Shooting Down Pictures

The following is a rough translation of an essay by Volker Pantenburg of the Kunst der Vermittlung project, on the fifth part of Matt Zoller Seitz’ immense series of video essays, ”Wes Anderson: The Substance Of Style.” I used Babelfish and Google Translation to stitch together the most coherent translation I could manage; by no means perfect but hopefully you’ll get the idea:

You can watch the video being described by visiting the Moving Image Source

THE SUBSTANCE OF STYLE MEETS THE ART OF CAPTION

Note to the 5th part of Matt Zoller Seitz’” Wes Anderson: The Substance Of Style “

Matt Zoller Seitz, former film critic in print media such as the New York Times, moved at the beginning of 2006 to write blogs, especially on the site The House Next Door. Since 2008 he also published under the alias insomniacdad at youtube a partly annotated, partly uncommented montage (Berkeley (esque)), a video which is between film criticism and analysis.

Seitz’ most comprehensive occupation with a producer – after a fourt-part series to Oliver Stone (1, 2, 3, 4) – is the five-part essay WES ANDERSON: THE SUBSTANCE OF STYLE (1, 2, 3,4, 5), which was published in March and April 2009 on the Museum of the Moving image website, also the producer of this and the Stone series. In The Art Of Bill Melendez (2008), an homage to the producer of the Peanuts films, Seitz had already connected Anderson’s film RUSHMORE with its surprising references to Melendez. In the five parts of the Anderson analysis there follows now more systematically the influences of other auteur styles on Anderson. The first four sequences are devoted to individual models (“Part 1 covers Bill Melendez, Orson Welles, and François Truffaut. Part 2 covers Martin Scorsese, Richard Lester, and Mike Nichols. Part 3 covers Hal Ashby. Part 4 covers J.D. Salinger. “)

Part 5 highlights already in the title of the previous parts. “The prologue to The Royal Tenenbaum, annotated,” says the 6-minute sequence. Annotation is to be understood literally: Zoller Seitz writes in the images of the opening sequence of the film in exuberant abundance of commentaries, notes and analysis inside Notes, especially in the sober designated cases, this is Anderson’s own practice in the caption ( “Caption”) to. In addition, as a small picture-in-picture, moving or unmoving, parallel bodies in other film-historical reference films (CITIZEN KANE, about films of Hal Ashby and Bill Melendez). You can use this wealth impossible for a single passage through Zoller Seitz ‘film exercise, which alone is already a reference to Wes Anderson playful love of detail and precision verortbaren way as the film emphasizes the concrete camera movement, the Zoller Seitz “emphatic dolly” is called. Zoller Seitz ‘annotated version is based – in excess of ironic, but very serious item in their view – at the critical commentary, as they are in the book of classic media spending knows where the “apparatus” to the text length is often far in excess.

The effect of almost baroque richness comes off also by the fact that in all interventions and conveyances of the image two components are not touched: the temporality and the soundtrack of Anderson’s film. Seitz adds to the film no Zeilupen, does not stop the picture and does not interfere with the conduct of a perfectionist exposure of infant-family. His annotations, passing in a clerical scurry, are best described with the American adjective “hilarious”, informed by the result of a fascinated astonished, again and again the “rewind” button-pressing cinema enthusiasm. Repeat viewing for repeat viewers.

I had an excellent time in Berlin. The screening and co-presentation with Sebastien Lutgert at the Kino Arsenal was near full-capacity and much of the audience stayed on afterwards to mingle and talk about cinema in ways I rarely experience even in New York City (will have to take steps to address that).  I was surprised by how well the internet videos held up when projected digitally on the big screen (even the ones that were ripped off the internet). I was also surprised that the Kunst der Vermittlung project team wrote several critical essays analyzing a number of the videos in the program. These essays are all in German, but I’ll attempt to produce some coherent translations with the help of tools available online.

Here are a couple of videos documenting my presentation, courtesy of Martina Lunzer:

Part One:

0:50 – Introduction and origin of Shooting Down Pictures project
4:20 – Introduction of videos in program

Part Two:

0:00 – “Why aren’t there more of these movies on the internet?”
3:30 – Issues with YouTube, copyright and fair use

Unfortunately I didn’t have enough free space on the little Flip to film Sebastien Lutgert’s presentation, which was in German. The most eye-opening portion of his presentation was his website 0xdb, which, to paraphrase the description on the website, “uses a variety of publicly accessible resources, like search engines and file-sharing networks, to automatically collect information about, and actual images and sounds from, a rapidly growing number of movies. What the 0xdb provides is, essentially, full text search within movies, and instant previews of search results.” One really unique feature is that it offers a frame-by-frame visual timeline of each film in its database, resulting in a visual re-representation of the film that resembles abstract art:

Saturday I was back at work on another Shooting entry which should be up later this week. I also assisted Mina Lunzer with her current project, a visual and textual study of Vienna’s Prater, made famous in films such as The Third Man and Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March.  She recently published an article about the Prater in film in the newest issue of Senses of Cinema.

On Sunday I mixed work and play, starting off with recording a commentary track with local critics and programmers Michael Baute (of Kunst der Vermittlung) and Ekkehard Knörer of Cargo Magazine for a planned video essay on Helmut Kautner’s Under the Bridges.  Then we had a sunny outdoor lunch in the hip Kreuzberg neighborhood with two other members of the Kunst der Vermittlung team, Volker Pantenburg and Stefanie Schlüter.  There was a good deal of discussion about the New Berlin School film movement that has made an impact on German cinema over the past decade, including films by Christoph Hochhausler, whom I also had the pleasure of meeting in Berlin. I for one would love to see a New Berlin School film series programmed by one of the theaters in New York. Finally Michael accompanied me on part two of “Helmut Kautner Day” with a boatside tour under the bridges of the Spree River, from Alexanderplatz to the Tiergarten. Hopefully the video footage I shot is good enough to make its way to the video essay on Kautner’s film.

Also a shout-out to David Hudson, who was at the screening and did his part to promote it at The IFC Daily; and Dirk Schaefer, a long-time sound designer on experimental films by Matthias Müller and Peter Tscherkassky.

So, back to New York and the old routine – but with high spirits and much encouragement received from colleagues in Berlin, I’m going to think of some ways to boost the commingling of the cinephile community here, especially as the long fun days of summer are approaching.

Historical background:

Saturday, September 28, 2002, 3:00PM – 39 th New York Film Festival, Alice Tully Hall

An obvious choice for this list, perhaps, it announces itself as a post-millennial milestone.   And in that regard it invites skepticism or ridicule.   But one has to consider it from all possible aspects: as a costume parade, a theme park, a historical and cultural meditation; as performance art, a museum tour, and (not or )an industrial commercial for digital filmmaking.  Some complain that the constant camera movement propels us too much, that there isn’t sufficient space for stasis and meditation.   Personally I found a strong countercurrent in that everyone in this film has a fixed place -even as we move with the off-screen narrator through one set piece to the next, our position is fixed through the frame – the screen we watch stays still.   Are we moving, or is the world moving before us?   This is echoed in the Marquis’ ambivalent regard of his surroundings, and in the final image of the sea outside in a state of endless churning, endlessly still.

I can think of very few recent films that implant its way of seeing in a viewer as distinctively as Russian Ark .   That was certainly true when I saw it at the New York Film Festival; I left the grand screening room along with 1,000 other viewers flooding into and floating through the lobby and out into Broadway, borne aloft by ourselves and by the film – we became the film as surely as the film had become part of us.   I could hear Sokurov’s detached, bewildered whisper voicing my perception of the surroundings – look at all these people, as destined to die and as alive in this moment as the digitally captured antique humans we just witnessed.   Look, there’s Wes Anderson, encircled by admirers asking him what he thought of the film.   What is he saying that everyone is hanging on every word?   He says that a lot of the historical Russian stuff went way over his head, but he couldn’t get over that one shot of the girls with flowers in their flowing tresses twirling and scampering down the hallway.

Certainly, a beauty that transcends cultural specificity is at least part of what Sokurov is after.   But is it possible to understand Russian Ark without appreciating the historical context – is gawking at the girls enough?    As one of the charter members of the Platform Fan Club, I’m all for dogged specificity and emphasis on the geopolitical — and it needn’t be in favor of the films either.   Dan Edwards, doing a great riff on David Walsh, writes of Russian Ark , “While the sheer material grandeur of Russia’s upper classes prior to 1917 cannot be denied, it seems deeply abhorrent to nostalgically celebrate and mourn the passing of that grandiose tradition without any acknowledgment of the absolutely grinding poverty upon which this opulence was built.” What response can be offered to such a formidable critique?     Is it possible to embrace this film without lamenting its seeming disregard for the masses?

Perhaps Russian Ark can be seen as a perverse inversion of early Soviet filmmaking.   Instead of eye-blistering montages, we get one super-extended shot, where the montage is in a disjunctive mise-en-scene, perpetually unfolding. Instead of peasants elevated to regal status, we get rulers reduced to a petty humanity – Catherine the Great searching for a piss pot, oodles of nobles standing around or walking, living lives with as high a quotient of banal lack of incident as the rest of us.

I don’t necessarily endorse this tactic so much as I recognize how it’s symptomatic of a larger trend in international culture, one also touched on in Guy Maddin’s brilliant The Saddest Music in the World .   As Benjamin Halligan writes, the film manages to be both an introspective reflection and an outward promotional piece about Russia’s potential to contribute and reconnect with both Continental and global culture.   This paradoxical depiction – that of a mighty national legacy with a down-home underbelly, embodied in grandiose figures who are also rendered as beneficent, mortal, and a tad pathetic, packaged for entry in the global marketplace –   can also be seen In Zhang Yimou’s Hero and the domestic persona of George W. Bush (the least successful export item of the three).   The examples are all symptoms of neo-imperialist culture, a global competition over dreams of universal power and representations of entire peoples – a global battle that seems to play out somewhere way beyond where you and I exist.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with what the former me wrote above, I’m having a hard time resolving it with what I felt watching it recently (third or fourth screening but first since 2005). There’s no question that it’s a unique work, but somehow the novelty of the film’s formalist charms gave way to a new impression, something reinforced by a comment made by German filmmaker Christoph Hochhausler when I spoke with him about the film in Berlin. To him, the film amounts to one big bet that Sokurov, once his camera starts moving, must win by all means – as long as he gets those 90 minutes in, it doesn’t necessarily matter what’s in those 90 minutes. This was definitely a suspicion that came to mind when I watched it this time around. Of course, there are some stupendous moments of jaw-dropping beauty in the film, but there are also several passages when it feels like Sokurov is just letting the camera roll, focusing on nothing really in particular, either because the next set piece isn’t quite ready or he didn’t have a full set of ideas to play with visually in the current scene. Or there just aren’t a whole lot of ideas put in play.  I mean, all the ideas I touch on in my earlier write-up are more of a cumulative impression of this film, but on a scene-by-scene basis the film feels like more of a sketch-level rendering of those ideas; his treatment of centuries’ worth of Russian history feels willfully oblique.  This fatuousness is especially evident in the climactic ballroom scene, where the camera swings from one end of the room to the other, then back, with a little hint of romantic intrigue caught on camera, a lot of costume spectacle and not much else.

I might be overstating the case against the film in the wake of this disappointing recent viewing – there is still something stunning about the beauty of this film and its unique manner of exploring ideas of nation and history (though another thing that’s become evident is how impatient I’m becoming with Sokurov’s totemic approach towards those ideas). One thing I’ll always carry with me is the film’s Russian Ross McElwee/Michael Myers first-person lensmanship as it probes through space and time. It recalls submerged childhood fantasies of moving invisibly through the world, which may be why the film blew me away when I first saw it beyond all other considerations.

No, Richard Pena did not say that Chinese Indie Films “kick ass” – I said that to him, or at least I wished I had. Anyway, now that I have your attention, I want to let you know about a great new resource for Sino-cinephiles. The new website of my distribution company dGenerate Films has a blog that’s been seeing steady stream of content coming through, sort of an ongoing depository of all things going on in the Chinese indie cinema scene (that we know of, at least).  Some highlights so far:

- The insider’s scoop. Chinese cinema festival programmer Shelly Kraicer (Udine and Vancouver Film Festivals, among others) will be a regular contributor to our site with informed articles giving his take on what’s happening in the Chinese indie scene. Here’s his first entry, “An Independent Film Scene, Thriving Miles from Main Street“, reporting on the 3rd Annual Beijing Independent Film Festival. 

- On the Road with Yours Truly. Lately I’ve been attending academic events related to Chinese cinema to get the word out about dGenerate and meet others in the academic community who are actively interest in Chinese cinema. Recently I’ve been to the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting in Chicago and a special series of Chinese independent documentaries hosted at Harvard University. Read up on both and you’ll get a sense of how I’ve been spending my weekends lately.

- Upcoming screenings!  We’re happy to be presenting Chinese indie director Ying Liang on a bicoastal tour of NYC and SF this coming weekend.  Read more about his screenings at Film Society of Lincoln Center, The China Institute in New York (yours truly in attendance), the San Francisco International Film Festival and UC Berkeley.

Then read about another dGenerate screening, this one happening next Wednesday at BAM. Jian Yi’s Super,  Girls! will be screening at 7:30 with yours truly in attendance.

- Aforementioned “Kick Ass” Interview with Richard Pena.  The only thing scarier about the breadth of Richard Pena’s knowledge of Chinese cinema is the likelihood that his knowledge of other national cinemas around the world is equally extensive. 

That’s it for now, but more will definitely be on the way.  I’ll try to get in the habit of cross-posting… unless you want to get in the habit of visiting or RSSing dGeneratefilms.com!

Screened April 15 2009 in Astoria, NY on .avi (special thanks to Jürgen Fauth for live translation assistance)

TSPDT rank #866

IMDb

An odd, uneasy blend of social-realist verite and low-budget romanticism, this made-for-television melodrama by one of Germany’s self-proclaimed bad boys of filmmaking seems like an attempt to express both the rock and roll lifestyle mythos and its utter out of place-ness in the real world. Following two anti-establishment types – one a biker gang ex-con, the other a car thief – the film wears its crudeness on its sleeve, with endearingly campy results. Propelled by a soundtrack leveling dollops of Stones, Santana and Led Zeppelin, the film enjoys solid cult status in Germany, seemingly for the same reason that The Big Lebowski does in the US – as a compendium of memorable one-liners and for creating an alternative reality out of the ramshackle milieu of life on the fringes.

Winding through an urban wasteland of deadpan faces and a plot that is geared less towards sustaining narrative plausibility than in emphasizing the grand gesture, Lemke establishes a brazen internal logic propelled by braggadocio moments: a man can borrow a crowbar from parking garage workers to break into a car with them raising nary an eyebrow, or can ask a strange girl on a subway if she likes to screw and make out with her moments later in a bar bathroom while his brother waits among their beers. Not everything is rosy for these rockers: one of them is tied up by an unidentified gang, his lodgings burned to the ground for some reason left unexplained by the film, but makes for a dramatic moment all the same. Later he comes into mucho Deutschmarks through a drug deal so half-baked it feels almost poetic, and his resulting radical spike in swagger leads him to pick a fight with the biggest truck driver in a diner; the accosted silently gets up and proceeds to run his 18-wheeler over the rocker’s bike, leading to a funeral pyre sacrifice of the motorcycle a la Jimi Hendrix’s Monterey Pop guitar.

Gradually the film focuses its attention on the fate of the car thief’s teen brother, a troubled kid not quite ready for rockerdom but still badass enough to send a shelf of bread loaves crashing down a supermarket aisle. In the final act he instigates a free-for-all brawl where the rockers come looking to kick climactic ass but end up looking like sloppy brawlers, while in the distance ominous police sirens grow louder. Pathetic futility wins the day, but in doing so these rockers gain a modest measure of pathos. They ask for no pity, no quarter, nothing but a space to play out the emptiness of their lives with maximum ostentation.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE? Continue Reading »

Friday April 17 is a special day for Shooting Down Pictures. The Kino Arsenal in Berlin will be presenting several of my videos as part of a monthly program: “The Art of Mediation: Films About Films.” The series, which began in October and concludes in July, includes films and appearances by the likes of Harun Farocki, Alain Bergala, Alexander Horwath, Tag Gallagher and Jean Douchet, among others. The theme of the April 17 program is Films about Films and the Internet. Author, artist and media activist Sebastian Luetgert of Pirate Cinema will discuss the issue of free artistic expression on the internet, and they’ll be showing several of my video essays. I’m excited and a bit intimidated to meet Sebastian Luetgert: he’s a remarkable and provocative theorist who is as likely to critique the notions of freedom in the internet age as he will argue passionately for them. Read a sample essay of his here. Also in addition to my videos, Matt Zoller Seitz’s wonderful video essay on The Art of Bill Melendez will screen.

“The Art of Mediation: Films About Films,” or known in German as “Kunst der Vermittlung: Aus den Archiven Filmvermittlung Films,” is an ambitious project to catalog all existing films about other films, on all formats: DVD extras, films, video essays, etc. Organized by Stefan Pethke, Michael Baute, Volker Pantenburg, Stefanie Schlüter and Erik Stein, the project has already catalogued an impressive number of films about films, including just about every video essay that I’ve produced to date.

I would love for everyone out there to be on hand in Berlin for this big evening for Shooting Down Pictures. The funny thing is, in a way you can be, at least for the screening part of the presentation, since all of the films screening are already accessible on YouTube. You can find the links below in the program description if you’d like to watch them. I’ll send a report upon my return – wish me luck!

Films About Films and the Internet

New forms of distribution of the internet and the digital technologies have made all means for the production of movie-commenting movies easily accessible for today’s web-prosumer. Vast numbers of feature-films and other cinematographic productions exist as digital footage, recording- and editing devices in various complexity are availabe for everyone.

When it comes to working with this treasure, the pertinent questions are analogous or even identical to those that authors of movie-commenting movies are confronted with: Which elements of an existing movie can I work with? What can be used, what am I allowed to use? What is a citation, what is a copy, what is a transmission? What is —in the broadest sense—legally or even morally interesting or possible, what is aesthetically interesting or possible in the working-with or the deictical gestures (the showing)? And who should watch all this? To be more specific: What is the difference between digital footage found on the net and the tangible footage collected in movie archives or found in the dustbin of history? What is algorithmic and what is intellectual indexicalization?

We have been looking for various forms and formats of movie-commenting artefacts in the internet. Starting from these we are going to discuss the questions mentioned above with Sebastian Lütgert (pirate cinema). The film selection focuses on works created within the frame of American Weblogs – particularly “Shooting Down Pictures”, the project of our special guest, the filmmaker and critic Kevin B. Lee. Examples include video essays on current and classical films by Nicole Brenez, Kristin Thompson, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Matt Zoller Seitz, and others.

Diskussion mit Sebastian Lütgert, Special Guest: Kevin B. Lee

Filme:

• Kristin Thompson und Kevin B. Lee: Shooting Down Pictures video essay on E.A. Dupont’s Variety (USA 2009, 5 min 51 sec)
• Christianne Benedikt und Kevin B. Lee: Shooting Down Pictures video essay on George Roy Hill’s The World According to Garp (USA 2009, 6 min 32 sec)
• The Film Society of Lincoln Center: Clint Eastwood – A Critics’ Roundtable. Part Two: Gran Torino (USA 2009, 7 min 20 sec)
• Jonathan Rosenbaum und Kevin B. Lee: Shooting Down Pictures video essay on John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud (USA 2008, 15 min 17 sec) First Part, Second Part
• Kevin B. Lee: Shooting Down Pictures video essay on George Sluizer’s Spoorlos and David Fincher’s Zodiac (USA 2007, 6 min 24 sec)
• Kevin B. Lee: Shooting Down Pictures video essay on Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (USA 2007, 4 min 51 sec)

Matt Zoller-Seitz: A Little Love: The Art of Bill Melendez (USA 2008, 9 min 31 sec)

Screened Sunday April 12 2009 on New Line DVD in Watertown, MA

TSPDT rank #925  IMDb Wiki

Pink Flamingos may remain the purest, rawest manifestation of John Waters’ inimitable worldview, but Female Trouble is his masterpiece, taking that film’s libidinal anarchy and slipping it like a series of time bombs inside something resembling a classical narrative.  Having a story provides a steady target against which Waters’ tastelessness  (never as extreme as it was in these two films) tirelessly hurls itself; it’s the same approach taken by Mel Brooks, whose more mainstream brand of subversion feels rather artless compared to what Waters and his game cast and crew accomplish here.

Superwigged juggernaut Divine rumbles like a rhinoceros through a bad-girl-gone-abominable melodrama that takes her from teen rape to robbery to married life (involving sex with carrots and pliers) to unspeakable disfiguration to mass murder.  Divine devours each debased woman scenario with full-throated gusto, defecating a performance that surpasses camp reduction, reaching deep into a kind of pathological, gleefully sado-masochistic apotheosis of female suffering and ambition.  It’s a dervish dance of garishness whose strident bellows betray unexpected small revelations: giving birth in a hotel hallway, she pulls the rape-seed infant from her womb, tears into the umbilical cord with her teeth and spits it against the green upholstery.  That piece of afterbirth stuck on the couch is one of the most mind-blowingly defiant gestures I’ve seen in a long time.

While Waters can’t resist the gimmicky shock value of having Divine clobber her parents with a Christmas tree or get raped by a male hick played by himself, or close ups of grime-covered penises, it’s the little unexpected gestures that elevate this film to sublime trash: robbery masks that fit over beehive hairdos; a 300 pound transvestite attempting somersaults on a trampoline in reckless abandon; a bowlful of spaghetti slithering down a wall. At one point Divine, ascending a staircase, casts his eyes downward and delivers a broken marriage, woe-is-me monologue with a black beehive and limpid eyes worthy of Liz Taylor, he looks downright beautiful, and more convincing as a downtrodden woman than his Hollywood counterpart’s Oscar performance in Butterfield 8. It’s a moment that becomes especially poignant given what’s to follow, his character’s dream of stardom succumbing to physical and psychic mutilation. The film’s second half pushes hard into the monster-freak aspect of Divine’s persona, reducing her character to a single-minded aspiring tabloid icon.  It’s a risky move that threatens to bury the film in nihilism, its heroine terminally blinded by ambition. But Divine’s hearty embrace of whatever the script demands of her preserves the film’s humanity, and even offers the last word to the film’s cynical view towards celebrity culture: in the end, she is a star.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE? Continue Reading »

Some historical context:

Tuesday, February 11, 2003, 3:30 PM – Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, NY

3:30 PM can’t be right, but that’s what’s listed on the schedule I have, so I must have taken a late lunch from my day job to watch this.   I wonder, did I even come back to the office?   Did I leave my computer on to feign my presence in the office?   What I remember is watching two Thai women and the Burmese man they are illegally harboring marking time through several mundane errands, appointments and obligations.   Yes, I escaped from white collar banality to watch third world banality.   45 minutes of this pass before me.   And finally, with all obligations fulfilled and provisions set, they finally get in their car and embark on a getaway to the Thai equivalent of the Catskills, at which point the opening credits roll to a blast of pop music, and I cried out “Yes!”   How many times do you get that moment where everything comes together, not just the meaning of the movie but its relevance to your life?   For me, it was this irreconcilable duality between my daily demands and the idyllic existence I was trying to formulate — and have been for the last 5 years — as a wage slave moonlighting as a career cinephile.   To live as an average young person is to live in a world that has made us numbly compliant to our own exploitation at the service of global capitalism, whether we be illegal migrant day laborers or overqualified computer drones.

What is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s prescription for our ailment?   A day in the country, an eternal balm.   Sounds like the kind of mystical opiate that Karl Marx railed against, and yet Weerasethakul depicts it in such a natural, inventive way, that our alibis for 21st century creative fatigue melt away.   He seems to say that all it takes is to observe nature and draw strength from its infinite mystery — though he acknowledges that such transcendence is fleeting, and that the disappointments of the world are waiting at a moment’s distance, an everyday horror into which we must dive headlong.

2006 New York Film Festival:

What David Lynch promises in Inland Empire, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century delivers. Again, it is a film that defies easy summarisation; basically it is another A.W. diptych, the two halves comparing life and love in a rural and urban hospital. The film manages to be both inscrutable and hypnotic, enigmatic yet ravishingly beautiful in its handling of visuals, rhythms and human interactions. It manages to occupy a number of contradictions at once: terrifying in its environmental creepiness yet funny in the shaggy, laid back behaviour of his characters, schematic yet spontaneous, natural and realistic yet self-conscious as an act of filmmaking, concerned about the conflicts between modernisation and the environment and the physical and spiritual well-being of the people around him, and yet the film is never pushy or preachy, just always watching and listening. His camera almost always seems to place itself in a non-assuming position, whether in close up or long shot – quite a few times his characters’ backs are turned away or they’re talking off-screen. He’s making the rules up as he goes, just going with what feels right, and having a blast doing it. I’ve rarely encountered a film with a filmmaker so innately in tune with his intuition.

Interestingly, both films share a similar ending, a kind of musical number, but I think the comparative effects are totally different. Lynch is closed, looking inward into his own reservoir of ideas, whereas Jo takes inspiration from the activity bustling in the world around him.

I don’t think I set out, Armond White-like, to make Apichatpong Weerasethakul the corrective to David Lynch; it’s just happened that way through seeing their most recent films in contradistinction at the New York Film Festival, and this week seeing Blissfully Yours following Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire (I still need to track down a copy of Syndromes and a Century; I’m not as eager to rewatch Tropical Malady or Mysterious Object at Noon, which are fine films but in my mind aren’t “best of 2000s” caliber). As documented in this three party play-by-play viewing of Inland Empire, there are certainly a number of smart things to say about what Lynch may be up to in that film. The thing is, I found a lot of those smart things going on in rewatching Blissfully Yours, and presented in a way that feels more genuine, more organic, more beautiful, more true. An indulgence in non-narrative or anti-narrative. The attempts of people to escape from the dehumanizing industries of consumerist capitalism, specifically the entertainment industry (in Lynch it’s the cruel politics of Hollywood film production; here it’s factory work, with a girl painting the eyes on an endless array of Bugs Bunny toys).

There’s also a good deal of game-playing in both films, not just by the directors but by the characters. Laura Dern gets to play several characters and part of the pleasure of her performance is in watching her feel her way through each one, an experience that must have been adventurous and torturous for her in alternating measures. Similarly, one thing that struck me rewatching Blissfully Yours is how much putting on and pretending there is among the main characters: in the first scene, they lie to the doctor in order for her to treat an illegal immigrant; later, we see them lying to get off work to pave the way for their jungle romp; by the end, we get an amazing sense of how this outing amounted to these three characters convening to act out their individual fantasies, before giving way to a bittersweet, dissolute flow of life’s next chapter. I’ll have to carry this insight the next time I go on a picnic, group excursion or even a party; thanks to this movie I’ll see my social gatherings as collective productions of individual intentions commingling together. This isn’t a cynical observation, just one that makes for a new sense of awareness to how one lives their life. (And not to be an asshole, but I’m not sure what Lynch has to offer in that department).

Both directors also use ambient sound to memorable effect, except that here again I state a strong preference: whereas Lynch uses a wall of white noise and synth chords to generate three hours of menace, Weerasethakul uses the teeming chorus of cicadas and frogs to convey an immersion in nature that’s both meditative and hedonistic, tranquil and sensual.  Maybe it can be chalked up to what kind of film I prefer, but there it is.

When I think about both artists, I also think about that maxim someone once said about art being “whatever you can get away with.” What amazes me about Blissfully Yours is just how little happens in terms of plot and incident.  It takes a good while to see how the initial, somewhat dissheveled sequence of scenes adds up to the brilliant catharsis that happens at the midway point – a lot of it is in adjusting to the. But every moment gets milked for all its worth, and every moment builds together into a strange paradox: a film that is both linear and alinear, that threatens to dissolve in the vagaries of a moment, then solidifies in the lucidness of another; that expands and contracts, that breathes.  I suppose the Lynch apologists could say the same for their film in their own way.  To each his own.

Screened April 8 2009 on Films Sans Frontiers DVD (courtesy of Ed Gonzalez) in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT rank #909 IMDb Wiki

Made in the middle of his underrated Mexican period, Luis Buñuel’s perverse comedy about the world’s most inept (or most psychically potent?) serial killer finds Buñuel settling into the style that would dominate the remainder of his career: a deceptively banal mise-en-scene of deadpan performances and surfaces occasionally yielding to eruptions of psychologically charged surreality. The pattern is set from the stunning first scene: as a boy, the title character is captivated by his nanny’s harmless fantasy that their music box has murderous powers. But his imagination is catapulted into a lifelong obsession with sex and murder when, after the boy plays the music box, the nanny is randomly killed, her body sprawled before him, her legs exposed to the garters.

Now a respectable middle class adult, Archibaldo tries to kill the women in his life, but is thwarted by circumstances, ranging from the mundane to the melodramatic, in which the women die before he can act on his impulses. Panged with guilt over the possible potency of his hidden moties, Archibaldo tries to confess his would-be killings, but the police chief, who acts as a father confessor to his flashbacks, dismisses him by suggesting that his impulse is no greater than those who satisfy their blood lust by reading mystery novels. As the opening scene establishes, the film constantly depicts stories, as well as fetishized objects, as the chief mediators between a world of respectable appearances and the violent desires of sex and death raging underneath.  The film’s centerpiece is a bizarre seduction/attempted murder scene involving a menage a trois with a mannequin that the two lovers take turns dressing and undressing.

Characters are always in the act of narrating as a way of exerting control on others: in suicide notes, bedtime stories, confessions, pardons; even a tour guide seems to play to her group’s fantasies of discovering a Mexican culture that they had essentially brought with them, if only to keep them occupied. Whether it’s Archibaldo’s superstitious suspicion that his desires magically caused the women’s murders, the police inspectors’ eagerness to seek an easy explanation for death to facilitate an early coffee break, or even the American tourists impositions on their host country, the behavior of these characters share an underlying impulse to colonize the world around them with their limited and selfish capacity to comprehend it. It’s to Buñuel’s credit that he depicts this absurdist human comedy within the stylistic conventions of classical narrative filmmaking; it only serves to weave the craziness of humankind more inseparably with the appearance of normalcy.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

Continue Reading »

Starring me, Ryland Walker Knight, Daniel Kasman and a six pack of Beck’s.

Some context: Until today I’ve only seen Inland Empire once, back at the 2006 New York Film Festival – and my review was decidedly mixed. Not a few of my friends consider it one of the landmark films of the decade, and so a few of us got together to see if seeing it with them could persuade me. The result: I do have a greater appreciation for the film, because it does have some genuinely stunning moments and is trying to do things that no other American film to my knowledge is attempting. It may also be considered the first major work of cinema in the era of YouTube. I wonder if this film would be just as affecting if each scene were a stand alone clip on a website that allowed you to play them in any order, endlessly.

I like it more now than I do Mulholland Dr., which I also recently rewatched (my third time, first since its theatrical run) and found is like a sexier, more attractive warm-up act to Inland Empire, strung with the same liabilities of broad caricature and loose assocation, almost like skit comedy.

Here’s the play by play, with Ryland’s and Danny’s comments color-coded:

0:01 – Ambient groan and white noise. Opening images – a projection of light (searchlight, film projector?) and the needle of a phonograph. Recordings of light and sound. As with Mulholland Dr. I feel Lynch can get away with anything so long as he has the ominous aural wallpaper going in the back. He could have footage of a bunny farm and make it come off as creepy. Speaking of which…

0:05 – Rabbits – a parody of domestic banality? The safe room of conventionality turned into a nightmare rabbit cage?

This does look better on DVD than it did in a theater. It probably looks even better on an iPhone.

0:08 – Lynch’s second foray into filming in a foreign language, expanding on what he did in Mulholland.

0:11 – To what extent is this film a comedy, and what is he trying to do with the comic – the rabbit sitcom (putting menace into a comic setup), the awkward uncomfortable rhythms of the dialogue between the Polish lady and Laura Dern (putting comedy into a menacing setup).

Ryland: “I find this movie really funny. His company’s name is Absurda, which invokes both comedy and horror.”

0:13 – Discussion about the film – the film that we are about to watch? – between Polish lady and Nikki Grace (Laura Dern). Heavy foreshadowing.

0:14 – Apocryphal story – “an old tale” about a little boy who went out to play followed by Evil. Leering, garish close-up, further uglified by DV imaging. David Lynch without the makeup mask of celluloid.

0:17 – “Actions do have consequences, and yet we do have the magic.” “If it was tomorrow you would be sitting over there.” The disorientation of language.

0:22 – Marilyn Levens’ talk show – “Where Stars Make Dreams and Dreams Make Stars” – jackal industry feeding on manufactured intrigue of its own making. Hollywood = eating your own shit.

0:25 – Script reading – rehearsal.  A fiction of a documentary reading, practicing the performance of emotions. “Are you crying?” “Yeah?” But she’s not. Continuing the interest in rehearsal and performance from Mulholland Dr.

0:32 – Disclosure that the feature film in production, High on Blue Tomorrow, is a remake of an unfinished Polish film, 4-7. Layers of fiction continue to accumulate.

After 30 minutes, what do we have?

Ryland: “I don’t think it’s an informational kind of film. I don’t think it’s part of his vocabulary. That might be the trouble behind understanding the “genre” of this film. Simply avant-garde play of light, affectations and moods. I think the first time I saw this, by this point I was thinking that it was explicitly about interpretation. And it’s setting up all these signs for you to interpret in any number of ways. But it is going to provide a network of significance, and there are several things that will keep popping up for you to pay attention to how and when. There’s an intuitive kind of architecture to the film. A lot of it is just the face – dreams, and faces. It’s all about cinema as a dream, dreams as cinema. It’s not even a syllogism, it’s all a bunch of links. It’s really easy to write it off as an art school wank job: dumb rabbit suits and stuff, making fun of sitcoms but not really. And projections – that’s the first image, the projector coming on. And how does an image project itself and how do you project onto it.  “You look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you.”  Merleau-Ponty’s variation: “The image palpates you as much as you palpate the image” – there’s an actual physical ecounter between you and what you see, your eyes literally touch what you see. It’s manifest in all the close-ups of the face, they’re pure expressions and confrontations that you are forced to read.

Kevin: “I admit I find those close-ups bothersome, garish, tacky. But that could be the point; Lynch isn’t relying on conventional forms of aesthetic beauty to earn the appreciation of the viewer; quite the opposite. He’s confronting expectations of forms in order to challenge them.

Ryland: “Definitely. Keith Uhlich likes to bring up that one of the first thing Lynch shot with this camera was something called “A Room to Dream” – messiness and smudginess gives you a lot of space to project onto it, what you want to see as much as what you do see. And he wants to activate that kind of encounter. It’s a different tactic than something like the pure stimulus of something like Paul Greengrass, or the duration of Tarkovsky.”

—–

0:36 – watching the scene with two new characters, police interrogator and woman confessing to intentions of murder with a screwdriver lodged in her abdomen. Works as a stand alone short – makes me wonder how this film would work as a website hypertext where scenes could be clicked on individually and you could watch them in any sequence. That may very well be what this film is truly working towards; one thinks if Lynch wanted to go all out he could leave behind any trace of linear narrative.

Freddy: “There’s a vast network; an ocean of possibilities. I like dogs. I used to raise rabbits.” An incredibly disjunctive monologue, bits from three conversational threads spliced into one.

0:42 – music is less pronounced than in previous films. No Angelo Badalamenti this time, instead very subtle and gradual chord progressions with little or no melody. There’s no music credit other than a music consultant. Ryland thinks Lynch may have composed some of it himself.

0:44 – Ryland laughing at the comic bit between director Jeremy Irons and “Bucky Jay” the lighting tech (voice played by Lynch).

0:47 – We’re entering the shooting of scenes. Don’t find the scene being shot in the film within the film terribly interesting (some parlor conversation between would be adulterers) – but there’s some intrigue between the actors afterwards that’s interesting because there’s been plenty of advance warning that Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) is a cad, and true to form he plays the role – Nikki Grace replies “I’m sure you know a cute little Italian restaurant tucked away” – but she can’t help but go along, seemingly unable or unwilling to change the script – in a film that is trying to fuck that up thoroughly.

0:55 – Brilliant move – adultery between the film’s characters and the actors have been crossed up. Subsequent love-making scene is unclear which layer of fiction is being represented until Dern brings up a flashback, but they’re talking in Southern accents as if they were their characters.

1:00 – Sign on door “Axxon – N” – recalling voiceover in the beginning which described “Axxon – N” as the longest running radio show in Polish history.

1:02 – we are now through the looking glass – Nikki goes through the Axxon N door and walks into the rehearsal scene from half an hour earlier.  She gets chased by Devon Berk into the orange interior of a house which may be a set -she calls out after Billy (the character Devon plays in the movie).

1:05 – walking through a house (of fiction?) – towards a bedroom with a man turning off a light. Rhythmic palpitating beats in the soundtrack.

1:09 – now we’re in a light and shadow play, flashlights in the dark, Laura Dern surrounded by whores (or the women that Justin Theroux’s character has already slept with?).  This may be the first truly amazing moment of the film.

1:12 – looping back to the beginning of the movie (black and white, girl speaking in Polish) layers of film’s established realities collapsing upon each other.

1:15 – Next day? Breakfast, an unwinding clock and a hole burned through fabric and through another layer of story… More Polish. Old scratchy recording of audio matched to color footage – of what? Performance, historical incident? Theater?

1:20 – Reprise of the rabbits – and now dark spaces, setting the table for Laura Dern’s centerpiece monologue. “A lot of guys change. They don’t change but they reveal. They reveal what they really are. It’s an old story.”

1:27 – A harem of fears – women talking both cheaply and comfortably about their bodies, their daily business of sex – confronting Laura Dern with everything she’s afraid that’s cheap about who she is and what she desires (a-list actress attracted to playboy lover = self-debasement) “The Locomotion” – running train, lining up for sex

1:31 – domestic scene with unidentified man (husband from before but looking more low class) expressing dismay at Dern’s pregnancy

1:32 – Rabbits again – a marker of conventionality? domestic setting, sitcom culture – from which Laura Dern’s character is oriented on the outside – trying to call in (”Billy”?)

1:35 – alternating again with Laura Dern’s unnamed trailer trash girl, continuing her epic monologue – heroic, strong, angry, trashy but dignified. The film’s center of gravity in terms of humanism and true narrative (realer than the meta-movie layering). But again, it’s a performance and as much of a fiction as everything else. And there’s a look in Dern’s eye like she’s taking the piss (not unlike those “Unforgivable” videos on YouTube: storytelling that’s out to push buttons)

1:39 – Ryland: “This Polish girl’s line is a direct quote from an Erich von Stroheim movie (Queen Kelly?) that’s being projected in Sunset Blvd, with those same lines showing up. It’s a quote from a movie within a movie from another movie within a movie.”

1:50 – We’re back in the film within a film – though dramatically not feeling much at stake here. Susan Blue is at Billy’s house, exposes the affair in front of Billy’s wife. All the crazy effects (vertigo rack focus, a guy in a car talking Evil Dead gibberish) feel kind of laid on thickly.

1:56 – cool shot of Dern in the spotlight culminating in what Ryland calls “one of the most terrifying facial closeups in cinema history” – for me, something is flailing, either the film (overreaching for effects) or me in my ability to lock into what’s going on.

2:00:15 – very cool.

2:02 – I think this whole Polish business is just not really working for me – not finding the scenario compelling in its own right, let alone as something that informs what’s going on at the other layers of story. There’s a neat graphic match dissolve from the Polish thugs to the rabbits – point being?

2:04 – I’m wondering if part of my problem is that I’m not as invested in certain genres being referred to by this film (crime, mystery, horror) in such a way that I’m impressed by how it’s supposedly tearing them apart.

2:06 – Apparently Lynch has been watching Peter Tscherkassky.

2:09 – Gotta give Laura Dern credit for uglifying herself to the max on this one.

2:11 – Lynch’s sociological comparison of street prostitutes in early 20th century Poland and early 21st century Los Angeles: more garish close-ups and leering looks between laughing veteran whores at the hapless neophyte.

2:15 – Now the trailer trash husband is speaking Polish – tease.

2:17 – Gorgeous shot of Dern, strands of blonde hair lit aflame in the oversaturated light.

2:23 – “Color palettes in his earlier films are like Edward Hopper paintings. But this is so ragged, it’s robbed of beauty.”

2:27 – Kasman is having too much fun listening to this Japanese chick talk about her friend in Pomona. “I can totally write an article about how this scene is new territory for Lynch, like a new humanism.” His favorite scene in the movie, next to the end credits.

2:30 – Dern is giving a career performance in this movie, but I feel like in this death scene Dern is being upstaged by the supporting cast here. Weird blend of camp artifice and documentary authenticity. “No more blue tomorrows. You on high now, love.”

Daniel: “I feel like one of the weakest aspects of this film is the film within a film.  Also disappointed that Jeremy Irons doesn’t get more to do.”

Ryland: “I love how space dictates time in this film.”

2:36 – Ryland channeling Slavoj Zizek: “The image sees you!”

2:38 – Infinite convergence.

Daniel: “This film is taking discrete, unconnected things and finding intuitive connections between them.”

Daniel: “I remember a quote by Naruse late in his career when he said that he wanted to make a movie with no sets or other cast, just Hideko Takamine against a blank screen. And I think that’s what Lynch is after here.”

Ryland: “It isn’t even about feeling. It’s about inhabiting a space.”

2:41 – I’m feeling this movie a lot more now since the “death scene” – these silent sequences with Laura Dern walking through a movie approach pure abstraction. But I could do without the horror movie music – it burdens the sequence with too much genre baggage.

2:44 – Daniel: “Lynch and bad Photoshop were made for each other.”

2:48 – Layers of spectatorship – the two protagonists (Dern and Polish chick) – a big confrontation between two characters who have parallel stories but know nothing about each other. And lesbian kissing. Makes sense in a somewhat intuitive level though emotionally effecting in only an abstract programmatic way.

Daniel: “I think digital is what Lynch has been working towards his whole career. Because all this speckled pixilation. It can’t accurately represent everything that’s in front of the camera, and that’s all that’s he’s about. So that the experience of watching the film is as unstable as the story itself.”

Daniel: “Argento and Lynch borrow something from Hitchcock: ambiguous point of view – you’re never sure of what the perspective of the film is being focalized through.”