Criticism: Screening of film example, Rien que les heurs by Alberto Cavalcanti.

Second example: Music video for Rage Against the Machine’s “Sleep Now in the Fire” directed by Michael Moore.

Identification and differentiation : Excerpt from Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike.  Cinema must go beyond the aesthetic equivalent of charity giving.

Second example: excerpt from Oskar Langenfeld. 12 mals, by Holger Meins. Depicts a rag-picker in fragments of varying social contexts. Unsatisfied by the limitations of cinema in enacting social change, Meins joined the West German Red Army Faction and became a terrorist.

Third example: excerpt from La Douceur dans l’abime, Jerome Schlomoff and Francois Bon.

Fourth example: Peter Weiss‘ Faces in the Shadow.  A film that sticks to the simplest level of representational forms.  Non-individuation of figures jams the compassionate reflex of the viewer, generating a broader social context.

Interrogation: Excerpt from Embargo, Mounir Fatmi.

Transformation: Final clip: www.webcam, Lionel Soukaz

Can we make any conclusions about this topic?  These clips constitute a “third world” of images.  Any representation of the lumpenproletariat is indispensible if only because they are so few in number. No one of them is correct, there is no correct way to represent the poor. These clips however “save the honor of cinema” even if they can’t save the people they show.

What can the cinema do?

1) The cinema can make an “unbearable image.”

2) The cinema can attack the lines between material domination and symbolic/cinematic domination.

3) The cinema can melt itself in a “social acid.”

4) The cinema can interrogate its own limits and means.

There are two paths one can explore further. On the one hand there is an individual salvation of a filmmaker exploring this work, or there is a collective salvation.

Martin opens by sharing his thoughts on teaching Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, a film which typically baffles his students.

Cites Bazin’s writings on the film – in most films involving children, adult viewers will project something emotional or sentimental onto the child. With this film you cannot make that projection, you cannot penetrate the child with your own associations. This constitutes a new cinema. Even within the radical movement of Italian Neo-realism, what is truly radical is the face of this boy. The film dis-articulates cause and effect.

Nicole Brenez has also written about the film and the child’s performance. It doesn’t register the conventional pathos of film acting. For Brenez the film poses the question, “How do we somatize, internalize and act out the evil of the world?”

Martin then moves on to Alain Bergala’s take of Farough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black, in which Bergala asserts that the film is great from the first shot – in fact one only needs to see the first shot to know it’s great, because the first shot disrupts the viewer from their space of comfort.

Martin recalls his teenage screening of Bergman’s Summer with Monika. He rhapsodizes on the film’s achievement of “an eternal present” in the scenes between lovers on the island. Bergala has also written about this film and how it struck him like an arrow. Bergala asserted that the film’s island location revolutionized Bergman’s understanding of space and cinema. Bergala also asserts that Bergman was so jealous of his actor’s proximity to his leading lady Harriet Anderson (whom Bergman was having an affair) during the love scenes that Bergman placed the camera to be even closer than the actor to the actress. Martin cites Bergala’s writing as an example of powerful criticism, writing that both describes the sensual experience of watching the film while eliciting a profound, startling thought. He distinguishes this writing from the mundane criticism that attaches synopsizing with general like/dislike responses to the acting and story.

Martin recalls an anecdote by South African musician Abdullah Ibrahim. Ibrahim listened to a scratchy but complex recording made on a single instrument by a humble musician and was moved to tears because he could hear the musician’s aspiration to have a full orchestra. The musician’s spirit was transmuted to Ibrahim and he decided to fulfill the musician’s dream. In the resulting recording Ibrahim plays the musician’s arrangement simply for his orchestra to build on, then lets them free to improvise and improve on the composition. Martin uses this story as an allegory for criticism. Martin recalls his experience writing the monograph for Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. He had become exhausted with the film and ran out of interest. But when he sat down on a keyboard and and played out a simple melody from the score, the film re-opened itself to him. Martin’s recurring point is that one needs to maintain a freedom of mind when elucidating a work, and be unafraid to try new approaches to get into a film and understand it in different ways.

Martin discusses a certain strain of film criticism that assumes a condescending, pugilistic stance towards films, which he finds counterproductive.

Martin discusses the art of “giving an account” of a film, whether it means giving the synopsis of the film or discussing how the reviewer experienced and approached the film. Martin mentions David Bordwell’s “Making Meaning,” a smart but discouraging book that he thinks saps the joy and enthusiasm out of film criticism. He mentions Bordwell’s dismissal of interpretation as a “rigged game” where a critic can find any meaning he or she sets their mind on in a film, but finds this to be an oversimplistic dismissal that disparages the genuine illuminations to be found in interpretation. Martin cites an article by Shigeko Hasumi on the act of throwing things in John Ford films, which, Martin claims, after reading this article, a new world for understanding John Ford is opened. Martin also mentions the late Raymond Durgnat and the issue of free-association. It was Durgnant who observed that free-association is not really free, as the materials being associated are all drawn from our existence and as such reflect our relationship to our existence.

Discussing logical structures of arguing. Serge Daney invented three distinctions a day (”there are two kinds of offscreen space: space generated by sound vs. space generated by image”) and would incessantly play with different distinctions. Martin celebrates this illuminating play while warning against becoming too wedded to any given distinction or logical structure to understand a film.

Parting thought – Martin cites Rosenbaum’s description of film criticism as the art of creating desire. He mentions how his film students typically want to write about films by Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson or other directors who are readily accessible to them. He also sees this in academia, where he’s encountered a couple dozen academic papers on Michael Haneke’s Cache in the past year. He urges writers not to be pushed by the zeitgeist but to be pushing it, and the way to do that is by writing persuasively and passionately to generate desire.

Q&A: Rosenbaum expresses appreciation of Martin’s argument for film criticism as an art. JR discusses Manny Farber as someone who would probably fail a film writing course because he doesn’t thoroughly support his arguments.

Martin asserts that two items of description that can be most revealing of a critic’s mind is sex and music. Example: in describing a sex scene in an 80s film “Love Letters”, Robin Wood describes actress Jamie Leigh Curtis as being degraded and subjective to male-dominant patriarchal authority. Martin and his wife watched the scene and couldn’t relate it to what he had just read of Wood.

Question raised about Serge Daney’s famous essay “The Tracking Shot in Kapo” on affirming insights on cinema by discussing a film he hadn’t even seen, based on a comment by Jacques Rivette that to some extent mis-remembers the shot being criticized. Martin defends the valuing of a critical ethos expressed by Daney, but acknowledges the problem of inaccuracy that risks diminishing the full power of Rivette and Daney’s remarks.

Martin discusses David Walsh of the World Socialist Website, whose criticism he both admires and dislikes. Walsh’s political framework for approaching any given film is so rigid that Martin claims to be able to guess correctly what Walsh’s take is on any film.

Martin posits that two of the most limiting and mechanical means to discuss film are through genre or auteur. He finds these frameworks to be a blocking mechanism that prevents films from being fully explored in new exciting ways. In response to a question Martin also adds nationalist frameworks for generalizing films and cinemas: “films should be liberated from their nation” in order to invent new ways of appreciating them.

I apologize for the relative brevity of this entry – I guess I wasn’t fully functioning until Adrian’s afternoon presentation, as you might gather from my notes.  Anyway here’s some excerpts from Jonathan’s presentation. I might flesh this out more when I review the tape as it uploads.

Rosenbaum’s presentation was titled “The Future of FIlm Criticism–Film Criticism, The Internet and the Circulation of DVDs”

One highlight was his recounting of a couple of personal experiences with movie publicity materials, which I recalled from an end of year review article he wrote back in 2003 for the Chicago Reader:

21 Grams, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s hyperbolically grim art movie, has been receiving an inordinate amount of mainstream exposure, apparently because of its cast — Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro — and because of its huge advertising budget. In an offscreen speech at the end of the film Penn says, “They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death . . . everyone. The weight of a stack of nickels.The weight of a chocolate bar. The weight of a hummingbird.” Many critics have pointed out that this pseudopoetic claptrap isn’t true. But that didn’t prevent Focus Features from sending journalists, on consecutive days, express packages containing a stack of five nickels, a chocolate bar inside a wrapper advertising 21 Grams, and a made-in-China hummingbird. I doubt many critics were persuaded to have a better opinion of this difficult and unpleasant film by this obscenely stupid advertising scheme. The Jesus freak played by Del Toro gave me a few things to ponder, but I was much more spooked by those three packages — what they must have cost and what they were trying to do to my head.

There doesn’t seem to be any limit to what promotions departments will try or any evidence that they care whether they succeed. Dreamworks hawked Peter Ho-sun Chan’s 1999 The Love Letter by sending anonymous love letters to critics. Each appeared to be written on an old-fashioned typewriter with a faded ribbon, and I’m ashamed to confess that I was fooled into thinking it was a real letter until I saw the same letter on-screen.

Rosenbaum used these anecdotes to expound on the broader issue of the experience of cinema, challenging the notion that the movie starts and stops in the movie theater. He finds this notion more tenuous than ever especially given that a fewer percentage of people than ever are watching movies in the theater as opposed to DVD, online or other new formats.

Rosenbaum sees this development in film culture not as something to mourn, but to actively embrace in such a way as to develop our society as we would like to see it.  He gives the example of private home group screenings he attended of Roberg Greenwald’s movie Uncovered: The Truth about the Iraq War, which were organized by the political activist group Moveon.org to encourage citizens to take action to stop the Iraq War.  At the time some attendees felt that it would be effective to get the film released in movie theaters to reach a broader audience, but Rosenbaum disagreed, seeing the private party venues and ensuing group discussions as being more effective in generating a grassroots activist movement.

Rosenbaum went on to cite a cinema club in Argentina that had a membership of nearly 1,000 cinephiles.  The club has organized small theatrical runs of obscure films by the likes of Pedro Costa or Kira Muratova, projected off DVD.  Given that these directors can’t even secure a theatrical run in New York City, Rosenbaum sees these grassroots venues as being a step in the right direction by providing a venue for non-mainstream films and building a solid film community in the process.

Rosenbaum compared this phenomenon with the sort of film community of his childhood, as recollected in his book Moving Places, where his neighbors would all would go to the same movie that played at the local movie house, not caring what it was, and spending time discussing it amongst each other, such that it became interwoven in the fabric of their lives.  As fond as he is of that type of small town cinephila, he acknowledges that that kind of film culture can not exist as he knew it in today’s society, but instead of mourning the past he prefers to look for the present opportunities available to promote cinema.  He cites the website www.extremelowfrequency.com which makes alternative, politically minded films available via digital download – the site features a manifesto that argues “The cinema’s in crisis… suffocated by anachronistic conventions… aided by agents of commerce.” The site dedicates itself to the “propagation of new cinema waves” and in doing so “is not concerned with technological debates… refuses to identfy wth national borders… and strives to return popular culture to people.”

Rosenbaum argues that to think more radically about film culture means we can think more radically about global culture. To do this we must think of more creative or radical ways of using film media.  There is already a structure in place – namely, the internet – and a community within that structure, but these have yet to be fully utilized to their full socially progressive potential “We can do more than trade gossip.”

Just got back from this, an evening of screenings intended as a prelude to Friday’s full day of sessions led by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Adrian Martin and (in absentia) Nicole Brenez.  The theme of the workshop is “The Responsibility of Film Criticism.”  As elaborated in the winning NYU grant proposal submitted by Paul Grant, “As the technologies of filmmaking and distribution continue to proliferate, criticism must also develop in ways that are commensurate with its object in o9rder to effectively respond… In a series of workshops, these critics will address the ways in which their work attempts to be responsible through their respective methods and perspectives. The workshop will close with a round-table discussion using as a starting point the question that begs to be reposed continuously: what is to be done?”

Rosenbaum and Martin took turns making remarks to preface the films they had selected for the opening screening.   Rosenbaum’s presentation touched primarily on the issue of history as being in constant re-vision, with the ’60s being his object lesson.  He presented two short films, Farough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black and Charles Burnett’s When It Rains – the former exemplified a ’60s masterpiece that went largely unheralded for decades, demonstrating how assumptions of a set historical cinema canon can and should be left open to new discoveries; the latter, Rosenbaum asserted, exemplifies the how the spirit of the ’60s (communalism, anti-capitalism) can be enacted in a contemporary film to reflect its viability in contemporary times, rather than being consigned to a shrine of nostalgia.  Both films also demonstrated innovation in synaesthetic forms: Farrokhzad’s film is a masterful interweaving of cinema and poetry, while Burnett incorporates jazz and blues structural elements in his narrative and dialogues. Rosenbaum concluded by observing that both these films are available on DVD,  two among innumerable treasures previously unavailable to most audiences that are now accessible under a revolutionary culture of DVD and digital film distribution that would have been inconceivable in the sixties.

Martin built on Rosenbaum’s argument while focusing it more on the responsibility of the film critic.  He emphasized the value of diversity within film criticism, using as a negative example his recent findings that among about 20 film magazines he had recently surveyed, the majority had an image of Daniel Day Lewis and There Will Be Blood on the cover.  He found these tokens of hegemony lamentable (at this I couldn’t resist giving a consoling pat on the shoulder of the man seated in front of me, Richard Porton, editor of Cineaste, whose current issue has you-know-who on the cover).  Martin recalled a recent exchange with Andy Rector, intrepid critic and host of the Kino Slang blog, who wondered if he had been shirking his responsibility by not covering There Will Be Blood.  Martin’s response was that a critic only thing a critic needed to write was to write bravely – not necessarily to see new things, but to see things anew.  Martin’s screening selection illustrated these principles brilliantly – it was Jean-Luc Godard’s Origin of the Twenty-first Century, a montage of footage taken from as wide a range as war newsreels to porno flicks, mixed with a healthy serving of film clips, including some from his own films, all chopped up and thrown into a bold and poetic remix of the past 100-plus years of violent co-existence between image and humanity.

I’m going to bring my laptop and camcorder to tomorrow’s sessions to see if I can simultaneously blog and film as the day progresses.  One way or other I’ll have some (hopefully multimedia) reports to share either throughout or at the end of Friday.  Stay tuned.

 is live on Slant Magazine.  Film currently screening at the Film Forum.

My friend Karin especially enjoyed these lines:

Read the full review

The Chicago Reader has posted a tribute page commemorating film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who is retiring from the Reader after 20 years of providing some of the most thoughtful, erudite and purposeful film writing out there. Those who’ve gleaned his list of 1000 essential films posted on my site may already have seen what I’ve written about him.

The tribute page has culled together Jonathan’s favorite reviews of the last 20 years – from that list I highly recommend the ones on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, M, Rear Window, and Taxi Driver. There’s also a two part video interview in which Jonathan discusses his retirement. I’ve embedded them here as well. (And what’s witht he cathedral framing?)

Part One:

Part Two: