By Gleb Sidorkin
The word “veteran” in the headline above is meant in the literal, military sense. No, Marina Ambramovic didn’t fight like her parents did when they became heroes of the Serbian resistance- she was born after the Great War, in 1946. But her performance career has left as many scars on her body as a stint in the woods with her father’s guerilla unit would have. In one of the last videos Marina Abramovic showed in her talk at NYU on Tuesday, before ending the evening’s performance with a delectable quote about the power of sexual energy, we see her running a razor blade across her belly, re-tracing a five-pointed star carved there, on a much younger stomach, in a 1975 performance about her Communist heritage. The star also corresponds to the red star on her birth certificate, which in turn matches the swastika on the certificate of her long-term collaborator Ulay. Their romance and long series of (often nude) performances both ended in 1988 in a dramatic moment caught on video, at the midpoint of the Great Wall of China, after both had walked across half of its length. In the past thirty years, Abramovic has been burned, suffocated, drugged senseless, had her clothes cut off by spectators, had loaded guns and drawn bows pointed at her, been hung from the ceiling with snakes, and mutilated herself, each time forging an electric emotional bridge with her audience and her collaborators.
Abramovic pushes the limits of the human body in a way that combines athleticism, sexuality, and powerful emotional connections with the audience. “Sexual energy,” she said in closing, “is the only energy, and we can decide how to shape it.” This observation has been at the core of her work from the beginning, and connects her with one of my favorite performance pieces: Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle. In this series of sculptural set pieces featuring the body of the artist himself, the biological tension of an embryo at the moment of sexual differentiation explodes into dramatic stagings of space, objects, and the body. Abramovic and Barney’s approach to performance as an athletic and mental feat of endurance also connects both of these artists with the interesting recent work of NYU Cinema Studies student James Franco, who kicked off the performative evening at Tisch by reciting a detailed summary of Abramovic’s work, seemingly from memory. Franco has recently made an interesting move from film acting to performance art while blurring the line between the two, and has presented his film Erased James Franco as well as his ongoing run as the fictional character Franco on the soap opera General Hospital (set to culminate in the Dietch Projects gallery in New York) as time-based pieces in which he probes the limits of his actor’s instrument.
Erased James Franco, a collaboration with Carter, also shares with Abramovic’s work an important element of repetition. One of Abramovic’s earliest pieces, Rhythm 10, involved listening to a recording of herself being cut with a knife and re-staging the same actions as she listened to the tape. In her 2005 show at the Guggenheim in New York, Seven Easy Pieces, Abramovic re-staged one of her old performances as well as those of five well-known artists, ending the series with a new performance of her own. In his introduction, Franco argued that these events at the Guggenheim represented a major development for performance art as a medium. Individual performances have always been seen as corresponding to a single artist, a single space and time, and some form of recording medium. Abramovic, Franco argued, has opened up a space for treating performances as sets of actions and relationships that can be taken up again by anybody, at any time. Carter’s re-staging of all of Franco’s past film roles in Erased James Franco may thus be an Abramovic-inspired engagement of the idea of re-performance. Repetition is related to ritual in the work of Abramovic, whose great-uncle became an Orthodox saint and who was raised by a religious grandmother. Her act of re-staging a work of performance art is structurally similar to the Orthodox Divine Liturgy and rituals of fasting, prayer, communion, and marriage. In traditional societies, these highly emotional, performative acts are re-staged with equal spiritual intensity by generations of individuals. Folk traditions, such as the hilariously lewd ones enacted in Abramovic’s brilliant video Balkan Erotic Epic, also fit into this category of repeated, meaningful human activity.
The themes that emerged from Tuesday’s detailed retrospective of Abramovic’s remarkable career were closeness, death, and the energy that arises in the moments when we allow ourselves to truly embrace death, the other, and ourselves. One action that is common to several of her performances is the pressing together of human bodies. Sometimes the effect is primal, as with an early work with Ulay in which they ran towards each other and smashed their naked bodies together repeatedly. Sometimes it is psychologically playful, as when the pair placed their nude bodies in the doorway of a museum, forcing visitors to squeeze past. (At the outset of the talk, Abramovic tantalizingly offered to re-stage this performance at the end of the evening as the audience exited; sadly, this didn’t happen.) These moments of physical communion with Ulay are recalled in Abramovic’s later work, as when she lies in an intimate embrace with a model of her own skeleton, or slaps a human skull against her bare torso in Balkan Erotic Epic. She seems to be pressing her body against death, trying to get close to death in the same primal, desperate way that humans attempt to bridge the distance between individuals through physical intimacy.
Her collaboration with Ulay can be seen as a long attempt to leap across the bottomless chasm that renders one utterly separated from all others. Whether they were staring at each other for hours on end, inhabiting empty landscapes, or simply smashing their naked bodies together, they were trying to break through, to make contact with the Other. The firm contact of body on body that existed in those moments of collision between Abramovic and Ulay in their first performance came into sharp relief, later in the lecture, against the dwindling physical connection made during their final moment of collaboration, as he holds her fingers in his hand. They disconnect, and look out over the barren landscape. From that moment on in her life and work, Abramovic turned her gaze away from Ulay, and re-focused it in on the viewer in a radical move towards engagement with the audience. And face to face with an audience, you are always alone. As she said during the lecture, “In the end, you are always alone.”
The MoMA retrospective of her career, which opens on March 14, will feature a new work by Abramovic, which is also a modified re-staging of an earlier piece. The Artist is Present, like the earlier The House with the Ocean View, will require the artist to remain on display in the gallery, maintaining prolonged visual contact with the museum audience. This time, however, she will not be enclosed and elevated, but out in the open gallery space, face to face with the audience, for hours and hours on end. Yikes! Each new Abramovic piece seems to be more a more frightening prospect for the performer than the one before. Is Marina Abramovic trying to spill enough blood on the museum floor to equal the sacrifice of her parents and grandparents who lived through the darkest years of the Balkan 20th century? Or is she trying to create a body of grueling performances in order to dare future generations to take them up again? Either way, her passion for performance combined with her drive to prove herself capable of taking on any physical or spiritual challenge for the sake of art make her a living legend for a new generation of performance artists.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 11:48 - by Gleb Sidorkin
by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s name isn’t well known in the US. That’s an understatement: for the most part, even amongst cinephiles, it isn’t known at all. And not just in the US, but abroad. Civeyrac made À travers la forêt in 2005; it’s his most recent feature to date. It played a few festivals, but, like every Civeyrac film, no US distributor has seen it fit (or thought it would make a good enough return) to either put it in a theater or on a DVD. It’s a small film and a big one, both in the old-fashioned sense. Small, meaning that it’s barely over an hour long and was shot on just a few sets in less than two weeks, the sort of schedule Joseph H. Lewis and Edgar Ulmer used to work with back in the day. Big, in that it’s larger than its production budget, that its images are worth more than the money spent on making them. Maybe Civeyrac hasn’t made a feature since À travers la forêt because it is the ultimate Jean-Paul Civeyrac film: he would have to think long and hard to express himself more fully. But who knows — people are capable of a lot of things. To watch movies is to intend to be surprised. But, anyway, that it’s the “ultimate” Civeyrac, an auteurist honorific of the lowest order, isn’t what makes it important. Just because Defiance is the ultimate Edward Zwick movie (and it is) doesn’t mean you should see it. No, the reason that a film being the ultimate Civeyrac matters is that Civeyrac himself matters, whether we know it or not.
Civeyrac was born in the last week of 1964. That makes him 44 now — not a young man, but still a “young director,” because, after all, there isn’t a profession that requires as much living (or as few qualifications) as directing films. But he’s also a “young director” in the sense that he will always remain one — he’s one of those people like Nagisa Oshima, Manoel de Oliveira, Aleksandr Sokurov or George A. Romero, one of those for whom a hundred and fifteen years isn’t quite a history. There are older things (de Oliveira and Sokurov), newer ones (Oshima) or modern ones (Romero) to worry about. There are no people alive now who were around before people shot movies, yet, at the same time, there’s still a lot to discover, a lot of ideas to work out. Cinema only appears old because there are old movies, but the two things are as separate as art is from paintings or literature is from novels.
The opening shot of À travers la forêt is seven minutes long. Actually, every shot in À travers la forêt is about seven minutes long: there are ten of them in this 65 minute film. But Civeyrac’s technique isn’t fetish and it isn’t a question of “prolonging” or some conceptual take on duration: his films move rapidly, faster than almost anyone else’s, and in one of his long takes there are more distinct and original ideas and feelings than in many of the most complicated (which isn’t to say complex) editing schemes. Civeyrac is no virtuoso; he has nothing to prove about himself, only about the image and its capabilities. There’s a basic truth that forms the basis for his style: a picture can show you light or it can show you darkness, but only a movie can show the light changing, clouds suddenly appearing on the horizon or the Sun coming out after a storm. It’s in moving from one thing to the next that a certain sensation impossible in anything else occurs. The idea behind the opening shot of À travers la forêt, on a basic level, seems to be to construct a long take, the camera shifting from wide-shot to close-up, circling around and moving towards, out of a parade of ordinary pleasures: flowers, mirrors, a woman’s hair, hands, breasts, a man’s ass. Yet the shot is not about any of those things; if we’re gonna describe Civeyrac, then we should say that he’s what happens in the movement between those objects. He’s not the framing, but what occurs within the take when the camera moves from one framing to the next, the moment of the dissolve and not the image dissolved from or into, what occurs in the camera’s movement forward rather than the framing that results from its arrival at the end of the dolly track, the pan rather than what’s being panned between. His cinema is the transition, the dynamic, and also the blur. That transition is also a sort of tension, like in Les Solitaires, where the domestic tension of the plot is rivaled by the director’s own tension, a high-wire act between the traditions of naturalism and his own impulse towards truth (the solution, apparently, is theater — the theater of the image, you could call it, and that’s probably how Miklós Jancsó thinks of it, too).
A person can die in a moving image. While painting or photography can show a moment of death, cinema can portray the transition. A good question: is death Civeyrac’s great subject because of the nature of cinema, or was he drawn to cinema because of death? Either answer seems likely; it’s probably a combination of the two. He’s not haunted by death like, say, Philippe Garrel (for whom death has always been a sort of failure and life, by extension, a road to failure); no, death for him isn’t something final, but a sort of transition in and of itself, maybe into memory or into history. So we have the ghost that haunts every grainy image of Les Solitaires or the pre-Raphaelite short Tristesse Beau Visage, a story about how Orpheus seduced Eurydice, in color and black & white. Or is it how Eurydice seduced Orpheus? You’re never really sure — all these turns.
And it’s the turn, and the uncertainity that comes with it, that makes Civeyrac important — a director of small films working with one of the greatest tools available to an extent that’s unrivaled, like some unknown who discovers a secret to painting and toils in obscurity. He is against the definitive and for an image that shows what exists between things instead of the things themselves, what we feel between emotions. And we should be with him. Correction: we must be, because there are people who’d like you to believe that cinema’s old. “Film grammar,” and all that bullshit (what do grammarians make of people who think in run-on sentences, anyway?). They’ll tell you the movies are nothing but a dusty closet full of codes, techniques and signifiers. They are wrong.
By Daniel Gorman
Three men plan a heist in a shady backroom – loot will be stolen, no one will trust each other, and a cheating wife will be thrown in for good measure (her lover? A cop!). What could go wrong? Or more importantly, how long until something goes wrong? Usually, either the planning of the heist or its inevitable unraveling are the most common narrative conceits on which to hang such a thriller – the cosmic certainty of disaster. But here we have a unique gimmick – the hook is not the plot, or the various machinations that propel the plot, but the way in which the film itself was made. Three directors perform a large scale exquisite corpse, with Tsui Hark writing/directing the first thirty minutes or so of the film before passing it along to Ringo Lam, who in turn sends it to Johnnie To for the grand finale. If the heist gone horribly awry genre is middling and far too familiar, the opportunity to see three distinctive visual styles juxtaposed together in such a fashion is, as far as I know, entirely unique – most omnibus films function as discrete units, or if there are recurring characters/motifs, will still stop to identify who is doing what at any given moment. Interestingly enough, despite no identification of “chapter stops,” even the untrained eye will have no difficulty distinguishing almost exactly where each director transitions to the next. This is a master class in the practical applications of wildly different, and ultimately wildly opposed, film technique.
Hark’s madman, anything-goes aesthetic has, in recent years, began to show its seams. What was once a wild, razors edge approach to narrative and visual story telling has become simply incomprehensible. Canted angles, unmotivated zooms, frantic rack focuses and bizarre whip pans have worn out their welcome, and revealed a filmmaker and the end of his tether. David Bordwell’s recent post on the legacy of Hark reveals the limits of his tenuous (and now tedious) tight rope act – what was once fresh, unpredictable and dangerous has turned into one Ghost Story too many, with a few Once Upon a Time’s thrown in for good measure. Hark franchised himself too willingly, and the wild inconsistencies of his last great film, Time and Tide, have come to predominate. Perhaps one would be more forgiving without the context of two superior directors – one good, one great – and an interval of increasingly diminishing returns (I’m sorry, for you and myself, for having sat through Seven Swords and Zu Warriors).
Lam comes off slightly better, his slick, horizontally based compositions gliding the action smoothly across the 2:35 frame (he ensconces where Hark fragments). Tarantino’s appropriation of City on Fire notwithstanding, Lam never reached the heights of a Hark (or Woo, for that matter). His success with low budget, low expectation Van Damme fodder seems both a blessing and curse – Lam sidestepped the downfall of more epically minded directors ala Ronny Yu (who went from Bride With White Hair to Bride of Chucky, alas), but never strived for grandeur in the same way as a Woo or Yuen (again, for better or for worse). Here, Lam is allowed a bit more atmosphere, and his penchant for enclosing the frame in geometric compositions is almost Sternbergian. Sleek architecture creates an atmosphere of constant forward propulsion, as various characters move from point A to point B with acute precision, enveloped in chiaroscuro lighting. His episode culminates in a beautiful dance amidst stoic pillars in an amphitheatre-like parking garage – drama is displayed as if one is on a Grecian stage.
Leave it to Johnnie To to integrate wild abandon and cold architecture into something resembling filmmaking. From his first epic composition, with various characters stacked in depth and filling the widescreen frame, we realize instantly the auteur of Exiled, Sparrow and Breaking News (to name just a few). As our good friend Ignatius has pointed out over at The Auteurs, To is left with the task of synergizing these disparate threads, and he comes through with flying colors. After so much spatial fragmentation, To’s sense of space unifies plot, character and theme into a thrilling conclusion, with a late night shoot-out that rivals the finale of Exiled in aesthetic bliss, plumes of muzzle smoke drifting like clouds over stalks of tall grass. It’s a mesmerizing choice, the confusion and discontinuity of the plot evoked in purely visual terms, while To’s camera reveals a larger pattern of spatial configuration that never disorients the viewer – this is geometry as catharsis.
Perhaps unwittingly, To’s segment serves as a final nail in what was considered the Hong Kong New Wave. The second generation of HK action gods turned their eyes towards Hollywood over a decade ago, choosing Van Damme as their conduit to Hollywood fame and fortune. Fittingly, Hark and Lam (along with Woo) eventually made their way back to HK, but the game was up (I hasten to add that Woo’s Windtalkers might be one of his finest achievements, followed closely by Hark’s Double Team, an absurdist action amalgamation of twenty different movies, disintegrated into one ludicrous master stroke – sublime stupidity. Lam never fared so well, and Woo’s triumphant HK return is the laughable, wannabe-pseudo epic Red Cliff). Regardless, a few minor successes were far outweighed by embarrassment after embarrassment. One-too-many Better Tomorrows later, current HK action has disintegrated into self parody, the visceral action of yesterday replaced by slipshod FX (Yuen Wo-Ping gone digital) and increasingly uninteresting pop stars-turned actor (see, for instance Storm Riders). Wing Chun becomes Her Name is Cat, Fist of Legend turns into Black Mask 2; Corey Yuen has gone to work for Luc Besson while Ching Siu Tung choreographs for Uwe Boll and the recently nationalized Zhang Yimou. Perhaps, like most New Waves, the initial burst of youthful energy and vigor where what mattered most – a sense of daring and anything-goes-not-giving-a-fuck aggressiveness. Such smoke and mirrors can only last for so long before one demands something more – and, as if in a face-off in one of his own films, To is the last man standing.
Monday, August 24, 2009 9:23 - by Daniel GormanFrom Andy Seaman at the Filmmakers’ Club:
Come join us the third Tuesdays of the month at the LGBT Center at 208 West 13th Street, between 7th & 8th Avenues, from 6 to 8 pm. All are invited, novice to pro, Mac or PC. Next meeting Aug. 18th. $5 (students free).
The club will be responsive to the needs of the group. We’re in the initial planning stages, come help set the direction of the club! What subjects interest you? What type of speakers would you like to hear from? What topics would you like discussed?
Some initial ideas might be: Show your work, make connections, talk about experiences making films. Find out how to build a website that works for you. How to advertise your film. What’s the best camera for you? What’s in a simple makeup box and how do you use it?
Some potential topics are: Cinematography, lighting, audio, editing, special effects/motion graphics, teamwork, set design, music, copyright, equipment, software.
These days we must wear many hats. Each of us could benefit from a larger network and learn from others.
Questions/comments? Contact Andy Seaman andyjseaman@hotmail.com
Sunday, August 9, 2009 20:42 - by Ricky D Ambrose
By Daniel Gorman
“During those rare moments of reflection when I’m not doing what film critics are supposed to be doing – watching and evaluating movies that propose various escapes from modern life – I wonder what a different kind of cinema might be, a cinema that would lead us back into the modern world and teach us something about it. To imagine such a cinema requires traveling some distance from where we are…”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Essential Cinema”
“…the way the world is changing in general: How the big history of modern society changes the small history of a group of people, how the globalization we deal with in abstract terms – we read about it, we watch movies about it, we hear it in the news – is in fact something that hits home in very dramatic ways. Ultimately I wanted to show how those characters are defined in ways we are not so aware of, by the way global economics are changing…. These bigger trends are about the intimate daily lives of individuals.”
Olivier Assayas on Summer Hours
“The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody.”
John Berger
In this day and age, returning to a film for a second (or third) viewing is increasingly anathema to our critical apparatus. After all, movies are simply “product”, and the old product must be consistently, continually replaced with the new – as if they were items in a grocery store, complete with expiration dates. Not unrelated, we must pay less and less attention to, and spend less and less time with, even the newest releases, lest we inadvertently miss what comes next (always there is a next). Call it an assembly line of critical thought, churning out ideas and words with increasing speed, quality control be damned. The most recent Cannes proved particularly fertile in this respect, with “tweets” and live blogging establishing opinions and consensus before the last frame had advanced through the projector gate. Never mind the notion of grappling with complex works after only one viewing – speed is of the essence here. This doesn’t leave much time for contemplation or reflection, not withstanding those increasingly rare films that linger in ones mind for days or weeks - in with the new (Next!). One might be tempted to link this back to the Kael school of critical thought, although that seems both unfair and too limiting in scope. Our entire society has advanced past the point of lingering – to linger is to admit defeat in advanced capitalism.
I tinkered with some thoughts on Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City after a first viewing last year during the Chicago International Film Festival, despite my own misgivings (with my writing, not with the film). Such a complex work was bound to have details I hadn’t retained, rhymes and compositions that I hadn’t quite processed the first time through. Feel free to read those musings here. While I don’t fundamentally disagree with or recant any of those words (2008 is so long ago – do words themselves have expiration dates?), I admit to giving short shrift to several key elements of the film. The film’s structure, for instance (the two of us being reintroduced after a seven month hiatus), takes on an even more essential function. It is a testament to the stories being told on screen that the occasional fades to black might only register as punctuation to the inattentive (or first time) viewer. Far from it, as the fade outs become a key indicator (ala Resnais’ Love Unto Death) of expression – it becomes a matter of “Where the Stress Falls”. Zhang-ke indicates emotional beats, certainly, but also possible elisions – what someone doesn’t say becomes as important as what they do say. I also noticed a clearer sense of chronology, which is indicated in a series of visual motifs. A sign above the factory entrance is reduced, gradually, letter by letter. The flow of people into the factory is reversed later in the film with their flow outward, into a world they no longer know, with no work and a culture that has left them behind (it is a brave new world). A factory worker recalls the story of his first love dumping him while at a roller rink – an hour later, a young girl roller skates on the roof of a building, telling the filmmakers that her parent both work “at the factory”. The elderly worker who recounts his affection and admiration for his foreman is mirrored in the last interview, a young woman who reconnects with her parents in an effort to advance their social status and living conditions.
Most essential is the woman who recounts a testimony of profound loss – on a sanctioned leave from a passenger ship transporting workers to the munitions factory, the mother is separated from her child. Words can barely express the sense of loss projected from her eyes – her gaze, her tears indicate a trauma that few of us can even begin to fathom. And this trauma becomes the key organizing factor of the film – violent, irreparable separation, literal but also as broader metaphor - the violent wrenching of history progressing leaves a trail of collateral damage. The human psyche can only bear so much.
* * *
Zhang-ke has already arrived in the upper echelon of essay film/documentarian hybrid artists – Godard, Marker, Varda, late period Kiarostami, some Hou, early Weerasethakul - none of whom have totally abandoned certain aspects of narrative (read: fiction) film. But the point is that, increasingly, such distinctions mean less and less. Here we have artists intuitively engaing in the world around them, using any and all tools at their disposal. I hesitate to use the term “mix-artist”, which seems to refer to the more pop-art inclined, and any way my laundry list of luminaries pre date the terminology. Regardless, after a second viewing, the use of both professional actors and real documented factory workers becomes, paradoxically, both more and less important. Less because the inherent human drama is so profound, the impact so great, that one might be inclined to simply erase, or ignore, such distinctions. More so, because, as Manohla Dargis has pointed out, such distancing effects “can work beautifully for a movie about profound dislocation”. I originally suspected that actress Joan Chen recounting tales of her own first film was simply too pat, too meta, to be anything other than a overreaching, cute idea. But the complex ways in which the personal and the hisorical intermingle seem to demand such attention – legend has it that Mrs. Mao herself hand picked Ms. Chen for her first starring role. The “Great Leap Forward” was many things to many people, and Zhang-ke’s latest would seem to be so as well. Nostalgia and regret intermingle seamlessly, in fact as well as in fiction. Funny how few people realize that the past will point the way to the future, leaving us to sort out an increasingly complicated “now”. Welcome to the present tense.
Thursday, July 2, 2009 18:17 - by Daniel Gorman
by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Roland Barthes didn’t like Le Beau Serge. No use arguing with a dead man, but you can argue with his ideas. Barthes was a reader and not a viewer. A reader always imagines the author’s voice; he sees something monstrous and imagines that it has to be the product of a monstrous mind and not his own reaction. Barthes believed he was critiquing a film, but what he was critiquing was the author he imagined. His criticism of the imagined Chabrol is valid; Barthes was right, but the idea was wrong. When he criticizes the characters of the film, he thinks of them in terms of literary characterizations and signs, and not as the many other things movie characters are: actors, performances, images, real people. He was right, for instance, to attack the simplistic characterization of the country folk; what he ignores is that the people of Sardent play themselves. Le Beau Serge is so hard to see in the US that Barthes’ attack on the movie is probably as well known at this point as the film itself — something we’ve all learned to hate without seeing, like that tracking shot in Kapò. Doc Films had the audacity to show us the truth about The Struggle before Kino gave it a reputable DVD. A year later, the first week of their summer program includes Le Beau Serge.
Barthes saw the Chabrol film and read in it the director’s right-wing tendencies. But the politics of a filmmaker are second to the politics of the image. The thing that makes movies dangerous is that they are inherently radical. The most conservative idea takes on a radicalism when it informs a movie. I won’t argue Clint Eastwood’s politics, but there aren’t many American directors working right now who are as radical. The history of cinema shows us that the most reactionary films were mostly made by people who believed themselves to be forward-thinking, while the modern was largely invented by late Victorians, right-wingers, monarchists and anti-communists. Forty years later, we know that the real Chabrol is a lot more complicated (and more left-wing) than Barthes’ imagined one. But it’s not Chabrol’s politics that I want to write about, it’s the movie itself.
Francois (Jean-Claude Brialy) arrives home for the winter; just off the bus, he spots Serge (Gérard Blain), as shabby as Francois is prim. Brialy with the leather gloves, mannequin hair and rolled-up magazine, Blain ambling away with a half-smoked cigarette and two days’ worth of beard. “What happened to Serge?” Francois asks, “he used to be such a terrific guy.” He’s filled in on the details: who’s dead, who’s alive, and how Serge got married and abandoned his studies after he knocked up a local girl. It’s the sort of town where the streets are empty but there’s always someone in the bar.
Interpreted “psychologically,” Le Beau Serge’s images are jarring. We’re shown Francois’s Serge, Serge’s Francois, sometimes even Chabrol’s Blain or Brialy, but never at the same time. So we have Francois’ cool and disheveled image of his old friend, and we have Serge’s recognition of Francois as he is roused from a drunken stupor, first as a pale hand that enters the frame and finally as a half-angelic face. But we’re also given Serge as a handsome, needy mess, and Francois as the distant dandy. We are given the chance to see them as monsters, as ordinary people, as faces abstracted by street lights.
Barthes complained that movies undermined themselves because they gave us too much. Too many conflicts, too many mixed signals. He liked films for what they could show their audiences, not for what they gave their audiences the opportunity to see or feel. But the beauty of Le Beau Serge is in the way it interrupts an “important” tracking shot so that the camera can catch a group of children running across the street. In the way that every image of the dance hall scene gives us pathos, from the old man stamping forearms to mark that people have paid the price of admission to the confrontation between Brialy and Blain in the light of the windows. In the sensation each of us imagines as Brialy rubs a handful of snow in Blain’s face at the end. The Beau Serge I’ve seen and the one Barthes wrote about are different films because we’re different people. Therein lies its greatness.
Le Beau Serge will be playing Wednesday, June 24th as part of the summer program at Doc Films at the University of Chicago. It will screen August 7th at Cinematheque Ontatio.
Friday, June 19, 2009 17:25 - by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
By Daniel Gorman
Opaque – adjective: “hard to understand; not clear or lucid; obscure: The problem remains opaque despite explanations”
Uncertainty, aridity, peace – all things will resolve themselves into these and pass away.
- Kafka
By the looks of it, Jim Jarmusch has committed the cinematic atrocity of the year. Despite a couple of reasonably high profile defenders, The Limits of Control has to be one of the worst reviewed films of recent memory. Even more curious is the vicious hyperbole and acidic vitriol being hurled his way, questioning Jarmusch’s integrity, sincerity, intelligence – as if the simple act of viewing his most recent film has somehow damaged the individual critics psyche in unknown, irreparable ways. Perhaps this is the price one pays when playing the kinds of games Jarmusch seems interested in here. Mysteries abound, and more to the point, remain unsolved, open ended…
1. Mystery:
A mysterious man has appeared, as if from nowhere, to perform mysterious tasks, apparently at the behest of mysterious people. He will go on to meet other mysterious people, interacting with them in mysterious ways, before seemingly attaining his ultimate goal – a goal which, by and large, we are unclear about.
2. Being and Nothingness:
In his dismissive one star review, Roger Ebert assumes the persona of Isaach De Bankole’s elusive hit-man spectre in a snarky speculative fiction about a day-in-the-life on the set. His Isaach wonders about what the director and cinematographer will ask him to do, and how long he will have to wait before being done. Presumably unwittingly, Ebert sums up much of the film’s modus operandus, the idea of languidly waiting, of simply being.
3. Repetitions:
“You don’t speak Spanish do you?”; two espressos, in separate cups - not a double espresso; Diamonds, Matchbooks; Unintelligible, yet edible, notes; “he who believes himself bigger than everybody else ought to visit the cemetery”.
4. Point Blank:
As Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, the film bears a resemblance to John Boorman’s pseudo-psychedelic thriller, with De Bankole assuming the role of Lee Marvin’s carved-out-of-granite perpetual motion machine, a pit bull on a singular mission who’ll be damned if he’s letting go. Jarmusch honors the film, and lays bare his intentions, with an opening credit – the production company that birthed the film has been named after Boorman’s film. But to what end?
5. Godard, et al.
Not quite (not simply) a homage to the French New Wave, Jarmusch instead casts his net a bit wider. Glenn Kenny, as well as Rosenbaum, sense the spirit of Rivette at work in Jarmusch’s puzzle-without-an-answer. There is a bit of Antonioni’s spiritual and spatial ennui, as well as odds and ends from the noir love letters/deconstructions of Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player. De Bankole’s stone faced non-acting aligns him with a legacy of Bressonian models, while Chris Doyle’s elusive, shimmering cinematography, beyond the most obvious connotation, evokes that other great contemporary DP, Agnes Godard. The other Denis connection? The presence of Alex Descas, Denis’ favorite leading man. The camera ogles the local architecture like it was a Gaudi masterpiece, and there is a diffusive sense of space that Pedro Costa has been exploring in his recent pictures. The narrative (which does actually exist, although perhaps not in the sense that most people would prefer) proceeds in fits and starts, with scenes seemingly motivated by exquisite corpse-like free associations, or, (Kenny again) Robbe-Grillet zero-degree word play. Another association, again involving play – the games/narrative puzzles of Resnais’ early trifecta (Hiroshima/Marienbad/Muriel).
6. Doubles and Doppelgangers:
Having nothing to say - having no point - is different from arriving at ones point in a round-about way. Jarmusch seems to have a handle on his material at all times, and while one can disagree with or dislike that point, or its system of delivery, it is entirely inappropriate to confuse that dislike with idiocy on the filmmaker’s part. Whatever one makes of The Limits of Control, to assume that, like Ebert, every shot and gesture is simply a passing whim is, not to put too fine a point on it, missing the point. Paz de la Huerta’s “Nude” is the quintessential femme fatale, her goal stated and pursued with, um, naked abandon. She is all surface, every gesture simply there, and truthful. She seems incapable of subterfuge, although her existence implies it, and her eventual death is simply inevitable. Her role (and there is nothing else – the lack of depth is (purposefully) comical) requires it. She occasionally reappears as Tilda Swinton, her double/opposite – fully clothed from head to toe (not naked, unfortunately), with pale skin and blonde hair (not dark skin and deeply brown hair). Jarmusch also links them with raincoats – neither functional, one is heavy and thick, the other is totally transparent. Descas and De Bankole could be brothers, and both speak French, although Jarmusch has them interact, perversely, with a translator. The brief cameos by John Hurt (“Guitar”) and Gael Garcia Bernal (“Mexican”) are, despite obvious differences in age and ethnicity, linked by similar garb – the film briefly digresses into trying to redefine bohemia in the modern age – as well as interest in a particular guitar case. There is also a visit by Youki Kudoh as “Molecules”, who provides a dubious scientific explanation for the film’s far-fetched, comical ending. Needless to say, an international cast of actors meeting in terse vignettes and having pseudo-comical interactions, interrupted by the occasional language barrier, should be no surprise to Jarmusch fans.
7. Politics:
Make no mistake – beyond the genre trappings (lovingly violated), Jarmusch has made a boldly political film. I don’t necessarily agree with Rosenbaum’s assertion that Bill Murray’s “American” is a Cheney stand-in (an unreasonably limiting perspective, to my mind), but I do agree that Jarmusch has, for better or for worse, laid out a very specific statement of purpose – a kind of personal declaration/summation. The limits of a very particular kind of “control” become clear, as Jarmusch is railing against a society that no longer values art, museums, film, genre, the act of looking and sitting quietly, waiting, meandering through quasi-defined space, repetitions that become mantra-like – those elusive secular prayers.
8. Repetitions:
“You don’t speak Spanish do you?”; two espressos, in separate cups - not a double espresso; Diamonds, Matchbooks; Unintelligible, yet edible, notes; “he who believes himself bigger than everybody else ought to visit the cemetery”.
Postscript: In the most recent issue of Film Comment, there is an appreciation of the film by Kent Jones, which I very purposefully avoided. And, as it turns out, with good reason – as usual, Jones elucidates difficult material with remarkable poise and a disarming ease. I don’t think there is any critic working right now in English that makes the art of writing seem so incredibly effortless. I worried that the above post would come off as the very snark I was decrying, or even worse, as pretentious. But if that is the case, so be it. While writing about film as a pastime engenders quite a few benefits – reflection, hindsight, sometimes a second or third viewing – it can also be encumbered by all the cultural noise around it. Unless one lives in a vacuum, it is impossible to avoid reviews, conversations, all those opinions both pro and con, and it becomes something of a chore to sift through the avalanche of words and try to remember something of ones initial response to the film at hand. In other words, it is entirely possible that I value The Limits of Control so highly simply because everyone else dismissed it so easily. I certainly hope this isn’t the case – only time, and a few more viewings, will tell. I’ll end with Jones’ words, “Jarmusch’s new film stands alone, within his own body of work and in the landscape of current cinema. It is militant, and it is serene.” I can’t wait to see the movie again.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 8:02 - by Daniel Gorman
By Kalvin Henely
When we go to a movie we sit with strangers in silence; when we leave we go our separate ways. If we share our thoughts and feelings about the movie with anyone, it’s almost always with people we already know. Thus begins Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, The Girlfriend Experience, as upscale call girl, Chelsea (played by porn star Sasha Grey), sits with a client in a New York City restaurant discussing the movie Man on Wire. While the nature of their meeting makes the conversation private, there’s also something casual about this encounter; the path of least resistance becomes a goal.
This is a lesson of the trade that Chelsea herself knows and speaks of: you turn into what the client wants. It’s easier to handle one thing rather than two. An extra voice would be the mark of an intruder, someone breaking the skin of the couple’s comfort bubble. Could this be partly why we don’t share or inquire into strangers’ opinions of movies? Is there a fear of disagreement, embarrassment, and disharmony? Or would it be because our answers would be dishonest, like Chelsea’s, since we don’t really have a strong interest in one another due to our lack of companionship? While social etiquette and rules of personal space play a large part, one suspects whether these rules of the game were created to avoid awkward moments and whether or not this leaves our curiosity about others to find satisfaction.
The internet is where our curiosity leads us. There’s RottenTomatoes, the collector of professional opinion and easy consensus, for starters. But those kinds of critics probably weren’t the people you were sitting next to in the theater. Looking up the trailer for The Girlfriend Experience on YouTube, one can find 21 pages, or around 210 comments, from people who probably weren’t invited to advance press screenings. Better yet, their opinions don’t reflect those of a million-dollar newspaper; they don’t have editors nor are they edited before publishing. In less time than it look to watch the 2-minute trailer, one simply types a word, a sentence, a paragraph and presses submit. What you get is something close to a raw, emotional opinion as opposed to carefully articulated ideas, well-chosen words, and politeness. Some of these comments come from people who were in a theater, others from those who downloaded the movie, and most, as it turns out, from people who haven’t even seen the movie at all. The internet thus provides a direct pathway into the reactions of audiences we might otherwise not have interacted with. Myspace, incidentally, is also how Sasha Grey was contacted and offered the part.
Taking a look at the YouTube comments written in response to Soderbergh’s new movie, one can see that the choice to use a porn star in a “cinematic film” (as one YouTuber put it), as well as the trailer’s emphasis on money, caused a strong, mostly negative, and moral reaction. A level of discomfort and bewilderment remains. From the comments, the movie seems to be drawing a few different crowds and a couple prominent reactions. Most notably, there is a sense of amusement and curiosity: “A porn star in a mainstream movie!? That’s something else.” And it’s true. The worlds of porno and mainstream films rarely mix, despite being in the same business. One can represent or acknowledge the other without ever actually combining them. There are, of course exceptions: Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell features porn star Rocco Siffredi, who took his stage name from Alain Delon’s character in the 1970 movie, Borsalino. (Sasha Grey mentioned that she considered using the name Anna Karina, stemming from her own cinephilia).
Those who are opposed to Sasha crossing over feel outraged that the dirty could become clean. As these comments reveal, there’s a sense that a woman who enters the world of sex for money can never back out.
“I think it’s cool that she did this if that’s what she wants to do, but I would never pay money to see it. The only thing I want to see Sasha Grey do is drop to her knees, open her sweet little mouth, and drink some cum like fucking whore that she is. I like when she stretches her anus really wide too. Unless she’s doing something like that - I ain’t interested.” -jimjiminy76 (3 days ago)
“ugh…they just validated her shit life choices by actually putting her in a mainstream movie…now shes gonna be proud of being a porn star…society is fukd” -justforwatchingcraps (4 days ago)
“This is about a whore playing a whore wtf? stupidest movie ever”-1337speeed (1 week ago)
“Boring movie, no real meaning to it or purpose.. you just end up where you started.. just a waste of your time watching it. I think Sasha Grey is gorgeous, but what a waste of a beautiful smile.. She is a disgusting person.”-Shawkab (1 week ago)
“Looks shallow and stupid. She’s still an empty, burned-up porn star, no matter how articulate she is. Another throw-away project by an over-rated director. Hope the b.j. was worth it.”-philcr (2 weeks ago)
This desire to keep those like Sasha “hidden” isn’t without reason. For one, it’s in a person’s interest to keep their affairs away from their families and those that would judge them unfavorably. But there’s a difference between having sex with a real person and being a viewer of pornography, a distinction that may be beyond our evolutionarily programmed behavior. For the creators of these comments, the thinking seems to be that, since she’s had sex with many people outside the parameters of a romantic relationship - because she is in a business relationship, after all - Sasha Grey is “disgusting” and poses a threat to their idea of how the world should be. If someone were to witness this kind of scenario in his or her own lives (say with a coworker sleeping their way to the top), there would be good reason to react sharply because it would invalidate an honest effort. This sentiment is stated here:
“So what does that movie show us? In my modest opinion, A DECADENT world…promiscuos…thats a movie that show u how to make easy money, just FUCK for money….. bad for people litle heads…plus a Boyfriend tHATis cool with it?!??!?WTF?? is he a PIMP??….uau how nice…”-Navalhas81 (2 days ago)
In show business, however, crossing over is hardly unheard of. Think of all the people who were not professional actors and who appeared in movies throughout history. Sports stars, comedians, animals, singers, and entertainers of all kinds. Grey is an entertainer (and not a bad actress), who also happens to have appeared in many movies.
Money is another cause for commotion in the movie. As we watch the trailer we hear the drumming of Shakerleg over images of Grey and her boyfriend, dressed in black, but only together once, crossing the street, going to boutiques, eating, getting dressed, etc. During this sequence, we are shown pieces of text: “This is Christine. She is 22 years old. She has a boyfriend. He’s a personal trainer. He charges $125 an hour. Christine charges $2000 an hour.” (Yes, the name is different). Rarely do movies reveal how much money a person makes, unless it’s a heist picture (Soderbergh’s made those before), in which case the number is so large that we don’t relate to it; or a Charlie Chaplin film, where the money is so little that we feel the same way. But $125 and $2000 are figures we can comprehend; we can wrap our minds around these sums like Chaplin can wrap his fingers around his cane. Which is why many of us we can’t accept that someone could earn $2000 an hour for providing a “girlfriend experience”:
“Who on earth is going to pay $2000 an HOUR for an evening with a call girl? I dont care if you are a rich businessman who needs to impress a client at a lunch or dinner, or movie, and need a girl on your arm…………………….. A five or six hour “date” with someone that makes 2K an hour would be over $10,000 bucks. I doubt this really happens in the real world.
Some “pros” might get $300 bucks an hour, but I doubt its more than that.”-taghl (1 week ago)
“Some guys pay more than that. 300/hr is for a prostitute a step above what you’ll find on craigslist. A street hooker alone… STD’s and all, will run you 100 or 150 just for the sex itself, which usually lasts less than 20 minutes. Sex is expensive. It’s why women who aren’t desperate choose the profession, despite what the average feminist will say about the average prostitute.”-ryanman7 (1 week ago)
“$2000 an hour? God damn it! I take two months to earn this.”-diogo86 (1 week ago)
“i’ll pay 300hr for some low grade teenage ass in lower alabama, whereas a place like atlanta has high end girls at around 1200 and up.”-amplexorj (1 week ago)
Thus, trailer brings up something people don’t readily share: their wages. The movie, however, brings up even more. Chelsea keeps a diary that we periodically hear her read from in voice-over, wherein she describes all the luxury apparel she wears on each “date” in ways that recall a Mastercard commercial. We see her primarily in high-end settings, making it clear that a lot of money is being spent both on her and for her. In one scene, her boyfriend explains the cost of a personal training session plan, detailing the price differences of other plans. He also negotiates a salary with his boss after finding another job opportunity. Surrounding these activities is background chatter about the economic crisis and Hard Times For All. Shot during the 2008 presidential election, discussion of Obama and McCain can be heard; in the last scene, one of Sasha’s clients tells her that she must vote for McCain to save Israel. One YouTuber commented:
“Who edited this trailer? Obama?”-FefuFX (1 week ago)
FefuFX is referring to the general agreement that the trailer is bad:
“this trailer sucker.. bad editing.. i dont ecen wanna watch this movie… SPANKWIRE HERE I COME! lol” - roger3001
“This bucket of shit wasnt much to brag about.. The person who had the responsibility for the making of this trailer should be fierd, and be made to watch this clip for 48 hrs straight as punishment” -alrathas23 (1 week ago)
“any better than her previous movies?” -elocholero (1 week ago)
“This trailer makes me hate the editor more than anything in the world.”-n0time2spare (1 week ago)
“agree . worst trailer ever in history”-jitpunkia (1 week ago)
“stupid ass movie. i wish they could make movies like the onces in 1992s and 93s. Now they all suck.” -saykey2009 (1 week ago)
But there is a minority who do like the trailer and who may or may not have ever willingly paid money to see a Soderbergh movie:
“this film looks quite interesting. havent seen this kind of trailer in ages…. i miss watching non-action films.”-dwasten90 (3 weeks ago)
“this looks soooooo strange…..but resently i’m pleasantly surprised by weard films,so why not” -874497 (6 days ago)
“love the trailer and looking forward to seeing this film. geez, ppl are critical these days…talk abt being judgemental to a pornstar…. truth is, film’s not out - watch and then comment.”-withOphelia (2 weeks ago)
And those who most likely are interested because it is a Soderbergh movie:
“looks interesting. i think soderbergh has always been a risky film maker, judging from films like Solaris, Eros, and the Che films. I think it’s a brave thing to cast a porn star as the lead of a film and genuinely want to make a cinematic film from it.” -MyMelancholyDodo (4 days ago)
“I’m actually really interested in seeing this. I think Steven Soderberg is a brilliant filmmaker, and I’m curious to see how this Sasha Grey actually does with the roll.
The way Ebert described the film made it sound mature and tragic, and I’m kinda interested to see where it goes from there.”-KiernanMooney (15 hours ago)
“Soderbergh is overrated as is, but his movies lately have been complete shit. Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight are easily his best films.
Hopefully this is good. He has to redeem himself.” -Voltmx45 (1 week ago)
And then there are those who may like or dislike Soderbergh, but are interested in movies in general - movie buffs:
“For those of you who think the trailer is boring, then this film is not for you because the film is basically 77 mins of that. Majority of it is dialogue, shot in cinema verite style in a non-linear, fragmented narration with minimalistic sense. I mean it’s a decent film. It’s just not for everyone or even the general mass. Certainly not for guys in basement, masturbating to hardcore porn in front of the computer wanting to sit thru this film at a theater.”-genericaccountuser (2 weeks ago)
“this seems like a rip off of Lodge Kerrigan’s Claire Dolan.”-jcinla76 (2 weeks ago
What’s interesting about reading these opinions is the surprise (”Do you really think that?”) they can cause, even though one is aware that a variety of opinions exist. We went to the theater, shared a movie-going experience, had reactions that we kept to ourselves or amongst our friends, and then went home. Some of us then shared those opinions on the internet, but most of us didn’t. But it’s a movie that stirred up and brought to the surface a variety of feelings and opinions. It’s a fear of confrontation about politics, money and morality, that keep us from sharing our experience. But it’s movies that we keep going back to. What other medium does such a good job at getting us to think about our lives and our society in a communal setting? While movies provide the opportunity to engage in discussion, they also preempt discussion precisely because we aren’t fully aware of differences between one another; we simply aren’t wired in such a way. If you were watching The Girlfriend Experience in a theater where everyone in the audience freely shared their opinions (like on YouTube), the situation would be uncomfortable. We need the distance that the internet provides to give us comfort, just as we need the distance movies provide from real life in order to reflect and think.
So, The Girlfriend Experience is a movie upfront about the situations and feelings we keep private. The trailer is at once frank and confidential: you know that the movie is about Sasha Grey, her boyfriend and how much money they make, but the images don’t tell you much besides what these people look like. Presenting the movie in this way can leave you feeling “bored,” as so many reported, or curious to get behind that cracked door, like the one Sasha says that she’s closed for the majority of people she meets. Soderbergh’s frankness about money makes us feel as uncomfortable as when we confront our own differences. The movie is as fractured - scenes happen out of order - as the general consensus about it is. It is as private as the internet.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 17:20 - by Kalvin Henely
by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
A mysterious transmission, an MS. found in a bottle that somehow ended up on the screen. This inhuman film. This monster. There’s a lot to write about The Happening–a lot to write because so little has been written. When the movie was released last summer, the response from reviewers was a steady monotone. The reviews’ll tell you very little about the movie, but a lot about their authors: that they think cleverness is more important than intelligence, plotting’s better than feeling, and verisimilitude is important above all else. That they think that there are such things as “good” and “bad” acting and that a movie is not itself, but the interpretation of a screenplay. That cinema is a grammar. That they want that mysterious variable–”quality”–which The Happening completely lacks. And it’s the better for it.
It’s easier to identify decor than ideas. So we call anything with a cowboy hat a Western, anything with dancing a musical, anything with guns an action film, anything with a handkerchief a melodrama, anything strange “science fiction,” and anything with a sharp knife horror. It’s degrading, not because it misidentifies (ultimately a pedantic footnote), but because it’s usually used to denigrate movies classified as “genre films.” No one would say that The Quiet Man “is a drama” and end at that, but we’re fine with saying that Canyon Passage “is a Western,” as if that’s enough to let people know whether they want to see it or not. And when we feel there’s more to say than that, we write that a movie “transcends the genre.” So we say The Happening is a “horror film” and we use that word as if it refers to one thing. But it’s a term whose beauty lies in its vagueness. Horror can be a confrontation, as in Haneke. It can be a liberation, as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s recently demonstrated with the little, personal horrors of Tokyo Sonata. It can be the description of a struggle, like in Carpenter. It can be a violation of taboo, like in a Coffin Joe movie, or the reinforcing of a social code, like in Nakagawa or Craven. But The Happening isn’t any of these. We attack it, we’re disgusted by it, because it doesn’t seem to be horror at all–and then again, what’s it supposed to be? The Happening is made in a language entirely its own. It begs to be decoded. It ignores every convention of contemporary American cinema. There’s no naturalism here, little handheld camera. The characters are banal, not fashionably quirky. It’s asking, “What kind of movie am I?”
Well, first off, it isn’t a thriller; The Happening’s got no highs or lows, only a flat, inevitable doom, an abandonment of “drama” in favor of images and sounds and of “plotting” in favor of edits. There’s no twist ending. The final scene, which repeats the opening, confirms what we already know. It isn’t visceral, and is the more unsettling for it: there are maulings and deaths and mutilations in The Happening, but no “violence.” Violence is something social; violence is inflicted, it’s a matter of choices and actions. It’s emotional; for something to be pain, it has to be felt. No one killed in The Happening feels it. No one flinches or screams. People stick pins through their necks, hurl themselves off of roofs or smash their heads through windows with no emotion, not even calmness. There’s that infamous scene where the characters huddle to watch a video of a man having his arms bitten off by lions. What’s unsettling is not what’s on the iPhone screen, but the calmness of the reactions. It’s only a video, and so they’re able to watch unflinchingly.
If there is a horror to The Happening, it’s the horror of Bigger Than Life: a world that is empty. It has the directness of simple terror: The Happening is a series of little panics, episodes that are disconcerting in their acceptance of the fantastic. There is more Buñuel here than Hitchcock and more Shyamalan than any of his other films: with The Happening, he essentially strips away any attempt to be anyone else (namely Steven Spielberg) and any trace of the neat sentimentality that he’s often intoxicated by. It’s more expression than entertainment.
An expression of what? Maybe the director’s fears. There isn’t just “the situation,” but the unsettling way in which characters react to it. The irony of so many reviewers attacking the film for the implausibility of its plot (besides the fact that that kind of criticism belongs to another century), is that the movie isn’t an “ecological parable;” what’s horrifying isn’t that nature can turn against us, but that we are essentially machines, an idea that is spiritually unsettling to Shyamalan. To believe in the soul, Shyamalan must believe in free will and the world of The Happening is a nightmare where humanity is negated. When we talk, we’re merely transmitting information, not expressing. People are just fleshy machines.
The plot is a simple B-film set-up, the kind that would’ve been written for Lippert Pictures fifty years ago. For reasons unknown (i.e. unnecessary), flora in the US Northeast have begun releasing a chemical that forces people to kill themselves. A high school science teacher, his wife, his friend from the math department, the friend’s daughter and a dwindling group of refugees flee Philadelphia for the country. The high school teacher is Mark Wahlberg, all flesh and muscle; his wife is Zooey Deschanel, an image who almost resembles a human being. If the film has a human, it’s John Leguizamo, who doesn’t manage to live to the end. As in the films of Joseph H. Lewis, every image is not merely forceful, but seems to have been made forcefully. When the camera is stationary, it isn’t resting, it’s bolted down. When it moves, it’s a shove, not a glide. M. Night Shyamalan strips away all pretensions of verisimilitude: The Happening is a film without details. Every face is gigantic, even on the small screen, the features somehow distorted. Every line of dialogue is like a thudding footstep–a conscious progression.
To a man who believes in God, as Shyamalan clearly does, there is only one thing scarier than the chance of his non-existence: the possibility of his indifference. This is not the prodding God of Signs or the unmentioned God of Unbreakable and The Village, who watches while we go about our pathetic little lives. Heroism and virtue exist in those films; our actions have weight. But in The Happening, God, if he exists, doesn’t give two shits. Affection and friendship are nullified. It’s a world in which children are killed with no consequence. Our protagonists live to the end through a combination of circumstances that have little to do with fate or ability. They haven’t survived–they just haven’t been killed yet.
Thursday, May 14, 2009 19:55 - by Ignatiy Vishnevetskyby Monica Sandler
A film that follows the lives of a group of upper class elites and their servants as they spend a banter-filled, love-tangled weekend hunting sounds like the plot to any 1930s comedy of manners. However, scholars such as André Bazin have championed Jean Renoir’s classic The Rule of the Game as “true cinematic realism.” A recent screening at the Museum of Modern Art was a reminder of how the film’s brilliance lies in its opposing realist filmmaking and chaotic screwball narratives styles.
Stylistically, The Rule of the Game is characterized by its mobile camera, which André Bazin called “an invisible guest wandering about… with a certain curiosity.” This “wandering” movement is best seen in an elongated chase sequence between two of the lower class characters. It begins when one man accuses another of having an affair with his wife, the camera following him as he angrily runs after the other man, panning across rooms, spanning through the entire house. This fluid camera movement is very different from the more static, intercut shots of fighting characters. Deep focus and odd framing (seen in shots of doors in the front of the frame and movement in the background) furthers the realistic element of the scene.
Renoir's Depth of Field: Notice the figures present in both the foreground and background of the frame.
While all of these formal elements make the film “realist,” its narrative shows images of disorder and violence. In the same chase sequence, we see nearly everyone at the party burst into fighting: the two lower class men run chase each other around the house as their lover yells in the background; the master of the house confronts a man about his relationship with his wife. Within each frame, punches are thrown, papers go flying, and people are screaming. Chaos is being shown while the camera moves and focuses in a “realist” manner.
The film’s use of realism to portray disorder is linked to the realities of the film’s time period. This was the era at the cusp of World War II; France was neighboring a violent, erratic nation threatening to take over the content. As the structure and narrative of The Rules of the Game reveals, chaos was a frightening possibility.
These chase sequences are executed with a lightheartedness that makes the film enjoyable for any viewer to watch. As such, The Rules of the Game is regarded as one of the most important achievements in world cinema. The combination of wit, realism, and chaos make Renoir’s a film worthy of study and repeated viewing.
Thursday, April 23, 2009 21:13 - by msandler
