Sorry 'bout the absence, here are some ballerinas / The King Steps Out (Josef von Sternberg, 1936; photographed by Lucien Ballard)

Fedora (Billy Wilder, 1978)

Super 8 as a weapon / Panic in High School (Sōgo Ishii, 1976)

The Jericho Mile (Michael Mann, 1979)

from Les Solitaires (2000)

6 Sublime Images

Viva Las Vegas is the purest of the Elvis movies. Gone is the gleeful vulgarity of the Norman Taurog-directed Elvises, or the unsure scrappiness of the ones handed to lesser (Gene Nelson) or less-interested (Don Siegel, Phil Karlson) directors. What remains is color, shape and movement. Las Vegas is reduced to garish form; it resembles the colorful plastics of Alain Resnais’ Le Chant du Styrene -- a city built by Oskar Fischinger and not Bugsy Siegel.

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008; photographed by Eric Gautier)

Thoughts on Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger's hand and foot prints at Grauman's Chinese Theater
(from Wikipedia)

We're far removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger now. He's changed addresses, moved from the lobby poster to the political ad, from the movie theater to television news. Sure, a part of the old Schwarzenegger--the 1980s Schwarzenegger--remains on DVDs and the occasional midnight revival, but he's married to his politics now, and we can't separate the two (let alone divorce them) in our memories.

The last twenty years have infected the image of Schwarzenegger in the same way they've infected the songs of Michael Jackson. Schwarzenegger and Jackson stood out on the cultural landscape of the 1980s, so effortlessly alien. No one moved or talked quite like them. There had never been pop stars or film stars so devoid of pathos or motivation. Schwarzenegger would turn as though there were hydraulics hidden beneath his muscles; when you saw a photograph of him or Jackson, it seemed as though their bodies had been custom-built for the frame.

Schwarzenegger was not dispassionate; he simply made passion irrelevant. He approached every line of dialogue--the sarcastic quips provided by the screenwriters--with an astounding indifference. He was never human, never a feeling--he was always a sound and an image, and we never wondered what secret feelings might motivate him, but instead imagined ourselves as machines. Why have love when we could have love scenes? Why have hate when we could have a punch, a pistol shot, a well-worded put down? He made dispassion into a force, transforming inertness into inertia. He replaced acting with actions. Van Damme had an ace's cockiness, Stallone had Jerry Lewis's earnestness, Bronson had weathered distance, but Schwarzenegger would emit vaudeville puns like radio signals, as though he had a transmitter in place of vocal chords. His mouth was a slit in his face. He showed you that there was nothing human about the human body. You take the context away from a hand, a pair of shoulders, a head and it's no different from a chair, a window, a wall.

Watching his films forces me to question myself. History has a funny way of turning our interests against us. The 2003 California gubernatorial recall is an ugly but inseparable footnote to Commando and Red Heat. "Am I playing into the hands of Schwarzenegger the politician?" I think. The "man of action," the "thing that needs to be done" that exists outside of context or emotions, is the fallacy that serves as the basis of reactionary politics. The dream of the action film lead to the reality of a conservative America.

Did the dream fail? Or was it always waiting to betray us? I have a doubt, like a cough in the back of my throat: is fascination a surrender? Is interest an approval?

A Car Ride with King Vidor

A promotional still from Show People, directed by King Vidor

King Vidor came to Hollywood by car. He, his wife Florence and a friend slept in their Model T and paid for gas by shooting newsreel footage for the Ford Motor Company. It was a wild country then: you almost imagine they'd run into Indians or herds of buffalo the way he describes traveling across pre-highway America--all forests and deserts, rocks and tumbleweeds.

One of the first shots in his 1928 film Show People is of a man and his daughter in a car; an intertitle tells us that he, like Vidor, has driven all the way from Georgia (Vidor’s trip was a little shorter—from Texas) to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood.

Few directors understand movement the way Vidor did. Not stylized movement, everyday movement—the speed of trains, of carnival attractions that made so much of the 20^th century seem like a race to those born in the 19^th. The camera is riding alongside the speeding car (presumably in another car—the scene appears to be shot “on location,” if such a thing was possible in the Hollywood of the silent era), and the effect is that we do not as much perceive the car as moving as the city around it, which becomes a blur of street signs and intersections behind the characters’ heads. What a difference two decades makes: automobiles had seemed like speeding rackets to the early filmmakers, but by 1928, they had become commonplace; now it seemed as though the world was becoming fast as well.

The film’s beginning is dominated by the car, which the father and daughter don’t leave for quite a while; even at the gates of the studio, the father talks to the guard from the behind the wheel, the motor still running. Throughout Show People, we see cars in use; Hollywood in the 1920s, at least for those involved in the film industry, is not designed for public transportation. Cars are not only glamorous (that those who’ve “made it” get driven around by chauffeurs), but practical: the studios, offices and locations are far apart, and the concept of a “community” is largely imaginary—like the concept of “America” in westerns, it’s constantly being undermined by the reality of the landscape, only instead of Monument Valley, it’s California’s hills and winding roads. Though used differently, they’re a bit like the cars in the films of Abbas Kiarostami—a persistent detail that becomes an astounding indicator. It's like looking through a keyhole at a distant culture: in this case that of that small bit of the 20^th century that was mechanized but not yet homogenized: when tools for bridging geographic gaps were in use but had not been implemented to their full extent. Like seeing peasants in an engraving plowing wild lands—simultaneously seeing the past and its future. The car becomes a crystal ball.

Another indicative detail: the way, during a break from shooting, a camera man drapes a filthy cloth over the camera, like the kind you’d put over a table saw when you aren’t using it.

The Vague and The Painstaking

A still from Kenneth MacPherson's 1929 film Borderline

Borderline is an action movie. Kenneth MacPherson's only feature takes place in a universe of reactions--in fact, the movie seems overtaken, distracted by them, like someone trying to tell a story all the while following a tennis ball with their eyes, back and forth. The plot is reduced a series of title card interjections, the movements at the heart of it so fetishized, so examined that we no longer recognize what they are: climbing a staircase, opening a door--simple actions become so alien through the emphasis placed on them. It's like looking at the world through binoculars--we identify individual parts, but they become so fascinating that we can no longer grasp the whole. It's a re-examination that would make Francis Ponge proud, one where a new object seems to be created simply by describing an old one. The door knobs and coffee cups in MacPherson's film are not the same as their analogues in our world, all thanks to the miracle of transformation at the heart of cinema's alchemical side.
It's a terrifying world sometimes, too--the sheer interconnectedness the editing suggests, cutting to "reaction shots" of motionless objects, creates a sense of constant consequences. The film's small town is so tangled with the reaction a chair has to someone sitting down on it that we miss the melodramatic story that supposedly forms the film center, with Paul Robeson and his wife as two black outsiders in a community vaguely defined but painstakingly described, more vivid as a set of sensations than a set of buildings and people (a feat considering the small cast and repeated use of recognizable exteriors and interiors). So perhaps it isn't just Ponge that the film evokes, but Kafka as well.