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RR
RR replaces 13 Lakes’ elegiac stateliness with a folksy, all-American taste for forward motion. This tonal shift is achieved by moving our attention away from the philosophy behind Benning’s structural choices, and relocating it in the rhythms and movements plainly laid out onscreen.
"A fervent and frightened prayer..."
Links for the Day (October 6th, 2008)
1. Checking in with Girish and Emerson: "The Filmmaker Overview Essay" & "Pey or Falin, which is more realer?"
["I can't get enough of Tina Fey's Sarah Palin. I feel about her the way I felt about Dr. Evil in the first "Austin Powers" movie. My eyes light up whenever she's on camera. And then, of course, there are those little starbursts she sends through the screen that go ricocheting around the living rooms of America, as first reported by Rich Lowry of the National Review. Something strange is happening, though: Fey's Palin is not only sharper and funnier than Palin's Palin, she's also more vivid, more... real (maybe because she's on TV more). It's as if she's the main Palin and the other one is the paler surrogate Palin. In other words, for you baby boomers, Tina Fey's Palin is the Dick York and Sarah Palin's Palin is the Dick Sargent. Sure, they're both bewitching in their own ways, but Fey's is the real Darrin. If you know what I mean."]
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2. "Dispatch from sunny Vancouver": By Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell.
["I’ve noticed that there seems to be a mini-revival of 1970s-style art cinema conventions. After many years in which art cinema tended to mean intricate psychological studies, a more challenging, formalist avant-garde seems to surface now and then. While watching Eat, for This Is My Body, it occurred to me that it could almost have been called Haiti Song, so strongly did it remind me of Marguerite Duras’s India Song. There enigmatic actions, often dancing, were staged in a colonial house. Eat, for This Is My Body’s action is, if anything, more enigmatic, though in this case the native population is present in the house in the person of a dignified manservant and a group of nine boys brought at intervals into the house, apparently as a treat."]
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3. The latest GreenCine podcast from Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant. The subject: Wendy and Lucy. The participants: Sam Adams & Alison Willmore. Special bonus above: Drunken karaoke with Hillis and Fessenden!
["To follow up on the initial NYFF entry on Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant discuss the film with Sam Adams, who writes for the Philadelphia City Paper, the AV Club and the Los Angeles Times, and IFC.com editor Alison Willmore."]
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4. "Sources: Taliban split with al Qaeda, seek peace": From CNN.
["Taliban leaders are holding Saudi-brokered talks with the Afghan government to end the country's bloody conflict -- and are severing their ties with al Qaeda, sources close to the historic discussions have told CNN. The militia, which has been intensifying its attacks on the U.S.-led coalition that toppled it from power in 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, has been involved four days of talks hosted by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, says the source. The talks -- the first of their kind aimed at resolving the lengthy conflict in Afghanistan -- mark a significant move by the Saudi leadership to take a direct role in Afghanistan, hosting delegates who have until recently been their enemies."]
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5. "Facebook co-founder Moskovitz leaves to start group collaboration company": From Venture Beat.
["Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (left) and colleague Justin Rosenstein (right) said this weekend they are leaving Facebook to start their own company. The moves are just the latest in a steady exodus from Facebook, a trend that has sparked questions about whether the popular social networking company’s culture is changing and whether it is losing its magnetism."]
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Quote of the Day: M.C. Escher
"What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness."
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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): How much is a chihuahua worth? $29 million, apparently.
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Clip of the Day: Brandon Hardesty reenacts a scene from Labyrinth.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Alphabetical Order - Annett Busch
Setup - Susanne Lang
War - Sebastian Luetgert
Concept Person - Florian Schneider
Double Reflections: Beyond the Shadow of the Double
[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 7/18/2004, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]
The theme of “the double” has exerted a complex and ambiguous fascination throughout the cultural history of the last century. Arguably, every form of contemporary art has been touched by this powerful theme and its many implications. Indeed, the double is more than a theme: it is a basic figuration, an archetype whose flexible structure can express multiple meanings and associations. In a sense, the double is, appropriately, a multi-faceted mental form.
The relationship between the double and the cinema is especially intriguing: we could say that the double, born mainly in literature and poetry, has found in cinema its natural medium of expression. The reasons for that are more structural than aesthetic: in fact, in film the double is often not only a theme or a form, but also a fundamental subtext directly connected to the particular nature of the cinematic experience.
Filmic universes
The specificity of cinema is an expression of its inherent characteristics, its unique way of representing reality, its technologies, its implicit structure. The unique features that comprise filmic representation are powerful tools in the hands of a skillful director: for instance, the complexities of editing, the varied uses of sound and music, the control of cinematography, or the application of special effects. Perhaps the most peculiar and important of these filmic specificities is point of view, or more specifically, the manipulation of the camera, of its position and movement. Cinema is the only fictional and photographic medium over which the artist (in this case, the director) has total control of point of view, unlike painting, comics, and photography, that deal only with still images.
Another essential characteristic of cinema is its explicit formal boundaries. A film is a very delimited work of art: two-dimensional, it has specific boundaries in space (i.e., the screen) and time (i.e., a continuous experience generally of 1-3 hours), and is ideally experienced in a specific architectural space (i.e., the theatre). Furthermore, a film is a relatively fixed and reproducible object: we can see it as many times as we want, and, in one sense (but not every sense), it is always the same.
That’s why a movie is such a powerful tool for representing reality: it is, indeed, a finely delineated microcosm with a powerful tendency toward objectivity, yet is simultaneously open to various levels of subjectivity and vision. A movie is a mandala, a hologram of reality, of the artist’s vision and conception of reality. Like a miniature universe, it has a structure, a geometry, a continuous interaction of forms on an indefinite number of planes, texts and subtexts; and, above all, an insistent meta-commentary derived from its various points of view. As in Wagner’s Wort-Ton-Drama, in which the music realizes a meta-structure that comments and gives meaning to the theatrical action, so in movies the sum of the camera’s points of view and its movements provide interweaving levels of information, emotion, beauty and meaning. Not every director is able to exploit these levels to their full capacity; but those who can are certainly, if not the greatest, the most medium-specific artists: in their hands, cinema achieves its full stature.
Basic doubles
In a sense, creating a universe means to create a double. The creator-creation axis is one of the most fundamental dualities, the most archetypal division of consciousness. Such an axis is similar, if not identical, to another important duality: the subject-object division between a consciousness that perceives and something else, the object that is perceived. And, becoming more specific, and getting nearer to the stuff of cinema, it is the same axis as the seer-seen, observer-observed, voyeur-objective world dualities.
In cinema, the director is the creator and subject, while the movie is the creation and object. Yet immediately, we can see that something very interesting occurs in this fundamental duality. Another, more ambiguous division occurs: the subject splits in two, the director-creator and the spectator-perceiver; the first one owns, in a way, the vision of the second.
This structure is complex, indeed. The ambiguity of vision in cinema—its being shared between and asymmetrically controlled by two “minds”—is a basic double in cinematic experience. The spectators are in a way “possessed” by the director’s mind; their vision is guided, their emotions manipulated, their perceptions molded and structured. At the same time, spectators actively become new creators, masters of the world that is lent to them: their consciousness, perceptions and interpretations are given new form, a new synthesis; and they become, in the ultimate sense, directors of their own experience of a movie. Thus, cinema and double are inextricably intertwined.
Brian De Palma’s movies are a beautiful catalogue of the possible methods by which the double can find its full realization in a filmic structure. Remember, for instance, the wonderful sequence in The Untouchables when Malone is murdered. The director’s vision is viewed, for the most part, through both the spectators’ and the killer’s eyes. We see through the killer, and we see through De Palma. Our consciousness is immediately and tragically split: our cognition is bound to the camera’s vision, (“owned” by the bad guy), while our heart and feelings are projected onto Malone, the “object” (and target) of this vision (indeed a loved and cherished object, the sum total of what a De Palma “good guy” can be). With our spirit and aesthetic sensibility fully awake and focused, we perceive the beauty of the scene, the meta-meaning that is beyond its images, as if through a premonition achieved in only a few instants, which is always the case in truly great scenes. And, beautifully, this vision that penetrates Malone’s house, that spies and hides, shifting behind a wall, dancing through space and time in search of its object with calm complacency, becomes immediately the best incarnation of a metaphysical voyeur, of our desperate observing consciousness. We are outside the scene, spectators, helpless, but at the same time inside, as accomplices, maybe as killers. And perhaps, in a sense, we are also, ultimately, victims. Only in the end of the sequence, when geometries converge and meanings collapse, our consciousness is reconnected to its primary object, to Malone’s body and mind: but only in death, the only possible singleness, and in the final sign of his blood, which will give meaning to his death and guide his friend Ness to the next clue, the next level of truth.
Consciousness and awareness
A significant ambiguity that results from splitting a consciousness in two (or, similarly, blending two consciousnesses into one) is the mirror game of comprehension, of conscious acknowledgement: how much one knows about the other, how much the other is aware of what one knows. In the ultimate sense, life itself, like cinema, seems to be a complicated game of relative awareness. The sensation of “being observed while observing” is a fundamental component of our state of consciousness. It influences our judgements and our emotions, and as we try to see ourselves through the eyes of all, and to be aware of their awareness, the cloning of vision stems from the cloning of identities, and the theme of the double naturally gives space to that of voyeurism.
The fundamental movie about voyeurism as a symbol of the human condition is Rear Window, as the fundamental movies about the double are Psycho and Vertigo (Hitchcock had indeed a very special sensibility regarding film archetypes). Especially in the first half of his career, De Palma has enjoyed re-interpreting these Hitchcock movies, deepening and enriching their themes and contents, interweaving them in new fictional structures. From the beginning, therefore, the double and voyeurism were main obsessions in De Palma’s cinema, and so strong is their connection in the powerful and complex vision of his individual films that, often, it is difficult to say if what we are seeing is double or voyeurism, or both.
In Body Double, for example, the importance of awareness is expressed with extreme power in the film’s condensation of De Palma’s themes. Here the protagonist’s voyeurism is the effect of complex manipulation: his “friend” puts him in the right place at the right time with the right suggestions, so that he can “peep” on a woman. The set up’s metaphorical similarity to a film’s spectator and director is almost perfect. We can identify with the protagonist, and be unconsciously reassured in our role as voyeurs of the film, mirrored in his role as a voyeur of a body. The friend-actor-manipulator lurks in the background, but at this point in the story, we still have little comprehension of his real purpose.
Then something crucial happens: Jake Scully sees something outside the frame of the scene he has been set up to watch: a danger, a menace, perhaps a mystery, in the form of an Indian working on a satellite dish and “peeping” on the same woman. His role becomes more active; he pursues, he comes in contact with Gloria Rivelle, the object of his voyeurism. When Jake stumbles, on the beach, to explain his identity to her, this moment is one of the most moving and perfect in De Palma’s work. The voyeur cannot explain himself. His role is, in some way, fraudulent, incomplete. Similarly, man cannot explain his role in reality. In a sense, we are incomplete, fraudulent. We can “peep” on the movie of reality, sometimes even try to possess it, to interact with it. But always, something is fundamentally lacking. We cannot really become its heroes, let alone its protagonists.
At the same time, in the scene on the beach, the hero-villain double is expressed with unusual beauty. Jake, the would-be hero, and the menacing “Indian” are each other’s mirror. When Jake at last speaks to Gloria to disclose that someone is following her, she readily agrees, suggesting that she understands that he has been following her. Which is, literally, true.
And then something else happens. Gloria is killed, while Jake, the “hero,” is watching, still unable to save her. And so another strange facet of the double is expressed: the voyeur, the would-be hero, becomes a witness. Which is, in a way, an intermediate state: one who can only perceive and not act, but whose perception can in some way define reality, create the truth. Or at least what appears to be truth.
The truth here seems simple. The killer is an Indian, a mysterious pursuer we have already seen before—and decidedly not Gloria’s husband, Alexander Rivelle, who should be the natural suspect. But, as the story unfolds, we realize that nothing is as it seems: the killer is indeed her husband, who is also “the Indian,” who is also “Sam,” Jake’s so-called friend who has orchestrated the entire scenario. Sam is the creator, artist, manipulator and bad guy all at once: a mise en abyme of doubles, a summa of role-playing.
Amidst the ingenuity of the plot, a single question arises that we may not think to ask after a single viewing: why is Jake’s role as witness so important to convincing the police that Alexander Rivelle is not the killer? After all, he is the killer, but was only disguised as an Indian when he murdered Gloria. Jake, after all, has observed a perfect truth: a husband who, in disguise, has killed his wife. The more important point is that, in the apparent reconstruction of the murder scene by the witness and the police, the killer could not be aware that he was being observed. Jake was observing him through a telescope, from a distance. How could the Indian know? And therefore, why would the killer wear a disguise, and bother to enact such a complex show? The conclusion is therefore “obvious” that Gloria’s killer is not her husband.
But once we understand the larger scenario, and realize that the Indian and Sam are both Alexander Rivelle, who knows that he is being observed, we recognize a perfectly reasonable motive for the disguise, for the show, with no alibi available for Gloria’s husband.
Therefore, the subtext of the plot suggests that the interpretation of reality and comprehension of its structure depend on shifting modes of observation. In a word, vision and awareness of vision are the two strongest determinants of truth.
Moral mirrors
The double is, ultimately, a selection of information. It is, in this sense, a choice. And, as a choice, it has a moral value.
In an existence made of infinitely plural universes (a reasonable theory of quantum physics, not merely a fabrication of science fiction), every thing and every body can be everything and everybody. But if all chances are equal, then there is no choice, no value, no purpose. In the poetic world of Borges, for instance, the infinite is only an accumulation of chances; eternity is only the death of any individual value and hope. Thus, a repetitive view of the infinite leads to a completely void vision of humanity. It is the void space of Mission to Mars, the purposeless chance in which human stories seem to fail or die.
Identity, instead, is the choice of a specified form, of specified information. It is a choice among possible meanings. If one adopts a specified identity, a specified role, the dice have been thrown. And such a choice, such a selection of information, such a deletion of all other possible occurrences, fractures reality. Choice gives birth to similar, but different, chances. It certainly gives birth to opposite chances: one can be good or bad, can love or hate, be faithful or betray, protect or destroy.
The disincarnate consciousness seeking a role (i.e., the voyeur) is constantly trying to comprehend a “reality.” But an uneasy rule applies: you can look, you can “peep,” but if you touch, everything changes (as quantum mechanics students certainly know). If you look, the many are in you. If you touch, you are in the many. You are someone, but you can also be (or become) someone else. You are no more alone. You have to confront yourself and your multiple reflections. You have to confront your opposite. You must fight. You can lose. You can be a victim. You, or some part of you, can die. In a word, you have become a body.
Such is the ambiguity, and the fascination, of the double. It invokes specification, and at the same time it casts the shadow of a doubt. You can no more be anyone and anything. You can be someone, or someone else, or someone else again. But in each case, there is meaning. And the meanings, although elusive, are always different.
Mirrored moralities
Though the confrontations with the variations (or reflections) of one’s identity create a sense of uncertainty, meeting one’s opposite may be the cause of a moral crisis. In Snake Eyes, for example, Rick Santoro is morally superficial and ambiguous until he has to face his double-opposite, the good-guy-turned-bad-guy, Kevin Dunne. Likewise, in Casualties of War, Erickson is forced to become an “incomplete” hero when he confronts the “bad” Meserve and his accomplices.
Heroes are more or less ambiguous; fascinated by their own sense of duality, they split reality within themselves—good and evil, cognition and feeling, truth and power—and are never able to make an ultimate choice. Villains, in contrast, are fascinating. They seem to have achieved an attractive singularity; they act as though they really are simply a “body”, a permanent reality, an objective “truth,” as though they have found a seeming harmony with their physical role, and with the violence inherent in it. They have sex, and make a weapon of it (as Meserve clearly states in Casualties of War), while, for the voyeur-hero, sex is destined to be only a symbol, an impossible goal, the figuration of the failure to physically possess matter. Bad guys, instead, do possess things and people (or at least believe they do). In the words of Tony Montana, they have “balls.” But their ambition to own “the world and everything in it,” is a pitiful ideal, so similar to the voyeur’s ambition of knowing the world through vision alone. The negation of the double generates monsters, careless fighters doomed to destroy themselves and the things they (may) own. So in the end Montana is attacked, with tragic irony, by a baroque multiplication, almost a cloning, of a special, virtual double, a single-minded, powerful “metaphysical” killer: at the “excessive” ending of Scarface, Montana stands impossibly alive against crowds of repetitive enemies, while their leader, the origin and synthesis of all of them, easily destroys him with a single shot in the back. Thus, this “killer without an identity” becomes a perfect incarnation of the impersonal evil, which, in De Palma’s movies, seems to be the real substance behind the various villains, and is ultimately and completely triumphant over the physical, perishable bad guy.
Conversely, being in the many can also be an instrument of constructive choice, and sometimes of salvation. In Femme Fatale, for instance, the doubling of a consciousness and of a life becomes, perhaps, a useful tool to change destiny—to throw the dice a second time without coming up snake eyes. The way to freedom may not always require a moral recognition; instead, it may spring from the intuition of a pattern, from a reconstruction of reality with different space and time relationships, from a blinding ray of light. In any case, the result is all that matters. Freedom, salvation, these are the ultimate goals.
Differences
The double is always a mirror of the unsolved mystery of consciousness: if we are single, we are alone and helpless; if we are multiple, we are lost. The doubling and multiplying of vision in cinema is an extreme expression of a state of consciousness common to all: perhaps we are observing, perhaps we are being observed; perhaps we are not as simple as we like to think, not as lonely as we fear, not as free as we imagine. Perhaps good and evil are not so clear-cut, and yet they are not really blended either. As in the yin-yang symbol, black and white are separate and united at the same time, but in different ways.
This powerful figuration, this archetype so close to the very essence of cinema, is a form difficult to control. Not every director is able to manage its intimidating power, its deceiving complexity. When dealing with doubles, a director needs a very specific touch, a great mastery of his art; otherwise, he is bound to fail. He cannot be too explicit. He cannot be predictable. He cannot be moralistic, philosophical, or generic. The double is pure form, and requires absolute mastery of form to express its values.
De Palma has made the double (and voyeurism) a very private obsession. He is the best at dealing with the theme. His doubles live in the structure of his artistic vision; they are never too explicit, never vulgar, never contrived, never the same. Other great directors have incorporated the theme of the double in their work, with various results. Among the best examples are David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and David Lynch’s sublime Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.
Dead Ringers is more about the body than the double. Through the twin protagonists of Cronenberg’s movie, the body and the double are inexorably connected: they are identical; both are gynaecologists; in their physical being and occupation, the mystery of the body’s origin and duplication is passively and actively prominent: being twins, they share, in a sense, a same body while being physically separated; and by choosing to work and act on the generation of the physical body, they are trying to gain power over the same forces which were originally responsible for their condition. But the balance of this fragile gestalt is compromised by the love for one (single) woman; and the whole two-brothers-in-one system, once so efficient for sharing and compensating for all of life’s experiences, has to face a sudden crisis, and is ultimately destined to failure, madness and death. In a perfect scene, one of the twins, already aware of the fracture of the inner link between himself and his brother, hires a couple of twin prostitutes to recreate, by the power of names, his lost integrity: during their sexual intercourse, he instructs one of the girls to call him by his own name, and instructs the other to call him by his brother’s name. Thus, the fracture of a pristine symmetry—that is of the pre-existing, harmonious relationship between the twins—evokes the generation of new dualities on multiple sublevels. That’s how the structure of duality (or of the mind) evolves in new, (random?) branches, like a fractal image, or rather like a web.
In Lynch’s extraordinary movies, so similar and so different, a very radical double is displayed: two different persons with two different lives and stories tragically overlap, intruding one into the other. The way this is accomplished, at the plot level, is a true formal miracle, an aesthetic intuition that easily transcends any conventional treatment of space, time, causality and narration, following exclusively the inner, deep thread that only pure art can reveal. Thus, we see the body of one character simply substituted for that of another one (for example, the wonderful scene in the prison cell in Lost Highway), or rather, in Mulholland Drive, the cloning of one’s life story from another, through a very complicated web of totally irrational but extremely powerful connections. The films’ meaning, denied to the intellect, becomes a strong, chilling subtext that finds its devastating way directly to our hearts and souls. In Lynch’s movies, however, the double is only one of many doors to the ultimate mysteries of existence; and a surreal sense of subjective, unsolved tragedy takes the place of the objective failure of identity in De Palma’s classical, geometrical work.
Void
Toto le Héros, from Belgian director Jaco van Dormael, is an extremely complex and rich work of art, touching on many deep subjects with inspiration and grace. A unique plot structure based in the double beautifully supports its themes.
Essentially the “birth-to-death” life story of Thomas, it is more accurately his “death to death” story (à la Sunset Boulevard and Carlito’s Way), as his death scene frames and colors the story as a grotesque and ironic film noir. The actual starting point of the plot is the process of birth: the protagonist, indeed, lives his whole life with the firm conviction (maybe justified, maybe not) that, as a newborn, he was exchanged with another baby during a nursery fire. Thomas believes he is living a life not his own, and secretly hates the other child, Alfred, who has supposedly stolen his destiny, and who happens to live nearby in a wealthier family. The consequence of this mental fracture is that Thomas lives with the feeling that he is not really living, that his story is only a pale double of what could and should have been, a void without value or justification. Over the course of the plot, however, the lives of Thomas and Alfred interweave in beautiful and unpredictable ways, and the ambiguity and irrelevance of Thomas’s basic assumption becomes evident: the two parts of the double reveal their total incompleteness, their personal failures, their mirroring diversities. Dormael masterfully creates a precious vision of love, loss, solitude, friendship and compassion. In the end, we are left with the astonishing evidence that Thomas’ life has been all but void: he has touched, lived and lost almost any deep value of life, without being able to acknowledge that value.
Again, the double is a powerful symbol of the basic dissociation in human life, but given a different perspective. In De Palma’s movies the voyeur lives in a disincarnate state, and tries, without success, to “grasp” and possess the objects of life, to gain an identity and a role. In Toto le Héros Thomas lives a full and deep life, while being deprived of any sense of possession, of any chance at identification. In both cases, the result is the same: dissociation, failure, suffering.
Le coeur fait bum
Suffering, in the end, is key to the double. Lost in a jungle of multiple meanings or the desert of their absence, consciousness fights and observes, splits and multiplies; meanwhile, the heart suffers. It suffers in the innocent victims of Casualties of War, of Blow Out, of The Untouchables. It suffers in the voyeurs, in Jack Scully of Body Double or Jack “the écouteur” of Blow Out, in their lack of resolution and dignity. It suffers in the bad guys, in Tony Montana and Meserve, in their stolid absoluteness, in their cold, meaningless cruelty. It suffers in the body of Thomas, and in all of us who are looking at him, who are his voyeurs and doubles. And in the end, it suffers even in his ashes, when, during one of the cinema’s most beautiful endings, Charles Trenet’s wonderful song reminds us that, while all other things in the world may find their sound and their expression, “le coeur fait bum.” The heart is bound to pulse, suffer, feel, blow out: it constantly burns, and its ashes are thrown everywhere, all over reality.
In movies such as Body Double, Casualties of War, and Toto le Héros, we witness a complete universe that is a perfect double of our own, so tragically similar, so fascinatingly different. Our search for meaning, feeling and truth in this precious mirror-world is, in the end, not different from the touching quest of its characters.
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Giuseppe Puccio lives in Palermo, Italy, with a wife, two sons and a cat. He is a pediatrician and works as a neonatologist at the Palermo University, but cinema is one of his most important interests. He has harbored an insane passion for Brian De Palma’s cinema in dignified solitude, until, tired of simply speaking endlessly to reluctant friends, he started a website (Brian De Palma’s Split World) to express a few personal thoughts about his favorite director, realizing soon, to his great surprise, that there were a few people in the world who seemed interested. Other fundamental directors in his life are Lynch, Buñuel and Truffaut.
The Windmill Movie
Imagine Doug Jones’s laceratingly personal 51 Birch St. as compiled by his next-door neighbor and you’ll have a sense of the overall experience of The Windmill Movie. Rogers may be our avatar, but Olch’s never far from our consciousness, weighing in via voiceover on the process of culling through the mountains of raw footage, the problems of negotiating the material with the filmmaker’s widow with her own agenda at his side, and his place in relation to this thorny new work, an amalgamation of approximating Rogers’s intents and Olch’s mediating influence.
Four Nights with Anna
Grey and waterlogged, Jerzy Skolimowski's Four Nights with Anna is something like the Eastern European answer to Rear Window and Chungking Express, a deeply gothic, but no less romantic tale of voyeurism, breaking and entering, and secret love. Instead of a wheelchair-bound James Stewart, we have Artur Steranko as emotionally crippled ex-con Leon Okrasa, who, like Faye Wong in Wong Kar-wai's film, opts to anonymously clean his beloved's lodgings rather than announce his love.
Issue #1
Ron Silliman reports on a new publication, modestly entitled Issue 1. (I was first alerted to this by The Mumpsimus). This e-text is 3785 pages long (!); each page contains a “poem” attributed to one of 3785 3164 writers. The names of the writers range from Silliman himself and other language poets, through a number of (now dead) poets and writers, onto various bloggers (especially ones who appear in Silliman’s blogroll, it would seem). In point of fact, none of the writers have actually written the pieces attributed to them. My name appears among the list of authors, together with the names of several people I know, including some who read (and sometimes comment on) this blog. My own “poem” appears on page 1893; for what it’s worth, it doesn’t strike me as being very good, nor is it like anything that I could ever imagine myself writing, either in style or in sentiment.
I kind of wonder how other “victims” of this hoax (if that’s what it is) respond to it. Silliman seems kind of pissed off, as do many (but not all) of the commenters on his blog entry. Matthew Cheney (of The Mumpsimus blog) seems more or less amused:
The whole thing strikes me as a stunt pulled by someone who desperately wants attention. (And now I’m giving it to ‘em. So it goes.) I’m still amazed that anyone would put the time into creating something like this, but the amazement now is the sort of amazement one has when watching the totally insane rather than watching the harmlessly obsessive.
Me, I think that the stunt raises all sorts of interesting questions (or perhaps I should say, in Palin-speak, that lots of interesting questions “rear their heads”). Early-20th-century Dadaist stunts raised meta-questions about art, about what could be considered art, etc. But such meta-questions have long since been so well assimilated into our culture (both artistic culture and commercial culture) that they scarcely raise an eyebrow any longer. Today, we can only be blase about self-referentiality, conceptual art, and so on.
In such a context, Issue 1 attempts to up the ante, by asking meta-meta-questions, as it were. Most notably, there’s the difficulty of deciding whether the publication actually is some sort of interesting conceptual art, or whether it is rather just a dumb prank, or a malicious hoax. Then there is the issue of obsessiveness that Matthew Cheney raises. Certainly a lot of modernist and post-modernist art is quite obsessive (I am thinking of everything from Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots to Henry Darger’s weather chronicles). But Issue 1 might well only be pseudo-obsessive; it seems to be something that would have required an insane amount of time and energy (if only to collect all those author names and write all those poems), but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was all generated by a computer program in just a few hours. Even insanity isn’t what it used to be, in our age of digital simulation.
Finally, given all the questions about the status of the author that have been raised in the last half-century or so, it only makes sense that I should be credited with the authorship of something that I had nothing to do with writing. Remember, Roland Barthes proclaimed “the death of the author” more than forty years ago, in 1967. And even well before that, in 1940, Borges proposed a literary criticism that would “take two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, for instance — attribute them to a single author, and then in all good conscience determine the psychology of that most interesting homme de lettres…” (from “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Issue 1 is a logical outgrowth of the situation in which such ideas no longer seem new, or radical, or outrageously counterintuitive, but have instead been entirely assimilated into our “common sense.”
In short, Issue 1 makes sense to me as a conceptual art project precisely to the extent that it marks the utter banalization, routinization, and digitization of any sort of conceptualism and experimentalism in art, and of all supposedly “avant-garde” gestures. There is something melancholy in coming to this conclusion; but perhaps something liberating as well, since it suggests that the whole strain of avant-gardism that starts in the 19th century, goes through dadaism and other forms of radical modernism, and moves through conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s to the supposedly oppositional political art of the last few decades, has finally outlived its relevance and its usefulness. We have finally reached the point where we can shake off the dead weight of the anti-traditionalist tradition, and perhaps move on to something else. This doesn’t mean rejecting all the art of the avant-garde tradition, much of which I still very much love. But it does mean seeing that art historically, just as we see the art of the Baroque historically, or as we see the science fiction of the “Golden Age” of the early-to-mid 20th century historically. It’s still there to be tapped (or looted) for clever ideas, formal approaches, and so on. But modernist experimentation and avant-gardism is no longer a living resource; in an age of arcane financial instruments capable at one moment of generating huge quantities of fictitious wealth, and at another moment of sending shockwaves through the entire society, wiping out retirement accounts, causing businesses to go bankrupt and jobs to disappear, etc, etc — in such a climate, modernist avant-gardism fails to be “as radical as reality itself.” (I am fully aware that financial panics with real effects upon people’s lives are as old as capitalism itself; what’s new in the present situation comes from the way that new technologies have a multiplier effect, as well as adding additional layers of meta-referentiality and meta-feedback into the system).
I am sorely tempted to add the “poem” of mine which appears in Issue 1, and which I had absolutely nothing to do with producing, to my CV.
Links for the Day (October 5th, 2008)
["Tank.tv, an online moving-image gallery and curated series of experimental film and video art, is hosting 20 works by Ken Jacobs in October and November. Click the link to watch! The works will also be screened at Tank.tv events in the UK; Screening schedule and general info on the Jacobs series available here, including Ken Jacobs in person in London at the end of November. Also keep your eyes peeled for Tank Magazine's new issue, featuring a discussion between Jacobs and Mark Webber on Star Spangled to Death, and an essay from Jacobs on contemporary American politics entitled "Failed State." Ken is also answering questions via email in an extended Q+A session. You can email your questions to the artist at ken@tank.tv.
A regularly updated transcript of the dialogue will be online at www.tank.tv/askken."]
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2. "Provacateur & Muse": Online for a limited time, Tom Hall speaks with the cast and crew of Battle in Seattle for Hamptons Magazine. (Via Tom's blog, The Back Row Manifesto.)
["Stuart Townsend believes in the power of movies. The Irish actor, best known in this country for his devilish good looks and his off-screen romance with longtime partner Charlize Theron, is on a mission to change American minds, to show audiences that the movies can once again make a difference. During the past year Townsend has become an evangelist of sorts, putting his money where his ideas are and taking his show on the road. All that hard work seems to have paid off: Battle In Seattle, Townsend’s debut as a writer and director, is poised to become the story of the season, a Molotov cocktail of a movie thrown into our country’s already contentious political arena."]
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3. "No 'Action!' for Hollywood vets": By Anne Thompson for Variety.
["A generation of lauded directors is MIA in Hollywood. In an industry driven by buzz, heat, youth and momentum, many talented studio helmers now find themselves on the outside looking in. While directors such as Lawrence Kasdan (“Grand Canyon”), Joe Dante (“Gremlins”), Phil Kaufman (“The Right Stuff”) and Jim McBride (“The Big Easy”) were once reliable makers of modest studio hits, enjoying both popular and critical success, they’re rarely tapped for new film projects. And they often hit a brick wall in trying to mount their own passion projects. The heart of the problem is Hollywood’s “What have you done for me lately?” mindset."]
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4. Sean Axmaker reports from the Vancouver International Film Festival.
["I've always found Vancouver the most enjoyable film festival of my year, whether for a couple of days or a full week. It's an easy fest to navigate, with seven screens of a downtown multiplex dedicated to the festival and all but one of the ten screens within a few blocks of one another. Set two weeks after Toronto, showcases many of TIFF's North American premieres. And it's Dragons and Tigers sidebar is a fascinating snapshot of Asian cinema that takes chances on early works by promising directors in addition to the big names and domestic hits. More on the smaller films and early works later. For this dispatch, let's take a look at some of the established filmmakers and bigger films."]
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5. "Bushwhacked Cinema": A piece commissioned for the 17th edition of Time Out Film Guide, reprinted by the author (Jonathan Rosenbaum) on his personal website.
["According to the trade magazine Boxoffice, on 30 March 2008, The Passion of the Christ in fact placed 11th in its list of “all-time domestic blockbusters,” on the heels of (in descending order) Titanic (1997), Star Wars (1977), Shrek 2 (2004), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestial (1982), Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), Spider-Man (2002), Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005), Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), and Spider-Man 2 (2004). It’s a sobering thought that six of these came out during Bush’s eight years and the only other films on the list that didn’t qualify as fodder for kids were made during previous decades. But this infantilism can be ascribed to the preferences of the film industry as much as those of the audience, and this audience was plainly as Bushwhacked as the movies it attended. In more ways than one, its mind was elsewhere."]
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Quote of the Day: Franklin P. Jones
"Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again."
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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): NASA design for a potential space elevator.
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Clip of the Day: "We Sing the Forest Electric" by Grickle
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Reklame (3) | Projekt, Website, Veranstaltung
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»Filmvermittlung im Film hat parallel zur Kinogeschichte ein reichhaltiges und wenig beachtetes Genre hervorgebracht – den Filmvermittelnden Film. In Filmvermittelnden Filmen wird eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Kino geführt, die sich der Mittel des Kinos bedient: gearbeitet wird mit Montagen laufender Bilder und Töne.«
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Das Projekt (Michael Baute, Stefan Pethke, Stefanie Schlüter, Volker Pantenburg und Erik Stein) stellt solche Arbeiten in Texten und Veranstaltungen vor.
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Dossiers (seit Juni 2008):
(1) Filmvermittlung und frühes Kino
(2) Verfahren des Filmvermittelnden Films (1)
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Kino-Veranstaltungen, Auftakt:
Freitag, 10.10.2008, 20.30 Uhr, arsenal Berlin: Zu Gast Harun Farocki.
ÜBER BASIL WRIGHTS “SONG OF CEYLON” (D 1975), Regie, Buch: Harun Farocki
Schnitt: Marianne Müller-Kratsch, Sprecher: Harun Farocki, Produktion: WDR, Köln, Länge: 25 Min. Format: 16mm, s/w und Farbe, 1:1,37 Erstsendung: 07.10.1975, WDR.
FILMTIP: “TEE IM HAREM DES ARCHIMEDES” (D 1985), Regie, Buch, Kommentar: Harun Farocki
Produktion: WDR, Köln, Länge: 7 Min, Format: 1-Zoll-MAZ, Farbe, 1:1,37 Erstsendung: 12.12.1985, West 3.
DER AUSDRUCK DER HÄNDE (D 1997), Regie: Harun Farocki Buch: Harun Farocki, Jörg Becker
Kamera: Ingo Kratisch, Ton: Klaus Klingler, Schnitt: Max Reimann, Länge: 30 Min. Format: Video - BetaSp, 1:1,37 Produktion: Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Berlin, für den WDR, Redaktion: Werner Dütsch, Erstsendung: 07.09.1997, 3sat.
ZUR BAUWEISE DES FILMS BEI GRIFFITH (D 2006), Regie, Buch: Harun Farocki
Video, s/w, stumm, 9 Min.
Im Anschluss an die Filme sprechen Michael Baute und Stefan Pethke mit Harun Farocki über seine filmvermittelnden Arbeiten.
Happy-Go-Lucky (Vancouver International Film Festival)
The Greatest Living Soviet Filmmaker
A Note on Mass Murder as Child’s Play
Polish Documentaries: From Powiśle… (1958)
Z Powiśla…
1958, black and white, 10 mins
- Director/Script: Kazimierz Karabasz
- Camera: Stanisław Niedbalski
- Editor: Helena Białkowska
- Sound: Halina Paszkowska
- Music: Zbigniew Jeżewski
- Narrator: Tadeusz Łomnicki
- Production Manager: Jerzy Dorożyński
- Production Company: WFD
After making short films at the Łódź Film School (among them Day In Day Out/Jak co dzień…, 1955) and collaborating with Władysław Ślesicki on Where the Devil Says Goodnight (Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc, 1956) and People from an Empty Zone (Ludzie z pustego obszaru, 1957), Kazimierz Karabasz made his solo professional directing debut with this lyrical, poeticised portrait of the run-down Warsaw suburb of Powiśle, originally part of a series entitled Walking Around Warsaw (Wędrówki po Warszawie). It touches on a lot of topics familiar from other Polish documentaries - notably the bombed-out ruins from Brzozowa Street (Ulica Brzozowa, 1947), Warsaw ‘56 (Warszawa 1956) and Lublin Old Town (Lubelska starówka, 1956) and the topographical concerns of City on Islands (Miasto na wyspach, 1958) - but Karabasz seems completely uninterested in exploring wider social/political issues. Indeed, the commentary here is reduced to mere wisps, and many of Karabasz’ subsequent films would dispense with it altogether.
This is hardly surprising, when one considers the eloquence of Stanisław Niedbalski’s images when married to Zbigniew Jeżewski’s wistful woodwind score (which runs more or less continuously throughout). This combination is first seen in the opening shot, as the camera adopts a high vantage point to pan around the city’s skyline before slowly zooming in to the buildings in Powiśle as the main title comes up on screen. A cat strolls across an otherwise deserted courtyard that is otherwise only populated by cushions. A tap drips aimlessly onto the ground, filling a visibly eroded dimple, and a small girl carries freshly-filled bottles of water (one of many simple, unforced images of children that pepper the running time). The music swaps woodwinds for a barrel-organ, and the soundtrack becomes diegetic, as an elderly man sets up in the courtyard and cranks old folk tunes out of it. The apartment block’s windows are mostly open, but there’s no visible sign of any appreciation.
In the commercial centre of Powiśle, Karabasz and Niedbalski seem as interested in a passing dog, a flock of pigeons or a pair of children’s overalls hanging outside a shop window, than they do in human passers-by. The music is occasionally interrupted by the sight and sound of a train passing on an overhead line, which the narrator highlights as the only visible means of counting the hours. A woman yawns and shields her eyes from the sun. A man pulls a heavy cart by himself, his female companion merely steering it. Two elderly women gossip, one grabbing the other’s wrist to emphasise a point. Patients in the Solec hospital sit on the balcony and look aimlessly out into the distance - one watches a blonde woman as she leans out of the window of one of the trains, a fleeting connection with the outside world.
Powiśle, according to Karabasz, seems frozen in time, though not in a way that seems especially attractive or useful to nostalgists. Several decades ago, an unnamed writer claimed that no other part of Warsaw had so much charm and ambience, but Powiśle was bombed almost flat during the Uprising of 1944 - this is dealt with obliquely, presumably because Karabasz assumed that a contemporary Polish audience wouldn’t need the details spelt out a mere fourteen years after the events. The signs of daily life amid the ruins recall similar images in Brzozowa Street, though the effect is inverted: instead of life thriving among the rubble, here narrator idly muses on why anyone would want to live in Powiśle when other parts of Warsaw are clearly more appealing.
Somewhat anthropomorphically, Karabasz attempts to ascribe human characteristics to Powiśle: it’s been “badly wounded”, and is “lonely”. City on Islands had a similar concern for the character of its locations, but Karabasz is more interested in poetry than polemic. His quiet, understated film is in sharp contrast to the stridency of many of the other documentaries in the so-called “black series”, but it points the way towards a far more lyrical approach to documentary that would burst into full flower with Karabasz’s masterpieces of the early 1960s (The Musicians/Muzykanci, People on the Road/Ludzie w drodze, both 1960), other films that show rather than tell, evoke rather than explain.
The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: The Black Series double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). The source print is generally in good physical condition, though occasional exposure fluctuations cause the picture to flicker slightly, and there’s a modicum of minor surface damage. The soundtrack is fine by 1950s mono standards, with the music coming across well. Subtitles are generally easy to follow, the occasional typo notwithstanding - though the phrasing is occasionally somewhat awkward and there’s a jarring bit where the line “Ruiny jak rdza wżerają się w życie z tępym, milczącym uporem” is translated by the subtitles as “On each step, the ruins bite the life like rust, with dull, silent obstinacy” but in the booklet as “Like rust, the ruins come to life with dull and silent obstinacy.”
Night and Day
Hong Sang-soo’s latest, Night and Day, opens by misdirecting its audience with a credit sequence scored to the allegretto movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 (a classical favorite usually employed more obviously in movie trailers, as in The Fall earlier this year). It’s an ominously building epic the exact opposite in tone and thrust to Hong’s quiet, anti-momentum approach to cinema, but that the director returns to No. 7 throughout Night and Day clues us into the surging importance he attaches to what at first glance appears to be a rather ordinary tale.
Alphabetical Order - Annett Busch
Hungarians in Hollywood
The 8th Los Angeles Hungarian Film Festival is to be held between 15 and 23 October. It has four sections, and I’ve linked to Kinoblog reviews where they exist.
New Hungarian Films: 9 and 1/2 Date, Adventurers, Bahrtalo - Good Luck, Delta, Dolina, Eszter’s Inheritance, The Eighth Day of the Week, Girls, Iska’s Journey, Nosedive, Opium - Diary of a Madwoman, Out of Order, Tranquillity, Virtually a Virgin, Without Mercy
Spotlight on Miklós Jancsó: The Red and the White, Red Psalm, The Round-Up, Silence and Cry
The other two sections cover recent Hungarian documentary, and Hungarians in Hollywood - the latter including director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and Laszlo Kovacs (Easy Rider) and composer Miklós Rosza (Spellbound).
And for a tangentially related overview of what Hungarians contributed to British cinema, here’s my Screenonline piece Magyars in Mayfair.
